Month: May 2017

Salt Marshes

 

Photographer Unknown, The Salt Marshes of the Île de Ré

Île de Ré is an island off the west coast of France. It’s known for its salt marshes and beaches like the Plage de la Conche des Baleines, backed by dunes and pine trees. Nearby, the Phare des Baleines is a lighthouse offering expansive views. The main town of St-Martin-de-Ré has the 17th-century Fortifications of Vauban, plus outdoor cafes overlooking the marina. Bicycle paths crisscross the island.

Reblogged with thanks to joselito28.tumblr.com

Doune Castle

Doune Castle, Stirling, Scotland

Doune Castle is a medieval stronghold near the village of Doune, in the Stirling district of central Scotland. The castle is sited on a wooded bend where the Ardoch Burn flows into the River Teith. It lies 8 miles (13 km) north-west of Stirling, where the Teith flows into the River Forth. Upstream, 8 miles (13 km) further north-west, the town of Callander lies at the edge of the Trossachs, on the fringe of the Scottish Highlands.

Recent research has shown that Doune Castle was originally built in the thirteenth century, then probably damaged in the Scotties Wars of Independence before being rebuilt in its present form in the late 14th century by Robert Stewart, Duke of Albany (c.1340–1420), the son of King Robert II of Scotland, and Regent of Scotland from 1388 until his death. Duke Robert’s stronghold has survived relatively unchanged and complete, and the whole castle was traditionally thought of as the result of a single period of construction at this time. The castle passed to the crown in 1425, when Albany’s son was executed, and was used as a royal hunting lodge and dower house

For the television series ‘Game of Thrones’, a variety of locations were used to create Winterfell as it appears on screen. For the pilot episode, Doune Castle in Scotland  was used for some exterior shots and the great feast held when King Robert Baratheon and his party arrive.

Petr Bambousek

Petr Bambousek, “Iguana Iguana”

Petr Bambousek is a photographer living and working in the city of Pribram in the Central Bohemian region of the Czech Republic. This photo won the Cactus Award for the Category 4; Reptile Portrait.

The Nactus Award is an herpetological photography competition. Its purpose is to discover the best reptile and amphibian pictures taken by photographers worldwide and to inspire their visionary and expressive interpretations of nature. The competition is open to anyone, amateur or professional, of any legal age and of any nationality. As only digital images are accepted in the competition, the judges place emphasis on ensuring that the images faithfully represent nature.

Jane Fisher

Jane Fisher, “Black Pajamas”, Oil on Canvas, 2013

Born in 1961, Jane Fisher received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Ohio University, where she won the Sara Sidwel Rogers Prize for her work at the Undergraduate Art League Exhibition in 1982. She earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from The Art Institute of Chicago in 1984. Fisher has shown her work at exhibitions since 1984 and has become well known in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

A figurative painter, Jane Fisher paints ordinary, identifiable people in familiar settings as individuals rather than as ideals. Her subject matter is diverse, ranging from divers in mid-air to models at an auto exhibition. Fisher’s work has been shown at the Charles Campbell Gallery and the George Krevsky Gallery, both in San Francisco, The Gescheidle Gallery in Chicago, and the LyonsWier Packer Gallery in New York. 

“The ideas for my paintings emerge as emotions. My task is to turn those emotions into images. I do this by playing on the viewer’s empathy, sympathy, curiosity and sense of humor. My paintings are figurative, presenting people in varying degrees of self-awareness. I am interested in how people behave alone as well as how they present themselves to others when they want to make a specific impression. These are the two main contexts I have used in exploring this; presenting people in moments of isolation, and presenting them in performance.” 

-— Jane Fisher

Lyonel Feininger

Lyonel Feininger, “Gelmeroda XIII”, Oil on Canvas, 1936, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Born in July of 1871, Lyonel Charles Adrian Feininger was an American-born German painter, the son of a concert violinist and a singer and pianist from Germany. In 1887, he followed his parents to Europe where he attended the drawing and painting class at Hamburg’s Gewerbeschule. From 1888 to 1892, Feininger studied at Berlin’s Königliche Kunst-Akademie and later attended the private art school of the Italian sculptor Filippo Colarossi in Paris.

Feininger, along with Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Alexej von Jawlensky, founded the Die Blauen Vier group in 1924. He presented work at Berlin’s 1931 Kronprinzen-Palais, the first comprehensive retrospective of the group’s work. In 1933, Feininger relocated to Berlin; however, as his situation in Berlin intensified under the National Socialist government, he emigrated to the United States in 1937. That same year, Feininger was declared a degenerate artist and four-hundred of his works were confiscated by Goebbel’s Reich Chamber of Culture.

Lyonel Feininger did not achieve his breakthrough as an artist in the United States until 1944, the year of his successful retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Beginning in 1945, he held summer courses at North Carolina’s prestigious art colony, Black Mountain College. At this highly influential college, Feininger met such notables as Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, a pioneer of modernist architecture, and theoretical physicist Albert Einstein. Feininger’s classes, his written work and later watercolors were essential parts of the development of Abstract Expressionist painting in the United States. 

Lyonel Feininger died in New York City in January of 1956 at the age of eighty-four. A major retrospective of his work was held in 2011 to 2012. It initially opened at the Whitney Museum of Art from June to October of 2011 and then traveled to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts where it was viewed from January to May of 2012. 

Feininger’s 1936 “Gelmeroda XIII” portrays one of his favorite subjects—the Gothic church of Gelmeroda, located near Weimar, Germany. In his many images of the fourteenth-century structure, Feininger explored the building as a physical connector between the past and the present. Here, he adopts the angled fragmentation of form and space found in Cubism and Italian Futurism to give a sense of spiritual energy and transcendence. In 1937, one year after this work was completed, Nazi officials included Feininger’s art in the notorious Degenerate Art exhibition, prompting him to return permanently to the United States.

Gregory Crewdson

Photography by Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson uses Hollywood techniques to create glossy Edward Hopper-esque portraits of American life. He works like a Film Director with an enormous crew and artificial lighting. But where Hopper stripped life bare, Credson’s images offer an overabundance of detail.

Crewdson’s photographs usually take place in small-town America, but are dramatic and cinematic. They feature often disturbing, surreal events. His photographs are elaborately staged and lit using crews familiar with motion picture production and lighting large scenes using motion picture film equipment and techniques. He has cited the photographer Diane Arbus and the films “Vertigo”, “The Night of the Hunter”, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, “Blue Velvet” and “Safe” as having influenced his style.