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.

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock, “Pasiphae”, 1943, Oil on Canvas, 142.6 x 243.8 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Finished just after Pollock’s first exhibition in 1943 at Peggy Guggenheim’s New York gallery, Art of This Century, Pasiphaë is the largest of the painter’s mythologically themed pictures of the mid-1940s. Originally named Moby Dick, the picture was retitled before it was exhibited in 1944 when James Johnson Sweeney, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, related the story of the Cretan princess Pasiphaë who gave birth to the half-man, half-bull Minotaur. The Minotaur had been a favorite motif of Picasso and of the Surrealists (Minotaure had been the name of their literary magazine from 1933 to 1939, for which Picasso had designed the first cover).

Here Pollock incorporates two sentinel-like standing figures at the left and right and a prostrate figure at center. Pollock weaves these figures into a complex field of arcane symbols and free-form abstraction, his own novel interpretation of the Surrealist practice of automatism, wherein the artist’s unconscious is used to organize composition.

Antoine Laurent Dantan

Antoine Laurent Dantan, “Young Bather Playing with His Dog”, Marble, 1833, Louvre, Paris

Antoine Laurent Dantan, also known as ‘Dantan the Elder’ distinguishing from his younger brother also a sculptor, was born in Saint-Cloud, France, in December of 1798. He and his brother entered the studio of Francois-Joseph Bosio at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts at the same time in 1823. Antoine Dantan wone the Prix de Rome for sculpture in 1828.

Sculpted by Dantan during his stay in Rome, the “Young Bather Playing with His Dog” was exhibited at the Salon of 1835. The sculpture of marble, 1.05 meters in height, was purchased by the Louvre in 1835 and resides at the Department of Sculptures, Richelieu, on the ground floor of the Louvre.

Misha Gordin

Photography by Misha Gordin

Misha Gordin was born in 1946, the first year after World War II ended. Having survived the hardships of evacuation, Gordin’s parents returned back home to Riga, Latvia, after the war which was then under Soviet occupation. Growing up among the Russian speaking population of Latvia, Russian became Gordin’s root culture.

Gordin started to photograph when he was nineteen, driven by his desire to create a personal style and vision. He was involved in portraiture and did some documentary shots, but soon realized the results were unsatisfactory. Putting his camera aside, Gordin concentrated on reading (Dostoevsky, Bulgakov) and cinematography (Tarkovsky, Parajanov). He was constantly looking for the right way to express personal feelings and thoughts using photography.

One year later it came to him clearly and simply. Gordin decided to photograph “concepts” rather than the literal capturing of a moment on film. In 1972, Gordin created his first, and most important image, ‘Confession’. Instantly recognizing the potential possibilities of his conceptual approach and the knowledge acquired from creating this image,

Russian Red Army Choir, “Song of the Volga Boatmen”

Russian Red Army Choir, “Song of the Volga Boatmen” with Leonid Kharitonov

The “Song of the Volga Boatmen” is a well-known traditional Russian song collected by Mily Balakirev, and published in his book of folk songs in 1866. It was sung by burlaks, or barge-haulers, on the Volga River. Balakirev published it with only one verse (the first). The other two verses were added at a later date. Ilya Repin’s famous painting, Barge Haulers on the Volga, depicts such burlaks in Tsarist Russia toiling along the Volga.

The song was popularised by Feodor Chaliapin, and has been a favourite concert piece of bass singers ever since. Glenn Miller’s jazz arrangement took the song to #1 in the US charts in 1941. Russian composer Alexander Glazunov based one of the themes of his symphonic poem “Stenka Razin” on the song.

Spanish composer Manuel De Falla wrote an arrangement of the song, which was published under the name Canto de los remeros del Volga (del cancionero musical ruso) in 1922. He did so at the behest of diplomat Ricardo Baeza, who was working with the League of Nations to provide financial relief for the more than two million Russian refugees who had been displaced and imprisoned during World War I. All proceeds from the song’s publication were donated to this effort. Igor Stravinsky made an arrangement for orchestra.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Cinelli

Photographer Unknown, Cinelli

Cinelli is an Italian bicycle manufacturing company based in Milan, Italy. It was founded in 1948 by Cino Cinelli, a former professional road racer and president of the Italian Cyclists’ Association. He was a professional racer from 1937 to 1944, winning the Milan-San Remo in 1943, the Giro di Lombardia in 1938, and the Tour of the Apennines in 1937.

Victoria Topping

Victoria Topping, “Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders”

Victoria Topping has worked with designing the identity of an independent record label; designed and made many bespoke wallpapers; hand painted murals; been an interior designer and designed and installed a record shop, club and created the artwork for several festivals. Her work has found its way on to a successful greetings card range and even on to a nice bottle of french wine. Above all her favorite thing is to create and sell prints and original works through her online shop

She draws inspiration from her passion for music, specifically Jazz, Soul, Funk, Disco and World music. This vibrant scene has given her an everlasting source of joy and focus. She collects records and any visual snapshots she can find of the musicians and dancers she admires, from her favourite avant jazz composer Sun-Ra right through to her favorite disco star Sylvester, and even dipping in to the colour palette of Soul train.

Craig D. Lounsbrough: “The Magic of Those Dense Snowfalls”

Photographer Unknown, (Thumbs Up)

“It was always the magic of those dense snowfalls that bedecked the landscape in a whitened splendor and rendered the horizon cloaked to invisibility in winter’s frosty veil. And in the rapture of such moments, you find yourself pressed beyond any and all means of resistance to hold onto anything except the majesty of the ascending moment. And being held a willing hostage, it takes but a moment of these moments to realize that everything around you has been swept up in just the same way, leaving you joined with the whole of creation that is both quieted in awe, but likewise raucous in praise.”

–Craig D. Lounsbrough

Gio Black Peter

Gio Black Peter, “Don’t Let Me Down”, Oil and Acrylic on Canvas,  2016

Gio Black Peter (born Giovanni Andrade Paolo Guevara) is a New York based performance artist as well as an ardent visual artist. He examines text and subject, truth and fakery, rebellion and authority. His subversive work has quickly earned him a name in the downtown New York scene of young emerging artists who participate in today’s dialogue about the deconstruction of high profile, white box presentation and the desire to raise art awareness.

At the core of Black Peter’s thinking is the idea that the life of art depends on the viewer’s willingness to suspend his or her rational thoughts and play into the believability of lies and realistic falsehoods. Familiarity and a seductive aesthetic draw the viewer back to Black Peter’s art- a visceral exploration of vulnerability and self-reflection.

Roland Rafael Repczuk

Roland Rafael Repczuk, Title Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 1999

Roland Rafael Repczuk is a surrealistic painter from Hanerau-Hademarschen, Germany. He mixes his own oil paints out of light-fast pigments. He also does mosaic panels of Venetian glass pieces.

Roland Rafael Repczuk was born in 1963 in Kassel, a city located on the Fulda River in northern Hesse, Germany. He relocated, with his family, to Euskirchen, a seven-hundred year old city close to Cologne, Germany. Influenced by the artwork of german painter and sculptor Joseph Beuys and American craftsman Gustav Bereur, Repczuk decided to pursue an art career. 

Roland Repczuk exhibited his first works at an action art exhibition held in July of 1980 in Carqueiranne, located in southeastern France. This was followed by several exhibitions in the city of Euskirchen in 1981. After extensive traveling through Europe, Repczuk moved to the south of France and changed his style in 1985 from contemporary modern to a more tradition craft. Since then, he has had many exhibitions of his work in Germany and throughout Europe.

Using the techniques of the old master painters, Roland Repczuk creates realistic oil paintings of a surrealistic nature. At the end of 1990, he moved back to Germany with his family, settling in Hamburg and continued producing his paintings, mosaics and frescoes.

Sir Stanley Spencer

Sir Stanley Spencer, “The Bridge”, Oil on Canvas, 1920, Tate Museum

Sir Stanley Spencer CBE RA was an English painter. Shortly after leaving the Slade School of Art, Spencer became well known for his paintings depicting Biblical scenes occurring as if in Cookham, the small village beside the River Thames where he was born and spent much of his life. Spencer referred to Cookham as “a village in Heaven” and in his biblical scenes, fellow-villagers are shown as their Gospel counterparts.

Spencer was skilled at organising multi-figure compositions such as in his large paintings for the Sandham Memorial Chapel and for the ‘Shipbuilding on the Clyde’ series which was a commission for the War Artists’ Advisory Committee during World War Two. As his career progressed Spencer often produced landscapes for commercial necessity and the intensity of his early visionary years diminished somewhat while elements of eccentricity came more to the fore. Although his compositions became more claustrophobic and his use of colour less vivid he maintained an attention to detail in his paintings akin to that of the Pre-Raphaelites.

Spencer’s work frequently combined real and imagined elements. As a result, his paintings have a strong sense of narrative even if the subject is not wholly explicable. He painted “The Bridge” in a temporary studio in the Fee School, Maidenhead. The subject is believed to be spectators watching a boat race, probably the annual Cookham Regatta. They are standing on an invented stone bridge instead of Cookham’s cast-iron bridge, although the decorative quatrefoil motifs are taken from the metal version. The Airedale terrier dog lying on the bridge was called Tinker. Tinker belonged to a Cookham resident, Guy Lacey, who taught Stanley Spencer and his brother Gilbert to swim.