The clearest echo, of course, is Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which mirrors Nasser’s decision to thwart passage through the Suez Canal. In both cases, it was a foreseeable response that the attacking parties somehow failed to anticipate: “Instead of keeping the Suez Canal open, the [Anglo-French] action closed it, as the dumbest intelligence analyst, either British or American, could have predicted,” Miles Copeland, a famous C.I.A. agent working in the Middle East in the nineteen-fifties, wrote...

...The grimmer parallel is what all this may reveal about American power. By 1956, Britain and France were already empires in decline: Britain had let go of its major colonial possessions in the Indian subcontinent, while France had suffered major losses in Indochina and was in the throes of an era-defining battle to hold Algeria, where Nasser’s anti-colonialist message was proving persuasive. Their failure to retake the canal underscored their diminished status on a world stage.

From the New Yorker

Artist David Milne (1882–1953) was a contemporary of theirs and shared a keen interest in the Canadian landscape, occasionally painting with them in northern Ontario and the Muskokas. But he was profoundly different from them. He preferred solitude. He was a loner. His work moved in a quieter, more distilled direction, especially after the First World War.

Determined to witness war zones, he secured a commission as an official Canadian war artist. After the Armistice, he travelled to France and Belgium, where he produced sketches of ruined towns, flooded craters, shattered churches, and the quiet routines of soldiers waiting to go home.

Much more - including sketches - here.

Marsh with Water Lillies by van Gogh and from WikiArt

Really love his sketches

Really interesting blog/paper about drawing:

In the paper, we argue that drawing is hard because we humans have very limited vision and memory—much more limited than we think. We just don’t perceive the world as a picture. And so, learning to draw realistic pictures is not about innate talent, it’s about learning skills to bypass these visual limitations that we all share.

So much of this tracks. I've also often thought of learning to draw as about overcoming the urge to fill in details with what you think is there, rather than what is actually there. We spend a lot of time looking people in the eye, so we think eyes are bigger and higher than they really are, etc.

Brilliant streamgraph from the New York Times on oil passing through the Strait of Hormuz

...One of the most consequential lies in Australian public life is that we are a deeply polarised nation...

But when you sit with people, night after night, and give them the space to talk about what actually matters to them, the picture that emerges is striking in its consistency. Australians want the same things. They want to be able to afford a decent life. They want healthcare and education that works. They want their kids to have a future. They want kindness and fairness. They want to know that their neighbours are OK.

Interesting post from a researcher at Redbridge

Bridge and Waterfall at Pontoise

A Cezanne landscape from 1881.

From Wikiart