There are plenty of cliches about finding the sunshine on a rainy day, but this sidewalk art is not one of them.
Designed and produced by artist Peregrine Church, Rainworks
is a special type of street art that appears on sidewalks only when
they’re wet. The works include hopscotches, whimsical illustrations and
uplifting messages.
“The purpose of Rainworks is to turn rainy days into something to look forward to,” Church told The Huffington Post.
Rainworks appear in various locations around the Puget Sound region of Washington.
To
create the artwork and happy messages, Church uses custom-made stencils
and a non-toxic, biodegradable superhydrophobic coating. When dry, the
designs remain hidden, but as the sidewalk gets wet during a rainfall,
they slowly appear. Church says the designs work best on newer,
light-colored concrete where there is a more visible contrast between
wet and dry.
“I look for and brainstorm messages that are positive and inspiring, or clever and witty,” he told HuffPost.
Currently,
Rainworks are being produced exclusively in Washington, but Church
hopes to make the project global. “It’s something I do to make the world
happier,” he says.
Like her mother and grandmother before her, Ginevre King was named after Leonardo Da Vinci’s portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci. And she had many parallels with the Italian aristocrat: King also came from immense wealth and would be most remembered for how she was depicted by one of her era’s most famous creatives, in her case the author F. Scott Fitzgerald. King supposedly provided inspiration for Daisy Buchanan in Fitzgerald’s 1925 classic The Great Gatsby. But beyond these surface level details, King’s story becomes much more complicated. In addition to having a star-crossed romance with the American literary giant, she was the author of the text that provided a clear inspiration for The Great Gatsby, raising the question of whether King was simply a literary muse or a victim of Fitzgerald’s plagiarism.
Ginevra King
Born in 1898 in Chicago, Ginevre King grew up in immense privilege as the daughter of a socialite and financier. She arrived on the Midwest city’s social scene as one of the “Big Four” debutantes during World War I. As Maureen Corrigan wrote in the 2014 book So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures, King grew up in a “life of tennis, polo ponies, private-school intrigues, and country-club flirtations.” But she also knew the power of her family’s position and wealth; as Coorigan wrote, she had “a highly developed understanding of how social status worked.”
In 1914, Ginevre was sent to the Westover School, an elite finishing school where her classmates included members of the Rockefeller and Bush families. She was expected to pursue a life of “noblesse oblige,” in which her work commitments didn’t extend beyond childrearing and maintaining her family’s social circle. But things took a turn when 16-year-old King met 19-year-old F. Scott Fitzgerald (then a student at Princeton) at a sledding party in Minnesota while visiting her Westover roommate.
They had only known each other for a few months when Ginevre wrote in her diary that she was madly in love with him. The two began an extensive letter correspondence, with King sharing Fitzgerald’s passionate musings with her school friends. Their letters became increasingly romantic, with the two exchanging photographs. King supposedly would sleep with the letters, hoping “that dreams about him would come in the night”.
Fitzgerald visited the King estate outside of Chicago several times, but King’s parents refused to let her attend Princeton’s sophomore prom, an important social event. King’s father supposedly told Fitzgerald that “Poor boys shouldn’t think of marrying rich girls.” Still, Fitzgerald didn’t give up his ill-fated affair, writing a short story in 1916 called “The Perfect Hour” in which he imagines himself finally with King. He sent her “The Perfect Hour,” which she read to one of her other male boyfriends — he at least praised Fitzgerald’s excellent prose. As a response, King composed another short story in which she imagines herself in a loveless marriage to a rich man, still yearning for her ex-lover, Fitzgerald. The two are reunited after Fitzgerald makes his own fortune, hoping to win her back. Sound familiar? She sent the short story to Scott in March of 1916, seven years before the release of The Great Gatsby.
By 1917, the real relationship between King and Fitzgerald had fizzled, and she went on to enter an arranged marriage with William Mitchell, a rich Chicagoan and polo player. Meanwhile, a depressed and heartbroken Fitzgerald enlisted in the Army to fight in World War I. The future American literary giant kept a copy of Ginevre’s short story with him for the rest of his life, though he did have King destroy the letters he sent her.
Ginevra King , in December 1922
“Because she’s the one who got away, Ginevra—even more than Zelda—is the love who lodged like an irritant in Fitzgerald’s imagination, producing the literary pearl that is Daisy Buchanan”, notes scholar Maureen Corrigan, who believes that Scott’s works are full of characters inspired by King, including Isabelle Borgé in This Side of Paradise (1920), Judy Jones in Winter Dreams (1922) and Paula Legendre in The Rich Boy (1924).
Once upon a time, a knight was really pissed off. He had just discovered that his wife took a lover, and naturally, sought revenge in a joust to the death with his rival. But even that victory wasn’t enough to quench his rage, so he cut out the heart of his wife’s lover and gave it to his personal chef with specific instructions: cook this into a ragout for my wife. Sure enough, that night she licked her plate clean. And so goes a ye olde legend that is both Patrick Bateman-level crazy, and reaffirms how deeply rooted the heart’s role is as a powerful – and dangerous – symbol of love. But how did it get to the V-Day greeting card aisle, all the way from the era of chivalry – and what did it symbolise before that? When did the heart beat for love?
The earliest heart shaped symbol might have actually represented the seed pod of the silphium plant, which was used as contraception in ancient Libya. It also might also have simply represented the shape of someone’s backside or even a woman’s vulva. The ancient origins are manifold, and pretty much left to historical speculation.
The pods of the silphium plantmay have inspired the V-Day heart symbol as we know it today.
How else “did the heart icon exist before the high Middle Ages?” asks author Marilyn Yalom in The Amorous Heart: An Unconventional History of Love. A heart shaped symbol was found on Mediterranean coins in the 6th century BCE, as well as on chalices – which means it might’ve been associated with the heart shaped leaves of vines. Meanwhile, in a 14th century Spanish depiction of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, we also see hearts – the right side up – on some of the steeds’ rear ends:
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
“[The heart] might’ve also been the brand for horses,” says Yalom, “Why not? The double lobes do suggest haunches.” Were they symbols of war? Strength? All the wine they would drink after battle? Who knows. But in the Middle Ages, the real fun begins. This was the age of courtly love. Medieval philosophers looked to Aristotle, who said that sentiment lived not in the brain but the heart, for cues on where to pinpoint thine #feels. In Medieval Bodies: Life, Death and Art in the Middle Ages, Josh Hartnell explains that they also inherited the Greek idea that the heart was the first organ your body made, and hence, the one that most anchored your human existence – it was the “house of the human soul.”
A medieval book bound in the shape of a heart
But one of the biggest myths of the medieval heart is that it always had the scalloped shape we’re used to. At first, hearts were depicted like wonky pears, pine cones, or rhombuses, which is partially because back in the ye olde times, it was still pretty blasphemous to dissect the sacred human body. We knew that the heart pumped out blood, but not that all that blood returned on a superhighway of veins and arteries. Which is why it started to get such a track record for being susceptible to emotions – the “bleeding heart,” as it were.
The heart of Christ. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, Latin 1369, p. 410.
Until the 14th century, hearts were usually depicted upside down. The first depiction of a heart in romantic context is believed to be in this 13th century French manuscript “Roman de la Poire” or Romance of the Pear – proving that, yes folks, the French have always been obsessed with love – and you’ll notice the heart is indeed upside down, looking a bit like a mango.
The heart, as either a lumpy fruit shape or its famous scalloped form, became a motif of troubadour poems, marble coffins, and sheet music; it was seen on playing cards, in manuscript doodles, and fashion too – like the “Escoffin,” a kind of heart shaped head gear…
Portrait of Isabella of Portugal by Rogier van der Weyden, 1450.
Lest we forget, this was an era that took its dragons and even weirder medieval monsters very seriously, so the heart was susceptible to some very strange foul play (see: aforementioned heart ragout story). Folks in the middle ages very much believed the “you are what you eat” mantra, and so feasting on a sinful heart was a veritable death sentence. The heart, being the all-absorbant organ that it was, had eyes of its own.
This brings us to the origins of Valentine’s Day. Once upon a time, “courtly love” was a literary obsession with a specific romantic narrative: respectful knight pursues chaste maiden, usually with the help of a troubadour and a lyre. Dragons optional. Lather, rinse, repeat. But the heart also spoke to divine love, from Christianity to Islam, and it’s in straddling these two metaphors that V-Day is born.
The chanson Belle, Bonne, Sage by Baude Cordier, written in the shape of a heart, in the Chantilly Codex.
Rumour has it the 14th century English author Geoffrey Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales) was quite taken with the story of a martyred Christian from Roman times, Valentine, who married couples in secret. That’s right, there really was a flesh-and-blood Italian behind the kitsch holiday we’ve got today – and you can visit his remains here. There’s still a lot we don’t know about Mr. Valentine, but the gist of his story made for perfect holiday fodder.
The duo's 2014 Super Bowl ad captured America's heart when the dog ran away from its new owner just to find the horse, who had been missing his friend and staged a coup with fellow horse mates to get the dog back. The ad ends with the pair playing together as the two owners watch them.
In Budweiser's 2015 Super Bowl commercial, the dog returns to the farm after being lost for some time and is confronted by a wolf. A group of horses, led by the horse, break out of the barn to save the dog and they run up to the farm house together.
