Month: November 2016

Nina Simone, “Feeling Good”

“Feeling Good” is a song written by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse for the 1964 musical “The Roar Of The Greasepaint—The Smell Of The Crowd” and has since been recorded by many artists, including Muse, Sammy Davis Jr., Bobby Darin, Traffic, Michael Bublé, The Pussycat Dolls, George Michael, John Barrowman, John Coltrane, Toše Proeski, Frank Sinatra Jr., and Adam Lambert.

Perhaps the most famous version was recorded by Nina Simone, and first appeared on her 1965 album “I Put A Spell On You”. Simone’s version is also featured in the 1993 film “Point Of No Return”, in which the protagonist uses the code name ‘Nina’ and professes to be a longtime fan of Simone’s music. At least half the soundtrack for the film featured Nina Simone songs.

Ivan Milev Lalev

Ivan Milev Lalev, “Krali Marko”, 1926

Ivan Milev Lalev was a Bulgarian painter and scenographer regarded as the founder of the Bulgarian Secession and a representative of Bulgarian modernism, combining symbolism, Art Nouveau and expressionism in his work. In 1920 at the age of twenty three, he was admitted to the National Academy of Arts in Sofia, where he studied under Prof. Stefan Badzhov, and had three one-man exhibitions. He also contributed to the communist comic magazine Red Laughter as an illustrator and cartoonist.

Milev died of influenza in Sofia on 25 January 1927, shortly before his thirtieth birthday. Regarded as one of the great masters of distemper and watercolour painting in Bulgarian art, Milev’s characteristic decorative style was much influenced by the European Secession, but it was also related to Bulgarian folk art and icon painting. Milev’s paintings are exhibited in the National Art Gallery and the Sofia Gallery.

Kevin Weir

Kevin Weir, “Jacob”, Computer Graphics, Vintage Photograph Gifs

 

Art director and designer Kevin Weir uses historical black and white photographs forgotten to time as the basis for his quirky—and slightly disturbing—animated GIFs. Having mastered Photoshop in high school, he found himself five years later “making black and white GIFs as a way to occupy myself during the downtime of an internship I had during grad school.” He shared the images on his Tumblr “Flux Machine” where they quickly went viral.

Weir makes use of photographs found in the Library of Congress online archive, and is deeply drawn to what he calls “unknowable places and persons,” images with little connection to present day, that he can use as blank canvas for his weird ideas. The tinted nature of the medium’s limited frames of animation and the creepiness factor add to the strangeness of the gifs.

Weir is now an art director at Droga5 in NYC, he also also animates music videos and sassy birds.

Michael de la Paz

Michael de la Paz, “Hearst Castle- The Roman Pool”, 2012

The Roman Pool at Hearst castle is a tiled indoor pool decorated with eight statues of Roman gods, goddesses and heroes. The pool appears to be styled after an ancient Roman bath such as the Baths of Caracalla in Rome c. 211-17 CE.

The mosaic tiled patterns were inspired by mosaics found in the 5th Century Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna, Italy. They are also representative of traditional marine monster themes that can be found in ancient Roman baths. The statues are rough copies of ancient Greek and Roman statues. One such copy represents the “Apoxyomenos.” Statuary was used on a considerable scale in the Baths of Caracalla.

Reblogged with thanks to https://www.flickr.com/photos/mykdelapaz/

Albert Renger-Patzsch

Photography by Albert Renger-Patzsch

In the 1920’s a number of German photographers that were linked to the social, political and artistic movement were referred as ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ meaning new objective or new realism, which the new objectivity had tried to change the view point perspective on the development of photography than just the dark room experiments.

In its sharply focused and matter-of-fact style Albert Renger-Patzsch’s work exemplifies the esthetic of The New Objectivity that flourished in the arts in Germany during the Weimar Republic. Like Edward Weston in the United States, Renger-Patzsch believed that the value of photography was in its ability to reproduce the texture of reality, and to represent the essence of an object.

He wrote: “The secret of a good photograph—which, like a work of art, can have esthetic qualities—is its realism … Let us therefore leave art to artists and endeavor to create, with the means peculiar to photography and without borrowing from art, photographs which will last because of their photographic qualities.”

Big Mama Thornton

Big Mama Thornton and the Muddy Waters Blues Band, “Everything Gonna Be Alright”

Thornton’s performances were characterized by her deep, powerful voice and strong sense of self. She tapped into a liberated black feminist persona, through which she freed herself from many of the expectations of musical, lyrical, and physical practice for black women.

She was given her nickname, “Big Mama,” by Frank Schiffman, the manager of Harlem’s Apollo Theater, because of her strong voice, size, and personality. Thornton used her voice to its full potential, once stating that she was louder than any microphone and didn’t want a microphone to ever be as loud as she was.

Thornton was famous for her transgressive gender expression. She often dressed as a man in her performances, wearing work shirts and slacks. She did not care about the opinions of others and “was openly gay and performed risque songs unabashedly.”

Improvisation was a notable part of her performance. She often entered call-and-response exchanges with her band, inserting confident and subversive remarks. Her play with gender and sexuality set the stage for later rock-and-roll artists’ plays with sexuality

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Edward Hopper

Edward Hopper, “Gas”, Oil on Canvas, 1940, Museum of Modern Art, New York

This work resulted from a composite representation of several gasoline stations seen by Edward Hopper. The light in this painting—both natural and artificial—gives the scene of a gas station and its lone attendant at dusk an underlying sense of drama. But rather than simply depicting a straightforward narrative, Hopper’s aim was “the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature”—in this case, the loneliness of an American country road.

Fellow artist Charles Burchfield believed these paintings would remain memorable beyond their time, because in his “honest presentation of the American scene … Hopper does not insist upon what the beholder shall feel.”

Benjamin Rush: “Man is Naturally a Wild Animal”

Photographer Unknown, The Men in the Woods

“It would seem from this fact, that man is naturally a wild animal, and that when taken from the woods, he is never happy in his natural state, ‘till he returns to them again.”

― Benjamin Rush, A Memorial Containing Travels Through Life or Sundry Incidents in the Life of Dr Benjamin Rush