Month: December 2016

Sophie Tucker, “Some of These Days”

Sophie Tucker, “Some of These Days”, 1926, Featuring Ted Lewis and His Band

Sophie Tucker was born as Sophia Kalish on January 13, 1884 in Russia. When she was still an infant, her parents emigrated to the United States and settled near Hartford, Connecticut. In 1903, she was briefly married to Louis Tuck; from which she decided to change her name to Tucker.

She made her debut in the Ziegfeld Follies in 1909 and made the first of her recordings, including “Some of These Days” for Edison in 1911. The tune, written by Shelton Brooks became an instant hit and her theme song, and later was the title of her autobiography published in 1945.In 1921 Tucker hired pianist Ted Shapiro as her accompanist and musical director. Shapiro would remain with Tucker the rest of her career, and was also her lifelong friend.

Tucker made her first movie appearance in the 1929 early sound motion picture “Honky Tonk” where she was billed with her nickname, ‘The Last of the Red Hot Mammas’. Her hearty sexual appetite was a frequent subject of her songs, unusual for female performers of the era. In 1938, due to her efforts to unionize professional actors, she was elected President of the American Federation of Actors.

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

Paul Signac

Paul Signac, “Place des Lices- Saint Tropez”, Oil on Canvas, 1893, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

Paul Signac’s move to the tiny Mediterranean town of St. Tropez in 1892, the year after his friend and mentor Georges Seurat died, was motivated partly by his love of the sea and sailing but mainly by his weariness with the hectic life in Paris and by his desire to modify aspects of Neo-Impressionism. During the early 1890s, Signac began to find the effort of transcribing visual experience with the painstaking pointillist technique increasingly less satisfying.

He wrote, “I shall no longer worry about nature. It is very difficult to paint properly from nature, where one is distracted by its harmonies, by the slightest reflection…I attach more and more importance to purity of brushstroke…” Place des Lices, St. Tropez comes from this important transitional period in Signac’s art. This painting of majestic trees represents a shift in Signac’s choice of motif, a departure from the constant motion of sailboats, clouds, and water to comparative stasis.

Signac surely found satisfaction in the strong arabesque lines of the trees in the Place des Lices, and he used their patterns of shadows and filtered light to animate the painting’s foreground. The angle of sight, reminiscent of earlier Impressionist vistas through allées of trees, establishes a tunnel-like view into the distance, beyond the shadows of the plaza. A single seated figure sets the painting’s tone of tranquil solitude.

The painting is filled with obvious but delightful contrasts—for example, between the seven large plane trees in the foreground and the single tiny cypress in the background. It also makes an association between the cypress and the seated man, each of which is a fulcrum for forms balanced on either side.

Troy Morrison

Troy Morrison, “Earth Whale”, Steampunk Sculpture

Steampunk is an inspired movement of creativity and imagination. With a backdrop of either Victorian England or America’s Wild West at hand, modern technologies are re-imagined and realized as elaborate works of art, fashion, and mechanics. If Jules Verne or H.G. Wells were writing their science fiction today, it would be considered steampunk.

Troy Morrison is an Australian sculpture who works in the steampunk mode. The whale sculpture took three years to complete. The body of the whale is made from an old Ford Gearbox while the rest of the whale comprises of copper and vintage parts from trains, WW2 planes, cars and boats.

The Boundary Wall

Photographer Unknown, (The Boundary Wall)

“There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.

Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.”

― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

 

Leigh J Mccluskey

Paintings by Leigh J Mccluskey

Leigh Joseph McCloskey is an American artist, actor, and writer. As an actor, he has appeared in numerous television shows and movies, including a 46-episode stint as Mitch Cooper on the popular American soap opera “Dallas”, and a leading role in the Dario Argento-helmed supernatural horror film “Inferno”.

Leigh J. McCloskey is also a painter. His work delves into ideas of religion, mythology, philo-Sophia and esotericism to string theory, quantum physics and the multidimensional nature of consciousness. He has deeply studied Hermeticism, Alchemy and the Kabbala and presents these ideas in his paintings..

Footprintz, “Heaven Felt like Night”

Footprintz, “Heaven Felt like Night” from the Album “Escape Yourself”

Footprintz is a dance electronic band formed by Clarian North and Andy Weitzman under the label of Visionquest.

What becomes apparent throughout ‘Escape Yourself’ is a real craftsmanship to Footprintz’s songwriting. Each track reveals a little more on each listen, aided by the slick production work, done predominantly by the guys themselves in their Montreal bunker studio full of analogue equipment, odd instruments and a fridge laden with ‘special brownies’; which goes some way to explain a noirish-haze that permeates through the album.

Having met at an afterparty aged 15, Clarian North & Adam Hunter have experienced most of their adult life together. ‘Escape Yourself’ distills their experiences, wraps them in a warm analogue fuzz and shares them with the listener. You join them on their journey, and deep down they hope it helps you shape your own.

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