Month: October 2015

Paul Landacre

Paul Landacre, “Children’s Carnival”, Etching, No Date, 8.5 x 12 inches, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Currently Not on View.

Paul Hambleton Landacre, born in 1893 in Columbus, Ohio, participated in the Southern California artistic Renaissance between the world wars and is regarded as one of the outstanding printmakers of the modern era. His stylistic innovations and technical virtuosity gained wood engraving a foothold as an art form in twentieth-century America.

Landacre’s linocuts and wood engravings of landscapes, still lifes, nudes, and abstractions are marked for their design and mastery of material. He used the finest inks and Japanese papers and, with a few exceptions, printed his wood engravings on a nineteenth-century Washington Hand Press, which is now in the collection of the International Printing Museum in Carson, California.

James Whale, Frankenstein”: Film History Series

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“Frankenstein”: Directed by James Whale, 1931

“Frankenstein” is a 1931 American Pre-Code horror monster film from Universal Pictures directed by James Whale and adapted from the play by Peggy Webling (which in turn is based on the novel of the same name by Mary Shelley), about a scientist and his assistant who dig up corpses to build a monster, but his assistant accidentally gives the monster a murderer’s brain.

The film stars Colin Clive, Mae Clarke, John Boles and Boris Karloff and features Dwight Frye and Edward van Sloan. The Webling play was adapted by John L. Balderston and the screenplay written by Francis Edward Faragoh and Garrett Fort with uncredited contributions from Robert Florey and John Russell. The make-up artist was Jack Pierce. A hit with both audiences and critics, the film was followed by multiple sequels and has become an iconic horror film.

In 1991, the Library of Congress selected “Frankenstein” for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

Although Frankenstein’s hunchbacked assistant is often referred to as “Igor” in descriptions of the films, he is not so called in the earliest films. In both “Frankenstein” and “Bride of Frankenstein”, Frankenstein has an assistant who is played both times by Dwight Frye who is crippled. In the original 1931 film the character is named Fritz, who is hunchbacked and walks with the aid of a small cane. In “Bride of Frankenstein”, Frye plays Karl, a murderer who stands upright but has a lumbering metal brace on both legs that can be heard clicking loudly with every step. Both characters would be killed by Karloff’s monster in their respective films.

Alex MacLean

Aerial Photography by Alex MacLean

Alex S. MacLean is an American photographic artist who is best known for his aerial photographs. His photographs have portrayed the history and evolution of the land from vast agricultural patterns to city grids, recording changes brought about by human intervention and natural processes.

MacLean graduated from Harvard College in 1969 with a Bachelor of Arts degree and earned a Master of Architecture degree from Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1973. He became interested in aerial scenery while he studied community planning and by 1975, MacLean received his commercial pilot license. Soon after, he established Landslides Aerial Photography to provide illustrative aerial photography for architects, landscape designers, urban planners, and environmentalists.

He is the author of ten books and has won many awards, including the 2009 Corine International Book Prize, the American Institute of Architects’ award for Excellence in International Architecture Book Publishing, and the American Academy of Rome’s Prix de Rome in Landscape Architecture for 2003–2004.

Tuomas Korpi

Artwork by Tuomas Korpi

Tuomas Korpi is an illustrator, production designer and matte painter from Finland. He has worked professionally in the entertainment and advertising industry since 2005. He also had studied architecture at Helsinki University of Technology. Thomas Korpi currently lives in Helsinki, Finland,  and works as an illustrator, designer and art director at Studio Piñata, a Helsinki based animation and illustration studio.

Lee Bontecou

Sculptures by Lee Bontecou

Lee Bontecou is best known for the sculptures she created in 1959 and the 1960s, which challenged artistic conventions of both materials and presentation by hanging on the wall like a painting. They consist of welded steel frames covered with recycled canvas (such as conveyor belts or mail sacks) and other found objects.

Bontecou’s best constructions are at once mechanistic and organic, abstract but evocative of the brutality of war.  Art critic Arthur Danto describes them as “fierce”, reminiscent of 17th-century scientist Robert Hooke’s “Micrographia”, lying “at the intersection of magnified insects, battle masks, and armored chariots…”.

Bontecou exhibited at Leo Castelli’s art gallery in the 1960s. One of the largest examples of her work is located in the lobby of the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City, which was commissioned by the architect Philip Johnson.

From the 1970s until 1991 Lee Bontecou taught at Brooklyn College. She retired from the art world to Orbisonia, Pennsylvania. After decades of obscurity, she was brought back to public attention by a 2003 retrospective co-organized by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, that traveled to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 2004.

The retrospective included both work from Bontecou’s public art-world career and an extensive display of work done after retreating from the public view. Bontecou’s work was also included in the Carnegie International 2004-5 exhibit in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 2010, the Museum of Modern Art presented a retrospective of Bontecou’s work entitled All Freedom in Every Sense.

Adam Martinakis

Digital Artwork by Adam Martinakis

Adam Martinakis has lived and worked in Cannock, UK since 2012, and is currently contemplating moving again. This time for a longer stay in Poland. He was born in Lubań, Poland in 1972. His Mother is Polish and his father Greek. In 1982, he moved to Greece with his family, where he resided until his recent move to the UK. Adam Martinakis  completed his studies at Technological Educational Institute of Athens under the faculty of Interior Architecture, Decorative Arts & Industrial Design. He has subsequently freelanced for the digital media industry and lectured at art institutes.

Adam Martinakis has won a string of awards for his digital art and is a member of CultureInside, slashTHREE, Artia & Art.lica International Art Collectives as well as Chamber of Fine Arts of Greece. His digital artwork is available in very limited editions.