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Photographers Unknown, Beguiling the Senses and Enchanting the Mind: Photo Set Four
“We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves.”
– Denis Diderot
Photographer Unknown, (Kneeling on Small Pillows)
Photographer Unknown, (Thumb)
“Touch. It is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy, gentility with its codes and conventions and restraints. By touch we are betrayed and betray others … an accidental brushing of shoulders or touching of hands … hands laid on shoulders in a gesture of comfort that lies like a thief, that takes, not gives, that wants, not offers, that awakes, not pacifies. When one flesh is waiting, there is electricity in the merest contact.”
―
Jerry Lee Ingram, “Hollywood Boulevard”
Reblogged with thanks to the artist’s site: http://wearejustliketrees.tumblr.com
Charles Simonds: Sculpture with Clay
Charles Simonds majored in art at the University of California at Berkeley and after graduation, taught college art in New Jersey. There he discovered an area of clay pits that had once provided the raw material for some of Manhattan’s older buildings. He literally immersed himself in the subject, burying himself naked in a pool of wet clay to get a feel for the material. Back in New York, where he still lives, he experimented with clay and sand, learning to capture the look of the American Southwest or an African savanna.
Simonds’s sculptures are mostly enchanting miniature architecture and landscapes with small chambers and towers; some are abstract organic shapes, bulbous or phallic in form. Indoors, his sculptures are protected from immediate destruction, but permanence is not what his work is about.
The enduring value of his work – the art of it – comes across in the stories he tells and in the stories others tell about him. Like Robert Smithson, a friend and artist he respected, he embraces entropy. He builds his objects (at least his early work) for destruction, and he takes no measures to insure their survival. He said in the 1980s, “Their effect is enhanced by their destruction and disappearance.”
Photographer unknown, (Still Life with Fruit)
“It smells of blood and honey, of sex and song.”
― Kelly Sandoval
Photographer Unknown, Pair of Apple Halves
“Every summer we strung the old hammock between two hearty apple trees that tempered summer’s humidity with the thick shade that they poured on those that lingered beneath them. And I would swing for hours, listlessly adrift in the quiet refuge that they afforded me. And yet, while I slept wrapped in the solace of their sanctuary they were busy fashioning sweeping canopies full of apples of the sweetest sort. And in my busyness, had I not paused under their canopies all I would see are the apples that fed by body, but I would have missed the solace that fed my soul.”
―
Photographer Unknown, Texas Truck
“I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion. And this is true to the extent that people either passionately love Texas or passionately hate it and, as in other religions, few people dare to inspect it for fear of losing their bearings in mystery or paradox. But I think there will be little quarrel with my feeling that Texas is one thing.
For all its enormous range of space, climate, and physical appearance, and for all the internal squabbles, contentions, and strivings, Texas has a tight cohesiveness perhaps stronger than any other section of America. Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study, and the passionate possession of all Texans.”
―
Art Nouveau Doorway, Paris, France
A Year: Day to Day Men: 8th of July
Red Towel and Mirror
July 8, 1934 was the birthdate of British comedian, comedy writer, and actor, Martin Alan “Marty” Feldman.
Marty Feldman was born in the East End of London, the son of Jewish immigrants from Kiev, Ukraine. He suffered in childhood from thyroid disease and developed Graves’ ophthalmopathy, causing his eyes to protrude and become misaligned. By the age of twenty, he had decided to pursue a career as a comedian.
In 1954, Marty Feldman first met Barry Took, a West End revue performer, forming an enduring writing partnership with him which lasted for twenty years. Together they wrote most of the shows of “Bootsie and Snudge”, a situation comedy for the ITV Network, and the BBC radio show “Round the Home” from 1964 to 1967. Feldman became chief write and script editor for the 1966-67 “The Frost Report”, which introduce John Cleese, Ronnie Barker, and Ronnie Corbett to television.
Marty Feldman’s appearance on the sketch comedy series “At Last the 1948 Show” as the fourth cast member of the group raised his profile on television. His character, frequently a harassing pest, interacted with fellow comedians John Cleese, Tim Brook-Taylor, and Graham Chapman. Thirteen series were made during the ten-month run, of which eleven complete shows survive.
On film, Marty Feldman is best known for his portrayal of Igor (pronounced Eye-Gore) in the now-comedy classic by Mel Brooks “Young Frankenstein”, released in 1974. The screenplay was written by Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder, who had Feldman in mind when he wrote the part. Feldman improvised many of his scenes’ lines during the shooting.
Feldman later in his career, appeared as a guest on “The Dean Martin Show”, ventured into Italian cinema in the sex comedy “Sex with a Smile”, appeared with Gene Wilder in Wilder’s directorial debut “The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother”, played Marty Eggs in Mel Brook’s “Silent Movie”, starred in his own written and directed comedy “The Last Remake of Beau Geste”, and showed up in a cameo role with the Cookie Monster on “The Muppet Show”.
Marty Feldman died from a heart attack in a hotel room in Mexico City on December 2, 1982 at the age of forty-eight, while filming “Yellowbeard”. He is buried in Forest Lawn- Hollywood Cemetery near his idol, Buster Keaton, in the Garden of Heritage.
Photographer Unknown, (The Entry Greeting)
Cecil Beaton, “Salvador Dali with Fencing Equipment”, Published in Vogue Magazine, November 1, 1936, Silver Gelatin Print
Photographer Unknown, (The Tattoo and the Rope)
George Luks, “The Wrestlers”, 1905, Oil on Canvas, 48 x 66 Inches, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The 1905 oil painting “The Wrestlers”, depicting two nude men wrestling, is George Luks’ best known work. He painted it in order to shock the members of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts whom he thought were idiots. This painting was displayed at “The Eight”, the 1908 Ashcan School exhibition at the Macbeth Galleries on Fifth Avenue in New York.
