u/alcofrybasnasier

I keep coming back to how strange and self contained Moreau's paintings feel. Even when he is painting familiar myths they seem to exist in their own world. There is something espcially interesting about how still the figures are even when the subject is violent or dramatic. The tension is there but the scenes rarely feel frantic. They feel almost hieratic and ritualistic instead.

I also really like how opulent the paintings are without ever feeling cheerful. He fills them with jewellery and architecture and strange animals. The atmosphere still feels dark and almost suffocating. The relationships between the figures feel enigmatic too. It is not always obvious who actually has power over whom.

What interests me most is how he seems less concerned with illustrating a myth clearly and more interested in the psycological moment inside it. The stories are recognizable immediatly but the longer I look at them the more liminal and dreamlike they start to feel.

I am also fascinated by the actual execution of the paintings. The combination of extremely precise figures with hazy backgrounds and dense decorative surfaces feels very unusual. I know Moreau is generally considered a Symbolist painter but is there a more specific name for this style of painting. Or was this particular mixture of detail and atmosphere largely unique to him?

I am curious why Moreau returned so often to myths involving confrontation and temptation. There is also so much violence and supernatural imagery. Do you think he was mainly interested in the myths themselves or was he using them to explore something much more personal?

This Syrian old man hid his private library in his home in the city of Damascus since the end of 2011 before escaping to Kuwait out of fear of the Assad regime, where the mere presence of a banned book could lead you to Assad's gulag and death under torture.

Today, the uncle returned to his library and completely removed the wall behind which he had hidden it, revealing valuable books that the Assad regime prohibited possessing and circulating.

After the fall of the Assad regime and Syria gaining its freedom, books and publications also gained their freedom, and there are no longer any banned books. At the Damascus Book Fair, which has been held twice since the liberation along with book fairs in other provinces, there was no ban on any book regardless of its ideologies or orientations. Some publishing houses that were previously banned in Syria have reopened their offices and started publishing books.

Syria is witnessing a positive change regarding freedoms, which is of course what Syria was deprived of throughout the rule of Hafez and Bashar al-Assad, spanning nearly 60 years of repression.

This video was published on the account of Syrian writer Bilal Alloun - بلال علون, and the person appearing in the video is his father, Abu Bilal.

They found this boy with bright blue eyes in Yemen