Month: December 2016

James Havard Thomas

James Havard Thomas, “Thysis”, 1912, Tate Britain Museum, London

James Havard Thomas trained in Paris and then in 1889 moved to Italy, where he lived for seventeen years. In 1905 he sent a male nude ‘Lycidas’ to the Royal Academy, where its rejection caused a scandal. In 1912 Havard Thomas returned to the theme with ‘Thyrsis’. The title comes from the poem of 1866 by Matthew Arnold of that name, and Arnold’s poem had itself been based on Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ written in 1637.

Thyrsis was an ancient Greek shepherd. Arnold chose to commemorate in his poem a friend from Oxford as this pastoral character. The shepherd’s pipe was for Arnold a symbol of his own youth, and Havard Thomas’s figure itself commemorates Italy and classical art. This bronze was cast in 1948, from the original in wax.

William Kentridge

William Kentridge, “Blue Head”, Etching and Aquatint with Two Hand-Painted Plates on Velin Arches Blanc Paper, 47 ¼ x 36 11/50 inches, 1993-1998, Edition of 35

Kentridge was born in 1955 into a wealthy Johannesburg family, descendants of Jewish refugees from the purges and pogroms of Russia and Europe. For generations the family had been deeply involved in politics and human rights issues in South Africa. Both his parents were lawyers, famous for their defense of victims of the apartheid.

In 1976, he attained a degree in Politics and African Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand after which he studied art at the Johannesburg Art Foundation until 1978. There, he met Dumile Feni whose drawings had a major impact on Kentridge’s work.

By the mid-1970s Kentridge was making prints and drawings. In 1979, he created 20 to 30 monotypes, which became known as the “Pit” series. In 1980, he executed about 50 small-format etchings which he called the “Domestic Scenes”. These two groups of prints served to establish Kentridge’s artistic identity, an identity he has continued to develop in various media including theater. Despite his ongoing exploration of non-traditional media, the foundation of his art has always been drawing and printmaking.

Troy Schooneman

Fine Art Photography | Portraits by Troy Schooneman

Schooneman’s highly intense and often melancholy portraits of young male athletes from ethnically diverse backgrounds – frequently mistaken for paintings or drawings rather than contemporary photographs – are redolent in many respects of the works of Italian and other artists of the Renaissance.  Schooneman’s work is exquisitely sensual, luminous with rich, saturated colors and infused with an almost surreal painterly quality.

His exquisite male portraits, which possess a dream-like atemporal quality, take us on a journey beyond mere masculine beauty and allow us a glimpse of the profound elegance created by juxtaposing the strength and physical presence of his virile male subjects with the themes of vulnerability, uncertainty, and sadness – emotions that society often demands men hide from public view.  Schooneman has captured this elegance with great subtlety and we are often left transfixed by the seemingly endless contradictions created by his beautiful portraits.

Eric Petersen

Illustrations by Eric Petersen

Eric Petersen was born in Santa Monica, California. His style is influenced by instructional graphics, video games and the look of vintage comics of the 1940s. He is interested in the combination of a purely functional illustration style with an emotional scene. Since he began illustrating in 2012, his work has been seen in Juxtapoz, Hi-Fructose, New York Times, Fortune, and The Guardian.

Hunter S. Thompson: “Never Give Your Real Name”

Three Passages from Hunter S Thompson

“Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“1) Never trust a cop in a raincoat.
2) Beware of enthusiasm and of love, both are temporary and quick to sway.
3) If asked if you care about the world’s problems, look deep into the eyes of he who asks, he will never ask you again.
4) Never give your real name.
5) If ever asked to look at yourself, don’t look.
6) Never do anything the person standing in front of you can’t understand.
7) Never create anything, it will be misinterpreted, it will chain you and follow you for the rest of your life.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“The greatest mania of all is passion: and I am a natural slave to passion: the balance between my brain and my soul and my body is as wild and delicate as the skin of a Ming vase.”

― Hunter S. Thompson, The Curse of Lono

Walter Oltmann

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The Artwork of Walter Oltmann

Born in 1960 Walter Oltmann went to school and completed his Fine Arts Degree in Kwa-Zulu Natal. His father worked as a civil servant and the family moved between one remote area of Kwa-Zulu Natal to the next. This migratory life style exposed Walter Oltmann to the rich craft tradition of rural South Africa.

Oltmann recalls the rigorous training in drawing that university art students underwent at the time. Drawing skills were seen as a foundation to build the rest of one’s art making practice on.  His teachers “made it clear to us that drawing should be a regimen in one’s creative practice and also a way of thinking as an investigative activity”. The mastery of drawing skills has translated well into Oltmann’s interpretation of the mastery of traditional craft skills that are to be found in South Africa.

Walter Oltmann’s work can be divided into two main areas of practice: drawing (pencil, ink and bleach) and sculpture (wire work). He is a master at manipulating both two-dimensional and three-dimensional line. A thread runs through the prints that he made at The Artists’ Press: “While I have dabbled with lithography, this is my first real adventuring into it. The thread of the pencil line moves into wire which moves into polymer plate and then is transferred onto paper”.

The embossed quality of the letterpress printing gives an added tactile dimension to the work. The spirit of the wire work has translated well into print. The hand-made quality of the woven and knotted wire sculptures objectifies the aspect of time passing – the viewer grasps time as a tangible quality embodied in the material.  This aspect also carries over into the drawings and prints that Walter Oltmann makes.

Felix Salten: “Your Intimate Place in the Forest”

Photographer Unknown, (Hurdling the Fallen)

“Your growing antlers,’ Bambi continued, ‘are proof of your intimate place in the forest, for of all the things that live and grow only the trees and the deer shed their foliage each year and replace it more strongly, more magnificently, in the spring. Each year the trees grow larger and put on more leaves. And so you too increase in size and wear a larger, stronger crown.”

― Felix Salten, Bambi’s Children

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock, “Blue Poles″, Enamel and Aluminium Paint with Glass on Canvas, 1952, National Gallery of Australia

“Blue Poles” was first exhibited at Pollock’s solo show at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1952 where it was titled “Number 11, 1952″. Pollock’s decision to forego conventional descriptive titles and simply number his paintings, including the year of their execution, began with his 1949 exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery. Some paintings originally given number titles when they were first exhibited were later given more descriptive titles. For example, “Number 10, 1952″ became “Convergence”.

This is also the case with “Number 11, 1952″. The painting was first given the title “Blue Poles”, and dated separately as 1952, in the exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1954. Sidney Janis recalled clearly that the new title came from Pollock himself. Thereafter the painting is usually referred to as “Blue Poles”, although occasionally the earlier and late titles are combined as “Blue Poles: Number 11, 1952″.

Note: An Interesting discussion of Pollock’s actual painting of “Blue Poles’:  http://nga.gov.au/International/Catalogue/Detail.cfm?IRN=36334&MnuID=2&GalID=1