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Today we are celebrating a mural man, a big man with big ideas. Diego Rivera.
That’s right, that’s the one Diego, the great painter who did not painted pictures you hang politely over the sofa. No. He painted walls. Big ones. The kind of walls that don’t just sit there, they talk back.
Some people use a wall to keep things out; Diego used it to let everything in. Factory workers, farmers, steel, smoke, struggle… history splashing around like a river after the rain.
Diego Rivera grew up in Mexico, a place where the colors don’t ask permission to be bright. Rivera took those colors, put them in his pocket, and carried them all the way to Europe. Ran with the avant-garde crowd, you know, cubists, futurists, dreamers, the whole pack. But he came back home when he heard Mexico calling… and it wasn’t whispering.
You know, Diego Rivera used to say that art should be for the people. Not locked up in palaces where the only folks who see it are the ones already asleep. He wanted his paintings big enough so a worker on lunch break could stand there with a sandwich in his hand and say, “Yeah… that’s me up there.” Rivera had a way of painting ordinary people like they were carved out off mountain stone. Strong hands, tired backs, faces that looked like they knew the history books by heart, even the parts the teachers leave out.
(And yes, for this time let’s forget about Frida)
Rivera painted the past, the present, and the future, sometimes all in one mural. He took machines, myths, revolutions, old gods and new hopes, stirred them together like a pot of something simmering on the stove. Many thought he was too political. Others thought he wasn’t political enough. But Diego? Diego just kept painting. The wall was his microphone, and he had a whole lot to say.
So here’s to Diego Rivera, one of Los Tres Grandes, the man who turned buildings into books, and paint into thunder. The painter who showed that art can be tall as a tree and still belong to the people who plant the seeds.
ink, watercolor on paper
contact ibarraloana@gmail.com
I do not own this image. It is available for sharing on Wikipedia, and the file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. I am using it in an article for BellaOnline (todayinhistory.bellaonline.com/).
right as we walk in we see this on the whiteboard: "Joshua Slocum narrowly escapes pirates near Gibraltar" - go great great uncle, go!
Kwanon read that 177 years ago today, John Herschel created the first photographic negative on a glass plate in 1839. The little Camera looked up Herschel in his book, "A History of Photography from Daguerreotype to Digital." Kwanon believes modern photographers should know the history of their craft.
~Image from a 2016 Photo of the Day series: "A Dawn's Eye View: 366 Days Focusing on my 'Cameras'"
â¼ #dawnseyeview366 #photooftheday #366days #photohumor #toycamera #minicamera #miniaturecamera #photographerslife #artistslife #vintagephotography #kwanon #JohnHerschel #glassnegative #photohistory #historicalcamera #todayinhistory #firstphoto #glassphotograph #toddGustavson #FromDaguerreotypetoDigital #camerabook
Today we celebrate a woman who walked the cold roads of Sweden but had a fire in her head that could melt the snow clean off your boots. Her name was Ellen Key, that’s Key like a door key, which is fitting, because she opened a lot of doors people didn’t even know were locked.
Ellen Key was born back in 1849, the kind of year when people were arguing about kings, crops, and who got to have an opinion. Ellen Key decided she’d take all three. She grew up on a big old estate, reading books like some folks collect stamps. And while other people were sewing doilies, she was sewing ideas, long threads of ‘why not’ stitched into the fabric of her time.”
Key had a notion. She looked around and saw kids treated like furniture that moved. She said, ‘Hey now… maybe the next century oughta belong to them.’ Imagine that, giving the future to the future. It caught on like a prairie fire. Education, parenting, childhood, all those big heavy words suddenly they were lighter in her hands. Almost musical.
She also had things to say about love. Not Hallmark-card love, but the sort that knocks you sideways and asks you to rebuild yourself in a better shape. Said women ought to have independence, choice, a voice in the great big choir of life. Some folks didn’t like that. Others liked it a whole lot. See, Key was talking about sexuality back when polite society wanted to pretend it didn’t exist, like a stray cat you keep shooing off the porch even though it lives there. She believed sexuality wasn’t something shameful, or a sin tax you paid for being human. No, she saw it as a life force; messy, glorious, tender, dangerous, and absolutely essential. She didn’t much care for relationships built on cold duty and ironclad rules. She said love got to be real, rooted in mutual respect, friendship, trust. And she thought sexuality was part of that, a natural expression, not a guilty pleasure. Some people read that and clutched their pearls so hard they nearly made diamonds. Key had the guts to say something downright revolutionary for her century: that women had desires of their own and the right to express them. Not something handed down, or permitted, or whispered behind drapes. She said women should choose their partners, choose their lives, choose what love means to them. That was her brand of feminism: not just a vote at the ballot box but a voice in the bedroom, the classroom, the whole damn world. To her, sexuality wasn’t just biology. It was creativity. Inspiration. Like a songwriter finding a melody in the middle of heartbreak. She believed great love could make better human beings, gentle, thoughtful, courageous. So when folks accused her of stirring scandal, she just shrugged that Swedish shrug and kept writing. Said honesty never hurt anybody, only hypocrisy did. I tell you, she walked through taboos like a woman who knew the doorframe couldn’t hold her.
She eventually built herself a house on the shores of Lake Vättern, called Strand. Must’ve been nice: the waves like a metronome, the sky big enough to store all her notions. Writers came, teachers came, dreamers drifted through like smoke. She talked, she listened, she planted seeds. A regular lighthouse for the soul.
So here’s to Ellen Key: the teacher who taught teachers, the fighter who preferred pens to swords, the thinker who knew the world was overdue for a renovation. A woman asking everybody to be a little more truthful with themselves and a lot kinder to each other. If you’re ever feeling lost, pick up one of her books. Might not give you all the answers but it’ll sure remind you there’s more than one way to ask the questions.
ink, watercolor on paper
contact ibarraloana@gmail.com
I do not own this image. It is a still frame from “Star Wars Day Colosseum: Darth Vader & Attack of the Clones Film,” uploaded on May 5, 2014, by Canale 25 on YouTube, with a Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed). I am using it in an article for BellaOnline (todayinhistory.bellaonline.com).
I do not own this image. It is provided for media use by the Lego Group (www.lego.com/en-us/AboutUs/), and I am using it in an article for BellaOnline (todayinhistory.bellaonline.com).
Amazing Beauty Benefits of Beetroot for skin
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I do not own this image. It is provided for media use by the Lego Group (www.lego.com/en-us/AboutUs/), and I am using it in an article for BellaOnline (todayinhistory.bellaonline.com).