Signature of Cranach the Elder from 1508 on: winged snake with ruby ring (as on painting of 1514)

When I jump into RDP prompts, some of the time I’ll take the world and type it into the search box at Google Arts & Culture .  Sometimes I get a visual that brings the word of the day to life and from there I get a story or a memory jogger and VOILÀ ! I  end up writing about a life experience that I hadn’t thought about for years.

The thing of it is, when I do that most of the time I can’t hammer the word into what I’m writing and I’m ok with that. It’s not like someone is going to show up at my house with a performance review form in their hand and scold me for coloring ‘outside of the lines.’

Actually that happened once a another prompt site. I actually got an email telling me to ‘stay on topic’ I hadn’t used the word itself in the way the poster intended it to be used. Plus if I could not be so ‘dark’ that would be AWESOME because ‘we’ want spread positive feels.

My next post was about how  Grammar Nazis and Thought Police need to get laid more. Or at least on some kind of seasonal basis. I also put it out there that it was not unheard of to do the wild thing only holidays like Valentines or National Waffle day. I suggested they look into that. I mean. Who doesn’t’ t want to get a little crazy on National Waffle Day?

I know , that was a super immature shot but sometimes you just have to roll with it.

Well today’s word was Balloon. I was stumped. I hate balloons. I hate big ones and small ones. I even hate those fancy mylar balloons.

I don’t like the way they smell and the way they just sort of bob along looking uninvolved and then suddenly BANG. I hate that. I really do.

So I went to Google Arts and Culture and typed in Balloon and I found artwork by Lucas Cranach The Elder.

His painting, which is the first one that I’ve posted here, stood out because in an ocean of pictures of all kinds of balloons was this painting of a woman and  what looked like the end of her world outside of her window.

I found out that Lucas, for some unknown reason painted women with balloon like pot bellies so that’s why it got captured in my search for inspiration for the word ‘balloon’.

That fact aside, the woman in the featured painting had a balloon belly  AND wings. Not only that but through the window next to her is some sort of apocalyptic scene playing out with pot bellied witches flying on the backs of boars and  they are all following a devilish looking man riding a goat.

The Ballon Belly Lady With Wings  and her companions could careless.

There was a story there and Cranach left it to the viewer to read it. I like that.

I also really dug the painting.

I went on to learn that Lucas Cranachs paintings were considered strange in his day and that scholars couldn’t really decide what his paintings were about- it’s like someone gave him a word like  an  RDP Wednesday prompt : BALLOONand he said, ‘ oh yes, I got this’

Lucas Cranach
Melancholie

WIndow scene from
Melancholie by Lucas Cranach

I really liked the following paintings too- they’re takes on stories that are familiar but the visual take on them is a little macabre and I really do get into that.

In the last painting I can’t decide if Judith is wearing gloves or if she is some sort of reptile/human hybrid. Plus it’s like her hands are slithering around the severed head.

Fantastic story telling, isn’t it?

Venus and Cupid
Lucas Cranach The Elder

Lucas Cranach the Elder – Judith with the Head of Holofernes