Treasuring The Gaze

The end of the eighteenth century saw the start of a new craze in Europe: tiny portraits of single eyes that were exchanged by lovers or family members. Worn as brooches or pendants, these minuscule eyes served the same emotional need as more conventional mementoes, such as lockets containing a coil of a loved one’s hair. The fashion lasted only a few decades, and by the early 1800s eye miniatures had faded into oblivion. Unearthing these portraits in Treasuring the Gaze, Hanneke Grootenboer proposes that the rage for eye miniatures—and their abrupt disappearance—reveals a knot in the unfolding of the history of vision. Drawing on Alois Riegl, Jean-Luc Nancy, Marcia Pointon, Melanie Klein, and others, Grootenboer unravels this knot, discovering previously unseen patterns of looking and strategies for showing. She shows that eye miniatures portray the subject’s gaze rather than his or her eye, making the recipient of the keepsake an exclusive beholder who is perpetually watched. These treasured portraits always return the looks they receive and, as such, they create a reciprocal mode of viewing that Grootenboer calls intimate vision. Recounting stories about eye miniatures—including the role one played in the scandalous affair of Mrs. Fitzherbert and the Prince of Wales, a portrait of the mesmerizing eye of Lord Byron, and the loss and longing incorporated in crying eye miniatures—Grootenboer shows that intimate vision brings the gaze of another deep into the heart of private experience. With a host of fascinating imagery from this eccentric and mostly forgotten yet deeply private keepsake, Treasuring the Gaze provides new insights into the art of miniature painting and the genre of portraiture.

David Parker is disoriented: emotionally, professionally, and far, far from home. The dynamism of LA - all cosmetic perfection and streams of racing traffic - is too much after leafy Tufnell Park, and his wife's grace in embracing their new life unnerves him.

We live in a world full of shiny distractions, faced with an onslaught of viral media constantly competing for our attention and demanding our affections. These ever-present visual “spectacles” can quickly erode our hearts, making it more difficult than ever to walk through life actively treasuring that which is most important and yet invisible: Jesus Christ. In a journalistic style, Tony Reinke shows us just how distracting these spectacles in our lives have become and calls us to ask critical questions about what we’re focusing on. The book offers us practical steps to redirect our gaze away from the addictive eye candy of the world and onto the Ultimate Spectacle—leading to the joy and rest our souls crave.

David Parker’s new start in LA isn’t going entirely as he had hoped. London feels a million miles away, and even his loving marriage is beginning to look shaky. Drawn, through an alcoholic haze, into the orbit of Astrid and her friends, he spends a night on Malibu Beach that shocks him to the core. With the stakes suddenly raised, David must get his bearings: in love, in the city, and in a new century that seems to be imploding. Funny, deadly, and bristling with energy, this is the story of a man who loses life as he knows it – and sets out to find it again. 'Very funny, sparky and stylish. You won't be putting this book down' Independent on Sunday ‘A unique, persuasive voice. His is a name to watch’ Time Out ‘Scorching. Dark and sad, but equally smart and funny’ Elle

The tale begins over three-hundred years ago, when the Fair People—the goblins, fairies, dragons, and other fabled and fantastic creatures of a dozen lands—fled the Old World for the New, seeking haven from the ways of Man. With them came their precious jewels: diamonds, rubies, emeralds, pearls... But then the Fair People vanished, taking with them their twelve fabulous treasures. And they remained hidden until now... Across North America, these twelve treasures, over ten-thousand dollars in precious jewels, are buried. The key to finding each can be found within the twelve full color paintings and verses of The Secret. Yet The Secret is much more than that. At long last, you can learn not only the whereabouts of the Fair People's treasure, but also the modern forms and hiding places of their descendants: the Toll Trolls, Maitre D'eamons, Elf Alphas, Tupperwerewolves, Freudian Sylphs, Culture Vultures, West Ghosts and other delightful creatures in the world around us. The Secret is a field guide to them all. Many "armchair treasure hunt" books have been published over the years, most notably Masquerade (1979) by British artist Kit Williams. Masquerade promised a jewel-encrusted golden hare to the first person to unravel the riddle that Williams cleverly hid in his art. In 1982, while everyone in Britain was still madly digging up hedgerows and pastures in search of the golden hare, The Secret: A Treasure Hunt was published in America. The previous year, author and publisher Byron Preiss had traveled to 12 locations in the continental U.S. (and possibly Canada) to secretly bury a dozen ceramic casques. Each casque contained a small key that could be redeemed for one of 12 jewels Preiss kept in a safe deposit box in New York. The key to finding the casques was to match one of 12 paintings to one of 12 poetic verses, solve the resulting riddle, and start digging. Since 1982, only two of the 12 casques have been recovered. The first was located in Grant Park, Chicago, in 1984 by a group of students. The second was unearthed in 2004 in Cleveland by two members of the Quest4Treasure forum. Preiss was killed in an auto accident in the summer of 2005, but the hunt for his casques continues.

When Treasure woke up after an incident that took her life, she realized that she had returned to her twenty-three-year-old self—back when she was labeled as the most hated woman in the Empire. She was, once again, married to Reagan Trace Arzen, the reigning Emperor of the Arzen Empire; the man who hated her the most… and the father of her children. She was the vilest woman who ever existed. After having so many regrets about the way she lived her first life, Treasure decided to change her fate to avoid the death that awaited her in the future and to live a life solely for the children who hated her. Determined to change her fate, she was also on the lookout for the woman who was fated for Reagan; aware that her husband was fated to another. But the sudden changes in her didn’t go unnoticed… and Reagan is determined to keep her by his side whether she likes it or not.

Raising her siblings after their parents' deaths, Emma has always put their needs above her own, but when her first love, Adam, returns to the community of Middlefield, he tries to convince her to make decisions for herself.