J. Carino

The Artwork of J. Carino

Based in Riverside, California, J. Carino is a figurative artist whose work illustrates the interconnection between man with his sense of self-awareness and the natural world, both literal and symbolic. A 2011 graduate of the Parsons School of Design in New York City, he works in a variety of mixed-media techniques and often uses distortion and abstraction in the construction of his work’s figures.

Carino’s images depict nude, queer figures, often monumental in size, who are set in landscapes both idyllic and suffused with danger. Applying ideas from his study of the decorative arts, he explores the concepts of queerness, self-identity, queer intimacy, sensuality, and man’s relationship with the natural world through images of richly colored and patterned, layered figures and flora. During the evolution of his work’s creation, Carino often adds and removes the layers of landscape and figures to achieve the desired result.

J. Carino’s work has appeared in multiple exhibitions both in the United States and overseas. These include both the Act 1 and Act 2 Summer Stage exhibitions at Auxier/Kline in New York, the 2021 online “Eye Candy” exhibition by the WB Gallery, the 2020 Art Pride International, and, in the United Kingdom, the 2022 collective “Come Out & Play” at London’s BEERS gallery and the 2019 exhibition at Rye’s McCully & Crane Gallery, among others.

Solo exhibitions of J. Carino’s paintings include the March 2023 “Genesis” at New York City’s Auxier Kline Gallery; the 2023 “Natural Disaster” at Monti * in Latina, Italy; the February/March 2024 “Emparadise” at the Mornya Rowe Gallery in New York City; the 2025 “Between Garden and Wilderness” at London’s Rhodes Contemporary Art; and, most recently, the 2025 “Carry It With You” at the Yossi Milo Gallery in New York City.

“Like many queer people, there is a dichotomy of wanting to be seen as a whole person, sexuality included, but also the fear of people seeing too much. My figures, often self portraits, inhabit landscapes of abundance and fertility, lush with ferns and fruit, like an eden where these fears dissipate. Through my work, I explore the complicated influence of intimacy, sexuality, and being seen, especially as it relates to gay relationships and our ability to connect with one another and ourselves.” —J. Carino

J. Carino’s work can be found at the artist’s site located at https://www.jcarinoart.com and also at the following gallery locations https://linktr.ee/j.carino.art

Top Insert Image: Tate Tullier, “Portrait of J. Carino”, 2025, Color Print, The Hopper Prize

Bottom Insert Image: J. Carino, “Carrying Beauty”, 2025 Oil and Acrylic on Linen,

Giambologna: “Oceanus”

Giambologna, “Oceanus”, 1576, Marble, Museo del Bargello, Florence, Italy

Born in the Flanders city of Douai in the year 1529, Jehan Boulongne, known as Giambologna, was a Flemish sculptor based in Italy, who was the last significant sculptor of the Italian Renaissance. Working in the period between the High Renaissance and the Baroque, Giambologna transformed the Florentine Mannerism of the mid-sixteenth century into a style of European significance.

In his youth, Giambologna studied in Antwerp under architect and sculptor Jacques Du Brœucq, a Flemish artist who worked in the Italianate style. In 1550, he relocated to Italy and studied the city’s Hellenistic sculptures, particularly those complex groupings of figures in action. Although heavily influenced by the work of Michelangelo, Giambologna developed his own Mannerist style with a particular emphasis on elegance and refined surfaces. Invested in the idea of beauty for its own sake, he created works that featured figures composed of graceful curves, sinuous lines and asymmetrical contrapposto stances.

Giambologna’s elongated Mannerist contoured figures revitalized the Florentine sculptural scene. He was a master of what became known in painting and sculpture as the figura serpentinata, the serpentine figure. Giambologna’s winding figures presented movement as well as expressions of aggression and fear. He enhanced the drama by offering his viewers more than a primary viewpoint of his work; Giambologna specifically created works that could be circled and viewed from all sides. All the features in his work required great technical skill and a precise calculation to both the work process and the stress being placed on his materials.

Giambologna was awarded his first commission by Cardinal Borromeo for a large-scale bronze “Neptune” and secondary figures for a civic fountain in Bologna that would commemorate the election of the Cardinal’s uncle as Pope Pius IV. The over-life-size bronze figure of Neptune was based on an earlier design by Giambologna for a fountain in the city of Florence. His completed figure of Neptune was erected on Bologna’s fountain in 1566. This work led to Giambologna becoming the most important court sculptor of the Medici family.

Giambologna’s celebrated works include the 1578-1580 bronze “Mercury in Flight”, the first version of which is housed at Bologna’s Medieval Museum; the 1574-1582 marble “Abduction of a Sabine Woman” at the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence; the 1562 marble “Samson Slaying a Philistine” at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; and the 1599 marble “Hercules and Nessus” in Florence’s Loggia dei Lanza.

A member of the prestigious Accademia delle Art del Disegno, Giambologna died in Florence at the age of seventy-nine in August of 1608. His work influenced later sculptors through his many pupils who traveled throughout Italy and northern Europe.

Notes: Oceanus was the Titan god of the River Okeanos and all of the earth’s rivers, wells and springs. In Giambologna’s sculpture, Oceanus stands with one foot atop the head of a river fish; this symbolizes his command over the animal and all river creatures. As with many of his sculptures, Giambologna carved his marble Oceanus in the round so the viewer can see the statue from all angles.

Commissioned in 1565, the 1576 marble “Oceanus” was designed for the piazza in front of the Pitti Palace and later erected on the axis of the Boboli Garden behind the palace. “Oceanus” was removed early in the seventeenth-century to a site on the Isolotto near Porta Romana. This great marble figure, with its mass of over two tons and height of over three meters, is now preserved in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence.

The art form of contrapposto, from the Latin ‘contraponere’ meaning ‘place against’, refers to an asymmetrical arrangement of the human figure in which the line of the arms and shoulders contrast with, while still balancing, those of the hips and legs.

Linguistic Professor Arnold Zwicky’s blog has an article, entitled “An Ideal Male Body”, that discusses both Giambologna’s marble “Oceanus” and his bronze work for the “Fountain of Neptune” at: https://arnoldzwicky.org/2023/09/15/an-ideal-male-body/

Top Insert Image: Hendrick Goltzius, “Portrait of Giambologna”, 1591, Mixed Media on Paper. Teylers Museum, Haarlem, The Netherlands

Second and Third Insert Images: Giambologna, “Oceanus”, 1576, Detail, Marble, Museo del Bargello, Florence, Italy

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Edward Jean Steichen

Photography by Edward Jean Steichen

Born on March 27, 1879, Éduard Jean Steichen was a Luxembourg-born American painter, photographer and curator, who was a key figure in the development of twentieth-century photography. His parents, Jean-Pierre and Marie Kamp Steichen, emigrated with Edward to the United States in 1880, originally settling in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and later moving to Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1889.

In 1894, Steichen began attending Pio Nono College, a Catholic high school for boys in the city of St. Francis, where he was recognized for his drawing skills. After quitting high school, Steichen began a four-year apprenticeship in lithography with Milwaukee’s American Fine Art Company known for its advertisements and panoramic city views. In 1895, he acquired his first camera and became a co-founder with his friends of the Milwaukee Art Students League. Steichen’s first exhibited his photographs, a series of ten works, at the 1899 Second Philadelphia Photographic Salon held at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Éduard Steichen became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1900 and signed his papers as Edward J. Steichen; however, he continued the use of his birth name until after World War I. In April of 1900, he traveled to Paris to study art, both painting and photography. Through an introduction by photographer Clarence H. White, Steichen became a close friend and collaborator with photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who established the 1897 photographic magazine “Camera Notes”.

Steichen was elected in 1901 as a member of London’s Linked Ring Brotherhood which promoted photography as one of the fine arts. In 1902, Steichen was a co-founder, along with White and Stieglitz, of the Photo-Secession movement that promoted photography as a legitimate fine art on the same level as painting and sculpture. He began experimenting in 1904 with color photography and became one of the earliest to use the Autochrome process patented in France by Louis and Auguste Lumière. Steichen helped Stieglitz found New York City’s Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, which became a prominent venue for most avant-garde artists of the time.

After high quality half-tone reproductions of photographs became possible, the genre of fashion photography became established as a fine art. This was made possible by the works of Edward Steichen and French portrait photographer Baron Adolph de Meyer, Tasked by publisher Lucien Vogel in 1911 to promote fashion as fine art, Steichen took photos of couturier Paul Poiret’s designer gowns. Published in color for the April 1911 issue of “Art et Décoration”. two photos from this shoot were done in a soft-focus, aesthetically retouched style. The images idealized the garments beyond the exact description of its fabric and buttons, marking a strong distinction from former hard, sharp commercial images.

In 1940, the Museum of Modern Art in New York inaugurated the first department of photography in a museum; it was overseen by art historian and photographer Beaumont Newhall. In 1942, Steichen curated the museum’s exhibition “Road to Victory”, a series of photographs by enlisted Armed Force members, that also included images of aerial fighting engagements taken by automatic cameras on naval planes. In 1947, he was appointed Director of Photography, a position he used to expand and organize the collection. Steichen recognized new generations of photographers and exhitited early works by such artists as Henry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Robert Rauschenberg.

Among his accomplishments during his term as Director of Photography, Edward Steichen created the MOMA world-touring exhibition “The Family of Man”, a collection of five hundred photos depicting life, love, and death in sixty-eight countries. It was seen by nine million visitors and still holds the record for the most-visited photography exhibition. “The Family of Man” is now permanently housed, on continuous display, at Clervaux Castle in northern Luxembourg, the country of Steichen’s origin.

Steichen’s career did much to popularize and promote the medium of photography. Both before and since his death in March of 1973, photography, including his own, continued to appreciate as a collectible art form. In 2006, Steichen’s early 1904 pictorialist photograph “The Pond-Moonlight”, showing a wooded area and pond in Mamaroneck, New York, sold for US 2.9 million dollars. Steichen achieved the impression of color by manually applying layers of light-sensitive gums to the paper (the autochrome process not being available until 1907). Only three prints of “The Pond-Moonlight”, two being in museums, are known to exist.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Edward Steichen, Brâncusi, Voulangis, France”, circa 1922, Printed 1987, Gelatin Silver Print, 33 x 26.7 cm, Edward Steichen Trust

Second Insert Image: Edward Jean Steichen, “Walt Disney”, 1933, Gelatin Silver Print, 24.2 x 20 cm, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Museums, Washington DC

Third Insert Image: Edward Jean Steichen, “Gloria Swanson”, 1924, Printed 1960s, Gelatin Silver Print, 24 x 19.1 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Bottom Insert Image: Edward Jean Steichen, “George Gershwin”, 1927, Gelatin Silver Print, 24.1 x 19.2 cm, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Museums, Washington DC