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.

John Craxton

John Craxton, Title Unknown, (Blue Chair)

John Leith Craxton RA, was an English painter. He was sometimes called a neo-Romantic artist but he preferred to be known as a “kind of Arcadian”. His first solo exhibition was in London in 1942 at the Swiss Cottage Café, and his first major solo show at the Leicester Galleries in 1944. His work was seen as part of the neo-romantic revival, and his early pre-1945 work shows the influence of Sutherland and Samuel Palmer, and he was also heavily influenced by friend and patron Peter Watson.

He moved permanently to Crete from about 1970, and switched between living in Crete and in London. The writer Richard Olney remembered Craxton in Paris, en route to Greece during the summer of 1951; “Most nights, John Craxton, a young English painter, arrived to share my bed; we kept each other warm. He moved in a bucolic dreamworld, peopled with beautiful Greek goat herders. Soon he left for Greece.“

He was elected Royal Academician in 1993. Craxton lived and worked in both Chania, Crete and London. His love of Crete extended to his being one of the British Honorary Consuls there. In 2006, Craxton and his long-term partner Richard Riley were united in an official Civil Partnership. John Craxton died in 2009 at the age of eighty-seven, survived by his husband Richard.

Lois Dodd

Lois Dodd, “White Catastrophe”, Oil on Masonite, 1980, Private Collection

Lois Dodd was educated at the Cooper Union in New York City from 1945–48. She was the only woman founder of the Tanager Gallery, which was integral to the Tenth Street-avant-garde scene of the 1950s where artists began running their own coop galleries. From 1971 to 1992, Dodd taught at Brooklyn College and at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, where she served on the Board beginning in 1980 and is now Governor Emerita.

As part of the wave of New York modernists to explore the coast of Maine just after the end of the second world war, Dodd helped to change the face of painting in the state. Along with Fairfield Porter, Rackstraw Downes, Alex Katz, and Neil Welliver, Dodd began spending her summers in the Mid-Coast region surrounding Penobscot Bay. Attracted by inexpensive but rambling old farmhouses, verdant fields, and the bright sunshine of a summer’s day, these artists sought both companionship and an escape from the demands of city life.

Viktorija Stapone

Photography by Viktorija Stapone

Viktorija Stapone is a photographer-witch from Lithuania.

“I was born and raised in the country, which is very high in suicide and depression numbers. I was born in a country in which to be weak and have personal fears is a phenomenon in the society. And if you talk about it out loud you can be misunderstood for opening your personal experience. Openness can be a weapon against you.

The series of photographs is my inner emotional experience. It’s about people who are quite distant from developed society and today’s standards.
These photos are psychological portraits of human inner demons, downfalls and the ups and most importantly phobias. It’s like evidence that all the people from time to time hit the wheel of fear and fear or going through such a period is not a madness.” – Viktorija Stapone

Photographs reblogged with thanks to http://www.viktorijastapone.com. Please credit him when reblogging images. Thanks

Thirteen Senses, “Into the Fire”

Thirteen Senses, “Into the Fire”

Thirteen Senses are a post-britpop band from Penzance, Cornwall. The group released the album “The Invitation” on 27 September 2004, along with several singles: “Thru the Glass”, “Do No Wrong”, “Into the Fire” and “The Salt Wound Routine”, of which the first three have reached the UK Top 40. Their second album, “Contact”, was released in April 2007. Thirteen Senses are the only Cornish band to have a Top 20 single.

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

Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter, “Abstract Painting (613-3)”, Detail, Oil on Canvas, 1986, Collection of Preston H Haskell

The groundwork for pieces like Abstract Painting (613-3) was laid in the early 1970s, when Richter began a series of nonrepresentational paintings based on photographic enlargements of brushstrokes. Because they depict, in a highly illusionistic manner, reproductions of otherwise abstract marks, such paintings confuse the handmade and the technological, the original and the copy. Richter continued to duplicate brushstrokes until 1980, when he started to make actual abstract paintings, albeit in unconventional ways.

Abstract Painting (613-3) exemplifies the technique for which Richter is recognized today, one in which editing, subtraction, and cancellation play crucial roles. Here as elsewhere, the artist fleshed out a preliminary composition with ordinary brushes. As it was drying, he covered the hard edge of a squeegee with paint and dragged it across the surface of the canvas, an action that blended some layers but removed others, thereby revealing what was previously concealed. The resulting works are tapestries of abrasions and palimpsests, heterogeneous fields of visual incident.

Discontinuity is particularly evident in Abstract Painting (613-3), due to variations in the directionality of paint, the combination of cool and warm hues, and the presence of a vertical seam near the middle of the canvas. To the extent that it cedes some control to chance and introduces the specter of mechanicity, Richter’s process “muffles singular signs of personal expression” and trades existential drama for moderation, unlike the gestural, virtuosic canvases his paintings superficially resemble.

As with many of his abstractions after 1980, Abstract Painting (613-3)’s palette is bright and sumptuous in appearance but not necessarily in tone. For Richter, color does not signify “happiness,” he once said, but instead a “tense” or “artificial” “cheeriness” associated with “gritted teeth.”

The Ascension of Man

Artist Unknown, (The Ascension of Man), Computer Graphics, Animation Gifs

“We must try to remember everything, every movement, every stretch, every convulsion that made us how we move as we readily grow in our outer body that encompasses the planets, the suns and the moons in every other body that we touch, in every other mouth that we kissed, in every other language that we try to comprehend; for they are not the outside of a stranger, nor are they just images of our psyche, but the very being of ourselves, the dimensional levels of our very existence weaving colours in the tapestry of creation, yet the very non-existence of the template is proof of consciousness, of ascension, of Life.”
― AainaA-Ridtz, The Sacred Key — Transcending Humanity

Sophie Tucker, “Some of These Days”

Sophie Tucker, “Some of These Days”, 1926, Featuring Ted Lewis and His Band

Sophie Tucker was born as Sophia Kalish on January 13, 1884 in Russia. When she was still an infant, her parents emigrated to the United States and settled near Hartford, Connecticut. In 1903, she was briefly married to Louis Tuck; from which she decided to change her name to Tucker.

She made her debut in the Ziegfeld Follies in 1909 and made the first of her recordings, including “Some of These Days” for Edison in 1911. The tune, written by Shelton Brooks became an instant hit and her theme song, and later was the title of her autobiography published in 1945.In 1921 Tucker hired pianist Ted Shapiro as her accompanist and musical director. Shapiro would remain with Tucker the rest of her career, and was also her lifelong friend.

Tucker made her first movie appearance in the 1929 early sound motion picture “Honky Tonk” where she was billed with her nickname, ‘The Last of the Red Hot Mammas’. Her hearty sexual appetite was a frequent subject of her songs, unusual for female performers of the era. In 1938, due to her efforts to unionize professional actors, she was elected President of the American Federation of Actors.

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