Year: 2017

Eloy Morales Ramiro

Hyperrealistic Oil Paintings by Eloy Morales Ramiro

Eloy Morales is a 39 year old painter based in Madrid, Spain. He has been practicing his craft since 1995. Morales’ oils paintings are hyperrealistic facsimiles; the attention to detail in his work is uncanny. It ceases to be representation at this point, as the renderings are an almost-exact copy.

Observing his process, it appears that he patiently works in tiny pieces at a time, filling in pigment and blending it as he goes. The painting spreads and grows rather than being built up upon by layering. What is also impressive is the scale and size of his pieces, as his paintings are fairly large.

The majority of his subjects tend to be of himself. Usually, the self-portraits consist of his visage smeared with various types of mediums and color, to capture the light in a myriad of ways.

Fallen Leaves

Photographr Unknown, (Fallen Leaves)

“He’d grown unused to woods like this. He’d become accustomed to the Northwest, evergreen and shaded dark. Here he was surrounded by soft leaves, not needles; leaves that carried their deaths secretly inside them, that already heard the whispers of Autumn. Roots and branches that knew things.”
― Michael Montoure, Slices

Fritz Lang, “Metropolis”: Film History Series

Fritz Lang, “Metropolis” 1927

“Metropolis” is the classic silent-movie industrial dystopia from 1927. It portrays a futuristic city comprising a two-tier society of haves and have-nots who are kept unaware of each other’s existence. It had a budget of five million Reichsmarks, making it the most expensive film produced in 1927.

Numerous attempts have been made to restore the film since the 1970s. A new reconstruction of “Metropolis” was shown at the Berlin Film Festival in 2001, and the film was inscribed on  UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in the same year, the first film thus distinguished. In 2008 a damaged print of Lang’s original cut of the film was found in a museum in Argentina. After a long restoration process, the film was 95% restored and shown on large screens in Frankfurt and Berlin simultaneously on 12 February 2010.

Italo Calvino: “A Vague Murmur: The Sea”

Photographer Unknown, (Soft Morning Light)

“There is the moment when the silence of the countryside gathers in the ear and breaks into a myriad of sounds:a croaking and squeaking, a swift rustle in the grass, a plop in the water, a pattering on earth and pebbles, and high above all, the call of the cicada, The sounds follow one another, and the ear eventually discerns more and more of them -just as fingers unwinding a ball of wool feel each fiber interwoven with progressively thinner and less palpable threads, The frogs continue croaking in the background without changing the flow of sounds, just as light does not vary from the continues winking of stars, But at every rise or fall of the wind every sound changes and is renewed. All that remains in the inner recess of the ear is a vague murmur: the sea.” 

—Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees, 1957