Sid Avery

Sid Avery, “Rock Hudson at Home in North Hollywood”, Date Unknown, 1950-1979, Silver Gelatin Print

Sid Avery, a Hollywood photographer, was known for capturing the private moments of stars like Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean and Audrey Hepburn. His work in the 1950’s and 60’s was a departure from the glamorized, soft-focus portraits of an earlier Hollywood era when images of the stars were tightly controlled by the major studios. He showed celebrities on the movie set between takes and away from the job, relaxing with the family or engaged in household chores. Among his candid photographs are ones of Marlon Brando taking out the garbage, Rock Hudson emerging from the shower to take a phone call, and Audrey Hepburn riding her bike at Paramount Studios with a shaggy Yorkshire terrier in the basket.

The established stars, used to the old system, were not easily convinced to let a photographer document them in their unvarnished private lives, but Avery succeeded where others failed—he managed to get in where no one else could—and he soon became the man magazine editors and art directors called on for their candid photo layouts. Avery’s most effective tool was not his technical skill as a photographer, but his personality. His friendly, unassuming style put his subjects at ease and made them open up.

Among Avery’s first odd jobs as a young man was that of taking glamour shots of the chorus girls at Earl Carroll’s Vanities and the Florentine Gardens. When drafted into the Army, Avery was assigned to the Signal Corps and selected to receive six months of training at LIFE in New York before being sent overseas. Stationed in London, he was placed in charge of the Army Pictorial Service Laboratory, where all the still and combat footage coming out of the European theater passed through his hands. When Avery returned to Hollywood after the war, he was ready for the photo journalism boom. Avery eventually became one of the top advertising photographers in Los Angeles, moving from still photography into directing television commercials and receiving numerous awards.

In the eighties, Avery redirected his energies toward preserving the history of Hollywood as depicted in still photography, founding the non-profit Hollywood Photographers Archive which was donated to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts. Avery then rebuilt the collection which still thrives today, the Motion Picture and Television Photo Archive (mptv Images), representing over fifty of Hollywood’s best-known photographers. Avery’s photographs have been exhibited all over the world, from Australia to Japan to England and throughout Europe.

My thanks to Becker-Minty for the information on Sid Avery: https://www.beckerminty.com/art/

Kevin Desabrais

Kevin Desabrais, “The Ragged Man”, 2009, From the Album “Nothin’ But the Road”

The song”The Ragged Man”, written and sung by Kevin Desabrais, was released in September of 2009 on the album “Nothin But the Road” by the label Boy and The Bear Records. The album contains twelve songs that are available on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music. A great song by a talented artist.

Kevin Desabrais’s website is located at: https://kevindesabrais.com/home

Any information on this artist would be greatly appreciated.

Rateb Seddik

Rateb Seddik, “Sans Titre”, 1940. Oil on Wood, 120 x 220 cm, Musee Rateb Seddik Le Caire, Egypt

Founded in December of 1938, the Art et Liberté group in Egypt provided a young generation of intellectuals, artists and activists with a platform for promoting political and cultural reform, with the members playing an active role in the network of the Surrealist movement. At the start of the second World War, the Art et Liberté became part of the international movement defying fascism, nationalism, colonialism, including the British colonial domination of Egypt.

In line with Surrealism’s rejection of the alignment of art with political propaganda, the Art et Liberté rebelled against the merging of art and national sentiment. With their December 1938 manifesto entitled “Vive L’Art Dégéneré (Long Live Degenerate Art)”, the group declared their opposition to the reactionary attacks on art in Hitler’s Germany, epitomized by Munich’s 1937 Entartete Kunst exhibition which ridiculed modern art, and attacks elsewhere, notably in Vienna and Rome.

Rateb Seddik completed his formal artistic education at Chelsea College of Art in London, where he was a student of the English surrealist painter Robert Medley, and later continued his studies in Cairo. Seddik became a member of the Art et Liberté and participated in the group’s fourth exhibition, entitled “For Independent Art”, that was held on May 12, 1944, at the Lyceé Francais School in Cairo. Despite obstacles that occurred, the show was able to exhibit 150 works of art, including painting, sculpture and photography.

Rateb Seddik’s 1940 “Sans Titre (Untitled)” combines his passions for opera and ancient Egyptian art. The oil-on-wood painting depicts a group of diversely featured human beings who are all equally united by a white cloth symbolizing death or suffering. While the scene resembles a Turkish bathhouse, it also references Stravinsky’s opera of the tragedy of Oedipus Rex. This surrealist masterpiece is a prime example of an artwork that is at once locally rooted and universally informed.

Fabrizio Campanella

Fabrizio Campanella, “Painting of a Young Man”, 1980, Oil on Canvas, 91 x 61 cm, Private Collection

Born in 1965 in Rome, abstract artist Fabrizio Campanella’s creative work was primarily inspired by the culturally tumultuous period of the 1980s. The Neo Geo and The Pictures Generation became prominent art movements during this decade, alongside Neo-Expressionism which became well-known in Germany, France and Italy. Currently living and working in Rome, Campanella is a member of Art Club International, the independent artistic association founded by Italian abstractionist painter Piero Dorazio in 1995.

Campanella had his first solo exhibition in 1992 at the La Gradiva Gallery in Rome. He has subsequently had solo shows at Studio Soligo in Rome, Palazzo Collicola Visual Arts in Spoleto in 2012, Palazzo Ca Bonvicini in Venice in 2013, and at the Officina delle Zattere in Venice in 2014. His works have also been shown in many international exhibitions, including the XIV Rome Quadriennale and the “Hommage à Vlado Gotovac” second exhibition at the Klovicevi Dvori Gallery in Zagreb.

The “Painting of a Young Man” is one of several 1980s figurative works by Campanella painted before he began his abstractions in the 1990s.

William Gay: “An Infinite Number of Lives”

Photographers Unknown, (An Infinite Number of Lives)

“Down fabled roads reverting now to woods Winer felt himself imprisoned by the dark beyond the carlights and by the compulsive timbre of Motormouth’s voice, a drone obsessed with spewing out words without regard for truth or even for coherence, as if he must spit out vast quantities of them and rearrange them for his liking, step back, and admire the various patterns he could construct: these old tales of love and betrayal had no truth beyond his retelling of them, for each retelling shaped his past, made him immortal, gave him an infinite number of lives.”
― William Gay, The Long Home

Joseph Stella

Joseph Stella, “The Virgin”, 1926, Oil on Canvas, 100.8 x 98.4 cm, Brooklyn Museum, New York

Joseph Stella, “Purissima”, 1927, Oil on Canvas, 193 x 145 cm, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia

Born in Muro Lucano, Italy, in 1877, Joseph Stella came to the United States at the age of nineteen to study medicine. He soon, however, abandoned his medical studies and entered the New York School of Art, studying with painter and teacher William Merritt Chase. A remarkable draftsman, Stella worked from 1905 to 1909 as an illustrator, publishing drawings in magazine periodicals. He continued expressing himself in drawings throughout the different phases of his career.

Beginning his career as a Realist, Stella made a visit to Italy in 1909, and associated with artists involved in the Italian Futurism and Modernism art movements. He traveled to Paris in 1911 , often attending Gertrude Stein’s salon and meeting artists there. Stella began to incorporate Futurist principles into his artwork; however, he was also interested in the structure of the Cubists and the dynamic color of the Fauvists..

In January 1913, just after his return to New York from Paris, Stella submitted five works to the Armory Show’s Domestic Committee for possible inclusion in the February exhibition; they selected his oil on canvas “Still Life”. In New York during the 1920s Stella, fascinated with the geometric architecture, assimilated the elements of Cubism and Futurism in his works, an example of which is his “Brooklyn Bridge” with its sweeping diagonal cables. Working for the Federal Art Project, a WPA project in the 1930s, he traveled extensively around the world, painting through a series of styles from realism to abstraction to surrealism.

By the late 1930s, Stella’s work attracted less attention than it had in the past decades, his style no longer relevant to the time. He became emotionally cut off from the New York art world. Stella’s 1939 retrospective exhibition at the Newark Museum, though successful as a presentation, was less enthusiastically reviewed than expected. Diagnosed with heart disease in the early 1940s, subject to periods of anxiety, Joseph Stella succumbed to heart failure in November of 1946.

At the same time that Stella was painting his Italian Futurist works, he was also working in pastel colors producing works with stylized birds and landscapes with long, curvilinear rhythms and sharp silhouettes. It was from this style that Stella developed his Madonna paintings in the 1920s. His paintings, “The Virgin” and “Purissima”, with their naturalistic faces and totally stylized figures, are part of that series. These complex allegorical and religious works, with elaborate floral motifs, demonstrate Stella’s devotion to 15th century Italian painting and familiarity with the aesthetics of Catholic rituals.

Fabio Dolce

Photographer Unknown, Fabio Dolce: Underwater Dance

Born in Palermo, Sicily, Fabio Dolce started dancing at eleven years of age with ballroom dances. At sixteen, he began his ballet training and contemporary dance at the “Teatro Massimo di Palermo, later participating in several years of competitive Latin ballroom dancing. Dolce completed his studies of ballet at the National Academy of Rome. joining upon graduation the Cannes Jeune Ballet where he danced works by choreographers Jean-Christophe Maillot, George Balachine, Marc Ribaud, and Edward Cook.

Joining the CCN Ballet de Lorraine at age twenty-one, Dolce performed for nine years, dancing a varied repertoire of works by Emanuel Gat, Merce Cunningham, and Vronislava Nijinska, among others. At thirty years old, he joined DeNada Dance Theater in 2017 for the company’s second national tour of choreographer Carlos Pons Guerra’s seductive and provocative “Ham and Passion”, where Dolce danced the roles of Anna in “Passionaria” and the role of Maria in “O Maria”.

After working internationally for many years, Fabio Dolce is now a freelance dance artist, choreographer, and teacher, working in England and France. In France, he is a collaborative director with the dance company Antonino Ceresia, seeking funding for the new work “La Commedia Divino”. Dolce is also involved with the EU funded project “Lifelong Dancing”, a series of learning pathways about dance for adult educators.

Fabio Dolce’s website is located at: http://fabiodolce.com

John Steinbeck: “A Trip Takes Us”

Photographers Unknown, A Collection: A Trip Takes Us

“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ships’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, once a bum always a bum. I fear this disease incurable.

I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself….A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we not take a trip; a trip takes us.”

—-John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

Conan Chadbourne

Digital Mathematical Images by Conan Chadbourne

Born in 1978, Conan Chadbourne received his BA in Mathematics and Physics from New York University in 2011. He has worked in the fields of experimental physics research, digital imaging and printing, graphic design, and documentary film production.. Chadbourne lives in San Antonio where he works as a freelance graphic designer and documentary film producer.

Chadbourne draws inspiration for his work from his experience in mathematics and the sciences. He is motivated by his fascination with the occurrence of mathematical and scientific imagery in traditional art forms, and the mystical, spiritual, or cosmological significance that is often attached to such imagery.

Mathematical themes both overt and subtle appear in a broad range of traditional art: Medieval illuminated manuscripts, Buddhist mandalas, intricate tilings in Islamic architecture, restrained temple geometry paintings in Japan, complex patterns in African textiles, and geometric ornament in archaic Greek ceramics. Often this imagery is deeply connected with the models and abstractions these cultures use to interpret and relate to the cosmos, in much the same way that modern scientific diagrams express a scientific worldview.

Conan Chadbourn’s works have been exhibited at the Grace Museum in Abilene, Texas; The Art Center of Corpus Christi,;the Museum of Geometric and MADI Art in Dallas, Texas; and the Bridges Conference for Mathematics in the Arts.

“There are 212,987 distinct ways to partition a 4×4 grid of square tiles into component shapes composed of contiguous tiles, assuming any two such partitions are considered equivalent if they differ only by a symmetry transformation such as a rotation or reflection. There are exactly thirteen of these configurations which partition this grid of sixteen tiles into two component shapes of equal area, each composed of eight tiles. This image presents this set of thirteen equal divisions of this group of tiles.”

—Conan Chadbourne, Discussing his image “Concise Lesson in Uniform Partitions”

Thomas Eakins

Thomas Eakins, “Between Rounds”, 1898-99, Oil on Canvas, 127 x 101cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Most of Thomas Eakins’s paintings after 1886 were probing portraits; however, he returned to sporting subjects in the late 1890s with a series that he began after attending professional boxing matches at the Philadelphia Arena, which was then located diagonally across from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The resulting canvases were as revolutionary in their subject matter as his rowing scenes had been more than two decades earlier.

Thomas Eakins’s boxing and wrestling paintings are, however, even bolder in their subject matter than his early rowing pictures. Although the popular press, starting about 1900, featured images of prize fighting and accounts of boxers such as the famous John L. Sullivan, most artists turned away from depicting ring sports, which were associated with sanctioned violence, gambling, and alcohol.

Eakins fastidiously planned his “Between Rounds”. Every person portrayed in the painting posed for him. Eakins invited Billy Smith, a local featherweight, to pose for the boxer, asked other figures from the boxing world to re-enact their real-life roles in his Chestnut Street studio, and enlisted friends and relatives to pose for the spectators. The interior scenic location was the actual hall used by the fighters.

Although the painting does not depict a specific bout, Thomas Eakins combined details from several to give it verisimilitude and worked diligently to capture the atmospheric effects of dust and smoke in the arena. As usual, he minimized the drama, showing Billy Smith catching his breath rather than struggling against Timothy Callahan, his unseen, and ultimately successful, opponent.

Henry Miller: “We All Derive from the Same Source”

His Butt: Beguiling the Senses and Enchanting the Mind: Photo Set Eleven

“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.”

—Henry Miller

Louis Eugene Larivière

Louis Eugene Larivière, “Academic Drawing of a Nude Male with Arm Raised”, 1820, Black Pencil, Charcoal, and Stump on Paper, 58.6 x 43.7 cm, Private Collection

Born in Paris in December of 1800, Louis-Eugene Larivière was the second son of the painter André Philippe Larivière, and grandson of Charles Lepeintre, Painter to the Duke of Orleans. Three years separated Eugene from his elder brother, Charles-Philippe. The sons having demonstrated natural abilities for painting, the father placed both with French painter Anne-Louis Girodet who in turn presented them to the Special School for Fine Arts: Charles-Philippe in 1813 and Louis-Eugene in February 1816.

Following in his older brother’s footsteps, Louis-Eugène Larivière participated in the historic composition competition as Girodet’s student. Ranked thirteenth, he did not enter the second round, but was noticed and, as a painter, was exempted from military service. Unfortunately, illness prevented Larivière from competing again in 1823; and the illness finished by carrying him off prematurely in June of 1923 at the age of twenty-one years old.

A few family portraits by Louis-Eugène Larivière survive: one full of candor of his sister Pamela-Eugenie conserved at the Louvre; a protrait of his brother Edmond Larivière, and a “Self-Portrait”, both at the Museum of Picardy in Amiens. The works come from the collection of the painter Albert Maignan, the artist’s nephew by marriage who donated them to the Amiens Museum from the contents of the Lariviere brothers’ studio.

A few male acacemy drawings by Eugene can be found at the Amiens Museum similar to the image above. One of them is inscribed on the verso, “Eugène Larivière. 18 août 1817”, and countersigned by his teacher, the painter Pierre-Narcisse Guérin ,who corrected the student exercises of the Fine Arts students that day. Another academy drawing, dated 1818, and a few anatomical studies are know to exist in private collections.

Gregory Maquire: “The Edge of Things”

R Breathe Photography, Untitled, (The Edge of Things)

“Birds know themselves not to be at the center of anything, but at the margins of everything. The end of the map. We only live where someone’s horizon sweeps someone else’s. We are only noticed on the edge of things; but on the edge of things, we notice much.”

—Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

Image reblogged with thanks to https://thouartadeadthing.tumblr.com

Salem Beiruti

Paintings by Salem Beiruti

Born in Lebanon, Salem Beiruti is a conceptual artist and illustrator residing in Madrid. Working after graduation as an art director in the fields of advertising, graphics, and fashion design, he has more than seventeen years of client and freelance work. Upon his move to Madrid, Beiruti became a full=time illustrator and artist.

Beiruti’s skillful digital illustrations are unique and inspired by such artists and photographers as Patrick Fillion, Paul Freeman, Issauro Cairo, and Francisco Prato. His project of mixed-media works “Morphosis” is a result of his personal journey as a man of an Arabic mid-eastern culture and its traditions to the man he is today. The art book was published in June of 2017 by German publisher Bruno Gmnuender.

For those interested in purchasing a print, Art of Salem is offering all prints at a 40% discount for Easter 2021. Please reference Ultrawolves when ordering. Thank you. https://www.instagram.com/artistsalem/

Toussaint Dubreuil

Toussaint Dubreuil, “Apollo Victorious Over the Python”, Date Unknown, Black Ink and Stone Wash on Paper, Private Collection

Born in 1561 in Paris, Toussaint Dubreuil was a French painter associated with the Second School of Fontanebleau, a period of the arts during the late Renaissance that, centered on the royal palace, became crucial in the formation of Northern Mannerism in France.

A man of noble character, Dubreuil was a master lute player, horseman, and skilled as a jouster. His works, many of which have been lost, are in the late Mannerist style, with highly elongated and undulating forms and crowded compositions. Many of Duvreuil’s themes included mythological scenes and scenes taken from fictional literature by such writers as Italian poet Torquato Tasso, the French poet Pierre de Ronsard, and the ancient Greek novelist Heliodorus of Emessa.

In twenty years Toussanint Dubreuil had mastered all the significant innovations of the Mannerists in Italy and France. Not content with being their brilliant heir, he had achieved recognition, outshining contemporary painters Martin Fréminet and Ambroise Dubois, as the uncontested master of the Second School of Fontainebleau. Late in his brief career, Dubreuil began working in a new, eloquently clear style which in France paved the way for the Baroque Classicism of painters Laurent de La Hyre, Simon Vouet and Nicolas Poussin.

First painter to King Henry IV, Toussaint Dubreuil, after a short career, passed away on November 22, 1602, leaving behind him the image of a painter being exceptionally intelligent and notably skilled in drawing and the nude.