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.

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.

Francois-Xavier and Claude Lalanne

Photographer Unknown, “Francois-Xavier and Claude Lalanne in the Pigeon Chairs”, 1974

François-Xavier Lalanne: Born in Agen, France, 1927. Died in Ury, France, 2008. Claude Lalanne: Born in Paris, France, 1924.

Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne are part of a long, brilliant tradition of Western dilettantes. That is, they are part of a stream of the thoroughly interested sort, who, having deeply submerged themselves in literature, the fine arts and various histories—ancient, lateral and celestial—surfaced with delight and an impish sense of how things aren’t.

For the Lalannes, in the company of other folly-makers like Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Prince Pier Francesco Orsini, Piero Fornasetti and Jean Cocteau, were not concerned with bolstering existing conventions of how we eat or how we sit or ultimately how we see and think, but playfully inverting norms and exaggerating ordinary aspects to fantastic effect.

Claude and François-Xavier met in Paris in the early 1950s, at an exhibition of François-Xavier’s paintings. They were together until his death in 2008. Their working practice was fairly unique, as they always kept separate studios—Claude preferring to express flora in hers and François-Xavier giving form to strange fauna in his. But quite early on they eschewed first names, and all subsequent work (no matter the creator) was to bear the mark of only “Lelanne.”

They were close friends, personally and idealistically, with many of the leading artists of midcentury Paris (Yves Tinguely, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Salvador Dali). François-Xavier’s first studio was even adjacent to Constantin Brâncusi’s—interestingly enough, he took the studio as a painter and left a sculptor.

Henry Moore

Henry Moore, “Sheep”, Drawings, Lithographs and Sculptures

The sculptor Henry Moore saw a stark link between the rock that was both his material and inspiration, and the grazing calmness of sheep.  The animals stand out in the landscape in the same, oblique way, providing an aesthetic of both fitting in and being anomalous; they litter the vista in a way that is puzzling and warmly mysterious.

Roger Deakin, the English cinematographer,  saw this relationship himself when walking the Rhinogs where he writes of seeing that same relationship that sparked Moore’s fascination with sheep:  “I watched a ewe standing between two big rocks the shape of goat’s cheeses.  They were just far enough apart to allow the animal in, and I began to understand the relationship Henry Moore perceived between sheep and stones.  He saw sheep as animate stones, the makers of their own landscape.”

This permeable position between the maker and the made is perhaps what attracted the sculptor to the animal, leading him to produce a range of sketches in pen and ink (largely a ball-point pen in fact) that would make up his eventual 1980 publication, Henry Moore’s “Sheep Sketchbook”.

Bruce Crown: “His Actions Thus Far. . .”

 

Photographer Unknown, (His Actions Thus Far. . .)

“I squinted to the side towards him for a second and he caught my gaze almost immediately; his inky irises were comfortable enough to hold my stare indefinitely, his pupils seemed entirely ravenous as opposed to the feminist preferred oceanic turquoise, which for them is a physical demarcation of emotional sensitivity. He seemed like an uncanny bad guy any which way I looked at him, except of course, by his actions thus far…”

― Bruce Crown

Jason Hackenwerth

Jason Hackenwerth, “Crown of Thorns”, Latex Balloons

New York artist Jason Hackenwerth created the above in 2006 as part of “Honeysuckle Labyrinth” exhibit for the New Museum Gala in New York City. The artwork on display consisted of insect-like forms that rotated slowly on air currents, seemingly interacting with each other.

Hackenwerth chooses balloons as his medium because he feels they add an instantly recognizable characteristic to his creations—which he describes as microorganisms that communicate about connectivity.

Winter’s Snow

Photographer Unknown, (Winter’s Snow)

“There’s an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem that’s been rumbling around inside me ever since I first read it, and part of it goes: ‘Blown from the dark hill hither to my door/ Three flakes, then four/ Arrive, then many more.’ You can count the first three flakes, and the fourth. Then language fails, and you have to settle in and try to survive the blizzard”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

Grant Wood

Grant Wood, “The Birthplace of Herbert Hoover, West Branch, Iowa”, Oil on Composition Board, 1931, The John R. Van Derlip Fund; owned jointly with the Des Moines Art Center

Wood places the viewer at the crest of a steep hill, looking down into a green valley where a tour guide points to a small cottage beside a larger white house. But this is not an ordinary cottage – it is the place where Herbert Hoover was born.

Typical of Grant Wood’s Regionalist style, everything is neat and regimented, evoking the simplified forms of American folk art. Many tiny straight brushstrokes define the trim lawns, creating a rhythmic pattern across much of the painting, and patterned clumps of enormous autumnal leaves define the trees. Unrealistically, all of the forms, whether close or distant, are bathed in the same clear light and described with the same precise detail.

Wood did not re-create the scene as it may have looked at the president’s birth. Instead he painted it as the tourist attraction it had become. Upon Hoover’s election to the presidency, the ordinary cottage, which had been turned into a kitchen by later owners, began to attract visitors from all over the country. The owner of the cottage charged visitors ten cents for tours of it and set up a souvenir stand. Wood included a sign in front of the house and a pink rock in which the Daughters of the American Revolution had placed a plaque identifying the house as Hoover’s birthplace.

The Three

Photographer Unknown, (The Three)

“Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need – a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing. ”
― Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat