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.

Paul Signac

Paul Signac, “Place des Lices- Saint Tropez”, Oil on Canvas, 1893, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

Paul Signac’s move to the tiny Mediterranean town of St. Tropez in 1892, the year after his friend and mentor Georges Seurat died, was motivated partly by his love of the sea and sailing but mainly by his weariness with the hectic life in Paris and by his desire to modify aspects of Neo-Impressionism. During the early 1890s, Signac began to find the effort of transcribing visual experience with the painstaking pointillist technique increasingly less satisfying.

He wrote, “I shall no longer worry about nature. It is very difficult to paint properly from nature, where one is distracted by its harmonies, by the slightest reflection…I attach more and more importance to purity of brushstroke…” Place des Lices, St. Tropez comes from this important transitional period in Signac’s art. This painting of majestic trees represents a shift in Signac’s choice of motif, a departure from the constant motion of sailboats, clouds, and water to comparative stasis.

Signac surely found satisfaction in the strong arabesque lines of the trees in the Place des Lices, and he used their patterns of shadows and filtered light to animate the painting’s foreground. The angle of sight, reminiscent of earlier Impressionist vistas through allées of trees, establishes a tunnel-like view into the distance, beyond the shadows of the plaza. A single seated figure sets the painting’s tone of tranquil solitude.

The painting is filled with obvious but delightful contrasts—for example, between the seven large plane trees in the foreground and the single tiny cypress in the background. It also makes an association between the cypress and the seated man, each of which is a fulcrum for forms balanced on either side.

Troy Morrison

Troy Morrison, “Earth Whale”, Steampunk Sculpture

Steampunk is an inspired movement of creativity and imagination. With a backdrop of either Victorian England or America’s Wild West at hand, modern technologies are re-imagined and realized as elaborate works of art, fashion, and mechanics. If Jules Verne or H.G. Wells were writing their science fiction today, it would be considered steampunk.

Troy Morrison is an Australian sculpture who works in the steampunk mode. The whale sculpture took three years to complete. The body of the whale is made from an old Ford Gearbox while the rest of the whale comprises of copper and vintage parts from trains, WW2 planes, cars and boats.

The Boundary Wall

Photographer Unknown, (The Boundary Wall)

“There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.

Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.”

― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

 

Leigh J Mccluskey

Paintings by Leigh J Mccluskey

Leigh Joseph McCloskey is an American artist, actor, and writer. As an actor, he has appeared in numerous television shows and movies, including a 46-episode stint as Mitch Cooper on the popular American soap opera “Dallas”, and a leading role in the Dario Argento-helmed supernatural horror film “Inferno”.

Leigh J. McCloskey is also a painter. His work delves into ideas of religion, mythology, philo-Sophia and esotericism to string theory, quantum physics and the multidimensional nature of consciousness. He has deeply studied Hermeticism, Alchemy and the Kabbala and presents these ideas in his paintings..

Footprintz, “Heaven Felt like Night”

Footprintz, “Heaven Felt like Night” from the Album “Escape Yourself”

Footprintz is a dance electronic band formed by Clarian North and Andy Weitzman under the label of Visionquest.

What becomes apparent throughout ‘Escape Yourself’ is a real craftsmanship to Footprintz’s songwriting. Each track reveals a little more on each listen, aided by the slick production work, done predominantly by the guys themselves in their Montreal bunker studio full of analogue equipment, odd instruments and a fridge laden with ‘special brownies’; which goes some way to explain a noirish-haze that permeates through the album.

Having met at an afterparty aged 15, Clarian North & Adam Hunter have experienced most of their adult life together. ‘Escape Yourself’ distills their experiences, wraps them in a warm analogue fuzz and shares them with the listener. You join them on their journey, and deep down they hope it helps you shape your own.

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

Vivian Dorothy Maier

 

Photography of Vivian Dorothy Maier

Vivian Dorothy Maier was an American street photographer. Maier worked for about forty years as a nanny, mostly in Chicago’s North Shore, pursuing photography during her spare time. She took more than 150,000 photographs during her lifetime, primarily of the people and architecture of New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles, although she also traveled and photographed worldwide.

During her lifetime, Maier’s photographs were unknown and unpublished, and she never printed many of her negatives. A Chicago collector, John Maloof, acquired some of Maier’s photos in 2007, while two other Chicago-based collectors, Ron Slattery and Randy Prow, also found some of Maier’s prints and negatives in her boxes and suitcases around the same time. Maier’s photographs were first published on the Internet in July 2008, by Slattery, but the work received little response.

In October 2009, Maloof linked his blog to a selection of Maier’s photographs on the image-sharing website Flickr, and the results went “viral”, with thousands of people expressing interest. Critical acclaim and interest in Maier’s work quickly followed, and since then, Maier’s photographs have been exhibited in North America, Europe, Asia and South America while her life and work have been the subject of books and documentary films.

Netflix Streaming has a great documentary about Vivian Maier’s life and discovery and subsequent printing of her work. There are also many interviews with families who employed Vivian Maier as a nanny. A great film about a little known very talented artist.

Notes: Header images 5 and 9 are self-portraits.

Hermann Hesse: “You Should Long for the Perfection of Yourself””

Photographer Unknown, (Green Down Jacket)

“Oh, if only it were possible to find understanding,” Joseph exclaimed. “If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn’t there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?”

The master had never heard him speak so fervently. He walked on in silence for a little, then said: “There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught. Be prepared for conflicts, Joseph Knecht – I can see that they already have begun.

-Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

Henri Le Fauconnier

Henri Le Fauconnier, “Les Montagnards Attaqués par des Ours”, (Mountaineers Attacked by Bears), Oil on Canvas, 1912, Rhode Island School of Design Museum

Henri Victor Gabriel Le Fauconnier was a French Cubist painter born in Hesdin. Le Fauconnier was seen as one of the leading figures among the Montparnasse Cubists. At the 1911 Salon des Indépendants Le Fauconnier and colleagues Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger and Robert Delaunay caused a scandal with their Cubist paintings.

He was in contacts with many European avant-garde artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, writing a theoretical text for the catalogue of the Neue Künstlervereinigung in Munich, of which he became a member.  Le Fauconnier exhibited his vast “Les Montagnards Attaqués par des Ours” at the Salon d’Automne of 1912 in Paris.