Year: 2016

Craig D. Lounsbrough: “The Magic of Those Dense Snowfalls”

Photographer Unknown, (Thumbs Up)

“It was always the magic of those dense snowfalls that bedecked the landscape in a whitened splendor and rendered the horizon cloaked to invisibility in winter’s frosty veil. And in the rapture of such moments, you find yourself pressed beyond any and all means of resistance to hold onto anything except the majesty of the ascending moment. And being held a willing hostage, it takes but a moment of these moments to realize that everything around you has been swept up in just the same way, leaving you joined with the whole of creation that is both quieted in awe, but likewise raucous in praise.”

–Craig D. Lounsbrough

Gio Black Peter

Gio Black Peter, “Don’t Let Me Down”, Oil and Acrylic on Canvas,  2016

Gio Black Peter (born Giovanni Andrade Paolo Guevara) is a New York based performance artist as well as an ardent visual artist. He examines text and subject, truth and fakery, rebellion and authority. His subversive work has quickly earned him a name in the downtown New York scene of young emerging artists who participate in today’s dialogue about the deconstruction of high profile, white box presentation and the desire to raise art awareness.

At the core of Black Peter’s thinking is the idea that the life of art depends on the viewer’s willingness to suspend his or her rational thoughts and play into the believability of lies and realistic falsehoods. Familiarity and a seductive aesthetic draw the viewer back to Black Peter’s art- a visceral exploration of vulnerability and self-reflection.

Roland Rafael Repczuk

Roland Rafael Repczuk, Title Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 1999

Roland Rafael Repczuk is a surrealistic painter from Hanerau-Hademarschen, Germany. He mixes his own oil paints out of light-fast pigments. He also does mosaic panels of Venetian glass pieces.

Roland Rafael Repczuk was born in 1963 in Kassel, a city located on the Fulda River in northern Hesse, Germany. He relocated, with his family, to Euskirchen, a seven-hundred year old city close to Cologne, Germany. Influenced by the artwork of german painter and sculptor Joseph Beuys and American craftsman Gustav Bereur, Repczuk decided to pursue an art career. 

Roland Repczuk exhibited his first works at an action art exhibition held in July of 1980 in Carqueiranne, located in southeastern France. This was followed by several exhibitions in the city of Euskirchen in 1981. After extensive traveling through Europe, Repczuk moved to the south of France and changed his style in 1985 from contemporary modern to a more tradition craft. Since then, he has had many exhibitions of his work in Germany and throughout Europe.

Using the techniques of the old master painters, Roland Repczuk creates realistic oil paintings of a surrealistic nature. At the end of 1990, he moved back to Germany with his family, settling in Hamburg and continued producing his paintings, mosaics and frescoes.

Sir Stanley Spencer

Sir Stanley Spencer, “The Bridge”, Oil on Canvas, 1920, Tate Museum

Sir Stanley Spencer CBE RA was an English painter. Shortly after leaving the Slade School of Art, Spencer became well known for his paintings depicting Biblical scenes occurring as if in Cookham, the small village beside the River Thames where he was born and spent much of his life. Spencer referred to Cookham as “a village in Heaven” and in his biblical scenes, fellow-villagers are shown as their Gospel counterparts.

Spencer was skilled at organising multi-figure compositions such as in his large paintings for the Sandham Memorial Chapel and for the ‘Shipbuilding on the Clyde’ series which was a commission for the War Artists’ Advisory Committee during World War Two. As his career progressed Spencer often produced landscapes for commercial necessity and the intensity of his early visionary years diminished somewhat while elements of eccentricity came more to the fore. Although his compositions became more claustrophobic and his use of colour less vivid he maintained an attention to detail in his paintings akin to that of the Pre-Raphaelites.

Spencer’s work frequently combined real and imagined elements. As a result, his paintings have a strong sense of narrative even if the subject is not wholly explicable. He painted “The Bridge” in a temporary studio in the Fee School, Maidenhead. The subject is believed to be spectators watching a boat race, probably the annual Cookham Regatta. They are standing on an invented stone bridge instead of Cookham’s cast-iron bridge, although the decorative quatrefoil motifs are taken from the metal version. The Airedale terrier dog lying on the bridge was called Tinker. Tinker belonged to a Cookham resident, Guy Lacey, who taught Stanley Spencer and his brother Gilbert to swim.

Annie Dillard: “Something is Already Here, and More is Coming”

Photographer Unknown, (Orion Emerges)

“The North washes down the mountains like a waterfall, like a tidal wave, and pours across the valley; it comes to me. It sweetens the persimmons and numbs the last of the crickets and hornets; it fans the flames of the forest maples, bows the meadow’s seeded grasses and pokes it chilling fingers under the leaf litter, thrusting the springtails and the earthworms deeper into the earth. The sun heaves to the south by day, and at night wild Orion emerges looming like the Specter over Dead Man Mountain. Something is already here, and more is coming.”

-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Shaun Tan

Shaun Tan, “Never Eat the Last Olive at a Party” from His Graphic Novel “Rules of Summer”

Shaun Tan is an Australian artist, writer and film maker. He won an Academy Award for “The Lost Thing”, a 2011 animated film adaptation of a 2000 picture book he wrote and illustrated. Other books he has written and illustrated include  Red Tree” and “The Arrival”.

Tan was born in Fremantle, Western Australia, in 1974 and grew up in the northern suburbs of Perth, Western Australia. In 2006, his wordless graphic novel The Arrival won the Book of the Year prize as part of the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards. The same book won the Children’s Book Council of Australia Picture Book of the Year award in 2007, and the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards Premier’s Prize in 2006

“In a book that reads like an homage to The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, Lindgren award-winner Shaun Tan offers a sequence of paintings that represent a boy’s cumulative summer knowledge, framed as rules and populated by Tan’s now-familiar menagerie of one-eyed robots, malevolent rabbits, and windup dinosaurs. The rules appear on the left, while lavish, brilliant paintings of the accompanying disasters light up the opposite pages.

An older boy yanks his younger brother away from a platter at a soiree full of glaring raptors (“Never eat the last olive at a party”); frowns when bats, lizards, and sea anemones move into the living room (“Never leave the back door open overnight”); and, after a fistfight, bundles the younger boy into a locomotive and sends him off through Siberian wastes (“Never lose a fight”).” – Publishers Weekly

David Nicholls: “One Day on Earth”

Photographers Unknown, (One Day on Earth)

“He wanted to live life to the extreme, but without any mess or complications. He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph. Things should look right. Fun; there should be a lot of fun and no more sadness than absolutely necessary.”

― David Nicholls, One Day

Many thanks to http://lowlanderbear.tumblr.com for the great images.

Raoul Pene Du Bois

Raoul Pene Du Bois, “Nudes Stepping Forth”, Theatrical Sketch, Painted Gouache, circa 1945, 40 x 30 Inches

Du Bois was born on Staten Island in New York City, the son of René Pène Du Bois, a banker. He started his career as a costume designer when he was 14, by designing four showgirl costumes for the Ziegfeld Follies. He went on to design the costumes for the Broadway revues “Ziegfeld Follies of 1934″, his first show and “Ziegfeld Follies of 1936″.

Du Bois designed the costumes and/or the scenery for some 48 Broadway shows, starting in 1934 with the “Ziegfeld Follies of 1934″ and his last, “Reggae” in 1980; his designs were used in Jerome Robbins’ “Broadway” in 1989. Among his work was “Gypsy””(1959) and many other musicals starring Ethel Merman. He worked on Billy Rose’s Aquacade for the New York World’s Fair (1939–40).

He won the 1971 Tony Award and Drama Desk Award, Best Costume Design for “No, No, Nanette” and the 1953 Tony Award, Best Scenic Design, for “Wonderful Town” and was nominated for the Tony Award, Costume Design, for “Sugar Babies” (1980), “Doctor Jazz” (1975) and “Gypsy” (1960), and for scenic design for “The Student Gypsy” (1964).

https://www.1stdibs.com  Reference Number LU86512102682

Donal Hord

Donal Hord, “Morning”, Black Granite, 1951-1955

“Morning” by Donal Hord, a San Diego artist, is in the Embarcadero Maria Park at Seaport Village, California. The six foot figure made from black granite is a figure of a muscular man, waking in the morning. The man sits on a base of symbols, the sun and moon, fangs and corn. The fangs are an Aztec symbol of man’s birth from the earth and corn is both a Mexican and American Indian symbol for the basic source of life giving food.

Donal Hord carved the sculpture between 1951 and 1955, keeping it at his home. The sculpture was acquired by the Port of San Diego in 1983, twenty three years after his death. Having lived in San Diego most of his life, many of his large outdoor sculptures are located in the city.

Sir Frederic Leighton

Sir Frederic Leighton, 1st Baron PRA, “The Athlete Wrestling a Python”, Bronze, 1877

Frederic Leighton was an English painter and sculptor. His works depicted historical, biblical, and classical subject matter. Leighton was bearer of the shortest-lived peerage in history.  Leighton was the first painter to be given a peerage, in the New Year Honours List of 1896. The patent creating him Baron Leighton, of Stretton in the County of Shropshire, was issued on 24 January 1896; Leighton died the next day of angina pectoris.

Leighton received his artistic training on the European continent, first from Eduard von Steinle and then from Giovanni Costa. At age 17 in the summer of 1847, he met the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer in Frankfurt and painted his portrait, in graphite and gouache on paper—the only known full-length study of Schopenhauer done from life. In Florence at the age of twenty-four, Leighton studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti and painted his 1853-1855 “Cimabue’s Madonna Carried in Procession”, a large-scaled work which originally hung in the Music Room at Buckingham Palace in 1862. From 1855 to 1859, Leighton lived in Paris, where he met Ingres, Delacroix, Corot and Millet.

The supposition that Frederic Leighton may have been homosexual continues to be debated today. He certainly enjoyed an intense and romantically tinged relationship with the poet Henry William Greville whom he met in Florence in 1856. The older man showered Leighton with letters, but the romantic affection seems not to have been reciprocated. Enquiry is furthermore hindered by the fact that Leighton left no diaries and his letters are telling in their lack of reference to his personal circumstances. No definite primary evidence has yet come to light that effectively dispels the secrecy that Leighton built up around himself, although it is clear that he did court a circle of younger men around his artistic studio.