Month: July 2015

Trulli Houses

Trulli Houses in Italy

A trullo (plural, trulli) is a traditional Apulian dry stone hut with a conical roof. Their style of construction is specific to the Itria Valley, in the Murge area of the Italian region of Apulia. Trulli were generally constructed as temporary field shelters and storehouses or as permanent dwellings by small proprietors or agricultural labourers. In the town of Alberobello, in the province of Bari, whole districts are packed with trulli. The golden age of trulli was the 19th century, especially its final decades marked by the development of wine growing.

Charles Demuth

Five Watercolors by Charles Demuth

Painter Charles Demuth (1883-1935) was one of the earliest American artists to expose his gay identity through forthright, positive depictions of homosexual desire. As a leader of the American Modernist movement, Demuth was best known as a pioneer of the precisionist style* and as a master watercolorist.

Raised in a well-off merchant family, Demuth had the financial freedom to pursue his artistic vision without regard for public opinion concerning aesthetics or sexuality. Born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he started painting when a childhood illness rendered him unable to walk. Charles studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where the realist tradition of former faculty member Thomas Eakins prevailed. Eakins was himself a painter of major works of homoerotic content.

In 1912, Charles began a relationship with Robert Locher, also from Lancaster, who was to become his life partner. After spending two years in Paris, the two men went to New York City, enjoying the bohemian lifestyle of Greenwich Village. They also embraced the summer artist colony of Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Demuth associated with leftist writers and artists committed to sexual liberation.

Note: In regards to Charles Demuth’s “Turkish Bath with Self Portrait”, seen above, the watercolor sketch offers an illuminating depiction of the gay subculture in postwar New York. The setting is likely the Lafayette Baths, a Turkish bathhouse in the East Village. The artist, with dark hair and mustache, appears nude in the center of the frame. He talks with two other men: a blonde man swaddled in a towel, who faces away from the camera, and a fully undressed red-headed man who strikes a confident pose. Behind the trio, a man with indistinct features stands in a pool, water waist high, while a duo in the upper right corner of the canvas seem to be caught up in an intimate moment.

Demuth was likely open about his sexuality with his friends, and frankly depicted the evolving, underground gay scenes in New York and Paris. This image is striking in its open, candid depiction of desire and attraction between men. It was not intended for public exhibition during Demuth’s lifetime and historically it has great significance, visualizing the emergence of a sexual subculture organized along very different lines than male/female courtship. Since his death, Demuth’s watercolors of early-20th-century gay life have proven to be sources of inspiration and fellowship to later generations of American artists, including Andy Warhol, another Pennsylvania native.:

 

Eugène Fredrik Jansson

Eugène Fredrik Jansson, “Naken Yngling (Naked Youth)”, 1907

Eugène Fredrik Jansson was a Swedish painter known for his night-time landscapes and cityscapes dominated by shades of blue and very visible brush strokes.Over the years his paintings moved towards increasing simplification and abstraction, and at the end of his “blue” period, little more than the street lights and their reflections in the waters can be discerned from the mass of blue of the canvas.

Jansson enrolled in the Tekniska stolen, now the Konstfack, and studied with Edvard Perséus, a painter who ran a private school in Stockholm. He was accepted into the Antique school of the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in 1881 but did not have sufficient funds to finish his studies with his fellow students in Paris.

After 1904, when Jansson had already achieved success with his “blue period” Stockholm views, Jansson confessed to a friend that he felt absolutely exhausted and had no more wish to continue with what he had done until then. He stopped participating in exhibitions for several years and went over to figure painting. To combat the health issues he had suffered from since childhood, he became a diligent swimmer and winter bather, often visiting the navy bathhouse.

Jansson found the new subjects for his paintings at the bathhouse. He painted groups of sunbathing sailors, and young muscular nude men lifting weights or doing other physical exercises. Jansson also met his lover Knut Nyman at the bathhouse and exhibited Nyman’s portrait, “Naken Yngling”, in 1907. Jansson and Nyman shared a house together next to his studio and lived an isolated life until 1912 while Jansson worked on his new series of paintings.

Eugène Fredrik Jansson died of a cerbral hemorrhage in 1915. Adrian Jansson, his brother, who was also gay, burnt all of Eugéne’s letters and many other papers, possibly to avoid scandal as homosexuality was illegal in Sweden until 1944.

 

H.E. Davey: “. . .To Realize the Way of Living Itself”

Photographer Unknown, (Shadows an a Wall)

“In Japan, a number of time-honored everyday activities have traditionally been deeply examined by their proponents. Students study how to make tea, perform martial arts, or write with a brush in the most skillful way possible to express themselves with maximum efficiency and minimum strain. Through this efficient, adroit, and creative performance, they arrive at art. But if they continue to delve even more deeply into their art, they discover principles that are truly universal, principles relating to life itself. Then, the art of brush writing becomes shodo—the ‘Way of the brush’—while the art of arranging flowers is elevated to the status of kado—the ‘Way of flowers’. Through these Ways or Do forms, the Japanese have sought to realize the Way of living itself. They have approached the universal through the particular.”

-H.E. Davey, Japanese Yoga: The Way of Dynamic Meditation

Cuong Nguyen

Cuong Nguyen, “The Mask”, Pastel on Sanded Paper

Growing up in Vietnam after the fall of Saigon, Cuong Nguyen was accepted into Saigon’s Academy of Art while still in high school. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1991, where he earned a degree in illustration from San Jose State University and established a successful career as an icon designer in Silicon Valley.

Cuong works in both oil paints and pastels. Though he almost never blends his strokes, Cuong achieves a level of detail and smoothness of gradations that is unusual in pastel paintings This painting was done in pastel on sanded paper. In 2011, this pastel painting was selected to one of the top pastel show in New York, Pastel Society of America, and won the President Award.

Javier Fuentes-León, “Undertow”

“Undertow” Written and Directed by Javier Fuuentes-León

Miguel (Cristian Mercado, “Che: Part Two”) has lived his whole life in the small Peruvian fishing village where he now awaits the imminent arrival of his first child with his pretty wife, Mariela (Tatiana Astengo).  But Miguel keeps a large secret and when Santiago (Manolo Cardona, “Beverly Hills Chihuahua”), a painter shunned by the denizens of the town for being homosexual, disappears, Miguel’s very soul is pulled down by the “Undertow.”

Writer/director Javier Fuentes-León makes his feature film debut with this Peruvian-Colombian drama film chosen to represent his country for the Foreign Language Film Oscar.  Stunningly photographed by Mauricio Vidal, “Undertow” is about a ghost caught between his lover’s private shame and a town’s public traditions.  Mercado creates a complex man who remains likable even as he struggles with his own identity and machismo.

“Undertow” had been gestating since 1996, when the director Javier Fuentes-León wrote the very first scene. Originally conceived of as a supernatural revenge thriller about a fisherman having an affair with a prostitute, Javier decided to change it after coming out of the closet himself, in an attempt to explore more interesting themes and material.

The film shot in Cabo Blanco, Peru, won the World Cinema Audience Award in the Dramatic category at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival in the U.S.A. Other Audience Awards included Cartagena, Montreal, Miami, Chicago, Utrecht, Lima, and Galway, as well as Jury Awards in Madrid, San Francisco, Seattle, Toulouse, and Philadelphia. It received a nomination as Best Latin American Film at the 2011 Goya Awards in Spain.

A great film. Javier Fuentes-Leon is a great writer and director. The photography and use of symbolism in this film both make this a movie that must be seen.

Song “I Know Him So Well” is performed by Elaine Paige and Barbara Dickson

Dionisio González

 

Dionisio González, Architectual Digital Photography

Dionisio González lives and works in Seville. His digital photographs create spatial, sculptural and photographic explorations of space, architecture and urban development.  Combining existing urban structures with digitally drawn architecture, González’s landscaped images are deceiving yet convincing.

González’s work has been exhibited in many of prestigious institutions and museums, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Bourdeaux, France, the Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá (MAMBO), Bogotá, Colombia, the Museo de Arte de Sao Paulo (MASP), Sao Paulo, Brasil, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCCA), Toronto, Canada.