Month: November 2020

Ólafur Arnalds: Music History

Ólafur Arnalds, “Woven Song”, 2020, From the Album “Some Kind of Peace”

Born in Mosfellsbaer, Iceland, in November of 1986, Ólafur Arnalds is a multi-instrumentalist, composer and producer. A former drummer, he mixes strings and piano with loops and beats to produce sounds from ambient and electronic to pop. He has produced five albums, multiple singles and extended plays, and soundtracks for films and drama seroes, such as the 2013 “Gimme Shelter:, the 2015 series “Broadchurch”, and the 2020 “Defending Jacob”

Ólafur Arnalds released his single “Woven Song” on September 24, 2020. The song is from his new album “Some Kind of Peace”, which was released on November 6th. The fractal shapes of the video effects were produced by director Thomas Vanz using an acrylic pouring process called “viscous fingering”. 

One of the influential musicians of modern times, Ólafur Arnalds has combined the electronic and classical worlds in his productions, often weaving pieces of his life into the songs. Collaborators on the new album include British musician Bonobo, Icelandic singer and instrumentalist JFDR, and German singer and songwriter Josin. 

“This album is about what it means to be alive, daring to be vulnerable and the importance of rituals. It is a personal album, my most personal to date, set against a background of a world thrown into chaos. I’ve poured all my love, dreams and fears into this album through a magical but difficult process, but the result is something that makes me immensely proud and happy to be doing what I do.” —Ólafur Arnalds

“Some Kind of Peace” is available in multiple mediums at: https://mkx.lnk.to/OASKOP

Dana Yurcisin

Photography by Dana Yurcisin

Dana Yurcisin is a screenplay and song writer, cinematographer, musician and photographer. He entered Rowan University in 2007 and graduated with a Bachelors of Art in radio, television, and film.  In his third year at Rowan University, Yurcicim, along with John Bradley and Kevin McTinge, created the eight-part mini-series “The Adventures of Squirrel Man”, which won a Silver Telly Award. 

In 2011, Dana Yurcisin teamed with Daniel Attamante on the short film “Dog” for the Campus MovieFest competition. A campus finalist and an AT&T Rethink Possible semi-finalist, it was nominated for a Golden Tripod Award for cinematography and won the AT&T Wild Card Award. It also eared a spot at the International Grand Finale at Hollywood in June of 2011.

Expanding into still photography at the end of 2018, Yurcisin shoots with a fixed-lens Fuji and edits his images using Photoshop and Lightroom, often incorporating effects inspired by graphic novels and cinema. Using the backdrops of East coast beach towns, he produces images devoid of human presence that explore themes of solitude and loneliness.

Yurcisim  has done work in the digital marketing field: creating videos, shooting events and travel footage, advertising photography, and advertising campaigns. Currently based in Asbury Park, New Jersey, Yurcisin has also worked in all facets of media production including motion graphics, music and logo composition, and writing and editing.

The artist’s website is located at: http://www.danayurcisin.com

Ray Bradbury: “Twilights Linger and Midnights Stay”

Photographers Unknown, Twilights Linger and Midnights Stay

“That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.” 

—-Ray Bradbury

Jaques Augustin-Catherine Pajou

Jaques Augustin Pajou, Academic Male Study, 1785, Oil on Canvas, 100 x 82 cm, Private Collection

Insert: Jaques Augustin Pajou, “Academic Male Study”, 1787, Oil on Canvas, 100 x 82 cm, Private Collection

The son of famous sculptor Augustin Pajou, Jacques-Augustin-Catherine Pajou was born in August of 1766 in Paris, France. He was a historical and portrait painter in the Classical style, with the emphasis on form, simplicity, proportion and the clarity of formal structure. In 1784, Pajou became a student at Paris’ Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. 

In 1792, accompanied with painter Louis-François Lejeune and economist Jean-Baptiste Say, Jacques Pajou became a member of the Compagnie des Arts de Paris. This military unit of the French Revolutionary Wars, organized by the Louvre, consisted of students of literature, the arts, and sciences, particularly from the École des Beaux-Arts and the École de Droit. Pajou, during this period, was stationed in Sedan, an administrative district in north-east France.

After demobilization, Jacques Pajou was a member of the General Arts Community of Paris, a revolutionary institution, founded by painters Jacques-Louis David and Jean ll Restout, to replace the Royal Academy. This movement succeeded in abolishing the Academy in September of 1793 during the French Revolution, burning paintings and books. It was later restored as a division of the Institute of France in 1803 by Napoleon Bonaparte.. Jacques Pajou served as Secretary for the General Arts Community’s president, painter Joseph-Marie Vien. 

Under the First French Empire, ruled by Napoleon Bonaparte, Jacques Pajou was commissioned to paint a portrait of Louis-Alexandre Berthier, Marshal and chief of staff to Napoleon, which is now on view at Versailles. In 1812, Pajou was awarded a gold medal for his depiction of Napoleon offering clemency to the Royalists who had taken refuge in Spain. In 1814, he painted three tableaux, displayed at the Paris Salon, which celebrated the Bourbon Restoration, the period in France following the first fall of Napoleon and the restoration of a conservative government under Louis XVII and Charles X.

Citing poor health, Jacques-Augustin-Catherine Pajou resigned in 1823 from most of the associations of which he was a member. After experiencing increasing poor health and a year of continual tremors, Pajou died in November of 1828, while residing in Paris. His body was interred at the Père-Lachaise Cemetery. 

Hernan Bas

Paintings by Hernan Bas

Born in 1978 in Miami, Florida, Hernan Bas is an American painter whose work presents a world composed of personal and historical references. Graduated from the New World School of the Arts in 1996, Bas creates his multilayered, densely textured works of art, by combining the mediums of woodcut, linoleum print, airbrush or gold leaf with painting,.

Hernan Bas takes his inspiration from literature, history and contemporary culture, presenting in his work references to Romanticism and Nihilism, and literary allusion to such writers as Robert Frost and Oscar Wilde. Inspired by the aesthetics of the male androgynous dandy, Bas constructs narratives of adolescent exploration, which often serve as metaphors for a sexual and sensual awakening.

Portrayed usually alone in sprawling natural surroundings, the figures in Bas’s large-format paintings reside in a utopian world of innate sensuality, painted with lush, abundant brushstrokes. The stories of their adventures are woven together with classical poetry, mythology, religious stories, the paranormal, and classical literature.

Hernan Bas’s 2017 exhibition at the gallery Victoria Miro Mayfair was inspired by the lore and romanticism of life at Cambridge, England. Following a period of research while in residence at Jesus College Cambridge in 2016, Bas developed new subject matter including the famed ‘Night Climbers of Cambridge’, a group of students whose nocturnal ascents of the ancient buildings of the university and town, taking photographs while trying to avoid detection, gained them a cult following during the early decades of the twentieth century.

Loosely based on vintage men’s fashion magazine covers, the Bas’s most recent work depicts male magazine-cover celebrities surrounded by a choreographed array of artifacts, accessories and architectural elements that point to the idea of identity. Infused with an aura of eroticism and decadence, and loaded with codes and double-meanings, these recent works of Hernan Bas further point to the intricacies of self-identity, while celebrating moments of transformation from the ordinary to the extraordinary.

Hernan Bas had solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2009, Miami’s Rubell Family Collection in 2008, and the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami in 2002. He currently, October 17 to December 10 2020, is showing at gallery Ocula in Paris.  Hernan Bas’s work has also been widely exhibited in group exhibitions, including shows at the Venice Biennale, the Busan Biennale, the Aspen Art Museum, and the Whitney Biennial, among many others. 

Hernan Bas has work in the permanent collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Detroit Institute of Arts; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and others.

Second Insert Image: Hernan Bas, “The Palm Tree Enthusiast”, 2021, Acrylic and Gouache on Arches Paper, 76.2 x 57.2 cm, Anat Ebgi Gallery

Bottom Insert Image: Hernan Bas, “A Gathering of Minds (The Agoraphobic), 2021, Acrylic on Linen, 182.9 x 153.4 x 4.45 cm, Anat Ebgi Gallery

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “Wandrers Nachtlied”

Photographers Unknown, Fleeting Episodes

“As we walk through life, fleeting emotional episodes may keep on twinkling, curl up in the hive of our recollection and enrich our imagination. In the same vein, aesthetic allurement and poetic gracefulness may possess us, besiege our mind, light up our thinking and shape our future. ( “Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh”)” 

—-Erik Pevemagle

“Wandrers Nachtlied (Wanderer’s Nightsong)” is the title of two famous poems written by German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. 

The manuscript of the first, “Der du von dem Himmel bist”, was among Goethe’s letters sent in February of 1776 to his friend Charlotte von Stein. The second poem, “Uber allen Gipfein”, is often considered the most perfect lyric in the German language. It is believed, according to a letter sent to Charlotte von Stein, that Goeth wrote it on the evening of September 6th in 1780, while spending the night in a gamekeeper lodge at the top of Kickelhahn Mountain on the edge of the Central Thuringian Forest.

German poet and translator Karl Ludwig von Knebel, a friend of Wolfgang von Goethe, mentions the “Uber allen Gipfein” manuscript in his diary; and the manuscript was documented by other friends, Johann Herder and Louise von Göchhausen. This manuscript was later published in 1800 and 1803, without authorization, by writer and publicist August von Hennings. An English version of “Uber allen Gipfein” appeared in London’s “Monthly Magazine”  in February of 1801. 

These two poems were first published together in Goethe’s 1815 “Works Volume One” under the headings “Wandrers Nachtlied” and “Ein Gleiches (Another One)”. Both works were set to classical music by Austrian composer Franz Schubert: the first “D 224”, published in 1821 as “Op. 4 No. 1” and the second “D 768”, published in 1822 as “Op. 96 No. 3”.

“Über allen Gipfein ist Ruh, In allen Wipfein Spürest du Kaum einen Hauch; Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde. Warte nur, balde Ruhest du auch.”

-Wolfgang von Goethe

“O’er all the hilltops is quiet now, in all the treetops hearest thou hardly a breath; The birds are asleep in the trees. Wait, soon like these thou too shalt rest.”

– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Cornelius von Haarlem

Cornelius van Haarlem, “The Fight Between Ulysses and Irus”, 1590, Engraving, 42.8 x 33.2 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Insert: Cornelius von Haarlem, Cain Killing Abel, 1591, Engraving, 33.3 x 41.5 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Dutch Mannerist painter Cornelius Comelisz, known as Cornelius van Haarlem, was born the son of wealthy parents in 1562 in Haarlem, the Netherlands. He first studied with Renaissance painter Pieter Pietersz the Elder in Haarlem. Later between 1580 and 1581, van Haarlem travelled to Rouen, France, and then to Antwerp, where he became a pupil of Flemish Renaissance painter Gillis Coignet for a year. 

Cornelius van Haarlem painted mainly portraits as well as mythological and Biblical subjects. Initially he painted large-size, highly stylized works with Italianate nudes in twisted poses with a grotesque, unnatural anatomy. Later, van Haarlem’s style changed to one based on the realist tradition of the Netherlands.

In 1581, van Haarlem settled in Haarlem, becoming a respected member of the community, and received his first official commission in 1583. The resulting militia company portrait of the Haarlem Civic Guard, a milestone in Dutch group depictions with its liveliness, earned him the position of official city painter and many future commissions.

Along with Karel van Mander, printmaker Hendrick Golzius and other Northern Mannerist artists, Cornelius van Haarlem established the Haarlem Academy which provided artists the opportunity to draw from models and plaster casts. Before this time, no Dutch artists studied the nude human figure, which was the principal motif of van Haarlem’s drawings and paintings. 

Between 1590 and 1593, van Haarlem worked on a large commission for four large paintings to decorate the Prinsenhof, part of the municipal complex in Haarlem. Following its completion, he received numerous major commissions from: the Civic Guard in 1599, the Commanders of the Order of Saint John in 1617 and 1624, the Court of the Stadholder in the Hague in 1622, and the hospital of the Helige Geesthuis in 1633. 

Cornelius van Haarlem served from 1613 to 1619 as a regent of the Old Men’s Home in Haarlem. From 1626 to 1629, he was a member of the Catholic Saint Jacob’s Guild and, in 1630, along with other artists, was involved in the formulation of new regulations for the Saint Luke’s Guild in Haarlem, a guild for painters and both gold- and silversmiths. Cornelius van Haarlem died on the 11th of November in 1638.

Works by Cornelius van Haarlem are on display at the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Louvre in Paris, the National Gallery in London, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, and other museums. 

Neil Galman” “. . Words on the Air”

Photographer Unknown, Words on the Air

“Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds’ eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas-abstract, invisible, gone once they’ve been spoken-and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created.” 

—Neil Galman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

Virgil Finlay

Artwork by Virgil Finlay

Born in July of 1914, Virgil Finlay was an American pulp science fiction, fantasy, and horror illustrator. Working in a range of materials from gouache to oils, he was most prominently known for his detailed pen and ink drawings using stippling, scratchboard, and cross-hatching techniques. In his thirty-five year career, Finlay created more than twenty-six hundred works of graphic art. 

Finlay was a childhood fan of science fiction, particularly the fantasy appearing in “Amazing Stories” and “Weird Tales” magazines in the late 1920s. He studied art in high school and was greatly influenced by the works of Pablo Picasso, Aubrey Beardsley, and Gustave Dore. At the age of twenty-one, Finlay submitted his art portfolio to editor Famsworth Wright of ”Weird Tales”, who debuted Finlay’s  work in the December 1935 issue.

Virgil Finlay’s work appeared inside sixty-two issues of “Weird Tales” and on nineteen covers. During this time, he also produced illustrations, both large and small, for “The American Weekly”, a Sunday newspaper supplement owned by the Hearst Corporation with over fifty million viewers, as well as several other pulp publications. 

During service in the US Army during World War II, Finlay saw combat in the Pacific Theater and produced posters and illustrations for the Morale Services of the war effort. After the war, he continued illustrating, turning to astrology magazines as the pulp magazine market declined, and started painting large abstract canvases.

In 1953 Virgil Finlay won one of the inaugural Hugo Awards for Best Illustrator. He had major surgery for cancer in early 1969, succumbing to a recurrence of the disease in January of 1971 at the age of fifty-six. Finlay was named Best Artist of 1945 in the fifty-year celebration of the Hugo Awards held in 1996.

“He came out of his coma. We left a sketch pad and pencils beside the bed. He did a drawing, went back into the coma, and died.”

—-Lail Finlay, Virgil Finlay’s daughter describing her father’s final hours

Haruki Murakami: “Warped in the Folds of Time”

Photographer Unknown, Warped in the Folds of Time

“Silence. How long it lasted, I couldn’t tell. It might have been five seconds, it might have been a minute. Time wasn’t fixed. It wavered, stretched, shrank. Or was it me that wavered, stretched, and shrank in the silence? I was warped in the folds of time, like a reflection in a fun house mirror.” 

—-Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

Thomas Downing

Thomas Downing, “Untitled”, 1950, Acrylic on Unprimed Canvas, 243.8 x 225.4 cm, Private Collection

Born in 1928 in Suffolk, Virginia, American painter Thomas Downing initially studied English literature at Randolph-Mason College in Ashland, Virginia, receiving his Bachelor of Arts in 1948. After frequent visits to exhibitions held at Randolph-Mason and local museums, he eventually decided to study art. Downing moved to New York City to study at the Pratt Institute of Art, where he was influenced by the New York School of painters. With a grant given to him in 1950 by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, he was able to travel and study in Europe, briefly enrolling in the Académie Julien in Paris.

In Paris, Thomas Downing secured a position as a studio assistant for the painter Fernand Léger in 1951, eventually exhibiting a series of his own gouaches at Paris’ Galerie Huit. After a short service in the US Army, he moved in 1953 to Washington, DC, working as a high school teacher. Downing attended summer sessions at Catholic University, where he studied under and was influenced by painter Kenneth Nolan, one of the founders of the Washington Color School of painting, a flourishing abstract art movement emphasizing pure color. An established member of Washington’s art community by 1958, Downing had his first one-man show with the Sculptors Studio in 1959. By the early 1960s, he began producing canvases that were composed of grids and circles of dots of varying color, a motif which became recognizable as his body of work.

Thomas Downing’s work explores the formal possibilities of color and color-space, establishing that as the sole subject of his compositions. His circles of varying hues and colors seem to float in an undefined space, with each set of color appearing on a flat plane, but collectively presenting a depth of space. Downing’s specific color choices suggest the modern design principles of the Bauhaus movement, particularly the color-space theories of painter and instructor Josef Albers. 

Following a series of successful solo shows in the DC area, several of Downing’s dot paintings were included in Clement Greenberg’s 1964 traveling exhibition “Post-Painterly Abstraction” and the New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s influential 1965 exhibition “The Responsive Eye”. In 1966, Downing included a series of shaped canvases to his works in the “Systematic Painting” show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. 

Downing taught at the Corcoran School of Art from 1965 to 1968, influencing artists such as Sam Gilliam and Rockne Krebs. He moved to New York to teach at the New School of Visual Art, and after a brief tenure at the University of Houston in 1975, settled in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In his later years, he had many exhibitions, including tow at the Osuna Gallery in Washington, DC, in 1979 and 1980,  and one at The Phillips Collection in 1985, the year of his death. 

Thomas Downing’s work is in a number of collections, both private and public, including the National Gallery of Art and the Phillips Collection, both in Washington, DC, and the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California. 

Haruki Murakami: “In the Midst of the Everyday”

Photographers Unknown, In the Midst of the Everyday

“Our lives really do seem strange and mysterious when you look back on them. Filled with unbelievably bizarre coincidences and unpredictable, zigzagging developments. While they are unfolding, it’s hard to see anything weird about them, no matter how closely you pay attention to your surroundings. In the midst of the everyday, these things may strike you as simply ordinary things, a matter of course. They might not be logical, but time has to pass before you can see if something is logical.” 

—-Haruki Murakami, Killing Commendatore

Born in January of 1949 in Kyoto to parents both of whom were teachers, Haruki Murakami grew up in Kobe as an only child. Since childhood he was heavily influenced by Western culture, reading a wide range of European and American literature, such as Franz Kafka, Kurt Vonnegut, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Jack Kerouac. He moved to Tokyo, where he attended Waseda University, studying drama and graduating in 1973. After college, Murakami married and  opened a small jazz bar, “Peter Cat”, in Tokyo,  which he and his wife ran for seven years. 

Hanuki Murakami’s first novel “Hear the Wind Sing” initially appeared in the June 1979 issue of literary magazine Gunzo, and was published in book form the following month. This first book of the “Trilogy of the Rat” won the Gunzou Literature Prize for new writers in 1979 and was adapted by director Kazuki Ōmori for the 1981 film “Hear the Wind Sing”. Murakami followed this success with two sequels “Pinball, 1973”, published in 1960, and “A Wild Sheep Chase”, published in 1962. 

Murakami achieved national recognition in 1987 with the publication of “Norwegian Wood”, a nostalgic story of loss and sexuality, which sold millions of copies among the young Japanese. He is also the author of the novels “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World”; “Dance Dance Dance”; “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle””, and “Sputnik Sweetheart”, among others. He has also written three short story collections: “The Elephant Vanishes”; “After the Quake”; and “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman”. 

Most of Murakami’s works use first-person narrative in the tradition of the Japanese “I-novel”, a type of confessional literature where the events in the story correspond to events in the author’s life. With the family being a significant role in traditional Japanese literature, a central character who is independent becomes one who values freedom and solitude over close connections.

After Japan’s Hanshin earthquake and the Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995, Murakami interviewed survivors, as well as the Aum religious cult responsible for the subway attack. From these interviews, he published two non-fiction books, forming the series entitled “Underground” in 1997 and 2000. While the book consisted mainly of narratives from individuals, it contained common themes revealing aspects of the psyche and values of the Japanese society as a whole.

Hanuki Murakami’s work has received numerous awards, including the World Fantasy Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, and the Jerusalem Prize, a biennial literary award given to writers whose work deals with themes of human freedom, society and government. In 2011, Murakami donated his eighty-thousand Pound winnings from the International Catalunya Prize to the victims of the March 11th earthquake and tsunami, and to those affected by the fukushima nuclear disaster.

Salomon-Léon Sarluis

The Artwork of Salomon-Léon Sarluis

Born in the Hague in October of 1874, French painter Salomon-Léon Sarluis, known as Léonard Sarluis, studied at the École des Beaux-Arts before moving to Paris in 1884 where he became a well known figure on its boulevards. He was a student of the French Symbolist painter Armand Point and of the French novelist Élémir Bourges, who was strongly linked with the Decadent and Symbolist movements in literature. Sarluis was also associated with the openly gay poet Jean Lorrain, who is remembered for his contributions to the satirical weekly Le Courrier Français and his Decadent novels and short stories.

Léonard Sarluis traveled widely throughout Italy, visiting Naples, and Russia. Upon his return to Paris, he exhibited at the Salon de la Rose Croix and the Salon des Artistes Français, and at a number of other Parisian galleries. With designer Armand Point, Sarluis created the poster for the fifth exhibition at the Salon des Artistes Français, depicting Perseus holding the severed head of  novelist Émile Zola, who was rejected by the Symbolists for his Naturalist social commentary. 

Working under the influence of Point, Léonard Sarluis combined a technique inspired by the Old Masters with a style that was sensual and very modern. He liked to work on a grand scale, and his monumental “Nero”, exhibited at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris, was greatly admired by muralist painter Puvis de Chavannes. In 1919 Sarluis had a solo exhibition at the Galerie Bernheim, one of the oldest galleries in Pairs and a leader in avant-garde art. 

In 1923, Sarluis produced illustrations based on novelist Gaston Pavloski’s 1912 mystical “Voyage to the Land of the Fourth Dimension”. For a number of years, Sarluis worked on a series of three hundred-sixty paintings entitled “A Mystical Interpretation of the Bible”, which were shown at the Grafton Galleries in London in 1926. 

Léonard Sarluis’s inspiration was emblematic of a turn of the century that combined nostalgia for an imagined past, decadent themes and sometimes cloudy mysticism. A provocative character and dandy, and a friend of Oscar Wilde, Salomon-Léon Sarluis died in 1949 in Paris.

Gus Green Van Sant, Jr: “My Own Private Idaho”

Bruce Weber, Promotional Photo Shoot for “My Own Private Idaho”

These two images, showing River Phoenix with Michael Parker and with Rodney Harvey, were taken by Bruce Weber during a promotional photo shoot in 1991 for director Gus Van Sant’s early 1991 masterpiece “My Own Private Idaho”.

Born in July of 1952, Gus Green Van Sant, Jr. is an American screenwriter, film director, photographer, painter and author who has produced acclaimed independent and mainstream films. His films typically contain themes of marginalized subcultures, particularly homosexuality. Van Sant is one of the prominent film artists of the New Queer Cinema movement. 

Van Sant made his feature-length directorial debut with his 1985 film “Mala Noche (Bad Night)”, a drama film based on poet Walt Curtis’s autobiographical novel of the same name.  His second feature, released in 1989, was the highly acclaimed “Drugstore Cowboy”, which earned him Best Director from the National Society of Film Critics. Van Sant followed this success with the a series of similarly praised films: the 1991 “My Private Idaho” and the black comedy “To Die For” in 1995. His next two films,  the 1997 drama “Good Will Hunting”, and the biographical film “Milk” in 2008, were nominated by the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director. 

Note: You will find more information on Van Sant’s film “Malo Noche” at: https://ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon.blog/2015/07/09/mala-noche-directed-by-gus-van-sant-mala-noche/