Month: April 2018

Wu Lan-Chiann

Six Chinese Ink Paintings by Wu Lan-Chiann

Originally from Taiwan, Wu Lan-Chiann now lives and works in California. She specializes in Chinese ink painting, taking century old techniques and presenting her art by connecting the East with the West; old traditional painting in a contemporary format.

Wu Lan-Chiann received her BFA -with highest honors- from the Chinese Culture University in Taipei, Taiwan. She holds a MA from New York University’s Fine Art Department.

At the core of Wu Lan-Chiann’s paintings is a personal contemplation of universal values and themes that connect people across time and place. While Wu Lan-Chiann’s sources of inspiration are broad and diverse, she creates work that centers on the essence and meaning of life. In her most recent work, she explores the rhythm of nature as an allegory for the human cycle of life.

Wu Lan-Chiann has exhibited her art and lectured on the subject of Chinese ink painting in the Los Angeles area, San Francisco, and well as in New York, Taiwan, United Kingdom, and Japan. Wu Lan-Chiann’s work is collected on four continents.

Franz Radziwill

Franz Radziwill, “The Street (Die Strasse)”, 1928, Oil on Canvas

Franz Radziwill studied architecture at the “Höhere Technische Staatslehranstalt” in Bremen until 1915 and also attended evening classes in figure drawing at the “Kunstgewerbeschule”.  He was introduced to artist circles in Fischerhude and Worpswede by his teacher Karl Schwally. There Franz Radziwill met Bernhard Hoetger, Otto Modersohn, Heinrich Vogeler and Clara Rilke-Westhoff. He also studied works by Van Gogh, Cézanne and Chagall.

After returning from a British prisoner-of-war camp in 1919 Radziwill settled in Berlin for a couple of years where he joined the “Freie Secession” and the “Novembergruppe”. He moved to Dangast on the North Sea in 1923, and had his first one-man exhibition in Oldenburg two years later, in 1925. In the same year, Franz Radziwill increasingly abandoned the Expressionist style of his early work. His friend and fellow artist Otto Dix introduced him to the “Neue Sachlichkeit” circles; and Radziwill worked together with Dix in his studio in Dresden until 1928.

He participated in the large “Neue Sachlichkeit” exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1929. Radziwill was much praised when he took over Paul Klee’s chair at the Düsseldorf Akademie in 1933. The Nazis forced him to resign two years later, however, called his artwork degenerate and banned him from practising his profession. After the second war he returned to his house in Dangast, where he began painting religious subjects.

Franz Radziwill was awarded the Villa-Massimo Prize in 1963 and spent some time in Rome. Around the mid 1960s Franz Radziwill began changing his older works by painting over them. Most recently, his works have been on show at the Kunsthalle Emden in 1995 and in the exhibition “Der Geist der Romantik in der deutschen Kunst” at the Haus der Kunst in Munich.

Calendar: April 17

A Year: Day to Day Men: 17th of April

The Seat of the Revelation

April 17, 1918 was the birthdate of William Franklin Beedle Jr., known to the public as William Holden, one of the biggest stars of the 1950s and 1960s.

William Holden’s first starring role was in the 1939 film “The Golden Boy”, costarring Barbara Stanwyck, in which he played a violinist turned boxer. He was still an unknown actor at the time, while Stanwyck was already a film star. She liked Holden and went out of her way to help him succeed, devoting her personal time to coaching and encouraging him.

Next he starred with George Raft and Humphrey Bogart in the 1939 Warner Brothers gangster epic “Invisible Stripes” followed by the role of George Gibbs in the film adaptation of “Our Town”. After Columbia Pictures picked up half of his contract, he alternated between starring in several minor pictures for Paramount and Columbia before serving as a second lieutenant in the United States Army Air Force during World War II, where he acted in training films for the First Motion Picture Unit.

Holden’s career took off in 1950 when director Billy Wilder tapped him to star in “Sunset Boulevard”, in which he played a down-on-his-heels screenwriter taken in by a faded silent-screen star, played by Gloria Swanson. Holden earned his first Best Actor Oscar nomination with the part. Getting the part was a lucky break for Holden, as the role was initially cast with Montgomery Clift, who backed out of his contract.

Following this breakthrough film, his career quickly grew as Holden played a series of roles that combined his good looks with cynical detachment, including a prisoner-of-war entrepreneur in the 1953 “Stalag 17”, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. His most widely recognized role was an ill-fated prisoner of war in the 1957 “The Bridge on the River Kwai” co-starring with Alec Guinness. He also starred in John Ford’s western “The Horse Soldiers” playing an American Civil War military surgeon opposite John Wayne.

William Holden co-starred as Humphrey Bogart’s younger brother, a carefree playboy, in the 1954 “Sabrina” starring Audrey Hepburn. It was Holden’s third film with director Billy Wilder. His career peaked in 1957 with the enormous success of “The Bridge Over the River Kwai”, but Holden spent the next several years starring in a number of films that rarely succeeded commercially or critically.

By the mid-1960s, the quality of his roles and films had noticeably diminished. A heavy drinker most of his life, Holden made a comeback in 1969 when he starred in director Sam Peckinpah’s graphically violent Western “The Wild Bunch”, winning much acclaim. Holden gave two more great performances, in the 1974 “Towering Inferno” and the 1976 “Network”, until his shock death from blood loss due to a fall at his apartment while intoxicated. In 1982, actress Stefanie Powers, with whom Holden had been in a relationship since 1975, helped set up the William Holden Wildlife Foundation and the William Holden Wildlife Education Center in Kenya, an area where Holden was active in animal sanctuary.

Albert Camus: “A Real Life”

Photographers Unknown, A Collection of Black and Whites for a Monday Evening

“…if the actor gave his performance without knowing that he was in a play, then his tears would be real tears and his life a real life. And whenever I think of this pain and joy that rise up in me, I am carried away by the knowledge that the game I am playing is the most serious and exciting there is.” 

—Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

Charles Tanner: “Whirl and Whirl, Faster and Faster”

 

Artist Unknown, (The Djinn), Computer Graphics, Gifs

“However, as I say, he stood there and watched. Watched the smoke, or vapor, or whatever it was, whirl and whirl, faster and faster, snatching up the vagrant wisps and streamers that had strayed to the far corners of the room, sucking them in, incorporating them into the central column, until at last that column, swirling there, seemed almost solid.

It was solid. It had ceased its whirling and stood there quivering, jelly-like, plastic, but nevertheless, solid. And, as though molded in the hands of an invisible sculptor, that column was changing. Indentations appeared here, protuberances there. The character of the surface altered subtly; presently it was no longer smooth and lustrous, but rough and scaly. It lost most of its luminosity and became an uncertain, lichenous green. Until at last it was a – thing.”

― Charles Tanner, Zacherley’s Vulture Stew

Steve Thomas

Steve Thomas, “Joust” Arcade Game Propaganda Poster

Steve Thomas is a freelance illustrator and graphic artist. His work is influenced by vintage posters, propaganda and product art from the early 20th century, and retro futuristic art from the mid-20th century. He has done illustration work for Disney, Star Trek, Hasbro, Marvel and other companies.

Image reblogged from the artist’s site: http://www.stevethomasart.com

Calendar: April 16

A Year: Day to Day Men: 16th of April

The Serpent

April 16, 1932 was the release date of the Laurel and Hardy short film “The Music Box”.

“The Music Box” was produced by Hal Roach and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It starred Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy as delivery men attempting to deliver an upright piano up a long flight of outdoor stairs. This film won the first Academy Award for Live Action Short Comedy Film in 1932.

The stairs, which were the focal point of the movie was a steep climb of 133 steps with multiple landings. They still exist in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles, near the now Laurel and Hardy Park. The steps are a public staircase which connects Vendome Street at the base of the hill with Descanso Drive at the top of the hill. In the film, the duo of Laurel and Hardy make four attempts to get the piano to the top of the stairs. Each of the first three attempts the piano winds up rolling down the staircase. On the fourth attempt, they succeed only to find out from the local postman that they could have driven their truck up a road to the front of the house. Dutifully they carry the piano down the stairs, put it in the truck and drive it up to the house.

Hal Roach Studios colorized “The Music Box” in 1986 with a remastered stereo soundtrack featuring the Hal Roach Studios incidental stock music score conducted by Ronnie Hazelhurst. In 1997, this film was selected for preservation by the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

Note; As a great fan of the old comedy team of Laurel and Hardy, two films stand out in my memory. The second film is “Sons of the Desert” in which the duo, after telling their wives that they are taking a cruise for Oliver’s health, sneak off to attend a fraternal lodge convention. While having a good time, their supposed cruise ship sinks and they are assumed dead. The rainy night scene when they are hiding from their wives in Oliver’s house attic is great. However, the film that I rank at the top of that list is “The Music Box”; its stairway struggle in this film is a comedy classic that has endured for eighty six years. A must see.