Month: January 2017

Ichiro Kojima

Ichiro Kojima, “Near Inagaki, Tsugaru”, 1960, Gelatin Silver Print

Born and raised in the northern city of Aomori, Kojima was the eldest son in a family that ran a toy and photographic supply store. He learned photography under the influence of his father, and began to publish his work in photography magazines. His subjects were everyday landscapes on the Tsugaru and Shimokita peninsulas, but his work stood apart from the mainstream realism of that era and soon gained notice for its compositional and poetic sensibilities.

With strong encouragement from the pioneer photojournalist Yonosuke Natori, Kojima mounted his first exhibition, ‘Tsugaru’, in Tokyo in 1958. Following this strong start, he moved to Tokyo in 1961 to pursue a career as a professional photographer. There he held his second exhibition, ‘Freezing’. However, having emerged on the scene with photographs of his home country, he now faced great difficulty making photographs in a new environment.

After the death of Natori, his main supporter in Tokyo, Kojima returned to Aomori. He embarked on a new project in Hokkaido, but he feel ill after repeated exposure to severe conditions and died at the early age of thirty-nine.

Arthur Radebaugh

Advertising the Future: Illustrations by Arthur Radebaugh

Arthur Radebaugh was born in Coldwater, Michigan in 1906.  He developed his interest in art and briefly attended the renowned Art Institute in Chicago.  It was there that Radebaugh first began experimenting with airbrush painting, a technique he helped popularize and used throughout his career.

One of his first clients in 1935 was MoToR Magazine, which purchased a painting for $450 and used it for the highly coveted cover of the Annual issue through 1957.  With the exception of years 1941-1946, he designed covers for every Annual issue through 1957.  Radebaugh’s artistic vision of the future fell in line with the forward-thinking nature of the automotive trade shows that the Annual issues were published to coincide with.

His paintings drew heavily upon the art deco movement of the 1920s through the 1940s, though his style would evolve with the passage of time.  His renderings of the future were inspired by the context of his present.

Radebaugh’s work with MoToR garnered him widespread attention, and his list of clients grew to include several big-name brands including the Saturday Evening Post, Fortune, Coca-Cola, and United Airlines.  The automotive industry also took note, with Chrysler contracting him to do artwork for their 1939 Dodge Luxury Liner sales literature and advertisements.  For the marque’s 25th anniversary, Radebaugh blended the present with the future by painting the 1939 model year cars in front of lush science-fiction-inspired cityscapes.  These are shown in images two and three of this blog post.

Saint Paul and the Broken Bones, “All I Ever Wonder”

Saint Paul and the Broken Bones, “All I Ever Wonder”

Vocalist Paul Janeway and bassist Jesse Phillips met in the mid-2000s while playing in Birmingham as part of the alternative soul outfit The Secret Dangers. In 2012, Jesse and Paul met back in Ol’ Elegante Studios in Birmingham to start a new project. Janeway says of the project with Phillips, “It was going to be our last hurrah” before focusing on other careers, “but then something just clicked and we walked out of there with something.”

As the two began working around Janeway’s voice, they realized they were forming a soul outfit. As the project progressed, the pair brought in Browan Lollar, formerly of The 400 Unit, Andrew Lee, Ben Griner, and Allen Branstetter. Here, they recorded their first EP, Greetings from St. Paul and The Broken Bones before ever playing a live show.

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

Michael deMeng

The Artwork of Michael deMeng

Michael deMeng is an assemblage artist from Vancouver, Canada who exhibits throughout the United States. As an educator, he has been actively involved with VSA Montana, providing art education and encouraging participation in the arts to people with disabilities. Through these activities, as well as his artwork, deMeng fosters community awareness, and offers creative methods to explore the human experience.

In his art, he addresses issues of transformation. Discarded materials find new and unexpected uses in his work; they are reassembled and conjoined with unlikely components, a form of rebirth from the ashes into new life and new meaning.

These assemblages are metaphors for the evolutions and revolutions of existence: from life to death to rebirth, from new to old to renewed, from construction to destruction to reconstruction. These forms are examinations of the world in perpetual flux, where meaning and function are ever-changing.

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock, “Pasiphae”, 1943, Oil on Canvas, 142.6 x 243.8 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Finished just after Pollock’s first exhibition in 1943 at Peggy Guggenheim’s New York gallery, Art of This Century, Pasiphaë is the largest of the painter’s mythologically themed pictures of the mid-1940s. Originally named Moby Dick, the picture was retitled before it was exhibited in 1944 when James Johnson Sweeney, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, related the story of the Cretan princess Pasiphaë who gave birth to the half-man, half-bull Minotaur. The Minotaur had been a favorite motif of Picasso and of the Surrealists (Minotaure had been the name of their literary magazine from 1933 to 1939, for which Picasso had designed the first cover).

Here Pollock incorporates two sentinel-like standing figures at the left and right and a prostrate figure at center. Pollock weaves these figures into a complex field of arcane symbols and free-form abstraction, his own novel interpretation of the Surrealist practice of automatism, wherein the artist’s unconscious is used to organize composition.

Antoine Laurent Dantan

Antoine Laurent Dantan, “Young Bather Playing with His Dog”, Marble, 1833, Louvre, Paris

Antoine Laurent Dantan, also known as ‘Dantan the Elder’ distinguishing from his younger brother also a sculptor, was born in Saint-Cloud, France, in December of 1798. He and his brother entered the studio of Francois-Joseph Bosio at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts at the same time in 1823. Antoine Dantan wone the Prix de Rome for sculpture in 1828.

Sculpted by Dantan during his stay in Rome, the “Young Bather Playing with His Dog” was exhibited at the Salon of 1835. The sculpture of marble, 1.05 meters in height, was purchased by the Louvre in 1835 and resides at the Department of Sculptures, Richelieu, on the ground floor of the Louvre.

Misha Gordin

Photography by Misha Gordin

Misha Gordin was born in 1946, the first year after World War II ended. Having survived the hardships of evacuation, Gordin’s parents returned back home to Riga, Latvia, after the war which was then under Soviet occupation. Growing up among the Russian speaking population of Latvia, Russian became Gordin’s root culture.

Gordin started to photograph when he was nineteen, driven by his desire to create a personal style and vision. He was involved in portraiture and did some documentary shots, but soon realized the results were unsatisfactory. Putting his camera aside, Gordin concentrated on reading (Dostoevsky, Bulgakov) and cinematography (Tarkovsky, Parajanov). He was constantly looking for the right way to express personal feelings and thoughts using photography.

One year later it came to him clearly and simply. Gordin decided to photograph “concepts” rather than the literal capturing of a moment on film. In 1972, Gordin created his first, and most important image, ‘Confession’. Instantly recognizing the potential possibilities of his conceptual approach and the knowledge acquired from creating this image,

Russian Red Army Choir, “Song of the Volga Boatmen”

Russian Red Army Choir, “Song of the Volga Boatmen” with Leonid Kharitonov

The “Song of the Volga Boatmen” is a well-known traditional Russian song collected by Mily Balakirev, and published in his book of folk songs in 1866. It was sung by burlaks, or barge-haulers, on the Volga River. Balakirev published it with only one verse (the first). The other two verses were added at a later date. Ilya Repin’s famous painting, Barge Haulers on the Volga, depicts such burlaks in Tsarist Russia toiling along the Volga.

The song was popularised by Feodor Chaliapin, and has been a favourite concert piece of bass singers ever since. Glenn Miller’s jazz arrangement took the song to #1 in the US charts in 1941. Russian composer Alexander Glazunov based one of the themes of his symphonic poem “Stenka Razin” on the song.

Spanish composer Manuel De Falla wrote an arrangement of the song, which was published under the name Canto de los remeros del Volga (del cancionero musical ruso) in 1922. He did so at the behest of diplomat Ricardo Baeza, who was working with the League of Nations to provide financial relief for the more than two million Russian refugees who had been displaced and imprisoned during World War I. All proceeds from the song’s publication were donated to this effort. Igor Stravinsky made an arrangement for orchestra.

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