Month: March 2018

Basil Beattie

Basil Beattie, “Top Up”, 2013, Oil Paint and Wax on Canvas, 213 x 198 cm

Baeil Beattie is an English painter and printmaker. He studied at West Hartlepool College of Art and at the Royal Academy Schools, London. He taught at Goldsmiths College, London, from the 1960s to the 1990s.

He was Influenced by the work the New York artists associated with Abstract Expressionism while still a student at the Academy Schools in the late 50s. Throughout his career his work has always been distinguished by his sensuous and physical use of paint – characteristics which he shares with the Abstraction as practised by other English painters such as John Hoyland, Albert Irvin, and Gillian Ayres.

In the late 60s and into the 70s, Beattie was preoccupied with making paintings where there was no trace of the hand.The work was like ‘nature’ not so much in appearance but in the manner by which it was made, where gravity and the consistencies of paint were fundamental in the forming of the image.

It was in 1987, in his exhibition at the Curwen Gallery London, that Beattie’s pictographic language began to evolve. This was followed in 1991 with a drawing Installation – “Drawing on the Interior”, at the Eagle Gallery London, consisting of 376 drawings. The work explored the emerging imagery, such as ladders, stairways, corridors, tunnels, towers, doors, and ziggurats. Many of these images became subjects for paintings. Beattie has said of these images that they were not attempts to paint literal things, but were used as vehicles for conveying symbolic and metaphoric associations.

Calendar: March 18

Year: Day to Day Men: March 18

A Reflection on Life

The eighteenth of March in 1899 marks the birth date of Majorie Abbatt, an English toy maker and businesswoman. Abbatt Toys was founded on the philosophy that children’s toys should be functional in design and educational in play. 

Born Norah Majorie Cobb to a wealthy and educated family in Surbiton, a neighborhood of South West London, Majorie Abbat received her initial education at Roedean School, an independent boarding and day school on the outskirts of Brighton, East Sussex. She continued her studies at Oxford’s Somerville College and earned her Bachelor of Arts in 1923. Majorie gave up her postgraduate work in psychoanalysis at London’s University College with her marriage to Cyril Paul Abbatt in December of 1930. 

Paul Abbatt, born into a Quaker family in 1899, was a graduate of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and a teacher at the private Quaker-owned boarding and day Sidcot School near Winscombe, Somerset. Influenced by Woodcraft Chivalry, a scouting and woodcraft movement in the United Kingdom, Paul Abbat and Majorie Cobb met at a 1926 gathering of the organization at Godshill, Hampshire. With the intent to establish a progressive kindergarten, they travelled to Vienna for research on its educational facilities. 

Majorie and Paul Abbatt met painter and art education reformer Franz Cižek at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts. Cižek had founded Vienna’s Child Art Movement and was the director of the Vienna School’s Department of Experimentation and Research. The Abbatts attended his classes as well as classes at the city’s Montessori kindergartens. They also became acquainted with psychoanalyst Milan Morgenster and developmental educator Helena Löw-Beer, both of whom were working in the field of special education for severely handicapped children.

In 1932, Majorie and Paul Abbatt founded Abbatt Toys, a manufacturer for functional and educational toys. Part of a pioneering generation, they designed toys to stimulate the imagination of children as well as their physical skills. Working within their Bloomsbury, London apartment, they made a small exhibition space and developed a mail-order business from an illustrated catalogue created by painter and designer John Skeaping. By 1934, Abbatt Toys was progressing well and a new catalogue was published with photographs by Bauhaus-trained Edith Tudor-Hart who had previously been a Montessori teacher.

In 1934, Hungarian-born architect and designer Ernö Goldfinger moved to London and met Majorie and Paul Abbatt; this meeting led to a collaboration with Abbatt Toys throughout the company’s early years. In 1934, Goldfinger designed Abbatt Toys’s first showroom on central London’s Endsleigh Street, a place that encouraged children to touch and play with the displayed toys. In 1935, Goldfinger created a logo for Abbatt Toys as well as a children’s alphabet. The next year, he designed a second store on Wimpole Street and redesigned the couple’s apartment. In 1937, the now established Abbatt Toys had an exhibition space, designed by Goldfinger and the Abbatts, at the International Exposition of Arts and Technology in Modern Life held at Paris.

In 1951, Majorie and Paul Abbatt founded Children’s Play Activities Limited, a research organization with the aim of understanding play as an element of mental and social education. A report that criticized the practices of the British industry’s toy manufacturing sector was produced by the CPA, Limited in 1957. The Abbatts founded the International Play Association in 1961 to protect and advance the role of play in children’s lives. 

Majorie Abbatt was a member from an early age of the West London Ethical Society, one of the founding groups of the Union of Ethical Societies, now the Humanists UK. After the death of Paul Abbatt in 1971, she sold Abbatt Toys and remained active in all the organizations she had supported. Honored in 1981 by a Master of Arts from University of Nottingham, Majorie Abbatt died at her home at Oxford ten years later in November of 1991 at the age of ninety-two.

Doszhan Tabyldy and Ethno-Folk Ensemble, “Turan” 

Doszhan Tabyldy and Ethno-Folk Ensemble, “Turan”

Исполнитель: этно-фольклорный ансамбль “Туран”
Орындаушы: “Тұран” этно-фольклорлық ансамблі

Музыка: этно-фольклорный ансамбль “Туран”
Слова: Исраил Сапарбаев (из поэмы “Өртолғау”)
Музыкасы: “Тұран” этно-фольклорлық ансамблі
Сөзі: Исраил Сапарбаев (“Өртолғау” поэмасынан)

Студия звукозаписи: “Kazakhstan records”
Дыбыс жазу студиясы: “Kazakhstan records”

(Performer: Ethno-folklore ensemble “Turan”

Lyrics: Israel Saparbayev

Recording and Dubbing by Kazakhstan Records)

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

Calendar: March 17

Year: Day to Day Men: March 17

Morning’s Red Splendor

The seventeenth of March in 1916 marks the birth date of Ray Ellington, an English singer, drummer and bandleader. He specialized in jazz but experimented with many other genres. Ellington’s musical style was heavily influenced by songwriter and saxophonist Louis Jordan’s up-tempo hybrid of jazz, blues, and boogie-woogie. 

Born Henry Pitts Brown in Kennington, London, Ray Ellington was the youngest of four children to Eva Stenkell Rosenthal and Harry Pitts Brown, an African-American music hall comedian. After his fathe’s death in 1920, he was raised as an Orthodox Jew and, beginning in 1924, attended the South London Jewish School until 1930. Ellington entered show business at the age of twelve with his first acting appearance on a London stage. 

In 1937, Ellington joined Harry Roy and His Orchestra as the band’s drummer. At his first session with the band, he did vocals along with his drumming for the 1937 song “Swing for Sale”. In May of 1940, Ellington was called for military service. He joined the Royal Air Force and became a physical training instructor for the course of the war. Ellington also played in service bands including the RAF’s Blue Eagles in 1945. 

After demobilization, Ray Ellington resumed his music career with a group of his own musicians that played at London’s The Bag O’Nails club. After rejoining Harry Roy’s orchestra for a couple of months, he formed the Ray Ellington Quartet in 1947. Ellington’s band was one of the first in the United Kingdom to feature the simple guitar, bass, drums and piano format that became the basis of rock and roll. The band was also one of the first jazz bands in the United Kingdom to feature an amplified guitar. 

The guitarist in the Ray Ellington Quartet was Trinidadian Lauderic Rex Caton, an autodidact on guitar who played professionally from the age of seventeen. He was also proficient on saxophone, double bass and banjo. Jazz pianist Dick Katz studied at the Peabody Institute, the Manhattan School of Music and the Juilliard School. He became the favorite pianist of Benny Carter, Coleman Hawkins and vocalists Carmen McRae and Helen Merrill. Jamaican-born George Coleridge Goode was the bassist  and had recorded with Django Reinhardt the year before the quartet was formed. He had a long collaboration with alto saxophonist Joe Harriott and became involved with Harriott’s pioneering blend of jazz and Indian music, the Indo-Jazz Fusions. 

From 1951 to 1960, the Ray Ellington Quartet had a regular music segment on “The Goon Show”, a radio comedy program broadcast by the BBC Home Service and occasionally the BBC Light Program. Musical performances alternated with scripted comedy segments. Occasionally Ellington would have small speaking roles in many of the episodes; no attempt was made to change his normal accent regardless the role.

Ray Ellington was married to British actress Anita West, who also co-hosted the BBC children’s program “Blue Peter”. They had two children, Nina and Lance. Lance Ellington became a singer who recorded several jazz-oriented albums. After a prolific forty-year recording career, Ray Ellington died of cancer on the twenty-seventh of February in 1985.

Notes: The online “The Seagoon Memoirs” has a short May 2022 article on Ray Ellington by Nick Reeves. The article includes photos, newspaper reviews and several videos including the Ray Ellington Quartet performing “Pink Champagne”. The article is located at: https://www.theseagoonmemoirs.com/post/ray-ellington

Jasmine Records issued a thirty-song collection in 2019 entitled “Ray Ellington: That Rock’n’Rollin’ Man” which contains several songs from his early to mid 1950s Columbia 78 rpm records.

Steven Kenny

Steven Kenny, “The Wing”, 2005, Oil on Linen, Private Collection

Steven Kenny was born in Peekskill, New York in 1962. He attended the Rhode Island School of Design, receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1984. His final year of art school was spent studying independently in Rome. This direct exposure to European art (especially the Baroque works of the Italian, Dutch and Flemish schools) had a significant effect on his painting style.

From an early age the beauty and mystery of nature have deeply influenced his chosen subject matter: compositions that most often combine the human figure with elements from nature to comment on our interactions with the environment while symbolically alluding to the dynamics of human nature in general.

First settling in New York City, he gained notoriety as a freelance commercial illustrator. In 1997 Steven turned away from illustration in order to devote his full attention to fine art. Since that time he has lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and his home state of New York before settling in St Petersburg, Florida.

David Burdeny

David Burdeny: Photos of the Mikhailovsky Theatre, St. Petersburg, Russia

Born in 1968 Winnipeg, Manitoba, David Burdeny has degrees in both Interior Design and a Masters in Architecture. At the age of 12, David started to photograph the prairie landscape and make his own black and white prints in a makeshift darkroom that also served as his bedroom closet. Primarily self-taught, his architecture and design background heavily influences his penchant for simple exacting photographs, shot on sight, of sky, horizon and the marks humankind leaves behind. David purposefully photographs in poor light and near darkness.

Calendar: March 16

Year: Day to Day Men; March 16

The Darkness of the Night

The sixteenth of March in 1621 marks the day Samoset, an Abenaki sagamore, made contact with the Pilgrims of the recently established Plymouth Colony, the first permanent English colony in New England. 

Samoset was a sagamore, or subordinate chief, of an Eastern Abenaki tribe that resided in Maine. The Abenaki, ‘People of the Dawn Land’, are indigenous people of the Northeastern Woodlands of Canada and the United States. The are an Algonquian-speaking people and part of the Wabanaki Confederacy of the five principal Eastern Algonquian Nations. 

Samoset had learned some English from visiting an earlier settled fishing camp in the Gulf of Maine; English fishermen would fish cod off the coast of Mohegan Island. In March of 1621, Samoset was visiting Massasoit, the sachem or leader of the Wampanoag Confederacy. Massasoit’s people had been seriously weakened by a series of epidemics and were vulnerable to attacks by the Narragansetts, the most powerful tribe in the region when the English colonists arrived in 1620. Massasoit Sachem sought an alliance with the Plymouth colonists as a way to protect his people.

On Friday, the sixteenth of March in 1621, Samoset entered the settlement at Plymouth alone and greeted the colonists in English. He was the first indigenous person with whom the colonists could converse. Samoset told the colonists about the land, the sagamores, and his people’s strength and numbers. He was also acquainted with many of the captains and fishermen who visited the colony. Samoset and the colonists communicated and, in the evening, lodged at colonist Stephen Hopkin’s house. 

The next morning, the Plymouth colonists gave Samoset a knife, bracelet and a ring before he left with a promise to return. On the twenty-second of March, Samoset returned with Tisquantum, commonly known as Squanto, the last known member of the Wampanoag Patuxet tribe. Squanto, who spoke a greater degree of English, arranged a meeting between the leaders of the colonists and Massasoit.   

Massasoit forged critical personal and political ties with colonial leaders William Bradford, Stephen Hopkins, Edward Winslow, John Carver and Myles Standish, which grew from the peace treaty negotiated on the twenty-second of March in 1621. The alliance assured the neutrality of the Wampanoag Confederacy during the 1636 Pequot War. 

Notes: In the fall of 1621, the Narragansetts sent a sheaf of arrows wrapped in a snakeskin to Plymouth Colony as a threatening challenge. Plymouth governor William Bradford sent the snakeskin back filled with gunpowder and bullets. The Narragansetts understood the message and did not attack them.

English Sea Captain Christopher Levett entertained Samoset and other tribal leaders in 1624 onboard his ship at harbor in Portland, Maine. Samoset is believed to have died circa 1653 in Pemaquid, Maine.

Tadanori Yokoo

Illlustration by Tadanori Yokoo

Tadanori Yokoo’s work, while highly successful commercially, is deeply personal. Employing his own themes, pictures, and references to himself and his anti-modernist collage style, his approach is instantly recognizable and individual. He has said that he learned in the late 1960s “to escape from compromise when designing by linking my creations directly to my lifestyle.”

Yokoo’s work crosses the border between design and fine art. Seemingly devoid of limitations or rules, his paintings are warm, autobiographical, and mystical and draw on a variety of seemingly incongruous influences such as spiritualism, Japanese aesthetics, the psychedelic posters of the ’60s, science fiction, and comic art. It also consciously draws on Ukiyo-e, or “the art of the floating world,” whose themes express the impermanence of life.

Several motifs recur in Yokoo’s work. His fascination with waterfalls borders on obsession. In 1999, in a group exhibition titled “Ground Zero Japan” at the Mito Museum of Art, Yokoo filled an entire room from floor to ceiling with postcards of waterfalls which were reflected in a black mirrored floor. Other exhibitions on the subject include “Craze for Waterfalls” at the Kirin Art Space Harajuku and “Tadanori Yokoo’s Magical Make a Pilgrimage Round” exhibition. In 1992, Absolut Vodka commissioned him to design an advertisement titled Absolut Yokoo featuring twenty-five of his waterfall paintings.

Yokoo is also known for his science-fiction posters and Ken Takakura gangster-film posters, and his designs have been used for theater sets in Japan and Italy.

Uno Moralez

Uno Moralez, The Burning Mill and Miller

Uno Moralez is a Moscow-based pixel painter with a sinister and unique take on old computer game aesthetics. He is a Russian enigma whose LiveJournal is written in Cyrllic, whose work is both drawn and published in digital pixels, whose output comes in the form of bizarre and ferociously NSFW image/gif galleries as often as comics or illustrations, and whose name is not even Uno Moralez.