A fine art, film, history and literature site oriented to, but not exclusively for, the gay community. Please be aware that there is mature content on this blog. Information on images and links to sources will be provided if known. Enjoy your visit and please subscribe.
Photographers Unknown, The Clock is Ticking, The Hours are Going By
“Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.”
―
The Tesla Papers
“The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter — for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way. He lives and labors and hopes.”
― Nikola Telsa
The Guy in the Rear Seat
Reblogged with thanks to http://exposedtease.tumblr.com
Loomis Dean, “Gene Kelly, France”, 1960, Printed in Life Magazine
Loomis Dean was a veteran Life Magazine photographer who had a five-decade long career. He studied photography at the Eastman School of Photography in Rochester, New York. His first photography job was in 1938 working as an advance man and photographer for Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus. Dean was an Army Air Force photographer during World War Two.
In 1947, Loomis Dean joined the staff of Life Magazine, shooting images of celebrities, royal weddings, fashion shows, riots, and Mideast wars. He joined Life’s Paris bureau in 1956. This image, taken by Loomis Dean in 1960, shows Gene Kelly at dinner after his triumph performance at the Paris Opera. To his left is seated prima ballerina Claude Bessy, with her chin on her hands.
Photographer Unknown, (Three Reflections of One), Photo Selfie
Donald Laycock, “In the Beginning”, 1956, Enamel on Composition Board, 122 x 91 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
-Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
Introspection
“What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table
David Nash, “Ash Dome”, 1977, Circle of Ash Trees, Wales
In 1977, sculptor David Nash cleared an area of land near his home in Wales where he trained a circle of 22 ash trees to grow in a vortex-like shape for an artwork titled “Ash Dome”. Over 40 years later, the trees still grow today. The artist has long worked with wood and natural elements in his art practice, often incorporating live trees or even animals into pieces. The exact site of “Ash Dome” in the Snowdonia region of northwest Wales is a closely guarded secret,
“When I first planted the ring of trees for Ash Dome, the Cold War was still a threat. There was serious economic gloom, very high unemployment in our country, and nuclear war was a real possibility… To make a gesture by planting something for the 21st century, which was what Ash Dome was about, was a long-term commitment, an act of faith.“ – David Nash, 2001
A Year: Day to Day Men: 30th of June
Beauty in a Form
June 30, 1908 is the date of the Tunguska Event in Siberia.
The Tunguska event was a large explosion that occurred near the Stony Tunguska River In Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia on the morning of June 30, 1908. This event is the largest impact event on Earth in recorded history. The explosion over the Easter Siberian tiaga, a very large ecoregion of forests and wildlife, flattened 770 square miles of forest, yet caused no known human casualties.
The explosion is generally attributed to the air burst of a meteoroid, It is classified as an impact event, though no impact crater has been found. The object is thought to have disintegrated at an altitude of 3 to 6 miles rather than to have hit the Earth’s surface. Studies have yielded estimates of the meteoroid’s size from 200 to 600 feet. Estimates of the energy of the downward airburst range from three to five megatons of TNT (three to five million tons). The explosion knocked down some 80 million trees over the affected area.
Natives and Russian settlers in the hills north-west of Lake Baikal observed a column of bluish light, nearly as bright as the sun, moving across the sky. About ten minutes later, there was a flash and a sound similar to artillery fire. Eyewitnesses closer to the explosion site reported the sound moved from the east to the north. The sounds were accompanied by a shock wave that knocked people off their feet and broke windows hundreds of miles away.
The explosion registered at seismic stations across Euroasia; in some places, the shock wave registered equivalent to an earthquake of 5.0 magnitude. Fluctuations in atmospheric pressure were detected in Great Britain. Over the next few days, night skies in Asia and Europe glowed. The theory for this was light passing through high-altitude ice particles that had formed at extremely low temperatures. Suspended dust particles caused a month-long decrease in atmospheric transparency, according to observers at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles County, California.
It is believed that the passage of the asteroid through the atmosphere caused pressures and temperatures to build up to a point where the asteroid abruptly disintegrated in a huge explosion. The destruction would have to have been so complete that no remnants of substantial size survived, and the material scattered into the upper atmosphere during the explosion would have caused the glowing skies.
Photographer Unknown, (Tin Rockets: Seeking Out New Worlds)
Photographer Unknown, (Patterns on the Wall)
“America’s intellectual community has never been very bright. Or honest. They’re all sheep, following whatever the intellectual fashion of the decade happens to be. Demanding that everyone follow their dicta in lockstep. Everyone has to be open-minded and tolerant of the things they believe, but God forbid they should ever concede, even for a moment, that someone who disagrees with them might have some fingerhold of truth.”
―
All images reblogged with many thanks to the artist’s site: https://cruiseprince.tumblr.com
Harry Sternberg, “The Atom”, 1949, Aquatint, 44 x 25 cm, Private Collection
Harry Sternberg, painter, lithographer and educator was born on July 19, 1904 in New York City. At the age of nine he began to take art classes at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. From 1922 until 1926 he trained at the Arts Students League in New York. He rented his first studio in 1926 and began his career in etching, printmaking and painting.
During the depression Sternberg was a WPA artist, and his murals are in post offices in Chicago, Chester and Sellersville, Pennsylvania. From 1934 to 1968, he taught painting and graphics at the Art Students League in New York. He taught printmaking from 1942 to 1945 at the New School of Social Research. Sternberg was head of the Art Department in the Idylwild School of Music and Art at the University of Southern California from 1959 to 1969. He also wrote several books on graphics, including silk screening, etching and woodcutting.
Sternberg received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1936 and his work was included in the first Whitney Museum Invitational Annual in 1937. During this period, Sternberg was friendly with Mexican artists Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo, and David Siqueiros. Other artist- friends were Jacob Lawrence, Philip Evergood, and John Sennhauser, and the older artists, Rockwell Kent, Marsden Hartley and Max Weber.
Note: A more extensive biography and additional artwork by Sternberg can be found in the January, 2022, archive of this site.
Passed: Hand Inspected by Frank
Class Comics, “The Adventures of Lawsuit and T-Boy”, Issue No. 1
Class Comics is a publisher which issues several series of gay erotic comic books of high quality art, captivating characters, and exciting stories. Owned and operated by Canadian illustrator Patrick Fillion and writer Robert Fraser, Class Comics has been publishing their erotic comic books since 2000. In addition to the publishing of their own titles, the company has expanded their comic and art book collections to the French and German audiences through the European publishers Bruno Gmunder and H&O Editions.
Its titles include: Guardians of the Cube, Satisfaction Guaranteed, Camili-Cat, Naked Justice, Rapture, Deimos, Porky, “Rainbow Country” and The Pornomicon. Artists published by the company include French Logan and Max, and Spanish Ismael Alvarez.
Class Comics’ website is located at: https://www.classcomics.com
A Year: Day to Day Men: 29th of June
The Amazing Technicolor Man
June 29, 1995 marks the passing of one of MGM’s biggest stars: Lana Turner.
Born to working-class parents in northern Idaho, Lana Turner spent her early life there before her family relocated to San Francisco. In 1936, while still in high school, she was discovered while purchasing a soda at the Top Hat Malt Shop in Hollywood. At the age of 16, she was signed to a personal contract by Warner Brothers director Mervyn Le Roy who took her with him when he transferred to MGM in 1938.
Turner attracted attention playing a murder victim in her first film in 1937, LeRoy’s crime drama “They Won’t Forget”. During the early 1940s, Turner established herself as a leading actress and one of MGM’s top performers, appearing in such films as the film noir “Johnny Eager”, the musical “Ziegfeld Girl”, and the horror film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”, all in 1941. She starred in the 1942 romantic war drama “Somewhere I’ll Find You”, one of several films opposite Clark Gable.
At the advent of World War II, Turner’s increasing prominence in Hollywood led to her becoming a popular pin-up girl and her image appeared painted on the noses of U.S. fighter planes, bearing the nickname “Tempest Turner.” In June 1942, she embarked on a ten-week war bond tour throughout the western United States with her co-star Gable. Throughout the war, Turner continued to make regular appearances at U.S. troop events and area bases.
Turner’s reputation as a glamorous femme fatale was enhanced by her critically acclaimed performance in the 1946 film “The Postman Always Rings Twice”, a role which established her as a serious dramatic actress. Her popularity continued through the 1950s in dramas such as “The Bad and the Beautiful” and “Peyton Place”, the latter of which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress.
Turner’s 1959 film, “Imitation of Life”, proved to be one of the greatest financial successes of her career. Her last starring role in the 1966 “Madame X” earned her a David di Donatello Award for Best Actress. Turner spent most of the 1970s and early 1980s in semi-retirement, making her final feature film appearance in “Witches’ Brew”, released in 1980. She accepted in 1982 a much publicized and lucrative recurring guest role in the television series “Falcon Crest”, which afforded the series notably high ratings.
Turner maintained her glamorous image into her late career; a 1966 film review characterized her as “the glitter and glamour of Hollywood.” While she consistently embraced her glamorous persona, she was also vocal about her dedication to acting and attained a reputation as a versatile, hard-working actress. One of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s biggest stars, Lana Turner earned the studio over $50 million during her eighteen-year contract with them.