Month: January 2018

Granado Dolls

Granado Dolls

Granado is a studio specialized in making ball jointed dolls and was launched in April of 2011. The dolls are produced in 1/3 and ¼ scale, ranging from 66cm to 77cm on the larger end and 46cm at the smallest. Granado’s resin colors include white, new normal, sunshine, asura (gray), tan, bronze, and chocolate. The dolls are anatomically correct. Jointed hands are currently available for the new line of 70cm dolls.

Granado also produces special limited edition dolls. The company also makes dolls to order with choices in eye color, skin color, hair, body type, and other features. Their site is: http://doll-granado.com.

Note: These are not ordinary dolls that you will find in department stores. The dolls are high quality, custom made to your specifications, and the price reflects that. A great gift.

Calendar: January 4

Year: Day to Day Men: January 4th

Red and White Squares

Born on January 4th of 1809, Louis Braille was a French educator and inventor. He was the youngest of four siblings bor  to Simon-René and Monique Braille who maintained a successful enterprise for leather goods and horse tack. At the age of three, Louis Braille was playing with his father’s  tools in the workshop; an awl that he was using slipped and penetrated one of his eyes. No treatment was able to save the damaged organ and eventually lost sight in the other eye by the age of five, most likely due to sympathetic ophthalmia.  

Braille was raised by his parents in a normal fashion and prospered in their care. He navigated the village and paths with canes fashioned by his father. Braille’s intelligence and creative mind impress the local teachers and priests who assisted him with higher education. In February 1819 at the age of ten, he  entered Paris’s Royal Institute for Blind Youth which provided a stable environment for blind children to associate and learn. There the students were taught to read by a system devised by the school’s founder Valentin Haüy. The books in the small library used embossed heavy paper with raised imprints of Latin letters which could be traced with fingers.

These books however were in uncomfortable sizes and weights, fragile and expensive to obtain. While the blind children could read the letters by touch, there was no process by which the children could write by themselves. Louis Braille read Haüy’s books repeatedly and was attentive to the oral instructions offered by the school. After he exhausted the school’s curriculum, he was asked to remain as a teacher’s aide and, by 1833, was elevated to a full professorship. For the rest of his life, Braille stayed at the Institute and taught history, geometry and algebra. 

In 1821, Braille discovered a system devised by Charles Barbier, a code of up to twelve dots in two columns, impressed into thick paper. These impressions could be read entirely by the fingers. Inspired, Braille developed a system of his own, a system of  reading and writing that could bridge the gap in communication between the sighted and the blind. His system was largely completed in 1824, when he was fifteen years old. Braille’s first version, published in 1829,  used both dots and dashes in uniform columns of six dots for each letter. In 1837, he discarded the dashes as too difficult to read; the resulting small cells were capable of being recognized as letters with a single touch of a finger. Braille’s system was later extended to include braille musical notation.

Louis Braille published several written books on braille and educational books for the blind. In 1939, he created the decapoint, a systematic method of dot-punching with a specialized grill which overlaid the paper. With the use of an associated number table, which he devised, the grill permitted a blind writer to faithfully reproduce the standard alphabet. With the assistance of his friend Pierre-François-Victor Foucault, Braille helped develop the Raphigraphe, a device that could emboss letters in the manner of a typewriter. 

Although respected by his pupils, Braille’s writing system was not taught at the Institute during his lifetime. The successors of Haüy who died in 1822 were hostile to its use. Suffering through sixteen years with a persistent respiratory illness believed now to be tuberculosis, Braille relinquished his teacher position at the age of forty. He was eventually admitted to the infirmary at the Royal Institution when his condition reached mortal danger. He died in January of 1852, two days after he reached forty-three years. Due to the insistence of the blind students, Braille’s system was finally adopted by the Institute in 1854, two years after his death.

Charles Le Brun

Charles Le Brun, Lithographic Drawings Illustrating the Relation Between the Human Physiognomy and That of the Brute Creation

Charles Le Brun was a French painter, art theorist, interior decorator and a director of several art schools in the 17th century.  As court painter to Louis XIV, who declared him “the greatest French artist of all time”, he was a dominant figure in 17th-century French art and much influenced by Nicolas Poussin.

Le Brun primarily worked for King Louis XIV, for whom he executed large altar piecies and battle pieces.. His most important paintings are at Versailles. Besides his gigantic labours at Versailles and the Louvre, the number of his works for religious corporations and private patrons is enormous. Le Brun was also a fine portraitist and an excellent draughtsman, but he was not fond of portrait or landscape painting, which he felt to be a mere exercise in developing technical prowess.

What mattered was scholarly composition, whose ultimate goal was to nourish the spirit. The fundamental basis on which the director of the Academy-based his art was unquestionably to make his paintings speak, through a series of symbols, costumes and gestures that allowed him to select for his composition the narrative elements that gave his works a particular depth. For Le Brun, a painting represented a story one could read. Nearly all his compositions have been reproduced by celebrated engravers.

And then there were the delightfully bizarre studies he produced. He lectured on animal and human physiognomy, or facial features, and demonstrated the “signs that identify the natural inclination of men” to eagles, owls, goats, rams, lions, and other animals.

Al Boardman

Al Boardman, “Negotiation”

Al Boardman is a graphic designer based in Bristol, England. He first started producing motion graphics back in 2005, coming from a background in graphic design and art direction. He has created animated videos, gifs and motion graphics for some of the most respected international brands and agencies in the world; the likes of Nike, IBM, Google and Twitter amongst them.

His work has been profiled by Adobe, Dazed & Confused, Dezeen, Design Week, and Wired. Boardman co-founded the animation project “9 squares” which can be found at: http://9-squares.tumblr.com.

Jacob Hashimoto

Jacob Hashimoto, “Infinite Expanse of Sky”, 2008/ 2009, Vellum, Bamboo, Wire, Wood, Dimensions Variable

Jacob Hashimoto is an American born sculptor and installation artist currently based in New York City and Verona, Italy. He is best known for using traditional Japanese methods to create large-scale “tapestries” out of thousands of hand crafted paper and wood kites. While they are three-dimensional and can thus be described as sculptures, these works also invite associations with painting.

The kites appear as abstract painted forms suspended in space. Hashimoto’s dynamic constructions also blur the line between abstract and figurative. A tapestry may resemble a landscape when glimpsed from afar, however that likeness disappears when the work is approached at a closer distance.

Calendar: January 3

A Year: Day to Day Men: 3rd of January

A Spread on the Wood Floor

On January 3, 1927, the first Laurel and Hardy film, “Putting Pants on Philip”, is released.

The team was composed of the English thin man, Stan Laurel, and the American fat man, Oliver Hardy. Laurel played the clumsy and childlike friend of the pompous bully Hardy in their slapstick comedy routines, well known during the late 1920’s through the mid- 1940’s.

Prior to emerging as a team, both actors had well-established film careers. Laurel had appeared in over 50 films while Hardy had been in more than 250 productions. They were not a comedy team during that time;  and it was not until 1926 that they appeared in a movie short together, when both separately signed contracts with the Hal Roach film studio. Laurel and Hardy officially became a team in 1927 when they appeared together in their first silent short film “Putting Pants on Philip”.

They appeared as a team in 107 films, starring in 32 short silent films, 40 short sound films, and 23 full-length feature films. They also made 12 guest or cameo appearances that included the “Galaxy of Stars” promotional film of 1936. Since the 1930s, the works of Laurel and Hardy have been released in numerous theatrical reissues, television revivals, 8-mm and 16-mm home movies, feature-film compilations, and home videos.

In 2005, they were voted the seventh-greatest comedy act of all time by a UK poll of fellow comedians. The official Laurel and Hardy appreciation society is known as ‘Sons of the Desert’ which was named after a fictitious fraternal society featured in the Laurel and Hardy film of the same name. While much of their comedy remained visual, various lines of humorous dialogue appeared in Laurel and Hardy’s talking films. Some examples include:

“You can lead a horse to water but a pencil must be led.” (Laurel, “Brats”, 1930)

“I was dreaming I was awake but I woke up and found meself asleep.” (Laurel, “Oliver the Eighth”, 1934)

“A lot of weather we’ve been having lately.” (Hardy, “Way Out West”, 1937).

Nils Dardel

Nils Dardel, “The Bar”, Oil on Canvas, 1920, Private Collection

Nils Dardel was a Swedish Post-Impressionist painter, who studied at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm between 1908-1910. After studying in Sweden he did as many of his contemporaries and traveled to Paris. There he took inspiration from the Fauvists with their pure palette, the Post-Impressionists, as well as Japanese woodcuts. Dardel also made a brief foray into Cubism, painting a few cityscapes in that style.

Dardel lived a nomadic life, traveling far and wide without ever really settling down. Many of his portraits are of people and places whom he met along his travels. He was known to be self-destructive. Not exceptionally appreciated in his lifetime, his breakthrough in Sweden came simultaneously to the breaking out of World War IIin Europe, at the time whenthe Liljevalchs Konsthall displayed a retrospective of Dardel’s life and works.

Reblogged with thanks to http://flashandfootle.tumblr.com

Calendar: January 2

A Year: Day to Day Men: 2nd of January

Morning Cup of Joe

On January 2, 1870, construction of the Brooklynn Bridge begins with Washington Roebling as project manager.

In the summer of 1869, John Roebling, noted bridge-builder and chief engineer of the construction, severely injured his foot in a freak accident as he was surveying the site. He died of lockjaw not long after, and his son Washington Roebling, became chief engineer of the bridge project.

Construction on the Brooklynn-side wooden caisson began on January 2, 1870. To dig the foundations for the bridge’s enormous stone towers, caissons, enormous wooden boxes with no bottoms, were sunk in the river. Compressed air was pumped into them, and men inside would dig away at the sand and rock on the river bottom. The stone towers were built atop the caissons, which sank deeper into the river bottom.

After the caissons had been sunk to the river bottom, they were filled with concrete, and the construction of the granite stone towers continued above. When these anchorage towers reached their ultimate height, 278 feet above high water, work began on the four enormous cables that would support the roadway. Spinning the cables between the towers began in the summer of 1877, and was finished a year and four months later. But it would take nearly another five years to suspend the roadway from the cables and have the bridge ready for traffic.

The bridge was built with numerous passageways and compartments in its anchorage towers. New York City rented out the large vaults under the bridge’s Manhattan anchorage in order to fund the bridge. Opened in 1876, the vaults were used to store wine, as they were always at 60 °F (16 °C). This was called the “Blue Grotto” because of a shrine to the Virgin Mary next to an opening at the entrance.

Over the course of the next 40 years, several different liquor vendors would utilize the cellars below the bridge. City records indicate, for example, that in 1901, the “Luyties Brothers paid $5,000 for a vault on the Manhattan side of the bridge,” located at 204 Williams St., while in Brooklyn, “A. Smith & Company” forked over $500 a year to rent a wine cellar from 1901 until 1909.

By the late 1910s, as America debated the vices of liquor, the wine was moved out and the cellars were converted into newspaper storage. But the end of Prohibition in 1933 enticed new wine distributors. A celebration on July 11, 1934 was held in honor of Anthony Oechs & Co.’s move into the bridge’s blue-black caverns. After World War II, for logistical reasons, the city of New York took over permanent management of the cellars. To the despair of modern wine drinkers, adventurers, and those in pursuit of a good Instagram, the cellars have been closed and shuttered for years with only the occasional few gaining access.