Month: July 2018

Calendar: July 10

A Year: Day to Day Men: 10th of July

Wet Patterns on Tile and Skin

July 10, 1926 was the birthdate of American actor, Fred Gwynne.

New York City born, Fred Gwynne joined the Brattle Theater Repertory company after graduating from Harvard in 1951. He worked as a copywriter for the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson, leaving the company after being cast in a play. Gwynne appeared as a gangster for his first Broadway role in the comedy “Mrs. McThing”, starring Helen Hayes.

In 1954, Fred Gwynne had an uncredited role, playing “Slim” in the Oscar-winning drama “On the Waterfront”. Shortly afterwards, actor Phil Silvers, impressed by Gwynne’s role in “Mr. Mc thing”, sought him out for his television show. Gwynne portrayed Corporal Ed Honnergar in the “Phil Silvers Show”, a military based comedy, gaining him national recognition for his comedic acting.

Writer and producer Nat Hiken from Warner Brothers Studio cast Fred Gwynne in the situation comedy show “Car 54, Where are You?” as Patrolman Francis Muldoon, opposite comic actor Joe  E. Ross. The series which ran for two years was about two New York City police officers based in the fictional 53rd precinct of the Bronx. Car 54 was their squad car. The show was nominated for four Primetime Emmy Awards, and won one. During this series Gwynne met and established a longtime friendship with Al Lewis, a co-star in the near future.

In September of 1964, “The Munsters” started on television. It was a sitcom depicting the home life of a family of benign monsters and starred Fred Gwynn as the Frankenstein-like monster Herman Munster. The costars were Yvonne De Carlo as his wife and old friend Al Lewis as Grandpa, the aged vampire who pines for “the old days”. For his role, Gwynne had to wear forty pounds of makeup, padding, and four-inch asphalt-spreader boots. After this role, because of its popularity, he found himself typecast for two years.

A talented vocalist, Fred Gwynne sang in a Hallmark Hall of Fame production, “The Littlest Angel”, shown on television in 1969. He also appeared on Broadway in a revival of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” playing big Daddy Pollitt. The following years he appeared in the plays: the 1975 “Our Town” at the American Shakespeare Theater in Stratford and “A Texas Trilogy” on Broadway in 1976. In his last film “My Cousin Vinny” Gwynne played Judge Chamberlain Haller, using a Southern accent in his verbal sparring with Joe Pesci’s character, Vincent “Vinny” Gambini.

On July 2, 1996, Fred Gwynn died of complications from pancreatic cancer at his home in Taneytown, Maryland. He is buried at Sandy Mount United Methodist Church Cemetery in Finksburg, Maryland.

Edgar Rice Burroughs: “Go Naked into the Jungle”

Photographers Unknown, Six Selfies by Guys with Devices

“I do not understand exactly what you mean by fear,“ said Tarzan. “Like lions, fear is a different thing in different men, but to me the only pleasure in the hunt is the knowledge that the hunted thing has power to harm me as much as I have to harm him. If I went out with a couple of rifles and a gun bearer, and twenty or thirty beaters, to hunt a lion, I should not feel that the lion had much chance, and so the pleasure of the hunt would be lessened in proportion to the increased safety which I felt.”

“Then I am to take it that Monsieur Tarzan would prefer to go naked into the jungle, armed only with a jackknife, to kill the king of beasts,” laughed the other good naturedly, but with the merest touch of sarcasm in his tone.

“And a piece of rope,” added Tarzan.”

― Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes

Seated Male Figure

Seated Male Figure, Date Unknown, Mexico, Walters Art Museum

This exceptional exploration of the human form has a number of characteristics that underscore the fact that ancient artistic styles throughout West Mexico do not conform to modern political boundaries despite our use of Mexican states to name the region’s ancient cultures. The facial features and figural abstraction attest to connections between the San Sebastiian Red style of Jalisco and the Lagunillas pottery sculptures of adjacent Nayarit.

The male figure’s serene countenance and seated position on a bench-throne suggest a person of high status, his composed visage intimating that he is above the triviality of daily routine. On the other hand, his formal demeanor -arms held away from the body and hands resting securely on the knees- evokes a ritual pose like those of shamanic practices. The lack of any articulation of dress-other than the earrings, composed of a cluster of rounded forms-and the figure’s self-possessed expression point to the interpretation of the work as an idealized portrayal of a shaman in trance.

Gulaan, “Nodel Perofeta”

Gulaan, “Nodei Perofeta”

Gulaan is the stage name of Edouard Guïnedr Gulaan Wamedjo from New Caledonia, an accomplished musician and vocalist who plays guitar, drums, bass, keyboards and percussion. Gulaan first won acclaim in the mid 1990s as singer with the group Ryos OK, who released several albums in New Caledonia. His debut award winning solo album, “The Spirit of Yesterday”, was a warm and peaceful tribute to the land of his ancestors and his romances.

Gulaan’s guitar playing and voice are presented in all their stripped-back simplicity, showcasing his use of arpeggio and his striking vocal style. Gulaan enjoys making music in solitude, close to his source of creativity. His performances are moments of pure escapism, inspired by memories of his grandmother, his Baha’ï beliefs and his love of freedom. Gulaan hopes to discover new horizons as he exports his music throughout the world.

Phyllis Stapler

Phyllis Stapler, “The Moon Hare”

“Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamic of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problems and solutions sown are directly valid for all mankind.”

         Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

Ivan Pinkava

Photography by Ivan Pinkava

Ivan Pinkava was born in 1961 in Náchod, located in northeast Bohemia. He graduated from secondary school specializing in graphic art, and took his post-secondary training in photography at Prague’s FAMU. He is especially interested in the ambiguous character of the human being affected by suffering. His work is inspired by mythology, ancient tales, religious stories and theatre.

Pinkava regularly exhibits in Europe and the United States. His works are part of  public collections both in the Czech Republic and abroad. In 2005 Pinkava was appointed the head of the Studio of Photography at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. He is represented by the Leica Gallery, Prague, Czechia.

Gallery: https://www.lgp.cz/en.html

Art Books: “Ivan Pinkave: Remains” and “Ivan Pinkava” http://www.artbook.com/catalog–photography–monographs–pinkava–ivan.html

Danny Quirk

Danny Quirk, Title Unknown, From the “Faces of War” Series, Watercolor

Danny Quirk is an artist and recent graduate from the Pratt Institute. He specializes in photo realistic watercolors and painting what the camera can’t capture.

“My work is perceivably on the darker side, but the actually is, it’s about exploration. My two current bodies of work are of military, and anatomical themes. The military pieces were derived from countless interviews with military personnel deployed overseas, in the attempts to illustrate what they went through, the war in their eyes. My anatomical works combine classic poses, in dramatic chiaroscuro lighting, with a very contemporary twist… illustrating what’s underneath the skin, and the portrayed figure dissects a region of their body to show the structures that lay beneath.” – Danny Quirk

Nicolas Pain

Nicolas Pain, “Octopus III”, 2016, Bronze, 1 x 1 x 1 Foot

After graduating in 1990 with a  B.A. in Graphic Design, English sculptor Nicolas Pain pursued a career as a graphic designer though his interest and ability in three dimensional work drew him into the to the video game industry in the late nineties. This allowed him to support his life long interest in both SCUBA diving and marine wildlife that proved to be the trigger for his sculptural work which he began in 2005.

Calendar: July 9

A Year: Day to Day Men: 9th of July

Apollo on the Bed

July 9, 1858, was the birthdate of the German-American anthropologist Franz Uri Boas.

In 1887 Franz Uri Boas emigrated to the United States, where he first worked as a museum curator at the Smithsonian. In 1899 he became a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, where he remained for the rest of his career. Through his students, many of whom went on to found anthropology departments and research programs inspired by their mentor, Boas profoundly influenced the development of American anthropology.

Franz Boas was one of the most prominent opponents of the then-popular ideologies of scientific racism, the idea that race is a biological concept and that human behavior is best understood through the typology of biological characteristics. In a series of groundbreaking studies of skeletal anatomy, Boas showed that cranial shape and size was highly malleable depending on environmental factors such as health and nutrition, in contrast to the claims by racial anthropologists of the day that held head shape to be a stable racial trait.

Boas also worked to demonstrate that differences in human behavior are not primarily determined by innate biological dispositions but are largely the result of cultural differences acquired through social learning. In this way, Boas introduced culture as the primary concept for describing differences in behavior between human groups, and as the central analytical concept of anthropology.

Among Boas’s main contributions to anthropological thought was his rejection of the then-popular evolutionary approaches to the study of culture, which saw all societies progressing through a set of hierarchic technological and cultural stages, with Western European culture at the summit. Boas argued that culture developed historically through the interactions of groups of people and the diffusion of ideas; and that consequently, there was no process towards continuously “higher” cultural forms. This insight led Boas to reject the “stage”-based organization of ethnological museums, instead preferring to order items on display based on the affinity and proximity of the cultural groups in question.

Boas also introduced the ideology of cultural relativism, which holds that cultures cannot be objectively ranked as higher or lower, or better or more correct; but that all humans see the world through the lens of their own culture, and judge it according to their own culturally acquired norms. For Boas, the object of anthropology was to understand the way in which culture conditioned people to understand and interact with the world in different ways. To do this, it was necessary to gain an understanding of the language and cultural practices of the people studied.

Carmine Santaniello

Carmine Santaniello, “Amore”, Lithograph, 9 x 12 Inches

Collage is an integral part of New York City-based Carmine Santaniello’s art and is usually the starting point for each work. Employing the traditional method of cut and glued paper, he creates new faces out of amassed facial images. He incorporates elements of his own photographs of exterior environments such as graffiti or street art. Some works remain as collage, some become drawings, some artist books or articulated paper dolls, but most become monoprints utilizing lithography.

Through the juxtaposition of techniques and mediums, he creates evocatively charged works of art. These new works have an erotic edge with a voyeuristic feel to them. Each subject is confined behind a the vale of marred graffiti-like images.

Reblogged with many thanks to the artist’s site: http://carminesantaniellofineart.blogspot.com    and   https://www.etsy.com/in-en/listing/585432108/original-art-monoprint-lithograph-gay