Month: May 2015

Paola Epifani

Figurative Sculptures by Paola Epifani

Paola Epifani, also known as Rabarama, is an Italian contemporary artist born in 1969. Rabarama creates sculptures and paintings of men, women and hybrid creatures, often in eccentric poses. The skins of her subjects are always decorated with patterns, symbols, letters, glyphs and other kind of figures, in a great variety of forms.

Emien Etting

Paintings, Watercolors and Drawings by Emien Etting

Emlen Etting, born in Philadelphis in August of 1905, was a painter, sculptor, filmmaker, and member of Philadelphia’s elite Main Line Society. He attended schools in Lausanne, Switzerland, and St. George’s in Newport, Rhode Island. After graduating from Harvard in 1928, Eating  studied in Paris with the artist Andre Lhote who taught his students to reduce their subjects into lines and shapes. Emlen remained influenced by Lhote, his teacher and mentor, for the rest of his life.

Paris at that time was a student’s world. It was filled with myriad forms of art, philosophy, and all the passionate discussions that would accompany it. Etting frequented the most exclusive art shows and enjoyed the avant-garde films screened in Paris Studio 28. It was in this artistic crucible that Emlen Etting mingled with the most influential artists of the day

Emien Etting’s figurative paintings and drawings depict the loneliness of modernity and the extravagance of nature. He illustrated works by Paul Valéry and Franz Kafka, among others. Etting’s two films, the 1932 “Poem 8” and “Oramunde” filmed in 1933, are considered milestones of poetic filmmaking.

James Childs

James Childs, “The Bravo”, 1988, Black and White Chalk, 31 x24 Inches

The basis of James Childs’ art today is his study with Richard Lack and R.H.Ives Gammell, an education based in Boston Impressionism and the traditions of the Ecole des Beaux Arts transmitted through Gammell’s master, William McGregor Paxton. Childs amplified these studies by extensive copying of the Masters and comparative research in 19th. Century and Renaisance painting and drawing. The Greek aesthetic informs his personal ideal.

Childs has a B.F.A. from The Minneapolis College of Art and Design and spent a year at Atelier 63 in Haarlem, Holland, founded and taught by members of the expressionist group COBRA, Ger Lataster and Karl Apprl. Since moving to New York in 1987, Childs has mainly supported himself through society portraiture painted in a classical style. He has painted some of the most powerful men and most glamorous women of this era including Christopher Forbes, Carolyne Roehm, Blaine Trump, Elizabeth Ross Johnson, Ursula Corning, and Barbara and Donald Tober.

The Venator Series

The Venator Series by Joe Mikolay

West Chatham was a quiet town, sleepily wrapped up in its suburban comforts. It was a place where everyone knew that every day would play out to the same familiar melody, and every night would shroud them in tranquil silence. It was a simple town, with simple people living simple lives – or so it seemed from the outside looking in.

Until the day came when dozens of mauled and devoured carcasses were revealed by the unblinking light of the sun. And the night came when concealed horrors lurked, piercing the shrouded silence with bestial howls. For once The Pack claims a territory as its own, the feeding frenzy begins.

The first two books in a series about werewolves and, of course, eventually vampires. Leave the lights on; it is a good read. Available also on Kindle.

Gaston Bachelard: “We Return to Them in Our Night Dreams”

Photographer Unknown, (The Loft Space)

“And all the spaces of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from solitude, enjoyed, desired, and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us and precisely because the human being wants them to remain so. He knows instinctively that this space identified with his solitude is creative; that even when it is forever expunged from the present, when, henceforth, it is alien to all the promises of the future, even when we no longer have a garret, when the attic room is lost and gone, there remains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived in an attic.
We return to them in our night dreams. These retreats have the value of a shell. And when we reach the very end of the labyrinths of sleep, when we attain to the regions of deep slumber, we may perhaps experience a type of repose that is pre-human; pre-human, in this case, approaching the immemorial. But in the daydream itself, the recollection of moments of confined, simple, shut-in space are experiences of heartwarming space, of a space that does not seek to become extended, but would like above all still to be possessed. In the past, the attic may have seemed too small, it may have seemed cold in winter and hot in summer. Now, however, in memory recaptured through daydreams, it is hard to say through what syncretism the attic is at once small and large, warm and cool, always comforting.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Jack Cowan

Jack Cowan, “The Ascent”,. 2006, Oil on Linen;. 78.7 x 73.7 cm, Private Collection

Born in Florida in 1962, Jack D. Cowan is an American Realist artist whose work is known for a broad range of subjects, which include still lifes, landscapes, figurative work, and commissioned portraits. His work has been influenced by the compositional style of fashion industry’s promotions and the works of master painters such as Manet, Vermeer and Degas. 

Cowan has shown his work at exhibitions in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Miami. In addition to his frequent shows at Indianapolis’s Hoosier Gallery, his work has been exhibited at the Indiana State Museum in 1990 and at the 1993 Chicago Art Exposition. 

Lost in Thought

Photographer Unknown, (Lost in Thought)

“…the sad part is, that I will probably end up loving you without you for much longer than I loved you when I knew you.
Some people might find that strange.
But the truth of it is that the amount of love you feel for someone and the impact they have on you as a person, is in no way relative to the amount of time you have known them.”

― Ranata Suzuki