dana kitten profile picture

dana kitten

What we see and what we seem are but a dream...

About Me

I am a painter, a student of long lost techniques and a necromancer I am investigating the culture of death and sickness and decadence, and am very interested in the ephemeral nature of life and the interplay between the natural and the artificial world. But I am also a wandering waif, an orphan, a scullery maid, a brat, a very good girl, and an adventurer. Sometimes I live in a tower above the frenetic city where I like to be alone and sometimes in a dusty trunk full of spiders pencils and paper to keep me in good company while visiting foreign lands. My vast kitten world is dedicated to all engaged in building imaginary empires and grand ephemeral castles.you can see my workings at www.danasherwood.com

My Interests

hmmm....let's see....art deco, art nouveau, aquariums, antique linen sheets, accents, arsenic, bathtubs, broken glass, broken hearts, butter, catching birds, cotton wool, chloroform, consumption, cemeteries, chinese shoes, corsets, costumes, creosote, dust, drowning, datura, dyspepsia, dusty smelling books, egg tempera, fairytales, forests, ectoplasm, fawns, ferns, fevers, francesca woodman, fox hunting, ghosts, hairwork, horses, hysteria, hot water bottles, hirondelles, house martins, hysterics, illness, jungles, rowboats and picnic baskets, gardens of the dead, kitten hovels, feigned suicide, kid skin gloves, laudanum, moths, Mary Pickford, mushrooms, martyrs, molluscs, mourning art, nazimova, needles, opium, ossuaries, petticoats, painting, peeping into tombs, potatoes, poppies, pressing seaweed, raiding oyster beds, razors, rust, rot, rainy days, snail collecting, shipwreck, solitude, suicide, salt water, soft skin, saints, sick days, sewing kits, silk velvet, stigmata, skeleton keys, smelling salts, spiritualism, snails, speaking French, staying in bed, slugs, séances, swamps, spells, sirens, stagnant water, taxidermy, tombstones, thermometers, Thomas Mann, tragic heroines, turpentine, tattered dresses, theatrics, trying to catch chipmunks, velvet ribbon, Virginia Woolf, vintage clothing, widows weeds, witchcraft, watercolors, wax dolls

I'd like to meet:

If you are an artist, an adventurer, a fairy tale weaver, a traveller, an intellect, a seeker of curiousities, a mystic, a prophet, a pirate, a mapmaker, a wandering doe, a disembodied spirit, a fortune teller or a fortune maker I would like to know you.

Music:

accordions, baby rosebud, billie holiday, belle and Sebastian, cocorosie, carter family, clash, cranes, carpenters, cellos, enrico caruso, espers, elysian fields, faun fables, howler monkeys, locusts, maria callas, metallic falcons, the magic mountain song by blonde redhead, lisa Gerard,nouvelle vague, nick cave, Olivia Newton john, rasputina, regina spektor, pixies, smiths, swans

Movies:

picnic at hanging rock, gormenghast, svankmejer's alice, a z and two 0's, phantom of the opera, diary of a lost girl, angels and insects, heavenly creatures, flowers in the attic, innocence, 28 days later, daDDY long legs, the thin man, the innocents, night of the living dead

Books:

Turn of the screw, Virginia Woolf's essays, Susan Sontag, Death in Venice, The Black Swan, Edgar Allen Poe, Dorothy Parker, Magic Mountain, The Edwardians, Watership Down, The Age of Innocence, House of Mirth, Grimms Fairy Tales, The Yellow Wallpaper, the victorian celebration of death, Philipe Aries, idols of perversity, stories about invalids, stories about swans, fairies and victorian conscioussness, invalid women, pleasures taken, becoming, perfume, a rebours, lizzie siddall - the tragedy of a pre-raphaelite supermodel

Heroes:

Alice James, Dorothy Parker, Myrna Loy, Elizabeth Siddal, Virginia Woolf, Lily Bart, Marie Duplessis, Mollie Fancher and although i hate to admit it, fuschia groan

My Blog

Sydney NSW 33°52' S lat 151°12' E long

Sydney is an oddly familiar place despite it being on the other side of the world, which is why it seems that much stranger to see flying foxes, giant bright orange bats the size of cats, flying throu...
Posted by dana kitten on Sat, 21 Jul 2007 01:55:00 PST

The woman could give no milk but a hare

">Here is a bit of curiousa I discovered whilst I was otherwise working. I find esoteric trivia is always useful to enliven lagging dinner party conversation. In the year of her fame, 1726, Mary Tof...
Posted by dana kitten on Sat, 19 May 2007 06:38:00 PST

utrecht

..">Every now and again I find myself in wonderous places which make my dreary work seem a little less miserable. And in unusually bad form I run off to play...">In gardens among apiaries, under lill...
Posted by dana kitten on Thu, 19 Apr 2007 06:29:00 PST

introducing...the brooklyn enigma

In researching convalescents and convalescency i came upon this medcal curiousity....Mollie Fancher, the mysterious fasting girl....was she anorexic? Did she have multiple personality disorder? It is...
Posted by dana kitten on Sat, 17 Mar 2007 03:43:00 PST

in search of desire

I find myself in this house..still...gigantesque if only for the height of the ceiling from the floor..the fear it brings..the space of giants. Like enormous terrible spiders posed upon the hill. The ...
Posted by dana kitten on Sat, 17 Mar 2007 03:13:00 PST