Lawren Harris

Lawren S Harris, “Billboard (Jazz)”, 1921, Oil on Canvas, 1072 x 1275 cm, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

The first paintings Lawren Harris exhibited in Toronto in 1911 included urban scenes of streets and houses in The Ward, the largely immigrant area west of Toronto’s City Hall. Best known for his landscapes of Ontario’s near north, the Rocky Mountains and Arctic and later abstractions, Harris’s urban scenes played a key role in his exploration of the role of art in the transformations of Canadian society.

Harris exhibited several of his new “Shack Paintings” at the 1921 Group of Seven exhibition in the Art Gallery of Toronto. These paintings dealt with a subject he had been treating for almost ten years- houses in the poorer sections or in the unserviced and uninsurable outskirts of Toronto.

The painting “Jazz”, later retitled “Billboard” was provacative at the time, dealing with modern, urban life, considered by the then puritanical Toronto to be a decadent or immoral lifestyle. Painted with agressive brushwork and fractured text, it shows workers in the foreground and a row of frame houses receding in the background. The almost abstract billboard with its torn posters is the principle subject; this abstraction is carried across the top of the canvas by the torn clouds.

Over the course of his career, Lawren Harris’s painting evolved from Impressionist-influenced, decorative landscapes to stark images of the northern landscape to geometric abstractions. From 1934 to 1937, Harris lived in Hanover, New Hampshire, where he painted his first abstract works, a direction he would continue for the rest of his life.

In 1938 Harris moved to Sante Fe, New Mexico, and helped found the Transcendental Painting Group, an organization of artists who advocated a spiritual form of abstraction. Harris died in Vancouver in 1970, at the age of 84, as a well-known artist. He was buried on the grounds of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, where his work is now held.

Bruce Weber, “Ian Mckellen and Friend”

Bruce Weber, “Ian McKellen and Friend (Peter Johnson)”

This image taken by Bruce Weber of Ian McKellen and Peter Johnson is from Weber’s book “The Chop Suey Club” published by Arena Editions in 1999.

This book presents Bruce Weber’s collection of photographs mostly of Peter Johnson, a young man he met while shooting at a wrestling camp. Taken over a series of years, the photographs evolve in scope and involvement as the subject ages and grows more comfortable with the camera. It is a fascinating study of not only a young man coming of age, but of a photographers relationship with one subject over a period of time. Although an art photography book, the book’s compact size gives it a feel of a private journal rather than a glossy coffee table book. Published in a small edition, copies of the book are rare.

Alireza Shojaian

Alireza Shojaian, “Hamed Sinno et un de ses Frères (Hamed Sinno and One of His Brothers)”, 2018, Detail, Acrylic and Color Pencil on Wood Board, 150 x 120 cm, Private Collection

Alireza Shojaian is an Iranian gay artist, born in 1988 in Tehran. He studied at Islamic Azad University In the Faculty of Art and Architecture center located in Tehran, and obtained his Masters degree in Fine Arts. He now spends time living and working between his birthplace of Tehran and Beirut, Lebanon, a more tolerant country in the Middle East in terms of protection and acceptance for sexually and gender diverse people..

Shojaian’s artwork tries to highlight subjects which society tries to hide from view. His paintings often deal with the intimacy of his characters, sometimes confronting the viewer with a sense of suffering or embarrassment. Shojaian’s Pentagon and Hexagon series deals deeply with the issue of being a gay man in Iran. The two series depicts the final moments in the life of a gay friend, who was brutally murdered in his own home during the final year at the university.

For further information on the life of Alireza Shojaian and his experience within the Iranian culture as a gay artist, I suggest the following article: https://wearequeerhere.com/queerart

Image reblogged with thanks to a great site: https://bloghqualls.tumblr.com

Robert Fulford: “Form and Order”

Photographers Unknown, Faces of Man: WP Photo Set Five

“The anthropologist Clifford Geertz says that humans are ‘symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-seeking’ animals. In our species, he says, ‘the drive to make sense out of our experience, to give it form and order, is evidently as real and as pressing as the more familiar biological needs.’ To Geertz, a human being is an organism ‘which cannot live in a world it is unable to understand.”
― Robert Fulford, The Triumph of the Narrative

John Constable

John Constable, “Landscape with Double Rainbow”, 1812, Oil Sketch on Paper on Canvas, 33.7 x 38.4 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

John Constable was born in East Bergholt, Suffolk. Largely self-taught, he was a probationer in 1799; and in 1800, he became a student at the Royal Academy schools. Constable exhibited from 1802 at the Royal Academy in London, and later at the Paris Salon. He was influenced by Dutch artists such as paitner and etcher Jacob van Ruisdael, generally considered the pre-eminent landscape painter of the Dutch Golden Age. The works of Peter Paul Rubens and Claude Gellée also proved to be influencial to Constable for their color use and composition.

For a student trained in the British Royal Academy at the turn of the 18th century, landscape was lower in the hierarchy of genres than biblical and historical subjects. John Constable was drawn to local landscapes rather than classic Mediterranean ones, and rather than transforming these into grand mythologies or allegories, he painted them using scientific methods of observation drawn from new fields like meteorology. Constable’s sketches were the firt ever done in oils directly from the subject in the open air.

John Constable used oil sketches to record the subtle effects of light and changes in the weather. This approach of his would later influence artists like those of the emerging French Impressionists. Sketches Constable did in Hamstead, England, which at that time was just a rural village outside of London, show storm clouds gathering or light piercing the atmosphere. His painting “Landscape with a Double Rainbow”, seen above, is dominatied by a deep blue sky and shows an unusual atmospheric event not fully understood by early 19th century science.

When compared to the varnished paintings of the predominant academic style, John Constable’s canvases, composed of quick, broken brush strokes, were considered by comtemporary critics and most viewers to be “unfinished”. Constable’s 1821 completed painting “The Hay Wain” was shown at the Royal Academy and did not attract much attention. However, “The Hay Wain”, when shown with his other works, at the Paris Salon of 1824 earned a gold medal. The French Impressionists at that time, such as Delacroix and Géricault, were just beginning to gain prominence and challenge the early 19th century critics.

El Greco

El Greco, “Opening of the Fifth Seal (The Vision of Saint John the Divine)”, 1610, Oil on Canvas, 224 x 194 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The painting, unfinished at El Greco’s death and listed in a postmortem inventory, depicts a passage in Revelation (6:9–11) describing the opening of the Fifth Seal and the distribution of white robes to “those who had been slain for the work of God and for the witness they had borne.” It is cut down from a large altarpiece commissioned in 1608 for the church of the hospital of Saint John the Baptist in Toledo. The missing upper part may have shown the Sacrificial Lamb opening the Fifth Seal.