Month: March 2015

Sean Litchfield, “Jonathan #2”

Sean Litchfield, “Jonathan #2, Brooklyn”, 2014

Sean Litchfield is a Brooklyn-based architecture and interiors, editorial and landscape photographer. He draws on a deep and intimate connection with ordinary environments to produce earnest and beautiful images that evoke the deep sense of uneasiness that marks the contemporary landscape.

Through work made across the United States, Litchfield uses traditional landscape tropes to explore the modern environment. This sensibility carries over into a strong body of architecture and interior, and editorial photography. In this work, ordinary scenes are rendered extraordinary, evocative and memorable through his sense of subtle unease.

A Cape Cod native, Litchfield holds a BS in Photography. He works in large and medium format film as well as digital and is available for commissions worldwide.

Image with thanks to the artist’s site : http://seanlitchfield.com

Jack London: “Deep in the Forest, A Call Was Sounding”

Photographer Unknown, (A Call Was Sounding)

“Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest.”

-Jack London, The Call of the Wild

Egon Schiele

Works by Egon Schiele

Born on June 12 of 1890, Egon Schiele was an Austrian painter and a  protégé of Gustav Klimt. Schiele was a major figurative painter of the early 20th century, noted for the intensity and the raw sexuality of his work.He produced many self-portraits, of which many were naked self-portraits.  The twisted body shapes and the expressive line that characterize Schiele’s paintings and drawings mark the artist as an early exponent of Expressionism.

Eloi Biosca, “Córrer 2”

 

Eloi Biosca, “Córrer 2 (Running 2)”, 2014, Running Time 3:18 Minutes

“He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars.     —Jack London, The Call of the Wild

In Eloi Biosca’s slow-motion film “Córrer 2”,  a naked athlete appears running along a pathway. This video is a celebration of the beauty of the male nude body as it runs in absolute freedom, in a natural and wild environment. The body movements are a powerful stimulus for the spectator to experience aesthetic pleasure and sensuality.

The film was first screened at the First Festival Cindeporte of Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2014. Since then, it has been shown in multiple festivals throughout the world, including those in Spain, Germany, Norway and Peru.

Note: Other films produced by Eloi Biosca can be found on Vimeo.

 

Cai Guo-Qiang

Cai Guo-Qiang:  Installations

Cai Guo-Qiang was born in 1957 in Quanzhou, China. He was trained in stage design at the Shanghai Theatre Academy from 1981 to 1985, and his work has since crossed multiple mediums within art including drawing, installation, video, and performance.

Cai began to experiment with gunpowder in his hometown Quanzhou, and continued exploring its properties while living in Japan from 1986 to 1995. This inquiry eventually led to the development of his signature outdoor explosion events.

Drawing upon Eastern philosophy and contemporary social issues as a conceptual basis, his artworks respond to culture and history and establish an exchange between viewers and the larger universe around them. His explosion art and installations are imbued with a force that transcends the two-dimensional plane to engage with society and nature.

 

Otto Greiner

Otto Greiner, “Odysseus and the Sirens”, 1902

The images are from a color reproduction of a large-scale painting by Otto Greiner done in 1902. The original painting was lost from the Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig, Germany, during World War II.

Born in Leipzig, Germany, in 1869, Otto Greiner was a painter and printmaker. His work is based on careful graphic preparation and, in particular, on accurate life drawing of figures. He began an lithography apprenticeship in Leipzig in 1884 and also took lessons in drawing. Between 1888 to 1891, Greiner studied at the Akademie der Blidenden Künste in Munich under Sándor Liezen-Mayer, a Hungarian-born German illustrator and painter of historical scenes.

In the autumn of 1891, Otto Greiner made his first journey to Italy, visiting Florence and Rome, where he met and befriended German symbolist painter and printmaker Max Klinger. Returning to Germany, he worked in Munich and Leipzig between 1892 and 1898, when he traveled back to Rome, using Klinger’s former studio and living there until 1915. Forced by Italy fighting against Germany in World War I, Greiner returned to his homeland.

Greiner produced 112 paintings, the majority devoted to antique and fantastic subjects, and portraiture. He died in Munich in September of 1916.

J. D. Salinger: “And I’m Standing on the Edge of Some Crazy Cliff”

Photographer Unknown, (The Red Cloth)

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.”

― J. D. Salinger, Tne Catcher in the Rye