Month: November 2015

Fran Recacha

Paintings by Fran Recacha

Fran Recacha was born in Badalona (Barcelona), Spain, in 1976. He graduated in Arts at the University of Barcelona. He has been a figurative and contemporary painter since 2001 and his paintings are in collections of different countries around the world. His work was exhibited at Spain, France, Italy, England, USA.

As a true poet, Fran Recacha touches our sensibility and imagination. Inspired by mythology, history and legends, he paints “”ideistic”“, symbolic and synthetic compositions. The eye revels at precise drawings, the disappearance of brush strokes, the expression of dynamism, energy, movement, or subtle color nuances in the shadows. The imaginary settings composed by Recacha’s mind take us to surrealistic scenes and often contribute to a critical (sometimes satirical or humoristic) perspective of contemporary society. The esthetic harmony of his work, hides truths that Recacha subtly explores: the antagonisms that prevail between vice and virtue, the fantastical and the real, collective memory and modernity.

Edward Munch

Edvard Munch, Six Paintings of the “Bathers” Series

Edvard Munch was a Norwegian painter and printmaker whose intensely evocative treatment of psychological themes built upon some of the main tenets of late 19th-century Symbolism and greatly influenced German Expressionism in the early 20th century. One of his most well-known works is The Scream of 1893.

The theme of redemption sounded earlier in Munch’s “Golgotha” painted in 1900 is explored in the “Bathing and Regeneration” series of  Munch’s work. These are primarily paintings of male bathers enjoying the healthful benefits of fresh air, sunshine and invigorating sea bathing—all while exercising in the nude and displaying their virility. Munch had begun visiting Norwegian spas in 1899 in pursuit of a cure for his own physical and psychiatric ailments, and it was at this time that he began to paint these scenes of bathing men.

Radical Face, “Welcome Home”

Radical Face, “Welcome Home”

Sheets are swaying from an old clothesline
Like a row of captured ghosts over old dead grass
Was never much, but we’ve made the most
Welcome home

Ships are launching from my chest
Some have names but most do not
If you find one, please let me know what piece I’ve lost

Peel the scars from off my back
I don’t need them anymore
You can throw them out or keep them in your mason jars
I’ve come home

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

Lev Grossman: “To Be a Magician Was To Be a Secret Spring- A Moving Oasis”

Photographer Unknown, (The Magician)

“The world was a desert, but he was a magician, and to be a magician was to be a secret spring – a moving oasis. He wasn’t desolate, and he wasn’t empty. He was full of emotion, full of feelings, bursting with them, and when it came down to it, that’s what being a magician was.

They weren’t ordinary feelings – they weren’t the tame, domesticated kind. Magic was wild feelings, the kind that escaped out of you and into the world and changed things. There was a lot of skill to it, and a lot of learning, and a lot of work, but that was where the power began: the power to enchant the world.”

-Lev Grossman, The Magician’s Land

Mark Summers

Mark Summers, “Centaur”

Mark Summers has been a full-time freelance illustrator since graduating from the Ontario College of Art in 1978. He has devoted the past 35 years of his career to the technique of scratchboard, a onetime popular medium which had become all but obsolete by the mid 70’s. Author and illustration historian Steven Heller credits Summers giving the medium a second life.

Mark’s career started off primarily in the newspaper industry, with clients like the New York Times, the Chicago Times, the Wall Street Journal and many others, but quickly moved into all forms of publication. He has worked for every major magazine, and has contributed work for Rolling Stone, Newsweek, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated and numerous covers for Time. He has also written and illustrate short articles for Vanity Fair. Mark has contributed covers for most of the major publishers in the world and has collaborated with James Michener and Issac Asimov amongst others.

He has also done lavishly illustrated volumes of Poe, Dickens, “Moby Dick”, “Gulliver’s Travels” as well as writing and illustrateing two book of his own. His work is best remembered for his decade long collaboration with Barnes and Noble, where he created the visual persona of their stores, doing portraits of famous authors that decorated their walls.

Image reblogged from http://cevans75.tumblr.com

Frank Cheyne Pape

Illustrations by Frank Cheyne Pape

Frank Cheyne Papé, was an English artist and book illustrator. He studied at The Slade School of Fine Art, completing his studies circa 1902-04. Papé was married to a fellow Slade student, illustrator Alice Stringer.

Papé’s first known work, for E. Clement’s Naughty Eric, published in 1902, remains extremely rare. One copy is held by The British Library. An original pen and ink illustration from one of the stories, ‘The Magic Stone’, has been found in Sussex, England.  Papé’s next earliest illustrations are found in books for children from around 1908, including The Odyssey and The Pilgrim’s Progress.

The Bodley Head, an English publishing company commissioned illustrations by Papé for books of Anatole France, including The Revolt of the Angels (1924) and Penguin Island (1925), in addition to those for the works of Rabelais. He also designed book covers for other authors, including Rafael Sabatini’s “The Life of Cesare Borgia”, published in 1924.

Pape collaborated with Ramon Coffman when Coffman launched Uncle Ray’s Magazine; Papé contributed to this publication until the mid-1950s, first as art director, then as a staff artist. By the end of the 1950s, his eyesight was in serious decline, and his only known work in the 1960s was a series of children’s books for Oxford University Press. His last published work was a 1968 reprint of a 1933 illustrated version of Robinson Crusoe.

Steven Spazuk

 

Steven Spazuk, The Gas Mask Series

For the past 14 years, Steven Spazuk, a Canadian born artist,  has perfected a technique called fumage, that allows him to use the flame of a candle or the flame of a torch as a pencil to create his paintings with trails of soot. Using various tools, he intuitively sculpt the plumes of soot left behind in response to the shapes that appear on the canvas.