Month: March 2016

Pordenone

Pordenone, “Pilate Judges Christ”, Detail, Fresco,1520, The Cathedral of Cremona, Italy

Pordenone, Il Pordenone in Italian, is the byname of Giovanni Antonio de’ Sacchis (c. 1484–1539), an Italian Mannerist painter, loosely of the Venetian school. Vasari, his main biographer, wrongly identifies him as Giovanni Antonio Licinio. He painted in several cities in northern Italy “with speed, vigor, and deliberate coarseness of expression and execution—intended to shock”.

He appears to have visited Rome, and learnt from its High Renaissance masterpieces, but lacked a good training in anatomical drawing. Like Polidoro da Caravaggio, he was one of the artists often commissioned to paint the exteriors of buildings; of such work at most a shadow survives after centuries of weather. Michelangelo is said to have approved of one palace facade in 1527; it is now only known from a preparatory drawing.

Much of his work was lost when the Doge’s Palace in Venice was largely destroyed by fires in 1574 and 1577. A number of fresco cycles survive, for example part of one at Cremona Cathedral, where his Passion scenes have a violence hardly repeated until Goya. Another cycle was at the Scuola Grande della Carità in Venice, now the Gallerie dell’Accademia, the main art museum, where he worked with the young Tintoretto.

His life was as energetic and restless as his art; he married three times, and was accused in court of hiring criminals to kill his brother to avoid sharing their inheritance. He perhaps had some influence on later works by Titian and more clearly on Tintoretto, who to some extent took over his position as the leading painter of large mural commissions in Venice. Titian and Pordenone were rivals in his last decade and gossip even claimed that his death was suspicious.

John Williams: “You Must Remember What You Are”

Photographer Unknown, (Food for the Mind)

“You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you’re trying to decide what to do.”

― John Williams, Stoner

 

Dean Koontz: “The Appearance of Ordinariness”

Photographer Unknown, (The Appearance of Ordinariness)

“Even if there are moments during the day when all seems normal and when every action of your own and of those around you seems to be unremarkable, the appearance of ordinariness is an illusion, and just below the placid surface, the world is seething.”

—Dean Koontz, Deeply Odd

Juan Gris

Juan Gris, “Still Life with Checked Tablecloth”, Oil on Canvas, 1915, Private Collection

Juan Gris was born in Madrid. He later studied engineering at Madrid’s School of Arts and Sciences. There, from 1902 to 1904, he contributed drawings to local periodicals. From 1904 to 1905, he studied painting with the academic artist José Moreno Carbonero. It was in 1905 that José Victoriano González adopted the more distinctive name Juan Gris.

In 1906 he moved to Paris and became friends with Henri Matisse, Georges Braque and Fernand Léger. In Paris, Gris followed the lead of another friend and fellow countryman, Pablo Picasso. He submitted darkly humorous illustrations to journals such as Le Rire, L’assiette au beurre, Le Charivari, and Le Cri de Paris.

Gris began to paint seriously in 1910 (when he gave up working as a satirical cartoonist), developing at this time a personal Cubist style. In A Life of Picasso, John Richardson writes that Jean Metzinger’s 1911 work, Le goûter (Tea Time), persuaded Juan Gris of the importance of mathematics in painting. Gris exhibited for the first time at the 1912 Salon des Indépendants (a painting entitled Hommage à Pablo Picasso).

Paolo Tredich

Three Oil Paintings by Paolo Terdich

“The water works represent my last project, an extreme challenge which combines the message I tried to transmit in my portraits and figures and the technical complications to render the movement, the transparencies and the light reflections of water and the fragmentation effects of bodies under water. These works are unusual and modern paintings, of the complex realization, with the subjects that crush the crystal of the water in decomposed glares that they decompose the bodies underwater”. – Paolo Terdich

Born in Piacenza (Italy), Paolo Terdich has travelled widely and has lived in various countries, including U.K., Netherlands, Egypt, and Nigeria. He has had the opportunity to experience diverse cultures and, hence, to develop and refine his art. He has presented his work at various personal exhibitions worldwide and at some renowned art fairs. The solo exhibitions in Abuja (Nigeria – 2010) at the Italian Embassy and at the “Istituto Italiano di Cultura” in Cairo (Egypt – 2000) are two example of events organized by the Italian Institutions, to show his works worldwide. He has also won numerous international prizes (e.g. he was among the winners of the ”VII Biennale Internazionale di Roma” and finalists in the prestigious “Premio Arte 2008”).

Curled Tongue

Photographer Unknown, (Curled Tongue), Selfie

“I resisted the temptation to turn around and stick out my tongue in derision at Beliquose. After all, there was no telling when or if we should meet again, and I certainly did not need him saying, ‘Ah yes, Poe, the fellow whose trespasses i could have forgiven in their entirety… except for the tongue thing. Yes, for that, you must surely die.”

― Peter David, The Woad to Wuin

 

Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg

Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, “A Young Bowman Sharpening His Arrow”, Detail, 1812

Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg was a Danish painter. He was born in Blåkrog in the Duchy of Schleswig (now in Aabenraa Municipality, in the southern part of Jutland in Denmark), to Henrik Vilhelm Eckersberg, painter and carpenter, and Ingeborg Nielsdatter. He went on to lay the foundation for the period of art known as the Golden Age of Danish Painting, and is referred to as the Father of Danish painting.

In 1786 his family moved to Blans, a village near the picturesque Alssund, where he enjoyed drawing pictures of the surrounding countryside, and taking sailing tours in his fathers boat. After confirmation he began his training as a painter under church- and portrait painter, Jes Jessen of Aabenraa (1797–1800). He continued his training at 17 years of age under Josiah Jacob Jessen in Flensborg, where he became an apprentice in May 1800. He, however, had his sights set on being accepted at the Royal Danish Academy of Art (Det Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi) in Copenhagen.

Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg’s greatest contribution to painting was through his professorship at the Danish Royal Academy of Art. He revitalized teaching by taking students out into the field, where they were challenged to do studies from nature. In this way it was he who introduced direct study from nature into Danish art. He also encouraged his students to develop their individual strengths, thus creating unique styles.

Eckersberg developed an increasing interest in perspective on account of his marine paintings. He wrote a dissertation on the subject called “Linear perspective used in the art of painting” (Linearperspektiven, anvendt paa Malerkunsten), published in 1841, and taught classes on the subject at the Academy. He made a small number of etchings that combine daily life observations with classical, harmonious principles of composition. This led the way to the characteristic manner in which Golden Age painters portrayed common, everyday life.

The Apoxyomenos from Croatia

The Apoxyomenos from Croatia

Apoxyomenos (the “Scraper”) is one of the conventional subjects of ancient Greek votive sculpture. It represents an athlete caught in the familiar act of scraping sweat and dust from his body with  a strigil, the small curved instrument used in Roman baths.

This substantially complete bronze Apoxyomenos, who strigilates his left hand held close to his thigh, was discovered by René Wouten. He found this bronze statue fully covered in sponges and sea life. No parts of the statue were missing, though its head was disconnected from the body. The bronze figure was recovered in 1996 from the northern Adriatic Sea between the Vele Orjule and Kozjaki inlets, near the Croatian city of Lošinj.

At 192 cm in height, this Apoxyomenos is currently thought to be a Hellenistic copy of sculptor Lysippos’ Apoxyomenos from the second or first century BCE. It is currently conserved, as the Croatian Apoxyomenos, in Zagreb’s Mimara Museum. The Apoxyomenos is similar to an Ephesus bronze votive figure in several ways: the almost portrait-like individuality of the face and a non-Classical form with a broad, fleshy jaw, short chin and hair made rough and unruly by sweat and dust.

Peter Clines

Peter Clines, The Eerie Adventures of the Lycanthrope Robinson Crusoe, Permuted Press, 2010

Recently discovered amidst the papers of the 20th century writer and historian H. P. Lovecraft is what claims to be the true story of Robinson Crusoe. Taken from the castaway’s own journals and memoirs, and fact-checked by Lovecraft himself, it is free from many of Defoe’s edits and alterations. From Lovecraft’s work a much smoother, simpler tale emerges–but also a far more disturbing one.

Here Crusoe is revealed as a man bearing the terrible curse of the werewolf and the guilt that comes with it–a man with no real incentive to leave his island prison. The cannibals who terrorized Crusoe are revealed to be less human than ever before hinted–worshippers of a malevolent octopus-headed god. And the island itself is a place of ancient, evil mysteries that threaten Crusoe’s sanity and his very soul.

This version of the classic tale, assembled by two legends of English literature and abridged by Peter Clines, is the terrifying supernatural true story of Robinson Crusoe as it has never been seen before.