Month: August 2015

JIm Kay

Illustrations by Jim Kay, “A Monster Calls” Written by Patrick Ness

River Road Entertainment, Participant Media, Lionsgate International, and Focus Features have teamed to finance and distribute Apache’s production of “The Orphanage” director Juan Antonio Bayona’s next film, “A Monster Calls”, based on the award-winning children’s fantasy novel by Patrick Ness of the “Chaos Walking” trilogy.

The film will be produced by Belen Atienza (The Impossible, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Orphanage) and is slated for a fall 2016 release. It will be distributed by Lionsgate world wide.

“A Monster Calls” is a visually spectacular drama about a young boy who attempts to deal with his mother’s illness and the bullying of his classmates by escaping into a fantastical world of monsters and fairy tales that deal with courage, loss and faith.

Ness wrote the novel based on an original idea by the late Siobhan Dowd. He and illustrator Jim Kay won Britain’s prestigious Carnegie Medal and Greenaway Medal in 2012, presented to the year’s best children’s literature in the UK. Ness is adapting the screenplay from his novel.

Guanyin Bodhisattva

Guanyin Bodhisattva of Compassion, Saint Louis Museum of Art

In Mahayana Buddhism, bodhisattva बोधिसत्त्व is the Sanskrit term for a being with bodhi (enlightenment). A bodhisattva is anyone who, motivated by great compassion, has generated bodhicitta, which is a spontaneous wish to attain buddhahood for the benefit of all sentient beings. A bodhisattva is one of the four sublime states a human can achieve in life (the others being an arhat, buddha or pratyekabuddha).

སྤྱན་རས་གཟིགས་

U Ram Choe

 

Kinetic Sculptures by U Ram Choe, South Korean Sculptor

Inspired by the grandeur of the physical realm, from celestial bodies to earthly organisms, U-ram Choe’s complex kinetic sculptures combine delicate, otherworldly beauty with machines. Choe’s shiny biomorphic forms flutter, glow, and breathe inside their metallic bodies, appearing both familiar and entirely alien.

Choe uses various metals, motors, gears, and custom CPU boards to control the precise motions of each sculpture that are at times perfectly synchronized and other times completely random. With names like “Unicus – Cavum ad Initium” and “Arbor Deus Pennatus”, it’s clear the artist treats each new work like a brand new species.

U Ram Choe

 

, Kinetic Sculptures, John Curtin Gallery, Australia, April 2012

In his first solo exhibition in Australia, U-Ram Choe from Korea presents his extraordinary kinetic sculptures, charting a path between art, science and cybernetic technologies. Finely engineered stainless steel, aluminium, and acrylic ‘bones’ provide the skeletal scaffolding for the ‘brains and muscles’ – CPUs and motors – which are assembled into captivating forms reminiscent of otherworldly flora and fauna, inviting the audience to imagine the evolution of life forms into the future.

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

Cesaria Evora and Marisa Monte, “E Doce Morrer no Mar”

Cesaria Evora and Marisa Monte, “E Doce Morrer no Mar”

This is a song written by Dorival Caymi who lived on the Bahia coast of Brazil.
The song tells the story of a fisherman who goes out to sea at night and dies, leaving his wife alone at home. His wife suffers with grief but thinks

“Doce more no mar, nas ondas verdes do mar.” (It is a sweet, graceful way to die, die in the green waves of the sea).

Uma música por dois classe mundial de cantores cujo vozes iluminar meu dia.

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

Alden Mason

Paintings by Alden Mason

Born in the state of Washington, Alden Mason is perhaps best known for his so-called Burpee Garden series, painted in the 1970s, and named for the seed catalogs that enthralled him as a child growing up on a farm in the Skagit Valley.

“They were big, glorious abstractions, with transparent, very thinned-down oil paint,” said Sheila Farr, a Seattle author, arts writer and former art critic for The Seattle Times. The paintings were acclaimed and catapulted his career into the New York art world. But Alden Mason paid a price for the works, as fumes wafting up from the thinners and paint sickened him. “He had invented this really unique style of painting, but he had to give it up,” Farr said.

The influence of nature, native art forms and the free-form artwork of children infused much of his work. “My paintings are a private world of improvisation, spontaneity, humor and pathos, exaggeration and abandon,” Alden Mason wrote in an artist’s statement for Foster/White Gallery, which has represented him since 2002. “Old-fashioned emotional involvement is still my main priority in painting.”

Hannah Faith Yata

Hannah Faith Yata, “Caustic”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 86.4 x 111.8 cm, Private Collection

Born in Douglasville, Georgia in March of 1989, Hannah Faith Yata is an American artist of Japanese-American descent, whose realist works are fashioned through techniques and materials employed by the historic Masters of Europe’s artist guilds. Her surrealist, often psychedelic, large-scale works depict the energy and beauty of nature, but also relay a sense of unease as they examine threats of moral injustice and environment degradation.

Hannah Faith Yata spent her early childhood in a small rural town where, home schooled, she developed a deep love of nature and animals. She studied at the Franklin College of Arts and Science in Athens, Georgia, and at the University of Georgia where she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drawing and Painting. After her studies in psychology, feminism, and art, Yata made the decision to relocate in 2012 to New York where she could focus on her work as a full-time painter.

Some of the prominent themes featured in Yata’s work are the origins of religion, the nature of the universe, and the symbolic significance of the feminine archetype in our consciousness. Fascinated with different cultures and tribal iconography, she  often employs masks in her paintings to differentiate emotions and characters, as well as, to create a link between nature and humanity. Yata’s elaborate dreamscapes contained multiple layers of symbolism dealing with society and the world which surrounds us. 

In 2015, Hannah Faith Yata was commissioned to produce several works of art for musician Bobby Ray Simmons Jr, popularly known as B.o.B. These paintings were featured on his album “Psycadelik Thoughtz” and those in his “Elements” series. Yata married fellow artist Jean Pierre Arboleda in 2016; both artists call attention to the impact of industry upon nature. In 2019, both artists had a dual-solo exhibition entitled “No Man’s Land” at New York City’s Booth & Last Rites Gallery; this show celebrated the mythology of a whole and unspoiled world. 

Yata’s initial solo exhibition was “Dancing in Delirium” held at the Corey Helford Gallery, one of the premier galleries for contemporary art in Los Angeles, California. In this show, she called upon the symbolism of the female figure, often combining it with parts of animals to create metaphorical hybrid characters. In April of 2018, Yata had a solo show, entitled “Exile” at the Phaneros Gallery in Nevada City, California. This exhibition focused on the mythos of the story of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the sacred garden. 

Hannah Faith Yats’s 2021 “Daughters at the Edge of the Garden” was held at the Allouche Gallery in New York City. The work of this retrospective, deeply inspired by Paleolithic and Neolithic art, were paintings woven with motifs and symbols to celebrate nature’s cycles and pagan imagery which has been demonized by society. In March of 2023, Yata was again at the Allouche Gallery with her “The Alchemy and the Ecstacy”, paintings and dreamscapes which harmonized the human body, its rituals and its growth with all other living beings. Using myths and alchemical symbols, she portrayed the transformation of the soul through its metamorphosis in light and darkness.

Hannah Faith Yata and Jean Pierre Arboleda currently live and work in Pennsylvania; each has a considerable influence on the other’s work. Although each has their own work components, they both share a reverence and respect for the natural world. 

Note: Hannah Faith Yata’s website contains images, exhibition information, as well as available limited edition giclée prints. Her site is located at: https://hannahyata.com

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Hannah Faith Yata”, 2017, Color Print, Bein Art Gallery, Brunswick, Victoria, Australia

Second Insert Image: Hannah Faith Yata, “Holy Ghost”, 2020, Oil on Canvas, 101.6 x 213.4 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Hannah Faith Yata, “Monarch”, 2013, Oil on Canvas, 45.7 x 61 cm, Private Collection 

Anthony McCall

Anthony McCall, “Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture, 2013

The Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, in Berlin showed an impressive exhibition by New York-based artist Anthony McCall. For his first solo show at a museum in Germany, McCall displayed the installation “Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture”. Since the ’70s, he has been developing the realm of projections that scratch at the surfaces of cinema, drawing and sculpture. The visitors of the exhibition got to walk into the beam of light and create a new appearance of the light installations/projection. Within 1,000 sq meters, McCall had five single and two double projections that slowly move.

Sci-Fi Warriors

Artists Unknown, Sci-Fi Warriors

“I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not “true” because we’re hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone who lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself. –From the Introduction”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game, Introduction