Month: July 2018

The Duck Vase

Vase in the Shape of a Duck, 300-200 BC, Faience with Polychrome Glaze,    8.5 x 18 x 7.9 Centimeters, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Egyptian faience is a composite material composed of ground quartz and natron (sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate). Most faience is glazed in a vivid blue or green color; the polychrome faience seen here is much more complicated to produce.

The duck was mold-made together with the remains of its ring handle on the bird’s left side. The surface of the body displays a raised dot pattern, while the end of the wings have a feather pattern. The form may have been inspired by the red-figure duck vases of Etruria and south Italy. The duck is depicted with such detailed naturalism that the underside even has delicately modeled webbed feet.

Calendar: July 28

A Year: Day to Day Men: 28th of July

Coffee and Morning Treat

July 28, 1932 was the release date of the film “White Zombie”.

“White Zombie” is a 1932 American pre-Code horror film independently produced by Edward Halperin and directed by Victor Halperin. The zombie theme was inspired by Kenneth Webb’s Broadway play titled “Zombie”. Webb sued the Halperin brothers for copyright infringement, but lost the case because the screenplay was not based upon his play. The film went into development in early 1932 with the hopes to cash in on the country’s interest in voodoo at that time.

“White Zombie” was filmed in only eleven days in March of 1932 at the Universal Studios lot. Bela Lugosi, who was very popular at the time due to his role as Dracula, starred as the white Haitian voodoo master who turns actress Madge Ballamy, the film’s damsel in distress, into a zombie. Except for the addition of film star Joseph Cawthorn, the majority of the cast were silent film stars whose fame had diminished.

The music of “White Zombie” started with “Chant”, a composition of wordless vocals and drumming created by Guy Bevier Williams, a specialist in ethnic music who worked with Universal Studios. The music of the film was supervised by Abe Meyer, who had orchestras record new versions of works by Wagner, Liszt, Mussorgsky, and other symphonic composers. A piece of music expressly written for the bar room scene in “White Zombie” was a Spanish jota by arranger and band leader Xavier Cugat.

“White Zombie” was released in July of 1932 at the Rivoli Theater in New York City to many critical reviews. Most of the unfavorable reviews focused on the poor silent-era style acting, the stilted dialogue, and a story line that many found comedic instead of dramatic. Harrison’s Reports, a New York City-based motion picture trade journal, wrote that it was not up to the standards of “Dracula” and “Frankenstein”. When it was released in the United Kingdom, the film received the review of “not for the squeamish or the highly intelligent”.

The film “White Zombie”, despite the mixed box office reception and reviews, was a great financial success for an independent film at that time. Later in 1933 and 1934, the film had positive box numbers in small towns, as well as in foreign countries. “White Zombie” was one of the few American horror films approved by the Nazi party in Germany.

“White Zombie” is considered to be the first feature length zombie film and has been described as the archetype and model of all Zombie movies. Although not many early horror films followed the film’s Haitian origins style, other 1930s films borrowed themes of the zombie mythology, such as the blank-eyed stares, the voodoo drums, and zombies performing manual labor. This film, although now considered by some as a classic horror film, was not nominated for any Academy Awards.

Shifting Sands

Photographer Unknown, (Shifting Sands of Time)

“The desert could not be claimed or owned–it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names… Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, left nothing behind, not an ember. All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

Reblogged with many thanks to https://oznagni.tumblr.com

Centered in the Photo

Photograoher Unknown, (Centered in the Photo)

“The world is an illusion, but it is an illusion that we must take seriously, because it is as real as it goes, and in those aspects of reality which we are capable of apprehending. Our business is to wake up. Whe have to find ways in which to detect the whole of reality in the one illusory part which our self-centered consciousness permits us to see.

We must not live thoughtlessly taking our illusion for the complete reality, but at the same time we must not live too thoughtfully in the sense of trying to escape from the dream state. We must continually be on our watch for ways in which we may enlarge our consciousness. We must not attempt to live outside the world, which is given to us, but we must somehow learn how to transform it and transfigure it.

Too much “wisdom” is as bad as too little wisdom, and there must be no magic tricks. We must learn to come to reality without the enchanter’s wand and his book of words. One must find a way of being in this world while not being in it. A way of living in time without being completely swallowed up by time.”  – Aldous Huxley

Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer, “Abendland (Twilight of the West)”, 1989, Lead Sheet, Polymer Paint, Ash, Plaster, Cement, Earth, Vanish on Canvas and Wood, 400 x 380 x 12 Centimeters, National Gallery of Australia

The huge scale of “Twilight of the West” creates a confrontational impact on the viewer that is not achieved with smaller easel paintings. Kiefer constructs works of this size with an underlying skeleton of broad gestural marks reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism. He adopts a wide variety of pictorial devices, in particular the nineteenth-century Romantics’ use of the symbolic landscape to create a drama of epic proportions.

Kiefer uses his camera as a sketching tool: a number of his works are painted directly onto enlarged photographs or are based on photographs. The image of the railway tracks was recorded during his visit to Bordeaux perhaps as early as 1984. The sky is a vast sheet of lead above the horizon line. The metal sheet is worked, wrinkled and crumpled like paper. Lead is a powerful metal, both as a protection against radiation and as an industrial pollutant. It also has associations with alchemy as the base metal that might be transmuted into gold and, as such, it parallels the idea of metamorphosis that underlies Kiefer’s art.

Like the lead curtain, the landscape below it is near monochromatic. The limited range of colour reproduces the muting effect of twilight, with its dominance of red-browns and raking illumination. The sun, an impression of a manhole cover stamped in the soft lead sheet, is low on the horizon. Twilight, and a leaden veil of darkness, descends on our civilisation in this painting. But just as the manhole suggests a way out, so the sun will follow the night.

Calendar: July 27

A Year: Day to Day Men: 27th of July

Hold

July 27, 1940 was the release date of the film “A Wild Hare”.

An early version of a Bugs Bunny-like character appeared in the 1938 “Porky’s Hare Hunt”. It was co-directed by Ben Hardaway and an uncredited Cal Dalton, who was responsible for the initial design of the rabbit. Porky Pig is cast as a hunter tracing his prey who is more interested in driving his pursuer insane rather than escaping. The white rabbit had an oval shaped head, a shapeless body, and was voiced by Mel Blanc.

This rabbit character appeared in “Prest-O Change-O”, directed by animator Chuck Jones and released in 1939. This version of the character was cool, graceful and controlled. He retained the laugh but was otherwise silent in the film. The third appearance of the rabbit was in the 1939 “Hare-um Scare-um” directed by Dalton and Hardaway. This time he was gray and had his first singing role.

“The Wild Hare” is considered to be the first official Bugs Bunny cartoon. It is the first film where both Elmer Fudd and Bugs, both redesigned by animator and developer Bob Givens, are shown in fully developed forms as hunter and tormentor. The film is the first in which Mel Blanc uses what becomes the standard voice for Bugs, and says Bugs’ famous catchphrase, “What’s up, Doc”. A huge success in the theaters, the film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Cartoon Short Subject.

Since Bugs’ debut in “ A Wild Hare”, Bugs appeared only in color Merrie Melodies films, alongside Elmer and his predecessors. Bugs made a cameo in the 1943 “Porky’s Pig Feet”, but that was his only appearance in a black-and-white Looney Tunes film. He did not star in a Looney Tunes film until that series made its complete conversion to only color cartoons beginning in 1944. “Buckaroo Bugs” was Bugs’ first film in the Looney Tunes series and was also the last Warner Bros. cartoon to credit Schlesinger, who had produced the film of the original rabbit. The Leon Schlesinger Productions studio was sold to Warner Brothers in1944 after the release fo “Buckaroo Bugs”.

The cartoon 1958 “Knighty Knight Bugs”, directed by Fritz Freleng, in which a medieval Bugs trades blows with Yosemite Sam and his fire-breathing dragon, won an Academy Award for Best Cartoon Short Subject, becoming the first Bugs Bunny cartoon to win that award. Three of Chuck Jones’ films —“Rabbit Fire”, “Rabbit Seasoning” and “Duck! Rabbit, Duck!”— compose what is often referred to as the “Rabbit Season/Duck Season” trilogy and are famous for originating the historic rivalry between Bugs and Daffy Duck.

Chuck Jones’ classic 1957 “What’s Opera, Doc?”, casts Bugs and Elmer Fudd in a parody of Richard Wagner’s opera “Der Ring des Nibelungen”. This cartoon was deemed “culturally significant” by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in 1992, becoming the first cartoon short to receive this honor.

In the Suburbs. . .

Photographer Unknown, (Saturday Afternoon in the Suburbs)

“Do you remember the suburbs and the plaintive flock of landscapes

The cypress trees projected their shadows under the moon

That night when as summer waned I listened

To a languorous bird forever wroth

And the eternal noise of a river wide and dark

― Pierre Albert-Birot, “The Voyager”, The Cubist Poets in Paris: An Anthology

Victor Fota

Victor Fota, “Conflicting Metaphysics”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas

Victor Fota is a visual artist from Romania whose surreal paintings are inspired by science theories and facts. He is a graduate of the Fine Arts High School in Bucharest. He has a bachelor and masters degree in Conservation and Restoration of Works of Art at the University of Fine Arts in Bucharest, Faculty of Art History and Theory.

During his studies, Fota has been continuously confronted by the structure of works of art, constructed at different scales. He studied mural painting techniques, panel painting techniques on wood and canvas, and also painted furniture. This lead to a better understanding of how works of art have survived in the passage of time, and what made them resist. This profound study of the materials that form the works of art led him to domains of physics and chemistry.

The traditional 15th century Flemish oil painting technique seemed to fit best with Fota’s artistic concepts. The use of transparent coloured layers was the best technical method that could enhance the final message of the subjects of his paintings. These combine science facts and theories but are illustrated with a twist, using his personal, artistic perception of reality.

“The concept is based on the objective or rational observation of reality which is distorted by our senses and personal understanding in a subjective way, the result being the world we know.” -Victor Fota