Month: April 2015

Scott Teitler, “Casey Levens”

Scott Teitler, “Casey Levens”, Photo Shoot for JON Magazine, 2015

Born and raised in New York, Scott Teitler now calls South Florida his home. His interest in photography began when his father gave him an old Nikon SLR camera, and his quirky group of friends became his subjects. Scott further developed his talents at the University of Florida where he studied advertising in the College of Journalism, while also pursuing a minor in photography from the College of Fine Arts.

Within a short space of time Teitler’s work was featured in local publications and national and international work soon followed. His passion is for taking clean, simple photographs that show the subject in a comfortable and unguarded way.

Featured in a previous spread from JON Magazine back in 2015, Scott Teitler’s photo shoot ‘Rabbit In A Hat’ with model Casey Levens is inspired by a magician and his rabbit.

Odilon Redon

Oil Paintings by Odilon Redon

Born in France in 1840, Odilon Redon was a painter and graphic artist, one of the outstanding figures of Symbolism. He had a retiring life, first in his native Bordeaux, then from 1870 in Paris. Until he was in his fifties Redon worked almost exclusively in black and white, producing charcoal drawings and lithographs. Influenced by the writings of Edgar Allen Poe, Redon developed a highly distinctive repertoire of weird subjects such as strange amoeboid creatures, insects, and plants with human heads.

Odilon Redon remained virtually unknown to the public until the publication of J.K. Huysmans’s celebrated novel “A Rebours” in 1884. The book’s hero, a disenchanted aristocrat who lives in a private world of perverse delights, collects Redon’s drawings. With the mention of Redon’s name  in this classic expression of decadence, Redon too became associated with the French Decadent Movement which was flourishing in France and starting to spread throughout Europe.

Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon, “Figure Reflected in Mirror”, 1977, Color Etching on Arches Paper, 36.5 x 27 Inches

Francis Bacon was an Irish-born British figurative painter known for his emotionally charged raw imagery. He produced series of images of popes, crucifixions, and portraits of close friends, with abstracted figures sometimes isolated in geometrical cages, set against flat, nondescript backgrounds.

Bacon said that he saw images ‘in series’; and his work typically focuses on a single subject for sustained periods, often in diptych or triptych formats. His work which numbers almost six hundred paintings, including some he destroyed, can be described as variations on single motifs. These include the 1930s ‘Furies’ and the bio-morphs influenced by Picasso; the 1940s male heads in rooms; the 1950s screaming popes, the later 1950s animals and lone figures,;the  crucifixions done in the 1960s; the later 1960s portraits of friends; the sea-portraits in the 1970s; and the more technical 1980s paintings with the cooler palettes.

Arctic Monkeys, “The View from the Afternoon”

 

Arctic Monkeys, “The View from the Afternoon”

Arctic Monkeys are an English rock band formed in 2002 in High Green, a suburb of Sheffield. The band consists of Alex Turner (lead vocals, rhythm guitar, lead guitar), Jamie Cook (lead guitar, rhythm guitar), Nick O’Malley (bass, backing vocals), and Matt Helders (drums, backing vocals). Former band member Andy Nicholson (bass guitar, backing vocals) left the band in 2006 shortly after its debut album was released.

They have released five studio albums: Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not (2006), Favourite Worst Nightmare (2007), Humbug (2009), Suck It and See (2011) and AM (2013), as well as one live album, At the Apollo (2008). Their debut album is the fastest-selling debut album by a band in British chart history, and in 2013, Rolling Stone ranked it the 30th-greatest debut album of all time.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Wayne Thiebaud

Wayne Thiebaud, Oil Paintings

Wayne Thiebaud is an American painter best known for his colorful works depicting commonplace objects—pies, lipsticks, paint cans, ice cream cones, pastries, and hot dogs—as well as for his landscapes and figures. He is associated with the Pop art movement because of his interest in objects of mass culture, although his early works, executed during the fifties and sixties, slightly predate the works of the classic pop artists.

Thiebaud uses heavy pigment and exaggerated colors to depict his subjects, and the well-defined shadows characteristic of advertisements are almost always included in his work.

Note: An extensive article on the life and work of Wayne Thiebaud is “City, River, Mountain: Wayne Thiebaud’s California” written by Margaretta M. Lovell. It can be found at the Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art site located at: https://editions.lib.umn.edu/panorama/article/wayne-thiebauds-california/

Ghulam Rasool Santosh

Ghulam Rasool Santosh, Tantric Paintings

Ghulam Rasool Santosh, also known as G.R. Santosh, was born in 1929 in the Kashmir valley in India. He was forced to give up painting after his father’s death and as a result took up several odd jobs of silk weaving, sign board painting, and white washing walls. In 1950 Santosh joined the Progressive Art Association (PAA) in Kashmir which mobilized Kashmiri painters.

As a member of this group, Santosh showed his work all over India. In 1954, he won the scholarship to study Fine Arts under N.S. Bendre at the MS University, Baroda in 1954. Santosh had a mystical experience in 1964 that was to have a profound effect on his work. ‘I went to Amarnath in the sixties, purely as an artist-tourist. But the truth is, that unknown to me, this journey changed my life, the way I think. Upon my return from the yatra, a ‘new’ poetry was born.’

Santosh became fascinated by religious traditions within Kashmiri Shaivism, a branch of Indian philosophy. This came to influence his art as the awareness and consciousness that stemmed from frequent meditation and practice of Tantra took form in his paintings as transcendent imagery. He launched himself at the vanguard of the neo-Tantric movement, associated with painters such as K.C.S. Paniker and Biren De. Here he has implemented ancient tantric iconographies and subsequently reinterpreted them by reducing them to abstractions, culminating in the construction of a fresh aesthetic language.

Many of the Tantric works, especially from the early 1970s were engulfed in black borders and backgrounds. At this time, when Santosh started experimenting in tantric art, he strongly aligned himself spiritually with goddess Kali, who is one of the proponents of Kashmiri Shaivism.  He is thus known to have referred to these seminal works as his ‘black period.’

Santosh has held over 30 solo exhibitions. He received the Lalit Kala Akademi award in 1973 and the Padma Shri in 1977. Gulam Rasool Santosh died in 1997 in New Delhi.

The Warwick Rowers (Worldwide Roar)

Photographer Unknown, The Warwick Rowers by the Canal

Started by LGBT activist, Angus Malcolm, and a group of mainly heterosexual male student athletes at an English university, the Warwick Rowers’s mission is to challenge homophobia and bullying in the sports world (and beyond) and champion diversity and inclusivity. With an emphasis on fundraising, the Warwick Rowers produce their famous yearly calendar and have funded the establishment of Sport Allies, a charity that shares the Warwick Rowers ambitions to make athletics a leader in championing for gender equality and LGBT inclusion.

The Warwick Rowers is now known as Worldwide Roar. Check out their website. Buy a calendar. https://www.worldwideroar.org