Since accidentally falling into a scheme of art posting according to a monthly theme last year, I've had to figure out how to associate the various calendar months with broad artistic buckets that are coherent but will still afford enough artistic variation that I can mix in a lot of different styles and mediums. I also wanted to give each month (with the exception of October) its own tag that is original to my art posting. Others are welcome (and encouraged!) to contribute to any of my art tags, but working with something dedicated is both organizationally convenient for me and avoids my spamming some pre-existing tag for a month.

In most cases, I've chosen tags are some sort of play on the name of the month, sometimes corny wordplay (e.g., #Red Ember December), sometimes a little more indirect (#The Carnival Of The Animals marks the theme for the month of Furbruary). Admittedly, a couple of the tags are unrelated because I couldn't think of a sufficiently clever/stupid idea to match a theme I wanted to use with one of the months that was still free (there's no grand scheme behind #Look Sharp! taking place in March, I just wanted to include a month for fashion and character design).

So when I got to the months of July and August, I found myself in a little bit of a pickle, because they were added to the calendar mainly to commemorate the collapse of the Roman Republic and the rise of generational dictatorship in its place. As such, I quickly ruled out any Caesar-related puns, or any explicit reference to ancient Rome. Speaking frankly, the current political climate has probably poisoned Rome for me as a topic of idle interest for the next decade, so I'd just as soon not hang my hat on a tag that's overtly Caesar-inspired, given that I intend on returning to it on a yearly basis.

Even so, the idea of art relating to cities and urban imagery was on my short list of themes anyway, and Rome is one of a handful of cities that are ancient and important enough that they have some feeling of infinity and eternity (other cities that I feel similarly about include London, Paris, Cairo, Moscow, and Beijing). The premise that cities are all connected, somehow metaphysically conjoined despite gulfs of time and space, has also appealed to me for a long time. So I figured I could evoke that vibe without explicitly #RoMe posting by using #There Is Only One City as my novel art tag for the month of July.

I've got a very different theme in mind for August that has no relationship at all to Rome or the Caesars, but folks will just have to wait and see what I have in mind.