Month: February 2015

Rufino Tamayo

Rufino Tamayo, “Perro Aullando (Dog Howling)”, 1960, Lithograph, 50 x 65.5 cm, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco

There are some dogs which, when you meet them, remind you that, despite thousands of years of manmade evolution, every dog is still only two meals away from being a wolf. These dogs advance deliberately, purposefully, the wilderness made flesh, their teeth yellow, their breath a-stink, while in the distance their owners witter, “He’s an old soppy really, just poke him if he’s a nuisance,” and in the green of their eyes the red campfires of the Pleistocene gleam and flicker…

-Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

Yume Cyan

Yume Cyan, “Fireflies, Nagoya City”

This long exposure photograph by Yme Cyan captures the glowing bodies of fireflies and translates them as floating yellow and green dots, dancing around a wooded area of Nagoya located in the Chūbu region of Japan.

“My brother and I used to catch fireflies and hold them in jars for a little while when we visited our relatives in Chattanooga.”‘

–Yuma Cyan

David Mack

David Mack, Variant Cover for “Fight Club 2”, Version One

David Mack is an american comic book artist and writer, known for his crator-owned series “Kabuki” and for co-creating with Joe Quesada the deaf Marvel Comics superhero Echo. David Mack is know for his unique painted and collage-like work.

Mack earned scholarships to Northern Kentucky University for five years, a four-year scholarship based on his porfolio of art, and in his fifth year the Dean’s Scholarship for academics. He graduated in 1995 with a BFA in Graphic Design.

Mack began first publishing “Kabuki” in 1995 with Caliber Press, later moving the series to Image Comics. It is now available through Icon Comics, an imprint of Marvel Comics. He has also worked on Marvel Comics publications of Daredevil, Alias, New Avengers, and White Tiger.

Russell Hart

Infra-Red Photography by Russell Hart

Russell Hart, an adnunct faculty member of the School of Visual Arts in New York, has taught photograph at Tufts University and the Boston Museum School. Until recently, he was the Executive Editor of American Photo magazine, where he wrote about photography for almost 25 years. Hart creates black-and-white,  infrared, and color Polachrome landscapes, still lifes, and miniature panoramas.

The artist’s site: https://russellhartphoto.com

 

M. C. Escher

M. C. Escher, “Snakes”, 1969, Woodcut Print, 49.8 x 44.7 cm,

“Snakes” is a woodcut print by the Dutch artist Maurits Cornelia Escher. First printed in July of 1969, the print was Escher’s last before his death on March 27, 1972.

Maurits Cornelia Escher was a Dutch graphic artist who made mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints. In 1918, he studied at the Technical College of Delft. Escher then attended Haarlem School of Architecture and Decorative Arts from 1919 to 1922, studying drawing and the art of woodcut printing.

Escher’s work is inescapably mathematical. This has caused a disconnect between his full-on popular fame and the lack of esteem with which he has been viewed in the art world. His originality and mastery of graphic techniques are respected, but his works have been thought too intellectual and insufficiently lyrical by critics. However, Escher’s narrative themes and his use of perspective have made his work highly attractive to the public.

M. C. Eschers woodcut “Snakes” depicts a disc made up of interlocking circles that grow progressively smaller towards the center and towards the edge. There are three snakes laced through the edge of the disc. The image is printed in three colours: green, brown and black. The use of snakes and the color palette of this composition recalls an earlier 1960 woodcut by the artist,”Möbius Strip I”.

The print haa rotational symmetry based on the number three, comprising a single wedge-shaped image repeated three times in a circle. This means that it was printed from three blocks that were rotated on a pin to make three impressions each. Close inspection of the print reveals the central mark left by the pin.

In several of his earlier works, Escher explored the limits of infinitesimal size and infinite number by actually carrying through the rendering of smaller and smaller figures to the smallest possible sizes. In “Snakes”, the infinite diminution of size and infinite increase in number is only suggested in the finished work.

Swedish pianist Fredrik Ullén used the “Snakes” print for the cover art of his 1998 album entitled “György Ligeti: Complete Piano Music, Volume 2”.

Randal Meyers

Randal Meyers, “Bedizened”, 2019

Born in 1961 in Salt Lake City, Utah Randal Meyers designed windows for Bergdorf Goodman while completing a degree in Fashion Design at Parsons School of Design in 1983.  He has designed women’s fashion for numerous fashion houses in New York, Paris and Tokyo, creating new ideas based on fashion styles of master designers, such as Sonia Delaunay and Madame Grès.

In 1996, Meyers studied Art at the University of Utah. During that year he produced a large body of art dealing with the Mormon religion, their secrecy, and their attitude toward homosexuals. After graduate studies at CalArts in Valencia, California, his work continued to grow in concept, encompassing digital techniques, studies of Foucault social theories, and multi-media installations.

Martin McKenna

Illustrations by Martin McKenna

Mart McKenna is a freelance illustrator based in the United Kingdom. Born in London, he started illustrating for fantasy and horror role-playing game fanzines in the 1980s. McKenna’s first professional commissions were from Games Workshop for their “White Dwarf” magazine. He later illustrated for Games Workshop the first “Warhammer 40,000” book, “Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay”, and many board games.

McKenna has also created gam-related material for other publishers including covers and internal illustrations including Puffin Books / Wizard Books’ “Fighting Fantasy” and also illustrating card art for “Magic: The Gathering”.

Robert Del Tredici

Robert Del Tredici, “Ubiquitous”, 2014, Mixed Media Print on Metallic Paper, New Bedford Whaling Museum

Robert Del Tredici started out as a pen-and-ink landscape-maker in the Marin county hills of California. His first big project was a series of 100 illustrations to “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville. He then took up street photography, made portraits of film-makers, and, with the near-meltdown at the Three Mile Island, started documenting the nuclear age.

His first book, “The People of Three Mile Island”, published in 1980, led to a 1987 book written about the entire US nuclear weapons complex, “At Work in the Fields of the Bomb”. Following its publication, he traveled to the former Soviet Union and photographed nuclear towns and facilities there.

Del Tredici is the founder of The Atomic Photographers Guild, an international collective of photographers dedicated to making visible the nuclear age. Since 2001 he has been creating collages depicting the era of the War on Terror, a series he calls “Evolution Pages 9/11”.

In the mixed media print “Ubiquitous”, artist Del Tredici captions an image of the phases of the moon, with Moby Dick breaching in between them. A quotation from Melville’s novel “Moby Dick” about ghostly sightings of the whale is written at the bottom left.

“One of the wild suggestions coming to be linked with white whale in the minds of the superstitously inclined was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous, that he had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time.”