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/

Émile Louis Salomé

Émile Louis Salomé, “The Prodigal Son”, 1863, Oil on Canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille, France

Born in Lille, France, in December of 1833, Émile Louis Salomé was a painter of genre scenes, portraits and still lifes. He received his initial art training from his father Louis Adolphe Salomé, an engraver and lithographer. Émile Salomé entered the Academic Schools of Lille around 1845 and exhibited his works for the first time at the Paris Salon of 1859.

In 1862 Émile Salomé shared with his fellow painter Carolus-Duran a four-year scholarship grant from the city of Lille to complete their studies at Rome’s Wicar workshop, bequeathed to the city of Lille by painter and art collector Jean Baptiste Wicar. His studies completed, Salomé settled in his hometown of Lille, establishing a strong regional reputation for his works.

Émile Salomé was admitted to the Society of Sciences, Agriculture and the Arts of Lille in 1878. He continued to exhibit his work at the Paris Salon from 1861 until his death in August of 1881 at the age of forty-seven. A retrospective of his works was held in 1881 at the Palais Rameau in Lille.

Émile Salomé’s work can be found at the Museum of Art and History in Neuchâtel, Switzerlnd; the Musée Benoit de Puydt in Bailleul, France; the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon, France; and the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille, which holds Salomé’s 1863 “The Prodigal Son” in its collection.

Victor E. Frankl: “Man’s Search for Meaning”

Photographers Unknown, Reflections on Life

“The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest. What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees, or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him?

No, thank you,’ he will think. ‘Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, although these are things which cannot inspire envy.”

—-Victor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Thanks to https://isthistoomuchblack.tumblr.com for the selfie image with sombrero.

Kyle McMillin

Kyle McMillin, “Los Primeros Cuatros”, 2020, Four Wet-Collodion Tintypes, Each 10 x 12.7 cm

These four portrait tintypes by Kyle McMillin were taken in Tacoma, Washington on July 27, 2020. They depict, in image order, Aloysious, Jesse, Kreg, and Kyle.

The wet-collodion process is an early photographic technique invented in 1851 by English sculptor and inventor Frederick Scott Archer. The process involved adding a soluble iodide to a solution of cellulose nitrate, known as collodion, and coating a glass plate with the mixture. In the darkroom, the plate was immersed in a solution of silver nitrate to form silver iodide.

This glass plate, still wet, was exposed in the camera and then developed by pouring a solution of pyrogallic acid over it. The image was fixed, originally, with a strong solution of sodium thiosulfate, for which potassium cyanide was later substituted. Immediate developing and fixing were required in this process because, after the collodion film had dried, it became waterproof, preventing the reagent solutions from penetrating the film. This wet-collodion process was valued for the clarity and level of detail it allowed.

A later modification of the process introduced in the 1850s, the ambrotype was a developed and fixed negative on a glass plate, which when viewed by reflected light against a black background, appears as to be a positive image. The clear areas look black, and the exposed, opaque areas appear relatively light. The glass plates were either backed with black velvet, or were coated on one side of the plate with black varnish.

During the 1860s, the ambrotype was superseded by the tintype or ferrotype, a photograph made by by creating a direct positive on a thin sheet of metal coated with a dark lacquer or enamel and used as the support for the for the photographic emulsion. Because the lacquered iron support was resilient and did not need drying, a tintype could be developed, fixed, and handed to the customer only a few minutes after the picture had been taken. The tintype became very popular in the 1860s and 1870s, being less fragile than the ambrotype and “instantly” available.

The artist’s site is located at: https://mcmillin.tumblr.com

Kyle McMillan’s studio, The Red Room Tintype Studio, is located at: https://www.redroomtintype.me

Paul Cadmus

Paul Cadmus, “The Fleet’s In!”, 1934, Tempera on Canvas, 94 x 170 cm, Naval History and Heritage Command, U.S. Navy Art Collection

Paul Cadmus, “The Fleet’s In!”, 1934, Etching, 18.9 x 35.7 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Paul Cadmus’s work is imbued with the compositions of the Renaissance period, the firm and expressive lines of Jean-Auguste Ingres, and the sharp, figurative appearance of Magical Realism. However, Cadmus received his greatest influence from his lover and fellow painter Jared French, with whom he studied and traveled extensively. French instilled within Cadmus the traditions of the Old Masters that became a fundamental part of his work.

Cadmus is best known for his erotic depictions of nude male figures, charged with satire, social criticism, and a strongly idealized sexuality. He first gained recognition for his 1934 Public Works of Art Project (WPA) tempera painting “The Fleet’s In!”, where the controversy of a group of sailors he pictured carousing among prostitutes and homosexuals inspired a public outcry.

The tempera “The Fleet’s In!” was removed in 1934 from the WPA exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC before public viewing by order of the US Secretary of the Navy and transferred to the custody of the US Department of the Navy. it was not seen in a public exhibition until September of 1981, when it was shown, on loan, in a traveling Cadmus retrospective. Upon the retrospective’s end in July of 1982, the painting’s repository remained the US Navy’s Art Collection, which has continued the practice of loaning it to domestic and international museums.

For more extensive information on the censorship of Paul Cadmus’s paintings, please visit Anthony J. Morris’s dissertation entitled “The Censored Paintings of Paul Cadmus, 1934-1940: The Body as the Boundary Between the Decent and Obscene”, 2010, Department of Art History and Art, Case Western Reserve University. The dissertation can be found at:

https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=case1270569282&disposition=inline

Pyotr Konchalovsky

Pyotr Konchalovsky, “Bathing Calvary (Horse Bathing), c 1928, Oil on Canvas

Born in February of 1876 in the village of Slavyanka, Russia, Pyotr Konchalovsky , at the age of eight, attended art school in Kharkov where he became interested in painting. His father, a book publisher now in Moscow, began to publish works by Romantic writer Mikhail Lermontov and novelist Aleksandr Pushkin, commissioning notable artists such as Vasily Surikov and Valentin Serov to produce illustrations for the works. Influenced by these artists, Konchalovsky attended classes at Moscow’s School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture.

In 1896 to 1898, Konchalovsky studied at the Academie Julian in Paris, later entering the Moscow Academy of Arts, from which he graduated in 1907. He traveled extensively over the next two years and, in 1907, attended the exhibition of Van Gogh’s works in Paris, which made a significant impact on his future works. This influence is noticeable in the work Konchalovsky produced between 1907 and 1910.

In 1909, Konchalovsky and his close associates, such as painters Robert Falk and Ilya Mashkov, founded the art group “Jack of Diamonds”, an early Russian avant-garde
movement that challenged the academic traditions and supported the post-impressionist, cubist and fauvist painters. Their first exhibition in Moscow was considered by some to be a scandal; but it initiated a cultural action that brought the new art forms to the public.

Konchalovsky painted landscapes, portraits, still lifes, and genre paintings, with simple compositions, lack of details, and with thick applications of color. Some of his most well-known works are the cubist paintings, “The Agave” and “The Dry Paints”, 1916 and 1913 respectively ; the post-impressionist 1946 “The Candlestick and Pears”; and the 1955 realist “The Strawberries”. Konchalovsky also painted portraits of outstanding figures, such as poets Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov, composer Sergey Prokofiev and theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold. He also illustrated a number of poems by Mikhail Lermontov.

The works of Pyotr Konchalovsky have been exhibited both in Russia and abroad. He was appreciated by the Soviet government and awarded with orders and medals. In 1943 Konchalovsky became a laureate of the Stalin Prize and, in 1947, received the rank of the USSR Academy of Arts member. Pyotr Konchalovsky died on the2nd of February in 1956 and is buried at the Novodevichie Cemetery in Moscow.

José Manuel Castro López

The Sculptural Works of José Manuel Castro López

Born in 1959 in Vilasuso, a village located in northwest Spain, José Manuel Castro López studied sculpture at the Escola de Canteros, a stone-masonry university in Pontevedra, Spain, from 1980 until 1985. Inspired by the mythology of his native Galician culture, José López believes that stones are spirits of the land and, as an artist, it is his role to to conjure them.

Starting with pieces of granite and quartz, José López grinds the natural stone into forms with creases and wrinkles, giving the illusion of sponge, clay forms, or soft, flowing fabrics. After the carving, he restores the stone’s original texture by removing any traces of his tool, resulting in the appearance of a slowly eroded natural stone. The added features he creates becomes very obvious against the stone’s natural appearance.

“My relationship with the stone is not physical, but magical. It recognizes me, it obeys me… we understand each other. My stones are not lifeless. They manifest themselves.” —-José Manuel Castro López