A fine art, film, history and literature site oriented to, but not exclusively for, the gay community. Please be aware that there is mature content on this blog. Information on images and links to sources will be provided if known. Enjoy your visit and please subscribe.
Photographer Unknown, (Rainy Drive Through the City Streets)
“It had started to drizzle. The lamp poles cast a kaleidoscope of light dancing across the puddles in the road. The rain made Sam feel even more lost now, as if these shadowy events were invisible to the world. As if the night was cloaked in anonymity. This wasn’t a peaceful rain – it was a sad one. A drizzle, which wept for the inevitable.”
―
Joachim Patinir, “Landscape with Charon Crossing the Styx”, 1515–1524, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain
“Landscape with Charon Crossing Styx” fits into common Northern Renaissance and early Mannerist trends of art. The 16th century witnessed a new era for painting in Germany and the Netherlands that combined influences from local traditions and foreign influences. Many artists, including Patinir, traveled to Italy to study and these travels to the south provided new ideas, particular concerning representations of the natural world. Patinir’s religious subjects, therefore, incorporate precise observation and naturalism with fantastic landscapes inspired by the northern traditions of Bosch.
Patinir utilised a Weltlandschaft (“world landscape”) composition with a three-colour scheme typical of his work, moving from brown in the foreground, to bluish-green, to pale blue in the background. This format, which Patiner is widely acknowledged as popularising, provides a bird’s-eye view over an expansive landscape. Furthermore, the painting uses colour to visibly depict heaven and hell, good and evil. To the viewer’s left is a heavenly place with bright blue skies, crystal blue rivers with a luminous fountain and angels accenting the grassy hills. On the far right of the painting is a dark sky engulfing Hell and the hanged figures on its gate. Fires blaze in the hills. The foreground of the painting consists of brown rocks in Heaven and brown burnt trees in Hell.
In the middle-ground is the river and the grasslands in bright hues of blue and green. The background, which is cut off by the horizon line of the darker blue river, is a pale blue sky highlighted with white and gray clouds. This compositional form is applied here by the crowded left and right sides bracketed by hills, which pushes the viewer’s eye into the open space in the middle and reinforces that the men in the boat are the main focus of the painting.
Cell Block: White, Red and Black
De Kooning, “Painting”, Oil and Enamel, 1948
For “Painting”, painted in 1948, Willem de Kooning used oil and enamel sign paint to create a densely packed painting in which the paint drips, bleeds, congeals, or dissolves into delicate streaks.
Enric Adrian Gener, Unknown Title, (Horse and Rider in Water)
Born on Menorca, one of the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Enric Adrian Gener is a freelance photographer who is passionate about the sea, the ocean, and photography. The vast majority of his minimalist work comes from real life underwater scenes. His photography project 27 MM can be located at: https://www.27mm.net/featured-photography
Reblogged with thanks to https://exercicedestyle.tumblr.com
Kurt Schwitters, “The Spring Door”, 1938
Kurt Schwitters was born Herman Edward Karl Julius Schwitters on June 20, 1887, in Hannover. He attended the Kunstgewerbeschule in Hannover from 1908 to 1909 and from 1909 to 1914 studied at the Kunstakademie Dresden. After serving as a draftsman in the military in 1917, Schwitters experimented with Cubist and Expressionist styles.
In 1918, he made his first collages and in 1919 invented the term “Merz,” which he was to apply to all his creative activities: poetry as well as collage and constructions. Schwitters’s earliest “Merzbilder” date from 1919, the year of his first exhibition at Der Sturm gallery in Berlin, and the first publication of his writings in the ‘Der Sturm’ periodical. Schwitters showed at the Société Anonyme in New York in 1920.
At the Kongress der Konstructivisten in Weimer, Germany, in 1922, Schwitters met Theo van Doesburg, whose ‘De Stijl’ principles influenced his work. About 1923, the artist started to make his first “Merzbau”, a fantastic structure he built over a number of years; the structure grew to occupy much of his Hannover studio. In 1932, Schwitters joined the Paris-based Abstraction-Création group and wrote for their publication of the same name. He participated in the Cubism and Abstract Art and Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibitions of 1936 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The Nazi regime banned Schwitters’s work as “degenerate art” in 1937. This year, the artist fled to Lysaker, Norway, where he constructed a second “Merzbau”. After the German invasion of Norway in 1940, Schwitters escaped to Great Britain, where he was interned for over a year. He settled in London following his release, but moved to Little Langdale in the Lake District in 1945. There, helped by a stipend from the Museum of Modern Art, he began work on a third “Merzbau” in 1947. The project was left unfinished when Schwitters died on January 8, 1948, in Kendal, England.
Photographer Unknown, (Three Pirate Ships at Dusk)
“His stories were what frightened people worst of all. Dreadful stories they were–about hanging, and walking the plank, and storms at sea, and the Dry Tortugas, and wild deeds and places on the Spanish Main. By his own account he must have lived his life among some of the wickedest men that God ever allowed upon the sea, and the language in which he told these stories shocked our plain country people almost as much as the crimes that he described. My father was always saying the inn would be ruined, for people would soon cease coming there to be tyrannized over and put down, and sent shivering to their beds; but I really believe his presence did us good. People were frightened at the time, but on looking back they rather liked it; it was a fine excitement in a quiet country life, and there was even a party of the younger men who pretended to admire him, calling him a “true sea-dog” and a “real old salt” and such like names, and saying there was the sort of man that made England terrible at sea.”
–Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
Four Portrait Paintings by Han Xiao
Photographer Unknown, (The Manifestation of the Dream Catcher)
“Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”
―
Photographer Unknown, Spines and Shoots
Photographer Unknown, (The Face-Off)
James Henry Daugherty, “Construction Workers”, Black and Sepia Conte on Paper, 1936
james Henry Daugherty lived in Indiana, Ohio, and at the age of 9 he moved to Washington, D.C., where he studied at the Corcoran School of Art. Later, he went to London and studied under Frank Brangwyn. During World War I, he was commissioned to produce propaganda posters for various US Government agencies, including the United States Shipping Board.
In September 2006, controversy erupted at Hamilton Avenue School, an elementary school in Greenwich, Connecticut, over Daugherty’s depiction of Bunker Hill hero and Connecticut native Israel Putnam in a mural commissioned by Public Works of Art Project for the town hall, and installed in the school in 1935.
The mural was restored, and revealed a scene, filled with violent and richly-colored imagery, including snarling animals, tomahawk-wielding American Indians, and a half-naked General Putnam strapped to a burning stake. School officials objected to the violent imagery, and ordered the mural removed to the Greenwich Public Library.
This was a study for a mural in the Social Room of Fairfield Court in Stamford, Connecticut.
Leo Herrera, “3 Eras of Gay Sex in 3 Mins”
An Original Three-minute Film by Leo Herrera Visually Spans The History of Homosensual Communication from Pre-Stonewall to Present Day
Leo Herrera is an San Francisco-based visual artist, filmmaker, writer and advocate with a focus on cataloging and presenting gay history. His new project is “FATHERS”, a sci-fi short web series that imagines AIDS never happened, and a generation lived. His 2015 short, “3 ERAS of GAY SEX in 3 Minutes” is an original piece illustrating 3 generations of gay sex in three-minutes, featuring Pre-Stonewall cruising; 1970’s/80’s Leather BDS&M; and Present Day App usage, filmed in NYC and San Francisco.
Instead of presenting gay history as sexless or focusing solely on AIDS, the film celebrates Gay Communication in its most sensual form, through the glances, codes and technological breakthroughs that have allowed gay sex and gay communities to flourish through generations of oppression.
Taking us on a time machine into archetypes of Gay Sex and the unspoken communication methods of these communities, “3 ERAS of GAY SEX in 3 Minutes” informs us and a wider audience, of the rich sexual history of the modern gay male; the symbolism and power of our once ‘secret’ encounters; and a glimpse into the infrastructure of deviant gay communities that are the foundations for the modern gay civil rights movement.
“The idea that as a culture we do have a past, present and future is something that is very, very powerful. We didn’t come out of nowhere, and we haven’t been standing around waiting to be “accepted”, and we aren’t this monolithic culture that will just be part of any “mainstream”, there are too many facets and subcultures. Who better to tell these stories than ourselves.”- Leo Herrera
The Unseen Series: Photography by Ed Thompson
Ed Thompson is a British photographer, artist and lecturer. His own photographic work has focused on various subjects over the years from covering environmental issues, socio-political movements, subcultures and the consequences of war. He lives in the South-East of England working on regular assignments both in the U.K and worldwide.
He developed a distinctive style from an early apprenticeship with the Russian photographer Sergey Chilikov, whom he met at the Arles Photography Festival in 2002. That summer he stayed with Sergey in Paris and learnt the value of shooting everyday life, Sergeys friend, Gueorgui Pinkhassov, told him how the everyday can allow you to touch at something great. His first job after graduating was working at a chain of static caravan holiday camps in the South-East taking portraits of children sitting on the knee of a giant rabbit.
