Home Page Feature

What I’m Blogging

What I’m Pinning

  • Albrecht Dürer - Self-Portrait at 26 (detail)

What I’m Reading:

What I'm Tweeting:

  • Loading tweets...

What I'm Posting on Facebook:

  • Here's one more Durer--this is a self-portrait, painted when he was 26. Now do you feel like you haven't accomplished anything in your life?

  • Happy birthday to Albrecht Durer, born on this date in 1471. This is his famous engraving of a rhinoceros, completed despite the fact that Durer never in his life laid eyes on the actual animal. Not suprisingly, he got several details wrong, but so great was Durer's reputation that it wasn't until the late 1800s that European textbooks replaced his rhino with drawings of the real thing.

  • Random fact of the day: On this date in 1899 the first traffic ticket was issued in America. New York cab driver was stopped on Lexington Avenue for going a blistering 12 mph.

What I’m Writing

"Grant Wood's 'American Gothic'" No American artwork has been parodied more than American Gothic. Zombies, dogs, Beavis and Butthead, the Muppets, Lego figures, and even Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton have taken a turn with the pitchfork. But the painting itself is no joke--American Gothic is as recognizable as the Mona Lisa and The Scream. mental_floss, Jan/Feb 2012.

Read more from Elizabeth . . .

What People Are Saying

“This is one of those books you buy to give to someone else and decide to keep for yourself.”
- Krys Boyd, Host of KERA 90.1’s Think!, on Secret Lives of Great Artists

“Lunday writes without meanness. Light, tight and bright. As she says, these guys are still the sources of some of the world’s most beautiful music. If there’s a takeaway from the whole thing it’s the all-too-human spectacle of the travails of the artistic spirit trying to get on in a workaday world.”
– From the Oregon Mail Tribune, on
Secret Lives of Great Composers

More reviews and buzz . . .