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#art

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🌦️ Harmony and balance

Plus = Minus, Joseph Albers

Too much of anything is probably a bad thing, variety is the spice of life, and eudaimonia is what we should be aiming for.

Sent from my laptop, perched on a Lisbon balcony overlooking the Tagus.

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Actually, it isn't what it is

My fascination with ambiguity goes back beyond even my doctoral thesis, although it was only between 2016 and this year (2026) that I had a dedicated blog on the topic.

Whether or not we choose to admit it, most of life is ambiguous. The main way this comes up for us as social animals is intra- and inter-personal communication: what does that mean. We're constantly second-guessing ourselves and others, searching for ever-better heuristics to help understand the world.

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Mountains at Saint-Rémy

I don't think I've seen this painting before, but I really like it.

From the Guggenheim website:

During the years preceding his suicide in 1890, Vincent van Gogh suffered increasingly frequent attacks of mental distress, the cause of which remains unclear. Mountains at Saint-Rémy was painted in July 1889, when Van Gogh was recovering from just such an episode at the hospital of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in the southern French town of Saint-Rémy. The painting represents the Alpilles, a low range of mountains visible from the hospital grounds. In it, Van Gogh activated the terrain and sky with the heavy impasto and bold, broad brushstrokes characteristic of his late work.

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