Month: February 2015

O. R. Melling: “To Run with the Wolf Was to Run in the Shadows”

Artist Unknown, (Running Wolf), Computer Graphics, Animation Film Gifs

To run with the wolf was to run in the shadows, the dark ray of life, survival and instinct. A fierceness that was both proud and lonely, a tearing, a howling, a hunger and thirst. Blessed are they who hunger and thirst. A strength that would die fighting, kicking, screaming, that wouldn’t stop until the last breath had been wrung from its body. The will to take one’s place in the world. To say ‘I am here’. To say ‘I am”.

—O.R. Melling

Roman Payne: “I Used to be a Poet”

Photographer Unknown, A new Tattoo for Him

I used to be a poet.
My words were traded in marketplaces like pieces of gold.
Merchants bought my verses for as much as they paid for saffron and Indian jade.

Now I am old…
drunk on wine and candle fumes.
Alone in this barren room, I speak my psalms to the night air
so as to entertain moths before they go off to die.
I used to be a poet
and my words were gold.

― Roman Payne

Erich Maria Remarque: “And in the Night You Realize. . .”

Artist Unknown, (White Cotton Shorts), Computer Graphics, Gay Film Gifs

“And in the night you realize, when you wake out of a dream, overcome and captivated by the enchantment of visions that crowd in on each other, just how fragile a handhold, how tenuous a boundary separates us from darkness – we are little flames, inadequately sheltered by thin walls from the tempest of dissolution and insensibility in which we flicker and are often all but extinguished. Then the muted sounds of battle surrounds us, and we creep into ourselves and stare wide-eyed into the night.”

― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

Brad Pasutti

Bad Pasutti, “What Was and Might Have Been”, 2015, Oil on Panel, 30 x 40 Inches

Born in Trail, British Columbia, Brad Pasutti began his formal art training at the Kootenay School of Art in Nelson, where he completed a three year diploma program with honours in sculpture. Deciding on a more practical career in art conservation, Pasutti enrolled in art history at the University of Victoria; however he later transferred  to the visual arts department, completing his BFA in 1983.

Soon after graduation, Pasutti met sculptor Jack Kidder, with whom he made several extended trips to Mexico. With its rich art and cultural heritage of ancient Pre-Colombian, colonial Baroque, folk art and contemporary international exhibitions, Mexico was seminal to Pasutti’s artistic development.

There is in Pascutti’s work an overriding concern with space, time and the metaphysical. Areas of precisely defined objects mix with intangible forms situating his artwork between figuration and abstraction. Figures, backgrounds, and memories intertwine in a labyrinth of spaces within spaces.

Brad Pasutti has had numerous solo exhibitions and his work is in the collections of the Canada Council Art Bank, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and the University of Victoria’s Legacy Art Gallery.

Eugène Fredrik Jansson

Eugène Fredrik Jansson, “Flottans Badhus (The Navy Bath House),1907, Oil on Canvas, 197 x 301 cm., Thiel Gallery, Stockholm.

Eugène Fredrik Jansson was a Swedish painter known for his night-time landscapes and cityscapes dominated by shades of blue. From about 1904 to the end of his life in 1915, he mainly painted male nudes. The earlier of these phases has caused him to sometimes be referred to as ‘blåmålaren’ meaning “the blue-painter”.

Art historians and critics have long avoided the issue of any possible homoerotic tendencies in this later phase of his art, but later studies have established that Jansson was in all probability homosexual and appears to have had a relationship with at least one of his models. His brother, Adrian Jansson, who was himself homosexual and survived Eugène by many years, burnt all Eugene’s letters and many other papers, possibly to avoid scandal as homosexuality was illegal in Sweden until 1944.

Note: The custom of swimming nude at institutional pools in all-male settings was at one time the fashion, if not mandatory, in the United States at gender segregated pools in public and private schools, colleges and universities, YMCAs, in the military, and at private men’s athletic clubs. Communal nudity among males was considered completely acceptable and was commonly practiced before it became sexualized and considered taboo, at least in the United States, as a result of increasingly conservative mores and prudishness during the 1970s and 1980s. It effectively ended in the 1990s by the advent of anti-discrimination laws prohibiting exclusion of females from all-male venues. 

Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino

Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, “L’ Incendio di Borgo (The Fire in the Borgo)”, (Detail), 1514, Fresco, 670 x 500 cm, Apostolic Palace, Vatican City

Born in early April of 1483, Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, known as Raphael, was an Italiam painter and architect of the High Renaissance period of Italy. His artwork is known for its clarity of form, the ease of the composition, and the visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human greatness. Raphael, along with Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, form the traditional trinity of great masters of that period.

Raphael’s fresco “L’ Incendio di Borgo”, which is in the Vatican Museums in Rome, depicts an episode taken from the “Liber Pontificalis” concerning the 847 fire which flared up in the neighborhood in front of St. Peter’s Basilica. On that  occasion Pope Leo IV imparted a solemn blessing from the Loggia delle Benedizioni, which miraculously extinguished the fire and saved the church and the people. The fresco has the clear intent of being a political allegory that presented Pope Leo IV to his contemporaries as the peacemaker who had put out the flames of the war.

The figures and architectures of the fresco clearly recall and allude to the Virgilian description of the Trojan fire. To the left of the fresco, as seen in the detail above,  are Aeneas with his father Anchises on his shoulders, his son Ascanio on the side and his wife Creusa behind. The Corinthian colonnade is reminiscent of the “Temple of the Càstori” , part of the Roman Forum in Rome.

Nick Leoni

Photographer Unknown, “Nick Leoni in Sweater”, Photo Shoot

Born in New York, Nick Leoni is an award-winning photographer now living and working in the San Francisco Bay area. He specializes in events and exhibits, portraits, and fashion photography, extensively doing photo shoots in Palm Springs and Las Vegas. His work can be seen in Forbes magazine, Newsweek, and Hornet.

Artist’s site: https://www.facebook.com/nickleoniphoto/

Kusma Petrov-Vodkin

Kusma Petrov-Vodkin, “Bathing of the Red Horse”, 1912, Oil on Canvas, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

When the Russian Empire was between two revolutions and  undergoing radical social and political changes, emerging avant-garde artists were manifesting new modes of artistic expression. They either rejected classical art altogether in favor of completely innovative approach, or stylized art of different epochs and cultures endowing it with new meanings. Kusma Petrov-Vodkin melded both approaches with his painting “Bathing of the Red Horse” in 1912.

There were at least three historical influences that Petrov-Vodkin could draw upon when painting “Bathing of the Red Horse”. They are Russian icons, Byzantine frescoes that inspired the Russian classical iconography, and Neoclassicist art. The boy’s peaceful face reminds us of the detached, yet compassionate expression of saints. Christian religious references are also seen in the painting’s triptych-like elements, the three horses and three boys, and in Petrov-Vodkin’s dominant red and blue palette traditionally used by European painters to identify Christ and the Virgin Mary.

The spherical sweep in the painting’s composition could have been derived from the frescoes on curved surfaces of the domed spaces in Byzantine churches. And, thirdly, nudity was most probably inspired by the Neoclassical tradition which was based upon cultures of Ancient Greece and Rome.

It is believed Petro-Vodkin’s inspiration for the blood-red horse was inspired by “Red Horses” sketched by his pupil and painter Sergey Kalmykov, who would become a model for the boy. The choice of the setting, circular composition and symbolism pervading the work also brings to mind “L’Eau” by Frantisek Kupka.

The simple plot, rounded lines, intense red and clear bright colors in the background, and symbolic horse made this work an icon of the Russian avant-garde. Kusma Petrov-Vodkin once again returned to the subject in 1925 with a painting titled “Fantasia”, which featured a boy on horseback flying over the mountains.

Oscar Matthiesen

Oscar Matthiesen, “Officers of the Scania County Dragoon Regiment in Ystad Ride into the Sea to Bathe on a Sunday in June”, 1906. Oil on canvas, 500 x 1000 cm. Ystads Militärhistoriska Museum

Oscar Matthiesen was born in 1861 as the son of the Danish House Vogts and Brand Director Johann Peter Matthiessen at Gottorp Castle in Schleswig.

After completing his studies in Copenhagen, Matthiesen took several trips to Paris, Rome, Berlin and Munich.  His work was primarily portraits as well as landscapes and seascapes. He was in great demand as a portrait painter, probably as a result of his Reichstag painting in 1915 “The Constitutional Assembly of the Reich”, a major work composed of 225 single portraits, all executed by live model.

In November 1910, Matthiesen celebrated a solo exhibition at the previously opened Kunsthalle zu Kiel where his monumental painting “Officers of the Scania County Dragoon Regiment…” received many favorable reviews. He was made a member of The Dannebro Order, a Danish knighthood that was instituted by King Christian the Fifth in 1808.

Matthiesen’s painting is related to the contemporary culture of athletics in Denmark where people of the same sex socialized in varying degrees of undress, atypical for society otherwise. As emphasized in the Danish philosophy of Vitalism, sport in itself was to guarantee that such situations were not of a sexual nature, and the contemporary literature on athletics emphasized that physical exercise would make the young man more resistant to carnal desires.