Author: ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon

https://www.instagram.com/wolvesofgray This blog is a refugee and a survivor of the Great Tumblr Inquisition of December 17th, 2018. I am gay artist, who received training at the Rhode Island School of Design, and now, a retired high-end fine art framer living in Maryland, USA. My interests and studies in life run a wide gamut from art to history and from the scientific to the esoteric. I have been building this blog of images and texts for the last eight years. My wish is that my posts pique the interest of viewers and encourage them to experience more.

Odile Decq

Odile Decq, Fangshan Tangshan National Geopark Museum, Nanjing, China

The Fangshan Tangshan National Geopark, near the city of Nanjing, is a geological and paleo-archaeological museum. This geological museum can be found in the beautiful valley between Tangshan and Fangshan, two volcanic mountains. Not only does the museum reveal a 700-million-year slice of earth’s geological history, but the discovery of ancient hominid remains in a cave here in the 1950s sparked worldwide speculation about the early origins of mankind.

The architect of the project was Odile Decq, the founder of Studio Odile Decq. She is an award-winning French architect, urban planner and academic. She graduated in 1978 from Ecole Nationale Superieure d’Architecture de Paris- La Villette with a diploma in Urban Planning. Okile Decq was awarded the Golden Lion of Architecture during the Venice Biennale in 1996.

Since 1992, Odile Decq has been a professor at the Ecole Soeciale d’Architecture in Paris where she was elected head of the Department of Architecture in 2007. She left in 2012, opeining her own school, the Confluence Institute for Innovation and Creative Strategies in Architecture, in Lyon, France. The Institute, cofounded with architect Matteo Cainer, opened in 2014.

Calendar: June 16

A Year: Day to Day Men: 16th of June

Beachwear

June 16, 1924 was the birthdate of Faith Marie Domergue, the American television and film actress.

While just a sophomore at high school, Ann Marie Domergue signed a contract with Warner Brothers and made her first on-screen appearance as a walk-on in the 1941 “Blues in the Night”. After graduating high school in 1942, Domergue pursued her career in acting; but after sustaining injuries in a near fatal automobile accident, she put her plans on hold. While recuperating, she attended a Howard Hughes yacht party.

Howard Hughes, emanored with her, bought her contract from Warner Brothers and signed her to a three picture deal with RKO Pictures. She was cast as the lead in the 1950 thriller “Vendetta”. The film had a four year troubled production period and, after its release in 1950, was dismissed as a trivial, slow paced period piece. After the film release, Domergue separated from Hughes and freelanced as an actor.

Domergue played a femme fatale in the 1950 film noir “Where Danger Lives”, opposite Robert Mitchum and Claude Rains. Signing a contract with Universal Pictures in 1953, she appeared opposite Audie Murphy in the western adventure “The Duel at Silver Creek”. In 1955, she appeared in another western, “Santa Fe Passage” playing Aurelie Saint Clair, an ammunition retailer on a wagon train, opposite John Payne and Rod Cameron.

Domergue then appeared in a series of science fiction films which earned her the reputation as an early “scream queen”, the films’ damsel in distress. The first was the “Cult of the Cobra” released in 1955 where airmen discover a cult of snake worshippers. Faith Domergue played the female lead role of the cult leader who transforms herself into a deadly cobra.

The next role was in the now famous sci-fi movie “It Came from Beneath the Sea” produced by Columbia Pictures. This 1954 film about a giant octopus was a major commercial success, grossing almost two million dollars at the box office and later becoming a cult classic. She played marine biologist Lesley Joyce who helped destroy the creature with an atomic torpedo. The following year, Domergue starred in the first color sci-fi film “This Island Earth”, which received praise for its writing and inventive special effects.

By the late 1960s, Domergue was appearing mainly in low-budget “B” horror movies and European productions. She relocated to Europe permanently in 1968, moving from Rome to Geneva, Switzerland, and Marbella, Spain. Her final film credit was for the 1974 “The House of Seven Corpses”, an independent horror film shot in Salt Lake City. Faith Domergue spent her later years in retirement in Palo Alto, California. She died on April 4, 1999, of unspecified cancer at the age of 74.

Dog Effigy

Dog Effigy Ceramic Pot, Date Unknown, Mexico, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland

Among the Aztecs of highland Mexico, dogs were associated with the deity Xolotl, the god of death. This deity and a dog were believed to lead the soul on its journey to the underworld. The Mexica also associated Xolotl with the planet Venus as the evening star and the twin brother of the deity QuetzalcГіatl, who personified Venus as the morning star. The dog’s special relationship with humans is highlighted by a number of Colima dog effigies wearing humanoid masks.

This curious effigy type has been interpreted as a shamanic transformation image or as a reference to the modern Huichol myth of the origin of the first wife, who was transformed from a dog into a human. However, recent scholarship suggests a new explanation of these sculptures as the depiction of the animal’s tonalli, its inner essence, which is made manifest by being given human form via the mask. The use of the human face to make reference to an object’s or animal’s inner spirit is found in the artworks of many ancient cultures of the Americas, from the Inuit of Alaska and northern Canada to peoples in Argentina and Chile.

Gol Stavkirke

Gol Stavkirke, Oslo, Norway, 1212 AD

Gol Stave Church (Gol Stavkirke) is a stave church originally from Gol, Hallingdal, Norway. It is now located in the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History at Bygdøy in Oslo, Norway. When the city built a new church around 1880, it was decided to demolish the old stave church. It was saved from destruction by the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Norwegian Monuments, which bought the materials in order to re-erect the church elsewhere.

It was acquired by King Oscar II, who financed its relocation and restoration as the central building of his private open-air museum near Oslo. The restoration, overseen by architect Waldemar Hansteen, was completed in 1885. In 1907 this early open air museum, the world’s first, was merged with the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History, which now manages the stave church, still nominally the property of the reigning monarch. The church was dated to 1212 by the characteristic patterns of the annual growth rings in the timber construction.

A modern replica of the Gol Stave Church is in the mediaval park Gordarike. The copy was built in the 1980s and consecrated by the bishop of Tunsberg in 1994. In the summer evening on Wednesdays there is a devotional and sometimes musical performance. The church is often used for weddings. The woodwork inside the church is adorned with beautiful carvings and details.

Source: dariaendresen

Art’s Reflections on Life

Art’s Reflections on Life

“What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who only has eyes, if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he is a poet, or even, if he is a boxer, just his muscles? Far from it: at the same time he is also a political being, constantly aware of the heartbreaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. How could it be possible to feel no interest in other people, and with a cool indifference to detach yourself from the very life which they bring to you so abundantly? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”
― Pablo Picasso

Source: xavier-samre

Tanabe Chikuunsai IV

Twisted Bamboo Sculptures by Tanabe Chikuunsai IV

Japanese artist Tanabe Chikuunsai IV earned a degree in sculpture from Tokyo University of the Arts and trained in bamboo crafts at a school in Beppu on the island of Kyushu, Japan.

Chikuunsai IV produces twisting installations of woven bamboo that meld into their environment’s floor and ceiling. To bend the durable material he first moistens each piece to achieve the perfect curve, and often recycles the same pieces of bamboo for future installations. In 2017 the artist constructed a site-specific piece titled “The Gate” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The work used tiger bamboo that had been used ten times, including in a piece shown at the Guimet Mueseum in Paris.

“Technique and skill and spirit are important, My parents taught me that this spirit is more important than technique. Using bamboo, I try to keep the spirit and tradition in my heart as I create new work.” -Tanabe Chikuunsai IV

Calendar: June 15

A Year: Day to Day Men: 15th of June

Black and Yellow Plaid

On June 15, 1878,  photographer Eadweard Muybridge used high-speed photography to capture a  horse’s motion.

Former California Governor Leland Stanford was an imperious, headstrong captain of industry who had helped build the transcontinental railroad and would later found the university that bears his son’s name. He retired to the life of a country horse breeder; and he wanted proof of what his eyes told him: that a horse has all four feet in the air during some parts of his stride.

Many photographers at that time were still using exposures of 15 seconds to one minute. Automatic shutters were in their infancy: expensive and unreliable. Eadweard Muybridge, a successful landscape photographer at that time, devised more-sensitive emulsions and worked on elaborate shutter devices. He also rigged a trip wire across a racetrack, letting the horse’s chest push against the wire to engage an electric circuit that opened a slat-shaped shutter mechanism to make the exposure.

This system produced an “automatic electro-photograph” on July 1, 1877. It showed Occident, a Stanford-owned  racehorse, seemingly with all four feet off the ground. The press and the public failed to accept this as proof, however, because what they actually saw was obviously retouched. (The photo had been reproduced by painting it, then photographing the painting, then making a woodcut of the photo for the printing on paper.)

Muybridge continued his labors with the engineering help of Stanford’s Central Pacific Railroad. They installed 12 evenly spaced trip wires on Stanford’s Palo Alto racetrack. When a horse pulled a two-wheeled sulky carriage over the wire, the wheels depressed the wire, pulling a switch that opened an electrical circuit that used an elastic band to open a rapid-fire sliding shutter mechanism in the side of a purpose-built shack. Inside the shack, behind a row of 12 shutters, was a row of 12 cameras. Opposite the shack was a white wall with vertical lines matching the distance of the trip wires and cameras.

So, on June 15, 1878, before assembled gentlemen of the press, Stanford’s top trainer drove Stanford’s top trotter across the trip wires at about 40 feet per second, setting off all 12 cameras in rapid succession in less than half a second. About 20 minutes later, Muybridge showed the freshly developed photographic plates. The horse, indeed, lifted all four legs off the ground during its stride. Remarkably, this was not in the front-and-rear-extended “rocking-horse posture” some had expected, but in a tucked posture, with all four feet under the horse.

Muybridge refined his invention, increasing the cameras from one to two dozen, and developed an electromagnetic timer that opened shutters independently of any trip wires. That allowed him to study the nonlinear motions of other four-footed animals, human athletes, a nude descending a staircase and even birds. Muybridge went on to publish a series of finely printed, large-format books of his stop-motion photographs.

Steven Erikson: “Shadow is Ever Besieged, for That is Its Nature”

Photographer Unknown, (Light and Shadow Upon a Figure)

“Shadow is ever besieged, for that is its nature. Whilst darkness devours, and light steals. And so one sees shadow ever retreat to hidden places, only to return in the wake of the war between dark and light.”

― Steven Erikson, House of Chains