Month: February 2018

Ubaldo Gandolfi

Ubaldo Gandolfi, “Mercury About to Behead Argus”, 1770-1775, Oil on Canvas, 218.8 x 136.8 cm, North Carolina Museum of Art

The Gandolfi family—Ubaldo, his brother Gaetano, and his nephew Mauro—were the last great painters of the Bolognese school, which rose to international prominence at the end of the sixteenth century. The confident understanding of human anatomy demonstrated in these paintings reveals Ubaldo’s debt to the Bolognese tradition, which was firmly based on drawing from live models.

Commissioned to adorn the walls of the Marescalchi family’s palace in Bologna, this and a companion painting in the North Carolina Museum of Art collection originally formed part of a series of six works illustrating classical myths. Io was a beautiful princess seduced by Jupiter, king of the gods. To conceal his infidelity from his wife, Juno, Jupiter changed Io into a white heifer. Suspicious, Juno cunningly asked for the heifer as a gift, a request that Jupiter could not very well refuse. His wife placed the heifer under the guard of the hundred-eyed giant Argus (whom Gandolfi wisely decided to depict with only two eyes). Sent by Jupiter to recover Io, Mercury lulled Argus to sleep with music and then cut off the giant’s head.

The two paintings illustrate consecutive moments in the story. In the companion painting, Mercury, wearing a winged cap and winged ankle bracelets, puts Argus to sleep by playing his flute. Here, Gandolfi represents the imminent dispatch of Argus with a touch of humor, as Mercury gestures for the viewer to be quiet so as not to wake the sleeping giant.

Carlos Soto

Carlos Soto, “Libertad”, Linocut

Carlos Soto is a New York-based artist. Soto is a theatre maker, performer and designer concerned with the body as a site in which narrative threads of the personal, sexual, social and political become knotted; focusing on the poetics of the moving body and its opposition to language; broaching the unspeakable: absence, solitude, the monstrous, anger, horror and pleasure.

Calendar: February 8

Year: Day to Day Men: February 8

Spring’s in the Air

The eighth day of February in 1865 marks the day the House and Senate of the State of Delaware declared their unqualified disapproval of the 13th Amendment which would have abolished slavery in all the states. Despite Governor William Cannon’s recommendation for its passage, the House and Senate refused to adopt and ratify it as it was ‘contrary to the principles upon which the government was framed’.

Delaware was a slave state on the Mason-Dixon Line. This demarcation line was part of a resolution to end the border dispute between Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and West Virginia which was part of Virginia until 1863. Drawn between 1763 and 1767 by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, it separated those states and established part of their borders. The largest portion of the line, along the southern Pennsylvania border, became informally known as the boundary between the Southern slave states and the Northern free states. 

All efforts to abolish slavery in Delaware prior to the Civil War failed due to a few politically influential Delawareans who were slave owners. As the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation only liberated slaves in the Confederate States, President Abraham Lincoln knew that an amendment to the Constitution was needed to totally abolish slavery in all the states. Thus, the proposal of the 13th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. 

Governor William Cannon sent the 13th Amendment to the General Assembly on the seventh of February with a recommendation of approval. This occurred two months before the surrender of General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox. The Delaware House and Senate refused passage. Even after the end of the Civil War, Delaware took no action to make slavery unlawful. Slaves in Delaware remained in bondage until the sixth of December in 1865, when the 13th Amendment was ratified without Delaware’s approval.

In early January of 1867, the newly elected Delaware Governor Gove Saulsbury lamented, during his address to the General Assembly, the ratification of the 13th Amendment. On the sixteenth of January, the General Assembly was presented with the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. This would provide due process, equal protection, and the counting of formerly enslaved people as full persons under the law. Since the 1787 Constitutional Convention, only three out of every five slaves were counted to determine a state’s total population for taxation and legislative representation. 

On the sixth of February in 1867, the Delaware House of Representatives rejected the proposed 14th Amendment using the same language as their previous refusal for the 13th Amendment. The 14th Amendment was ratified on the ninth of July in 1868 without Delaware’s acceptance. The last of the three post-Civil War Racial Justice Amendments was the 15th Amendment which gave Black males the right to vote. Again, the Delaware General Assembly refused ratification. This Amendment was declared part of the U. S. Constitution on the third of February in 1870 without Delaware’s approval.

In January of 1901, the new Governor John Hunn called for the General Assembly to dismantle laws passed after the Civil War that impeded voting including the poll tax on voter registration. On the thirty-first of January and the sixth of February in 1901, the Delaware General Assembly dismantled previous restrictive laws and passed a joint resolution which ratified the 13th, 14th and 15th civil rights Amendments of the 1860s.

Simon Cowell

Simon Cowell, “The Uneasy Feeling”, Oil on Board, 12 x 16 Inches

“Born in 1988 on the northern beaches of Sydney, Australia, from a very young age, I was fascinated with making stuff. As I grew I experimented with many means of creativity, ranging from sculpting and drawing to digital animation and graphic design. Every step sent me more and more towards the practice of drawing and painting. Drawing was so alluring to me that I still remember the excitement I felt when I first saw a skilled draughtsman creating the illusion of worlds on a page. The process is so simple, just a pen or pencil and a sheet of paper or some pigment and a brush, yet the opportunities are endless. I just had to do it too.

Taking inspiration from concept artists and illustrators I saw online I found a way to learn to draw. In 2007 I began full time at the Julian Ashton Art School, a classical fine arts atelier. There I learned from the figure and slowly developed a deep attraction to drawing from the world around me, and the people living in it.”

-Simon Cowell

Francis Lee: “God’s Own Country”

“God’s Own Country”, Directed by Frances Lee, 2017, Computer Graphics, Gay Film Gifs

“God’s Own Country” is a 2017 British drama film written and directed by Francis Lee in his feature directorial debut. The film stars Josh O’Conner and Alec Secăreanu.. The plot follows a young sheep farmer in Yorkshire, England, whose life is transformed by a Romanian migrant worker. The film was the only UK-based production to feature in the world drama category at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the world cinema directing award. It was released in the United Kingdom on the 1st of September 2017.

“God’s Own Country” was banned in some Arab countries due to explicit sex scenes between the two main actors. Romania was the only country in Easter European where the film was screened. The film won the Harvey Award at the 2017 Berlin International Film Festival, presented by the Teddy Awads program for LGBT-related films.

Note: The film is a quiet, moving exploration of loneliness and the beginning of intamacy between the two male characters. It is a quality story almost on par in its effect with the breakthrough feature length film “Brokeback Mountain”. It is available on disc from Netflix, and is online at Amazon Prime Video and Tubi.

Long-Horned Bulls

Hattian Standard with Two Long-Horned Bulls, 2300-2000 BC, Copper Alloy, Central Anatolia, Metropolitan Museum of Art

During the Early Bronze Age in central Anatolia, a number of nonliterate, localized cultures having little contact with urban Mesopotamia produced spectacular metal vessels, jewelry, weapons, and musical instruments to be buried with their rulers.

This pair of long-horned bulls probably served as a finial for a religious or ceremonial standard. Cast separately, they are held together by extensions of their front and back legs, bent around the plinth. A pierced tang at the base suggests that the pair was connected to another object.

The bulls’ elaborate, curving horns are half again as long as their bodies, and though impossible in nature, constitute an effective stylistic convention. The tendency to emphasize important features in the representation of animals is a common motif in ancient Near Eastern art.

David Hockney

David Hockney, “Pearblossom Hwy. 11- 18th April 1986, #2″, Chromogenic Print, J. Paul Getty Museum

“Pearblossom Highway (the painting) shows a crossroads in a very wide open space, which you only get a sense of in the western United States… . [The] picture was not just about a crossroads, but about us driving around. I’d had three days of driving and being the passenger. The driver and the passenger see the road in different ways. When you drive you read all the road signs, but when you’re the passenger, you don’t, you can decide to look where you want. And the picture dealt with that: on the right-hand side of the road it’s as if you’re the driver, reading traffic signs to tell you what to do and so on, and on the left-hand side it’s as if you’re a passenger going along the road more slowly, looking all around. So the picture is about driving without the car being in it.”     – David Hockney

Thus David Hockney described the circumstances leading to the creation of this photocollage of the scenic Pearblossom Highway north of Los Angeles. His detailed collage reveals the more mundane observations of a road trip. The littered cans and bottles and the meandering line where the pavement ends and the sand begins point to the interruption of the desert landscape by the roads cutting through it and the imprint of careless travelers.