Month: June 2018

Julian Jordanov

Julian Jordanov, “Poetic Library”, Aquatint Bookplate, 2002, Printed on Fabriano Rosaspina 220 Paper

Julian Jordanov was born in Lovech, Bulgaria. He has continued to live and work there, after receiving his Masters in Fine Art from the National Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia, Bulgaria. His prints are strongly influence by both surrealism and symbolism, and he is highly sought after for the specialized medium of creating ex libris prints. These smaller prints are almost always accomplished in etching and aquatint, and show a superb level of detail and skill hard to find outside eastern Europe. He also works in lithography for larger, more surrealistic prints.

More of his work can be found through Largo Art Gallery located in Varna, Bulgaria. Their site is https://www.largogallery.com

Calendar: June 7

A Year: Day to Day Men: 7th of June

The Toss of a Shirt

The Day of the Tiles occurs on June 7, 1788 in the town of Grenoble, France.

Grenoble was the scene of popular unrest due to financial hardship from the economic crises. The causes of the French Revolution affected all of France, but matters came to a head first in Grenoble. Cardinal Étienne Charles de Loménie de Brienne attempted to abolish the provincial appellate courts in order to enact a new tax upon the people. Tensions caused by poor harvests and high costs of food increased when the privileged classes insisted on retaining the right to collect feudal royalties from their peasants and landholders.

A meeting was held prior to the 7th of June in 1788 calling together at Grenoble the judges of the old Estates to discuss reforms. The government responded by sending troops to the area to put down the movement. In the morning of June 7th, merchants closed their shops; groups of 300-400 men and women formed, armed with stones, sticks and axes. They rushed the city gates to prevent the judges at the Grenoble meeting from leaving the city. The cathedral was seized and the bells rung, calling neighboring peasants into the city.

The Regiment of the Royal Navy was the first to respond to the growing crowds, and was given the order to quell the rioting without the use of arms. However, as the mob stormed the hotel entrance, the situation escalated. Soldiers sent to quell the disturbances forced the townspeople off the streets. During an attack, Royal Navy soldiers injured a 75 year old man with a bayonet.

At the sight of blood, the people became angry and started to tear up the streets. Townspeople climbed onto the roofs of buildings around the Jesuit College to hurl down a rain of roof tiles on the soldiers in the streets below, hence the “Day of the Tiles”. Many soldiers took refuge in a building to shoot through the windows, while the crowd continued to rush inside and ravage everything.

A noncommissioned officer of the Royal Navy, commanding a patrol of four soldiers, gave the order to open fire into the mob. One civilian was killed and a boy of 12 wounded. To the east of the city, the Royal Navy soldiers were forced to open fire in order to protect the city’s arsenal, fearing that the rioters would seize the weapons and ammunition.

Meanwhile, Colonel Count Chabord began deploying his regiment of Australasia troops to aid and relieve the Royal Navy soldiers. At six o’clock in the evening, a shouting crowd estimated at ten thousand people forced the judges to return to the Palace of the Parliament of Dauphine.  It wasn’t until the 14th of July that order was fully restored.

The Day of the Tiles was one of the first disturbances which preceded the French Revolution. Some historians have used that day to demonstrate the worsening situation in France in the buildup to the Revolution of 1789. Others have credited it with being the beginning of the revolution itself. Six outbreaks of rioting occurred in the city that day, leading to the Assembly of Vizille, which passed resolutions demanding reforms be made by the king.

Do Ho Suh

Fabric Installations by Do Ho Suh

Do Ho Suh’s immersive architectural installations—unexpectedly crafted with ethereal fabric—are spaces that are at once deeply familiar and profoundly alien. Suh is internationally renowned for his “fabric architecture” sculptures that explore the global nature of contemporary identity as well as memory, migration, and our ideas of home.

The large-scale installations of the artist’s brightly hued “Hub” sculptures—intricately detailed, hand-sewn fabric recreations of homes where Suh has lived from around the world. The Hubs comprise a series of conjoined rooms and passageways that visitors can enter and experience from the inside.

Suh was born in Korea and moved to the United States at the age of 29 in 1991, and he currently lives between New York, London, and Seoul. He crafts his works using traditional Korean sewing techniques combined with 3-D modeling and mapping technologies. Suh sees these works as “suitcase homes,” so lightweight and portable they can be installed almost anywhere.

A Step into the World

Photographer Unknown, (A Step into the World), Computer Graphics, Film Gif

“A lone wolf doesn’t tread paths its ilk leaves; it makes its own footprints in the snow. Most of its kind lives in packs, but it is an army in itself.
As quiet as it is fierce, it hones its own skills in the wild – building its lair, hunting its prey, sharpening its claws and facing its predators – no hurdle too big to cross in its passionate pursuit of a quest.
It loves with similar ferocity too, a loyal protector and provider when it crosses paths with its mate for life – a true soulmate.
Above all, however, it is a survivor. When the
conditions get harsh, it will do what it has to, to make it out alive.
No, a lone wolf would not go down without a fight.”

–Savas Mounjid, The Broken Lift

 

Ogle Winston Link and Thom

Photographer Unknown, “Ogle Winston Link and Thom”, 1940, Silver Gelatin Print

This 1940 photograph shows O. Winston Link with his assistant Thom with their lighting equipment.

Ogle Winston Link was an American photographer known for his black and white photography and sound recordings of the last days of steam locomotive railroading on the Norfolk and Western lines in the United States in the late 1950s. He was a pioneer in night-time photography. He used a 4 x 5 graphic View view camera with black and white film, from which he produce silver gelatin prints.

Kilian Schönberger

Kilian Schönberger, (The Abandoned Mill), Bavarian Forest, Germany

Kilian Schönberger’s work boasts captivating clarity and depth, serving to distinguish it from the masses of landscape photography. The range of color and tone found in his images is made all the more impressive by the fact that Schönberger is colorblind. Focusing on texture and pattern instead of color, Schönberger creates brightly contrasted, beautiful images.

“I recognized that I could turn this so-called disadvantage into a strength…while getting a picture of a chaotic forest scene, I can’t clearly distinguish the different green and brown tones. Brushing aside this ‘handicap’ I don’t care about those tones and just concentrate on the patterns of wood to achieve an impressive image structure.”               – Kilian Schönberger

Calendar: June 6

A Year: Day to Day Men: 6th of June

Heaven with Cerulean Fields

On June 6, 1683, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England opens as the world’s first university museum.

The Ashmolean Museum came into existence when Elias Ashmole, a weathy collector of rare books, gifted his collection to the University in 1682. He did so ‘because the knowledge of Nature is very necessary to human life and health.’ It opened as Britain’s first public museum, and the world’s first university museum on June 6, 1683. Though the collection has evolved considerably, the founding principle remains: that knowledge of humanity across cultures and across times is important to society.

Elias Ashmole acquired his collection from John Tradescant, father and son, both gardeners. The Tradescants were no ordinary gardeners; they were employed by the wealthy Earl of Salisbury. The Tradescants voyaged overseas, traveling the known world and shipping back new and exotic plant specimens for the Earl’s gardens. In the course of their travels they also acquired a remarkable collection of curiosities that included botanical, geological and zoological items as well as man-made objects.

When Elias Ashmole gifted this collection to the University, it was combined with an older University collection. The original Ashmolean Museum opened on Broad Street in Oxford in 1683, in the building that is now the Museum of the History of Science. Members of the public were admitted to the Ashmolean Museum from the outset- which was a controversial policy in the 17th century. Alongside the collection, this building was designed to house a chemistry laboratory and rooms for undergraduate lectures.

In 1823 the Ashmolean collection came under the reforming stewardship of brothers John and Philip Duncan – John was appointed as Keeper in 1823 and succeeded by Philip in 1829. In 1826 an “Introduction to the Catalogue of the Ashmolean Museum” was published, which proposed a detailed consideration of prevailing taxonomic systems of object organization. A full catalogue of the collections was completed in 1836 by Philip Duncan. These documents reveal the extent that the Duncan brothers, and the donors they attracted, transformed the collections with fresh specimens.

Sir Arthur Evans became Keeper of the Ashmolean in 1884. Sir Arthur was an Oxford scholar, traveller, and son of a famous academic of prehistory. In his 24-year keepership he transformed the museum by acquiring an archaeological collection and establishing the museum as a first-rate research institution. In 1908 the Ashmolean Museum and the University Art Galleries combined to create the current Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology.

Pieces of the Classics

Photographers Unknown, Pieces of the Classics

“The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of Greece and Rome—not by favour of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world were alike despicable.”

Thomas H. Huxley, Agnosticism and Christianity and Other Essays

Calendar: June 5

A Year: Day to Day Men: 5th of June

La Pièce de Résistance

June 5, 1895 was the birthdate of American film actor William Boyd.

William Boyd’s breakout role was Jack Moreland in Cedil B DeMille’s silent 1925 “The Road to Yesterday”, Boyd’s performance in the film was praised by critics, while movie-goers were equally impressed by his easy charm, charisma, and intense good-looks. Due to Boyd’s growing popularity, DeMille soon cast him as the leading man in the highly acclaimed silent drama film, “The Volga Boatman”.

Boyd’s role in that film firmly established him as a matinee idol and romantic leading man; he began earning an annual salary of $100,000. He acted in DeMille’s big lavish production “The King of Kings”  and later in the 1928 DeMille production “Skyscraper” playing the lead role of Blondy. In 1931 his picture was mistakenly run in a newspaper story about the arrest of another actor, William “Stage” Boyd, on gambling charges. This story damaged his career, despite having been shown false; and Boyd became virtually bankrupt.

In 1935 William Boyd was offered the supporting role of Red Conners in the movie “Hop-Along Cassidy”. He asked for the title role and won it. The original role of tlhe Hop-Along Cassidy character, written by Clarence E. Mulford for pulp magazine serials, was changed from a hard-drinking, rough-living red-headed wrangler to a cowboy hero who did not smoke, swear, or drink alcohol and who always let the bad guy start the fight. Although Boyd never lived in real life as a cowboy and disliked Western music, he became indlibly associated with the Hop-Along character and, like the cowboy stars Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, gained lasting fame in the Western film genre.

The films were more polished and impressive than the usual low-budget “program westerns”. The Hop-Along Cassidy adventures usually boasted superior outdoor photography of scenic locations and name supporting players familiar from major Hollywood films. Big-city theaters, which usually wouldn’t play Westerns, noticed the high quality of the productions and gave the series more exposure than other cowboy films could hope for.

The series of films ended in 1948 as interest in the character waned and fewer theaters were showing the films. William Boyd bought all the rights to all the Hop-Along Cassidy movies, mortgaging almost everything he owned to meet the price of $350,000 for the rights and the film backlog. He offered a print to a local NBC television station; it was so well received Boyd released the entire library to the national network, beginning the long-running genre of Westerns on television. Boyd’s gamble paid off, making him the first national TV star and restoring his personal fortune.

William Boyd estimated in 1940 (after only 5 years of the thirteen-year role) that he had starred in 28 outdoor films in which he fired 30,000 shots and killed at least 100 villians. He wore out 12 costumes and 60 ten-gallon hats, rode his horse Topper more than 2000 miles and rode herd on 5000 head of cattle. A score or more of heroines had been saved, but were never kissed.

Amos Chapple

Amos Chapple, “Harvesting Water Chestnuts, Jhalawar, India”, 2005

Amos Chapple is a New Zealand freelance photographer who in 2005 took a full-time postion shooting UNESCO World Heritage sites. In 2012 he started doing freelance news and travel photography. He took this modified drone photograph of a wife, husband and uncle in Jhalawar, India, while they were harvesting water chestnuts to sell.

Reblogged with thanks to the artist’s site: http://www.amoschapplephoto.com