Month: March 2016

Toni Grote

Toni Grote, “Storm Clouds with Lightning”, Oil on Wood Panel, 45.7 x 45.7 cm, Private Collection

Toni Grote is a successful artist from Iowa, who has used Ebay as her global gallery since 2001 for the exhibition and sale of her paintings. Since then, Toni Grote has posted over 1,000 paintings, selling most of them.

She uses acrylic and oil paints to create exquisite landscapes, farm animals, and still lifes. She paints on canvas, textured masonite, and other substrates. Her storm paintings, to me, are her forte.

Thanks to http://artisttonigrote.blogspot.com

Christophe Gans, “Brotherhood of the Wolf”

Brotherhood of the Wolf, Directed by Christophe Gans, Narrated by Jaques Perrin, 2001

Brotherhood of the Wolf (French: Le Pacte des loups) is a 2001 French historical horror-action film directed by Christophe Gans, written by Gans and Stéphane Cabel, starring Samuel Le Bihan, Mark Dacascos, Émilie Dequenne, Monica Bellucci, and Vincent Cassel.

The film is loosely based on a real-life series of killings that took place in France in the 18th century and the famous legend of the Beast of Gévaudan; parts of the film were shot at Château de Roquetaillade. The film has several extended swashbuckling fight scenes, with martial arts performances by the cast mixed in, making it unusual for a historical drama. It was well-received with critics praising its high production values, cinematography, performances and Gans’ atmospheric direction.

An older film with a werewolf horror atmosphere; a good thriller to watch.

Cooling Down

 

Artist Unknown, (Cooling Down), Computer Graphics, Gay Film Gifs

“Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell: Ding-dong
Hark! now I hear them,—Ding-dong, bell.”

― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

 

George Wesley Bellows

George Wesley Bellows, “Man on His Back, Nude”, 1916, San Diego Museum of Art

This is a very rare, rich proof impression printed in a black/ purple ink. The edition consists of only 19 prints. It is one of only two lithographs by George Wesley Bellows in which he depicted male nudes.

An American painter, lithographer and illustrator, George Bellows was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1882. He attended Ohio State University from 1901-1904, but moved to New York before graduating to study at the New York School of Art under Robert Henri.

In 1911, Bellows began contributing pictures to the radical journal “The Masses”, which gave him the opportunity to work with like-minded artists such as Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson and John Sloan. He produced several anti- war drawings during the time of the First World War and completed a series of paintings and lithographs concerning the war.

Bellows moved to the Chicago Art Institute in 1919 and illustrated novels, including several by H.G. Wells. While in New York in 1925, an attack of appendicitis caused his death.

Jon Krakauer: “Into the Wild”

Security Guards Numbers One Through Six

“make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.

–Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

Thanks to http://welyum-blog-blog.tumblr.com for these great gifs.

James Steuart Curry

John Steuart Curry, “The Missed Leap”, Lithograph on Cream Wove Paper, 1934, Smithsonian American Art Museum

John Steuart Curry traveled with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus for months in 1932, making studies for later paintings and prints. A trapeze artist misses her partner’s outstretched hand in the lithograph “Missed Leap,” and while Curry has fringed a lower corner with a net, she appears to be dropping straight toward a starred target on the floor below.

Nicholas Blowers

The Artwork of Nicholas Blowers

Nicholas Blowers was born in Chelmsford, England in 1972. He studied locally, and then studied Fine Art at Southampton, graduating in 1994. In Europe Blowers remains largely undiscovered, but he has already made an impact both in Sydney and Tasmania, where he relocated in 2007. Blowers works on the depiction and experience of landscape elements, chiefly the detritus of forests.

Most recently, in Tasmania, Blowers’s art has focused upon the serially damaged forests and their landscapes. In fact, as an Englishman in Australia, he could be said to have followed a long tradition, running more recently via the painter John Wolseley (b.1938), who settled in Australia in 1976, and historically, the famous emigrant from London to Hobart, Tasmania, the painter John Glover (1767-1849), in 1831.

“An impenetrable dark wall of trees may offer a glimpse of light some distance inward – often a huge gum has fallen, clearing a pathway. A fallen gum will have left a splintered trunk surrounded by splinters of shattered bark. I was recently standing on the trunk of a huge fallen tree and looking back at the trunk, it appeared a totally implausible form, unique and singular like a castle turret whose walls have splintered and fallen outwards’”              – Nicholas Blowers

Thanks to http://darksilenceinsuburbia.tumblr.com