Month: September 2015

James Ensor

James Ensor, “The Fall of the Rebel Angels”, 1889, Oil on Canvas, 3 x 4 feet, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp

Ensor was born in 1860 to an Englishman father and a Belgian mother. He studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, where he cofounded Les XX, an avant-garde exhibition society. Returning to his hometown of Ostend, he set up a studio. In 1887, Ensor began one of his most ambitious works “The Temptation of Saint Anthony”,  a monumental six-foot tall drawing, drawn on fifty-one separate sheets of paper. Two years later, he painted his “The Fall of the Rebel Angels”.

James Ensor was very passionate about the use of light in his canvases. He filled his canvases with it. In some of Ensor’s work, light is a radiant substance bathing children; and in others, light becomes a heavy presence, bright with movement and luminosity.

Light for Ensor also could be allegorical, splitting the sky open in a violent visible burst, as the piercing hand of God expelling Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden. It could also fill the heavens, as in the image above, out of which the rebel angels fell. The chaos in the light is painted chaotically with dense brushstrokes emphasizing the tumult.

Sebastiano Ricci

Sebastiano Ricci, “Saint Anthony of Padua Healing a Youth”, Oil on Canvas, 1690, Louvre Museum, Paris,, France

Sebastiano Ricci (1659 – 1734) was an Italian painter of the late Baroque school of Venice. About the same age as Piazzetta, and an elder contemporary of Tiepolo, he represents a late version of the vigorous and luminous Cortonesque style of grand manner fresco painting.

Leopard

Leopard

The leopard is one of the five “big cats” in the genus Panthera. It is a member of the Felidae family with a wide range in regions of sub-Saharan Africa, West Asia, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia to Siberia. Fossil records found in Italy suggest that in the Pleistocene it ranged as far as Europe.

Compared to other members of Felidae, the leopard has relatively short legs and a long body with a large skull. It is similar in appearance to the jaguar, but is smaller and more lightly built. Its fur is marked with rosettes similar to those of the jaguar, but the leopard’s rosettes are smaller and more densely packed, and do not usually have central spots as the jaguars do. Both leopards and jaguars that are melanistic are known as black panthers.

The leopard’s success in the wild is due to its well camouflaged fur, its opportunistic hunting behavior, broad diet and strength to move heavy carcass into trees, its ability to adapt to various habitats ranging from rainforest, steppe to arid and montane areas and to run at speeds up to 58 kilometres per hour (36 mph).

Henri Martin, “Clemence Isaure”

Henri Martin, “Clemence Isaure”, Oil on Canvas, 1895, 67×55 cm.

Clémence Isaure is a quasi-legendary medieval figure credited with founding or restoring the Acadèmia dels Jòcs Florals or Academy of the Floral Games. She is supposed to have left a legacy to fund awards in the form of gold and silver flowers that the city would award annually to the best poets.

As the mythic founder of the games, Clémence Isaure is celebrated principally in Toulouse, where poems, sculptures, and paintings have been dedicated to her and a variety of places and institutions bear her name. In order to provide her with a realistic outline, she has been identified as a member of the Yzalguier family of Toulouse. In 1806 the Rue des Yzalguier was renamed the Rue Clémence-Isaure. A tower at 7 De la Rue Cujas was named the Tour Clémence Isaure.

“Toulouse! ville antique où fleurissent encore
Pour les poètes, vos fleurs d’or, Clémence Isaure”

[“Toulouse! ancient city where flourish still
For poets your golden flowers, Clémence Isaure”]

-Charles Cros, 1888

Aryz and Os Gemeos

Aryz and Os Gemeos, Title Unknown, Mural on Building, Lodz, Poland

Aryz and Os Gemeos painted a collaborative mural in Lodz, Poland for the Urban Forms Festival. Pairing Aryz, the young street artist from Spain, with the experience of the Os Gemeos twins has certainly paid off as the resulting mural is pretty awesome with OsG’s character coming out of the building in some sort of embrace with Aryz’s skeletal beauty.

Ray Bradbury: ” Until the Apples Plummet Like Rain”

Photographer Unknown, (The Apple Eater)

“And then there is that day when all around,
all around you hear the dropping of the apples, one
by one, from the trees. At first it is one here and one there,
and then it is three and then it is four and then nine and
twenty, until the apples plummet like rain, fall like horse hoofs
in the soft, darkening grass, and you are the last apple on the
tree; and you wait for the wind to work you slowly free from
your hold upon the sky, and drop you down and down. Long
before you hit the grass you will have forgotten there ever
was a tree, or other apples, or a summer, or green grass below,
You will fall in darkness…”

― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine