David Guterson: “Good Neighbors”

Photographers Unknown, (Good Neighbors)

“No one [Islanders] trod easily upon the emotions of another where the sea licked everywhere against an endless shoreline. And this was excellent and poor at the same time- excellent because it meant most people took care, poor because it meant an inbreeding of the spirit, too much held in, regret and silent brooding, a world whose inhabitants walked in trepidation, in fear of opening up…They could not speak freely because they were cornered: everywhere they turned there was water and more water, a limitless expanse of it in which to drown. They held their breath and walked with care, and this made them who they were inside, constricted and small, good neighbors.”

—-David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars

Born in Seattle, Washington, it n 1956, David Guterson is an American novelist, journalist, poet and essayist. He attended the University of Washington where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and his MFA in Creative Writing. Guterson wrote “Snow Falling in Cedars” in the early morning hours over a ten year period, after which he began writing full time.

The story is set on the fictional San Piedro Island in the Puget Sound region of the Washington coast in 1954. The plot revolves around a murder case in which Japanese-American Kabuo Myamoto is accused of killing Carl Heine, a respected fisherman in the close-knit community. Told in mostly flashbacks, the interactions of the characters over the previous decades is explored.

The majority of the novel, including the trial of Myamoto, occurs during a severe snowstorm on the island during a time of deep anti-Japanese sentiments following World War II. The issues of former loves and family feuds are mixed with the bitter effects of the war and one’s sense of conscience.

Published in September of 1994, “Snow Falling on Cedars” became an immediate best-seller and won the 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. I was adapted in 1999 into a film of the same name which was nominated for the Best Cinematography Academy Award. Due to the book’s sexual content, it has been challenged, banned or restricted in several US school systems.

Cari Vander Yacht

Graphic Works by Cari Vander Yacht

Born in Oregon, Cari Vander Yacht is a Brooklyn, New York-based multi-media illustrator and computer graphic artist. Besides her work for print media and corporations, she animates photos found in Portland’s thrift shops, turning them into surreal, often humorous, gifs. Originally part of a collaborative project with film artist Thomas Sauvin called “Reanimation”, Yacht has developed them into a new series called “Thank God It’s Monday Graphic Interchange Format”.

Cari Vander Yacht ’s first illustrative work was for The New York Times, a media publication to which she still occasionally contributes. Among her completed projects are; developing the branding for the Iranian soft drink Mr. Cat; animations for the Pop Up magazine; animations for Nike’s Lebron XIII shoe release; illustrations for Businessweek magazine and Brooklyn’s Parlor Coffee; an animated cover for Buzzfeed Reader; and a promotional animated graphic for Emerald Nuts.

Nina Saunders

Nina Saunders: Sculptural Works

Born in 1958 in Odense, Denmark, Nina Saunders studied Fine Art and Critical Studies at Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design. Working across a wide range of materials, her artwork and installations play with the functions of objects, which appear familiar but question our preconceptions.

Saunders strips domestic objects of their comfort and use, turning them into odd, subversive works of art which project a disturbing sense of humor. Reclaimed sofas and chairs with floral patterned upholstery seem to melt into amoebic forms flowing across rooms, or take the form of bizarre creatures with swelling cushions and awkward angled legs.

Saunders’s work range from small objects such as upholstered hairbrushes and oddly-shaped, vinyl-wrapped dust pans with zippers to larger works, such as the 2017 “She May Not Be Your Friend But She is Your Hairdresser”, a sculptural work fashioned from a 1950s hairdressing chair, a deer head, plywood, foam, and deerskin.

Even when a Saunders installation scene seems normal, the effect can be mildly disturbing. In Saunders’s 2002 installation “Forever”, the scene is an ordinary middle-class room with limited-budget furniture, containing a potted plant, a gash in the wall, and a rocking swing suspended from the ceiling. Playing in the background is a loop of singer Engelbert Humperdinck singing the Demis Roussos song “Forever and Ever”. Although containing normal, recognizable objects, the scene is strikingly reminiscent of a Twilight Zone episode.

Nina Saunders has exhibited her works at many international locations including the Pallant House in London,;Note Art Contemporanea in Arezzo, Italy; and The British Council in Brussels. Her work was in the group show “Hidden Histories, Untold Stories” at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; the Nordic and Danish Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale; and the Museum of Modern Art in Vaasa, Finland.

Joseph Campbell: “The Love of Your Fate”

Photographer Unknown, (The Love of Your Fate)

“Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called ‘the love of your fate.’ Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, ‘This is what I need.’ It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment–not discouragement–you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow.

Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see that this is really true. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.”

—-Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

Juan Coderch and Javier Malavia

Bronze Sculptures by Juan Coderch and Javier Malavia

Born in 1959 in Castellar del Vallés, Barcelona, sculptor Juan Coderch graduated from Barcelona’s Faculty of Fine Art in 1984. Sculptor Javier Malavia, born in 1970, in Oñati, Guipúzcoa, graduated from Valencia’s San Carlos Faculty of Fine Art in 1993, Discovering similarities in their sculptural art, they started the common project Coderch & Malavia in 2015, following in the tradition of figurative work by master sculptors such as Rodin, Mailol, and Bourdelle.

Working from their studio and exhibition space in Valencia, Coderch and Malavia both share in the hands-on process of a single piece, each contributing to the creation of the sculpture. The figurative sculpture’s theme is taken from the common interests of both sculptors, particularly the theater, mythology, and the bullfight, with man and his life as the central focus.

Working in clay or wax initially, Coderch and Malavia’s finished works are cast in bronze. They model the human body in a classical tradition, featuring figures full of tension and movement, frozen in time but still depicting the intensity of their lives, and the myths these lives conjure up.

Since the very beginning of their project, Coderch and Malavia have been seen as prominent figurative artists. For their 2017 “Hamlet”, they received the Reina Sofia Painting and Sculpture Prize; and their 2019 “Swan Dance” won First Prize at the 14th ARC International Salon Competition, held at Sotheby’s in New York.

Coderch & Malavia have participated in more than fifteen collective and solo exhibitions in France, the United States, Mexico, Greece, and Italy, among others. Their bronze works are now a part of private collections in various countries of Europe, of Asia and America.

Wendell Berry: “The Real Names”

Photographer Unknown, (The Real Names)

“No settled family or community has ever called its home place an “environment.” None has ever called its feeling for its home place “biocentric” or “anthropocentric.” None has ever thought of its connection to its home place as “ecological,” deep or shallow. The concepts and insights of the ecologists are of great usefulness in our predicament, and we can hardly escape the need to speak of “ecology” and “ecosystems.” But the terms themselves are culturally sterile. They come from the juiceless, abstract intellectuality of the universities which was invented to disconnect, displace, and disembody the mind. The real names of the environment are the names of rivers and river valleys; creeks, ridges, and mountains; towns and cities; lakes, woodlands, lanes, roads, creatures, and people.

And the real name of our connection to this everywhere different and differently named earth is “work.” We are connected by work even to the places where we don’t work, for all places are connected; it is clear by now that we cannot exempt one place from our ruin of another. The name of our proper connection to the earth is “good work,” for good work involves much giving of honor. It honors the source of its materials; it honors the place where it is done; it honors the art by which it is done; it honors the thing that it makes and the user of the made thing. Good work is always modestly scaled, for it cannot ignore either the nature of individual places or the differences between places, and it always involves a sort of religious humility, for not everything is known. Good work can be defined only in particularity, for it must be defined a little differently for every one of the places and every one of the workers on the earth.”

—-Wendell Berry

Born in August of 1934, Wendell Erdman Berry is an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a recipient of The National Humanities Medal, the Jefferson Lecturer for 2012., and the 2013 recipient of the Richard C Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award.

Bernard Vista

Paintings by Bernard Vista

Born in 1968 in the city of Pakil in the Laguna Province of the Philippines, modernist painter Bernard Vista paints larger than life depictions of the rustic Philippine countryside and its people, focusing on their customs and traditions. He is a follower of the traditional ‘tipos dei pais’ art form, which showed Philippine’s different inhabitants in their native costumes worn during colonial times.

A graduate of the Fine Arts program of the University of Saint Tomas, Bernard Vista was influenced by his mentors: neo-realist painter Cesar Legaspi and modern abstractionist painter H.R. Ocampo, both awarded as Filipino National Artists for their work.

Vista became a member of the Saturday Group of Artists established in July of 1968 by painter Cesar Lagapi. This group, which became a premier art institution in the country, introduced interactive painting activities and helped to financially support artists in difficulty. Vista is also a founding member of the Guevarra Group of Artists, along with painter and sculptor Dominic Rubio, sculptor Jerry Morada, and painters Gig and Vincent de Pio.

Bernard Vista has had successful solo exhibitions at Galerie Joaquin in San Juan, Manila, and Galerie Joaquin in Singapore. A former resident-artist at the Artesan Gallery in Singapore, Vistas’s work can be found in many private collections.

Brenton Parry

Photography by Brenton Parry

Brenton Parry is a graphic designer with over twenty years of experience ranging from logos and stationary to posters and catalogues. Photography, a passion instilled by his father, has over the last fifteen years developed into a major part of his life. Parry’s male figure photography has resulted in two solo gallery exhibitions, work in two group exhibitions, a series of soft-cover male photography books published by Blurb Books, and a continuing series of downloadable male photography booklets.

Residing in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, Brenton Parry works in Australia and worldwide. In 2014, he photographed the Sydney Stingers, the city’s LGBTI-inclusive water polo team to promote their annual trivia fundraising night in the Star Observer online magazine. Parry has also done product work for ASICS Sportswear and Footwear, Shimano Fishing Australia, and other companies.

More information, prints for purchase, and downloadable booklets can be found at the artist’s site located at: https://www.brentonparry.com

A. A. Milne: “. . .Caught Up by a Little Eddy”

Photographer Unknown, (Caught Up by a Little Eddy)

“And out floated Eeyore.

“Eeyore!” cried everybody.

Looking very calm, very dignified, with his legs in the air, came Eeyore from beneath the bridge.

“It’s Eeyore!” cried Roo, terribly excited.

“Is that so?” said Eeyore, getting caught up by a little eddy, and turning slowly round three times. “I wondered. . . .”

—-A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

Joseph Hirsch

Joseph Hirsch, “Mercy Ship”, 1943, Oil on Canvas, 122 x 97 cm , US Navy Art Collection

Born in Philadelphia in 1910, Joseph Hirsch won a four-year scholarship from the city of Philadelphia at the age of seventeen. He studied the realist tradition of painter Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art, now the University of the Arts. After graduation, Hirsch studied privately in New York City under social realist painter George Luks, a founder of the Ashcan School of painting and one of the “Eight”, a group which favored painting scenes of urban life.

After the death of George Luks in 1933, Hirsch studied with painter Henry Hensche, who impressed with the colors of the impressionists, had started his own studio in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The awarding of a Woolley Fellowship in 1935 enabled Hirsch to expand his experiences by traveling throughout Europe for one year. He visited Egypt and areas of Asia before his return to the United States in November of 1936. During the 1930s, Joseph Hirsch’s art career received a boost through employment with the Works Progress Administration in Philadelphia, for whom he completed murals for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Building and the city’s Municipal Court.

During World War II as a member of the Associated American Artists, Hirsch worked for Abbott Laboratories where he produced artworks to illustrate the war effort. The most widely produced war bond poster was his 1942 “Till We Meet Again”. Continuing his style of capturing ordinary people and moments, Hirsch worked with fellow artist Georges Schreiber at the Pensacola Naval Air Station documenting Naval aviation training. From there he went to the South Pacific to document the efforts of Navy medicine and, later, covered Army operations on the Italian front and in North Africa.

Joseph Hirsch was a founding member of the Artists Equity, organized in 1949 in New York City to protect the rights of visual artists. Awarded a 1949 Fulbright Fellowship, Hirsch and his family resided for a period in France for study and work. During this time, the political climate in the United States became hostile to those holding unpopular views. This led to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s speech in 1950 denouncing Communists in the US State Department. Awarded a year extension on his Fellowship, Hirsch sold his Cape Cod home and remained with his family in Paris.

In March of 1952 on the floor of the House of Representatives, Congressman George Dondero denounced Artist Equity as a front organization for Communists. This resulted in blacklisting a number of Artist Equity member artists and the denouncement of Hirsch as a Communist sympathizer. Due to this action, Hirsch and his family did not return to the United States until 1955. After his return, Hirsch continued his successful career of selling paintings and working on commissions. In the 1960s to 1970s, Hirsch experimented by using a series of layered image planes, instead of lines of perspective, to suggest depth on his canvases. This series of figurative images appear as snapshots that captured its subjects in mid-action instead of posed postions.

Joseph Hirsch taught at the National Academy of Design from 1959 to 1967, and the Art Students League of New York from 1967 until his death in September of 1981, He was also artist-in-residence a the University of Utah, Utah State University, Dartmouth College and Brigham Young University. The Library of Congress twice awarded him the Joseph Pennell Prize for Lithography for his 1944 “Lunch Hour” and the 1945 “The Confidence”. Among many other awards, he won the 1968 Carnegie Prize by the Carnegie Museum of Art for his body of work.

Note: Joseph Hirsch’s 1943 “Mercy Ship” depicts the U.S. Navy Hospital ship, USS Solace, with its crew. Functioning as a floating medical treatment facility, the Navy’s hospital ships operated under the laws laid down by the Geneva Convention, as such they were unarmed, fully illuminated at night, and painted white.

Built as the passenger ship SS Iroquois in 1927, it was acquired by the US Navy in July of 1940, renamed Solace, converted into a hospital ship, and commissioned on August 9, 1941. She was at Pearl Harbor on the day of the attack, December 7th of 1941, where she pulled men from the burning oil-covered water and evacuated crews of damaged ships. The USS Solace received seven battle stars for her distinguished service in World War II.

Top Insert Image: Juley & Son, “Joseph Hirsch”, 1959,Juley&Son, Gelatin Silver Print, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Second Insert Image: Joseph Hirsch, “Window in Spring”, 1948, Oil on Canvas, 111.8 x 60.1 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Joseph Hirsch, “The Naked Man”, 1959-1962, Oil on Canvas, 188.6 x 130.1 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Bottom Insert Image: Joseph Hirsch, “Satisfaction Plus”, 1943, Oil on Canvas, 109.2 x 129.5 cm, Naval History and Heritage Command Museum

La Culture Physique Magazine

La Culture Physique Magazine

In 1885. French physiologist and physician Professor Edmond Desbonnet developed his Physical Culture theory and practice, which became popular in many European countries. His method was a reaction against the decadence he saw in the Belle Epoque era, and an emphasis on the premise that a healthy body was equally as important as a healthy mind. Before the first World War, fitness rooms were mostly frequented by the French societal elite; following the war, the working classes gained access to the Physical Culture movement and its facilities.

At the height of Desbonnet’s popularity, more than two hundred fitness centers espousing his method existed across Europe. Famous body builders, adepts of Desbonnet’s method, were often depicted in the various magazines and books that Desbonnet published. These photographs were offered for sale, often with a hand-held stereo viewer, through advertisements in his magazines.

Professor Desbonnet published five magazines on the practice of physical culture, in which his theories were explained and illustrated by famous athletes’ photographs, such as Apolion the Mighty, with the form of an ancient Roman gladiator, and Eugene Sandow, who organized the world’s first major body building competition.

Among Desbonnet’s many publications, one of the two most popular magazines was the French “La Culture Physique”. It was an illustrated bimonthly magazine created in Paris by both Desbonnet and author-publisher Albert Surier. Published between 1904 and 1967, except for the war periods between 1914 to 1925 and September of 1943 to December of 1946, the magazine promoted bodybuilding and the benefits of an active lifestyle for all.

During the rise of the gay consumer culture from 1945 to 1969, physique magazines, paperback novels, and other items became available through gay-oriented mail catalogues. This contributed to the sense of being in a larger community, validating one’s gay identity, and establishing models for what it meant to be gay. The legal struggles of the physique magazine publishers, in their fight against censorship laws, led to the first gay victories on the legal front, establishing the right to market these items, and became a catalyst for the rise of America’s gay movement.

For a more thorough study of the physique magazine and its contribution to the then-emerging gay rights movement, the article “Physique Pioneers: The Politics of 1960s Gay Consumer Culture” by University of Florida Professor David K. Johnson is a must read. The study was published by the Journal of Social History through Oxford University Press.

Available to read and download free through your school or library at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40802009?seq=1

A full version of Professor Johnson’s study can also be found at: http://history.usf.edu/faculty/data/johnsonarticle.pdf

Sebastiano Ricci

Sebastiano Ricci, “The Fall of the Rebel Angels”, 1720, Oil on Canvas, 82 x 68 cm, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Born in August of 1659, Sebastiano Ricci, an Italian painter of the late Baroque school of Venice, enjoyed an international reputation. He worked all over Italy, Austria, France, and England, primarily painting walls and ceilings with decorative schemes. Ricci’s patrons included Anne, Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland, and Lord Burlington, who commissioned Ricci for eight canvases of mythological frolics.

In his 1720 “The Fall of the Rebel Angels”, Sebastiano Ricci portrays the War in Heaven, as described in the Bible’s Book of Revelation 12,2-9. Archangel Michael leads the angels of Heaven against the rebel angels, who follow Satan. Ricci portrays, with great exuberance, the moment when Saint Michael drives the fallen angels from Heaven. The light radiating from the upper left quadrant illuminates St. Michael while casting the fallen angels into darkness, offering a poignant juxtaposition between virtue and vice.

There are five drawings relating to this composition at the Royal Library of Windsor Castle and one drawing in the Galleria dell’ Accademia in Venice.

W. Somerset Maugham: “. . .The Sense of Strangeness”

Photographers Unknown, This Sense of Strangeness

“I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history.”

—-W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

Henry-Robert Brésil

Paintings by Henry-Robert Brésil

Born in September of 1952 in Gonaīves, Haiti, Henry-Robert Brésil began to paint in his childhood, fascinated by the landscape of Haiti and its wildlife. At twenty-one years of age, he moved to Port au Prince in 1973, where his luminous jungle landscapes, instantly recognizable for his repetitive use of jungle vegetation, often populated with pink flamingos, received much attention. Although the majority of his oil on canvas work is of medium size, Brésil has also painted canvases of monumental size, with skyless scenes filling the surface.

Brésil won the ISPAN-UNESCO Prize in 1981 from its Institute for the Safeguarding of the National Patrimony. After the award, he began exhibiting in all the major galleries of Haiti. Recognized in major art books on Haitian art, Brésil’s work has been exhibited worldwide, including in the United States, Italy, France, Switzerland, Japan, Puerto Rico, and his native country of Haiti.

A meticulous artist who became quite eccentric in his later years, Henry-Robert Brésil was tragically killed, at the age of forty-seven, in 1999 during a violent altercation that took place at a local market restaurant.

Puck’s Mischief

Photographer Unknown, (Puck’s Mischief)

“I’ll follow you. I’ll lead you about a round,

Through a bog, through bush, through brake, through brier.

Sometime a horse I’ll be, sometime a hound,

A hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire,

And neigh, and bark, and grunt, and roar, and burn,

Like horse, hound, hog, bear, fire, at every turn”’

—-William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act Three, Scene One

In an early 17th century broadside. Puck, referred to as Robin Goodfellow, was the vassal of the Fairy King Oberon and inspired night-terrors in old women, led travelers astray, took the shape of animals, blew out candles, twitched off bedclothes, tattled people’s secrets, and changed babies in cradles with elfings while the parents slept.

Puck utters the quote above as an aside in Act III of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, after he’s transformed Bottom’s head into that of a donkey and the rest of the craftsmen have run away. Puck indicates he’ll lead the craftsmen in circles through the forest, and that he’ll continue to frighten them by assuming various animal and inanimate forms. Puck’s sing-song wordplay in these lines serves to express his delight in creating mischief.