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.

Annie Dillard: “Something is Already Here, and More is Coming”

Photographer Unknown, (Orion Emerges)

“The North washes down the mountains like a waterfall, like a tidal wave, and pours across the valley; it comes to me. It sweetens the persimmons and numbs the last of the crickets and hornets; it fans the flames of the forest maples, bows the meadow’s seeded grasses and pokes it chilling fingers under the leaf litter, thrusting the springtails and the earthworms deeper into the earth. The sun heaves to the south by day, and at night wild Orion emerges looming like the Specter over Dead Man Mountain. Something is already here, and more is coming.”

-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Shaun Tan

Shaun Tan, “Never Eat the Last Olive at a Party” from His Graphic Novel “Rules of Summer”

Shaun Tan is an Australian artist, writer and film maker. He won an Academy Award for “The Lost Thing”, a 2011 animated film adaptation of a 2000 picture book he wrote and illustrated. Other books he has written and illustrated include  Red Tree” and “The Arrival”.

Tan was born in Fremantle, Western Australia, in 1974 and grew up in the northern suburbs of Perth, Western Australia. In 2006, his wordless graphic novel The Arrival won the Book of the Year prize as part of the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards. The same book won the Children’s Book Council of Australia Picture Book of the Year award in 2007, and the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards Premier’s Prize in 2006

“In a book that reads like an homage to The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, Lindgren award-winner Shaun Tan offers a sequence of paintings that represent a boy’s cumulative summer knowledge, framed as rules and populated by Tan’s now-familiar menagerie of one-eyed robots, malevolent rabbits, and windup dinosaurs. The rules appear on the left, while lavish, brilliant paintings of the accompanying disasters light up the opposite pages.

An older boy yanks his younger brother away from a platter at a soiree full of glaring raptors (“Never eat the last olive at a party”); frowns when bats, lizards, and sea anemones move into the living room (“Never leave the back door open overnight”); and, after a fistfight, bundles the younger boy into a locomotive and sends him off through Siberian wastes (“Never lose a fight”).” – Publishers Weekly

David Nicholls: “One Day on Earth”

Photographers Unknown, (One Day on Earth)

“He wanted to live life to the extreme, but without any mess or complications. He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph. Things should look right. Fun; there should be a lot of fun and no more sadness than absolutely necessary.”

― David Nicholls, One Day

Many thanks to http://lowlanderbear.tumblr.com for the great images.

Raoul Pene Du Bois

Raoul Pene Du Bois, “Nudes Stepping Forth”, Theatrical Sketch, Painted Gouache, circa 1945, 40 x 30 Inches

Du Bois was born on Staten Island in New York City, the son of René Pène Du Bois, a banker. He started his career as a costume designer when he was 14, by designing four showgirl costumes for the Ziegfeld Follies. He went on to design the costumes for the Broadway revues “Ziegfeld Follies of 1934″, his first show and “Ziegfeld Follies of 1936″.

Du Bois designed the costumes and/or the scenery for some 48 Broadway shows, starting in 1934 with the “Ziegfeld Follies of 1934″ and his last, “Reggae” in 1980; his designs were used in Jerome Robbins’ “Broadway” in 1989. Among his work was “Gypsy””(1959) and many other musicals starring Ethel Merman. He worked on Billy Rose’s Aquacade for the New York World’s Fair (1939–40).

He won the 1971 Tony Award and Drama Desk Award, Best Costume Design for “No, No, Nanette” and the 1953 Tony Award, Best Scenic Design, for “Wonderful Town” and was nominated for the Tony Award, Costume Design, for “Sugar Babies” (1980), “Doctor Jazz” (1975) and “Gypsy” (1960), and for scenic design for “The Student Gypsy” (1964).

https://www.1stdibs.com  Reference Number LU86512102682

Donal Hord

Donal Hord, “Morning”, Black Granite, 1951-1955

“Morning” by Donal Hord, a San Diego artist, is in the Embarcadero Maria Park at Seaport Village, California. The six foot figure made from black granite is a figure of a muscular man, waking in the morning. The man sits on a base of symbols, the sun and moon, fangs and corn. The fangs are an Aztec symbol of man’s birth from the earth and corn is both a Mexican and American Indian symbol for the basic source of life giving food.

Donal Hord carved the sculpture between 1951 and 1955, keeping it at his home. The sculpture was acquired by the Port of San Diego in 1983, twenty three years after his death. Having lived in San Diego most of his life, many of his large outdoor sculptures are located in the city.

Sir Frederic Leighton

Sir Frederic Leighton, 1st Baron PRA, “The Athlete Wrestling a Python”, Bronze, 1877

Frederic Leighton was an English painter and sculptor. His works depicted historical, biblical, and classical subject matter. Leighton was bearer of the shortest-lived peerage in history.  Leighton was the first painter to be given a peerage, in the New Year Honours List of 1896. The patent creating him Baron Leighton, of Stretton in the County of Shropshire, was issued on 24 January 1896; Leighton died the next day of angina pectoris.

Leighton received his artistic training on the European continent, first from Eduard von Steinle and then from Giovanni Costa. At age 17 in the summer of 1847, he met the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer in Frankfurt and painted his portrait, in graphite and gouache on paper—the only known full-length study of Schopenhauer done from life. In Florence at the age of twenty-four, Leighton studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti and painted his 1853-1855 “Cimabue’s Madonna Carried in Procession”, a large-scaled work which originally hung in the Music Room at Buckingham Palace in 1862. From 1855 to 1859, Leighton lived in Paris, where he met Ingres, Delacroix, Corot and Millet.

The supposition that Frederic Leighton may have been homosexual continues to be debated today. He certainly enjoyed an intense and romantically tinged relationship with the poet Henry William Greville whom he met in Florence in 1856. The older man showered Leighton with letters, but the romantic affection seems not to have been reciprocated. Enquiry is furthermore hindered by the fact that Leighton left no diaries and his letters are telling in their lack of reference to his personal circumstances. No definite primary evidence has yet come to light that effectively dispels the secrecy that Leighton built up around himself, although it is clear that he did court a circle of younger men around his artistic studio.

Jason E. Hodges: “Our True Selves Should Never Be Created by Others”

 

Photographer Unknown, (The Skateboard)

“Express to our world what is alive inside us not what their world says we should be… Our true selves should never be created by others, Held in their pockets like belongings, like trinkets. We are skaters. We are artists. We are free.”

–Jason E Hodges, The Drop Off

Art with Symbols

Various Unknown Artists, Art with Symbols and Signs

Symbol. The best possible expression for something unknown.

Every psychological expression is a symbol if we assume that it states or signifies something more and other than itself which eludes our present knowledge.

Jung distinguished between a symbol and a sign. Insignia on uniforms, for instance, are not symbols but signs that identify the wearer. In dealing with unconscious material (dreams, fantasies, etc.) the images can be interpreted semiotically, as symptomatic signs pointing to known or knowable facts, or symbolically, as expressing something essentially unknown.

Whether something is interpreted as a symbol or a sign depends mainly on the attitude of the observer. Jung linked the semiotic and symbolic approaches, respectively, to the causal and final points of view. He acknowledged the importance of both.

“Psychic development cannot be accomplished by intention and will alone; it needs the attraction of the symbol, whose value quantum exceeds that of the cause. But the formation of a symbol cannot take place until the mind has dwelt long enough on the elementary facts, that is to say until the inner or outer necessities of the life-process have brought about a transformation of energy.”

– Carl Jung, “On Psychic Energy,” CW 8, par. 47