Month: May 2016

Eudora Welty: “Life Doesn’t Hold Still”

 

Photographer Unknown, (A Snapshot Worth Saving),Selfie

“The camera was a hand-held auxiliary of wanting-to-know. It had more than information and accuracy to teach me. I learned in the doing how ready I had to be. Life doesn’t hold still. A good snapshot stopped a moment from running away. Photography taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need I had. Making pictures of people in all sorts of situations, I learned that every feeling waits upon its gesture, and I had to be prepared to recognize this moment when I saw it.”

-Eudora Welty

Bill Domonkos

Bill Domonkos, Title Unknown, (The Two Sisters)

Working with photographs, film clips, and illustrations lost to time, San Francisco-based filmmaker and stereoscopist Bill Domonkos creates darkly humorous animated GIFs. The resurrected photos merged with modern animation are almost completely nonsensical in subject matter and yet perfect in their execution, the more random the better.

Roberto Ferri

Roberto Ferri, “Struggle IV”, Oil on Canvas, 2013

Roberto Ferri is an Italian artist and painter from Taranto, Italy. He graduated in 1996 from the Liceo Artistico Lisippo Taranto, a local art school in Taranto. Ferri moved to Rome in 1999, to do research on ancient painting, particularly those works at the end of the 16th century. He graduated with honors from the Academy of Fine Arts, Rome, in 2006.

His work is deeply inspired by the Baroque painters, particularly Caravagggio, and other masters of Romanticism, the Academy style, and Symbolism. Ferri’s work is represented in private collections and was featured in the Italian pavilion of the 2011 Venice Biennale.

Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko, “Hierarchical Birds”, 1944, Oil on Canvas, 100.7 x 80.5 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

During the 1940s Rothko’s imagery became increasingly symbolic. In the social climate of anxiety that dominated the late 1930s and the years of World War II, images from everyday life – however unnaturalistic – began to appear somewhat outmoded. If art were to express the tragedy of the human condition, Rothko felt, new subjects and a new idiom had to be found. He said, “It was with the utmost reluctance that I found the figure could not serve my purposes….But a time came when none of us could use the figure without mutilating it.”

In a 1943 letter to the New York Times, written with Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman, Rothko said, “It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints, as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess a spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.”

Alfred Seiland

Photographs by Alfred Seiland

Alfred Seiland’s photographs are a long-term and geographically far-reaching exploration of ancient sites and their appearance today. All the photographs are taken with an analogue, large-format camera, showing an extraordinary aesthetic sensibility and a distinctive compositional approach. Although the Austrian photographer’s images may appear staged, the photographs are the result of the artist’s careful and refined search for the perfect place and moment at which to take his photograph.

His photographs cast an objective eye on the human landscape with the resultant effect of realistic images, methodically corrected and perfected, that form a pictoral narrative and “a mood and space that’s seems to exist only in and for that picture.”

Top Image: “Odessa, Delaware”, 1983

Bottom Image: “Auf der Paßhöhe, Grimselpaß, Schweiz”, 1994

Rainer Maria Rilke: “You Lift Slowly One Black Tree”

Artist Unknown, (The Dramatic Entrance), Computer Graphics, Gay Film Gifs

“Whoever you are: in the evening step out
of your room, where you know everything;
yours is the last house before the far-off:
whoever you are.
With your eyes, which in their weariness
barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold,
you lift very slowly one black tree
and place it against the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world. And it is huge
and like a word which grows ripe in silence.
And as your will seizes on its meaning,
tenderly your eyes let it go…”

― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images

 

Yuuki Yugo

Wolf Guy

Wolf Guy is a Japanese manga series of two volumes published in 1970 by Bunkasha. Originally written by Kazumasa Hirai and illustrated by Hisashi Sakaguchi (坂口尚), the series has been readapted with a more violent and mature setting in 2007 by Yoshiaki Tabata and Yuuki Yugo. This new adaptation, also known as Wolf Guy: Ōkami no Monshō, has been released as twelve volumes by Akita Shoten.

The main protagonist of the story is Akira Inugami, a Japanese-American exchange student. He is constantly bullied and abused by gang members (whom in the stories, he usually ends up killing or maiming). His parents were killed by hunters when he was young, mainly because of their werewolf lineage, and was raised by a pack of wolves he had befriended. He can transform into a werewolf in his own will. He is quite powerful during full moons and is weak only during the days of new moons.

Odin, the Allfather

Artist Unknown, “Odin, The Allfather, with His Ravens Hugin and Munin, as Well as His Wolves Geri and Freki”

In Norse mythology, Geri and Freki (Old Norse, both meaning “the ravenous” or “greedy one”) are two wolves which are said to accompany the god Odin. They are attested in the Poetic Edda, a collection of epic poetry compiled in the 13th century from earlier traditional sources, in the Prose Edda, written in the 13th century by Snorri Sturluson, and in the poetry of skalds.

In the Poetic Edda poem Grímnismál, the god Odin (disguised as Grímnir) provides the young Agnarr with information about Odin’s companions. Agnarr is told that Odin feeds Geri and Freki while the god himself consumes only wine:

Freki and Geri does Heerfather feed,
The far-famed fighter of old:
But on wine alone does the weapon-decked god,
Othin, forever live.

Hair Patterns

Photographer Unknown, (Hair Patterns)

“A great textile, like the William Morris Strawberry Thief, is a piece of art, but it takes a lot of time to make a piece of art. It isn’t simply design either. You have to understand the fabrics and what they can bear. You have to understand the dyeing process and how to achieve certain colors and what will make the color last through the ages. If you make a mistake, you might have to begin again.”
“I don’t think I know Strawberry Thief,” Sadie said.”One moment,” Mrs. Watanabe said. Mrs. Watanabe went into her bedroom, and she returned with a little footstool that was upholstered in a reproduction of Strawberry Thief. The pattern depicted birds and strawberries in a garden, and although Sadie hadn’t known the name, she recognized the print when she saw it.
“This was William Morris’s garden. These were his strawberries. Those were birds he knew. No designer had ever used red or yellow in an indigo discharge dyeing technique before. He must have had to start over many times to get the colors right. This fabric is not just a fabric. It’s the story of failure and of perseverance, of the discipline of a craftsman, of the life of an artist.”

—Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow