Month: August 2018

Calendar: August 26

A Year: Day to Day Men: 26th of August

Fetish

August 26, 1986 marks the passing of American comedic actor Ted Knight.

After World War Two, Ted Knight studied acting in Hartford, Connecticut where he became proficient with puppets and ventriloquism. This led to steady work as a television kiddie-show host at WJAR-TV in Providence, Rhode Island, from 1950 to 1955. In Albany, New York, Knight hosted “The Early Show” for station WROW,  featuring Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movies.

Ted Knight spent most of his early years in Hollywood doing commercial voice-overs and playing minor television and movie roles. He had a small part at the end of Hitchcock’s movie “Psycho” playing the police officer guarding the arrested Norman Bates. Knight guest-starred in the episode “The Defector” of the 1961 season of the syndicated television series “Sea Hunt” which starred  Lloyd Bridges. He appeared frequently in all the popular television shows at that time including “Highway Patrol”, “The Outer Limits”, “The Donna Reed Show’, “Bonanza”, and”McHale’s Navy”, among others.

Probably Ted Knight’s most well-known role was his work on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” which ran from 1970 to 1977.  His role as the WJM newscaster Ted Baxter brought Knight widespread recognition and his greatest success. The Ted Baxter character was the dim-witted, vain, and miserly anchorman of the “Six O’Clock News”. Baxter frequently made mistakes and was oblivious to the actual nature of the topics covered on the show, but considered himself to be the country’s best news journalist. Ted Knight received six Emmy Award nominations for the role, winning the Emmy for “Outstanding Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in Comedy” in 1973 and 1976.

Ted Knight’s distinctive speaking voice brought him work as an announcer, notably as narrator of most of Filmation Studio’s superhero cartoons as well as voice of incidental characters. He was narrator of the first season of the “Super Friends” and other animated television series. Knight’s work included the voices of the opening narrator and team leader Commander Jonathan Kidd in the animated science fiction television series “Fantastic Voyage”.

A few months after the end of the “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” in 1977, Ted Knight was diagnosed with cancer for which he received various forms of treatment over several years. In 1985, the cancer returned as colon cancer which, despite rigorous treatment, eventually began to spread. Knight’s condition continued to worsen and he died on August 26, 1986, at the age of 62. He is buried in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. His grave marker bears his birth name Theodore C. Konopka and, at the bottom, the words “Bye Guy”, a reference to his Ted Baxter catchphrase “Hi, guy!”.

Crawford Barton

 

Photography by Crawford Barton

Born in 1943 and raised in fundamentalist community in rural George, Crawford Barton, a shy and introspective boy, escaped family tensions when he received a small art scholarship at the University of Georgia. After his first love for a man was unreciprocated, he returned at the end of the first semester to the family farm. Barton enrolled, at the age of twenty-one, in an Atlanta art school, making new friends and releasing his energy in the city’s gay bars and clubs.

During his time in Atlanta, Barton received a gift of a used 35mm camera and learned the basic darkroom techniques, making photography his calling in life. He moved to California in the late 1960s, settling in the San Francisco area, to pursue his photography and life as an openly gay man. By the early 1970s Barton was a leading photographer at the emergence of the gay awakening, a participant as well as a chronicler of this time.

Many of Barton’s images documenting love-ins in the park, cross-dressers in the Castro, and leather men prowling at night have become classics of the gay world. He photographed street protests, some of the first Gay Pride parades, Harvey Milk campaigning in San Francisco and celebrities such as actor Sal Mineo and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti

It was, however, Crawford Barton’s circle of friends and acquaintances that inspired his most intimate photography, Considered as a single body of work, his photographs of his lover of twenty-two years, Larry Lara, dancing in the hallway of their flat, standing in a doorway, or nude in the hills of the Golden Gate Recreation Area, show the richness and complexity of the man he loved most. 

In the early 1980s, San Francisco and the gay community were devastated by the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic, with its onslaught of illness and death. Larry Lara died from complications from AIDS and Crawford Barton later succumbed from AIDS at the age of fifty in 1993. 

In addition to his fine art photography, Barton photographed on assignment for “The Advocate”, the “Bay Area Reporter”,  “The Examiner”, “Newsday”, and the “Los Angeles Times”. The GLBT Historical Society, an archives, research center and museum in San Francisco, holds the complete personal and professional papers and studio archives of Crawford Barton. 

“I tried to serve as a chronicler, as a watcher of beautiful people — to feed back an image of a positive, likable lifestyle — to offer pleasure as well as pride.” – Crawford Barton

Top Insert Image: Crawford Barton, “Self Portrait”, circa 1970s

Bottom Insert Image: Crawford Barton, “Jason evans, San Francisco”, circa 1970s, Private Collection

 

Robert Buratti

Robert Buratti, “The Hierophant”, Date Unknown, Ink and Pen on Paper, 15.7 x 11.8 Inches

This work is part of the Arcana Series by Robert Buratti and was inspired by “The Hierophant” card of the Thoth tarot deck. Buratti’s work is chiefly concerned with the role of the spiritual within contemporary art, and the talismanic and transformational power of the image. Influenced by the approach and experimentation of artists such as James Gleeson, Andre Breton, Aleister Crowley, Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso, Buratti’s work seeks a balance between the seen and unseen, the technical and the intuitive.

Frog Effigy Pendant

Veraguas-Gran Chiriquí, Frog Effigy Pendant, 700-1520 AD, Gold, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland

Sometime after 500 CE, gold became the preferred material for fashioning personal adornments, supplanting jadeite and other green stones from which artists had made impressive pendants and necklaces for centuries. The relatively sudden appearance of gold and the specialized knowledge needed to work it imply the introduction of metallurgy from outside the region.

All evidence points to northwestern Colombia as the point of origin of the metal arts, a region filled with other archaeological and art historical lines of evidence indicating a long-standing history of contacts between the two regions. Gold pendants were cast in a variety of forms, from relatively naturalistic portrayals of animals to composite creatures combining human and zoomorphic features. The frog may be a totem, symbolic of transformational abilities or special connections to the supernatural.

James Mortimer

James Mortimer: Paintings, Oil on Linen

James Mortimer, a painter and a sculptor, was born in Swindon, Wiltshire in 1989. He was educated at a Catholic School and studied sculpture at the Bath School of Art, receiving the Kenneth Armitage Prize for Sculpture. Mortimer now devotes himself to painting imagined scenes of immoral excess, mythical creatures and larger than life characters. He is represented by the Catto Gallery on Heath Street in London.

James Mortimer’s fey boys inhabit a world of uncomplicated decadence, a surreal Renaissance landscape where man and beast exist together on increasingly equal terms. Inhibitions go out the window; each is a slave to their own nature. The ensuing relationships provide fertile ground for myriad little dramas as the companions look to get along. Animals become mischievous, even vicious at times. Their masters try to rise above it, retaining an almost Imperial sense of composure, but in the process find themselves somehow detached, lost even, gazing wistfully into the opium haze of their peculiar adopted land.

Whilst seemingly simple, there is wealth of drama playing out behind the scenes. Visual puns and innuendoes pepper his paintings like Freudian slips of the brush. Every fruit and every plant is pregnant with suggestion. Exoticism and the thrill of travel also permeate every scene, like Victorian Boy’s Own adventures that have turned slightly spicy and risqué. And underneath it all, there is a simmering sexuality. These characters are vain, vice-loving and beautiful.

Note: an Extensive collection of James Mortimer’s work can be found at: http://www.jamesmortimerart.com/paintings

art@cattogallery.co.uk

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “How They Met Themselves”, 1864, Watercolor and Bodycolor on Paper, 11 x 10 Inches, Leicester Galleries

There are three versions of this watercolor “How They Met Themselves”. One exists  in a private collection and the other two at the Fitzwilliam Museum. The first version of this doppelganger theme was made with pen and ink and brush and is dated 1851 1860. It was painted for George Price Boyce, Rossetti’s friend and fellow Pre-Raphaelite artist, during Rossetti’s honeymoon in Paris in 1860, to replace the earlier pen and ink drawing of the same subject which was either lost or destroyed.

In a letter to George Price Boyce dated February 4th of 1861, Dante Rossetti expressed, his intentions to undertaking a watercolour version: “I was much wishing to execute the Bogie pen and ink drawing which you have as a watercolour and would be greatly obliged to you for the loan of it…”

Dante Rossetti, by calling it the `Bogie drawing’, expressed his continuing fascination with the legend of the ‘Doppleganger’, the vision of which is a presentiment of death. To illustrate this strange theme, Rossetti chose the subject of two medieval lovers in a wood meeting their doubles who glow supernaturally. Doppelgänger imagery occurs in poems he admired such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “ The Romaunt of Margaret” and Poe’s “Silence” and also frequently in his own more autobiographical poems such as “Sudden Light”, “Even So”, and “Willowwood”.

Calendar: August 25

A Year: Day to Day Men: 25th of August

Marrakesh Delicacy

Beginning on August 25, 1835, six articles about the discovery of life on the Moon are published in the New York Sun newspaper.

The Great Moon Hoax refers to the series of articles published by the Sun, describing the discovery of life and possibly civilization on the Moon. The article was attributed to Sir John Herschel, one of the best known astronomers of that period, and written down by Dr. Andrew Grant, the personal secretary of Herschel.  The discoveries were made with an immense telescope based on an entirely new principle. Fantastic animals, including goats and bison, as well as bat-like winged humanoids were described. Ultimately, the observations were terminated with the destruction of the telescope and the observatory by the intense heat of the sun focusing through the lens of the telescope.

Authorship of the articles has been attributed to Richard Adams Locke, a reporter working for the New York Sun. Locke admitted it years later in an letter to the weekly paper “New World”. Rumors persisted that others were involved; but no evidence could be found to support that theory. Locke never gave any reasons for writing the series. His intentions were probably first to create a sensational story which would increase sales of The Sun, and, second, to ridicule some astronomical theories recently published.

In 1824, Franz von Paula Gruithuisen, Professor of Astronomy at Munich University, published a paper titled “Discovery of Many Distinct Traces of Lunar Inhabitants,  Especially of One Their Colossal Buildings”. Gruithuisen claimed to have observed color on the lunar surface, indicating climate and vegetation zones, and lines and geometric shapes, indicating the existence of walls, roads, fortifications, and cities.  Reverend Thomas Dick, minister and science teacher, wrote a book that computed the number of inhabitants of the solar system; the moon by his count would contain four billion inhabitants. Reverend Dick’s writings were very popular in the United States; Ralph Waldo Emerson was a fan of his book.

The story was not discovered to be a hoax for several weeks after its publication; even then, the New York Sun did not issue a retraction. Sir John Herschel was initially amused by the hoax, but grew annoyed when he had to answer questions by people who really believed the story was true. The Sun’s circulation increased dramatically because of the hoax and remained greater than before, establishing The Sun as a successful paper. The Great Moon Hoax is mentioned by characters in Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon”, published in 1865 by Pierre-Jules Hetzel.