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.

Tinariwen, “Toumast Tincha”

Tinariwen, “Toumast Tincha” from the Album “Emmaar”

Tinariwen was founded by Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, who at age four witnessed the execution of his father (a Tuareg rebel) during a 1963 uprising in Mali. As a child he saw a western film in which a cowboy played a guitar. Ag Alhabib built his own guitar out of a tin can, a stick and bicycle brake wire. He started to play old Tuareg and modern Arabic pop tunes. Ag Alhabib first lived in Algeria in refugee camps near Bordj Badji Mokhtar and in the deserts around the southern city of Tamanrasset, where he received a guitar from a local Arab man. Later, he resided with other Tuareg exiles in Libya and Algeria.

In the late 1970s Ag Alhabib joined with other musicians in the Tuareg rebel community, exploring the radical chaabi protest music of Moroccan groups like Nass El Ghiwane and Jil Jilala; Algerian pop rai; and western rock and pop artists like Elvis Presley, Led Zeppelin, Carlos Santana, Dire Straits, Jimi Hendrix, Boney M, and Bob Marley. Ag Alhabib formed a group with Alhassane Ag Touhami and brothers Inteyeden Ag Ablil and Liya Ag Ablil in Tamanrasset, Algeria to play at parties and weddings. Ag Alhabib acquired his first real acoustic guitar in 1979. While the group had no official name, people began to call them Kel Tinariwen, which in the Tamashek language translates as “The People of the Deserts” or “The Desert Boys.”

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

Vince Azzopardi

Photographer Unknown, “Vince Azzopardi”, Photo Shoot, Date Unknown

“What I am in search of is not so much the gratification of a curiosity or a passion for worldly life, but something far less conditional. I do not wish to go out into the world with an insurance policy in my pocket guaranteeing my return in the event of a disappointment, like some cautious traveller who would be content with a brief glimpse of the world. On the contrary, I desire that there should be hazards, difficulties and dangers to face; I am hungry for reality, for tasks and deeds, and also for privation and suffering.”

-Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

Kawase Hasui

 

Kawase Hasui “Night Rain at Omiya”, 1930

Born in May of 1883, Hasui Kawase was one of modern Japan’s most important and prolific printmakers. He was a prominent founder of the shin-hanga, or new prints, movement whose artists executed traditional subjects in a style influenced by Western art.

At the age of twenty six, Hasui ceased working at his family’s rope and thread wholesaling business and studied Western style painting under Yōga-style artist Okada Saburōsuke for two years. Hasui then approached Nihonga artist Kiyokata Kaburagi, the leading master of the bijin-ga genre, to teach him; it was Kiyokata who gave him the name ‘Hasui’, which translates as ‘water gushing from a spring’.

At the studio of Kiyokata, Hasui studied traditional Japanese painting and ukiyo-e, a genre of art which flourished from the seventeenth though the nineteenth centuries.. He worked almost exclusively on landscape and townscape prints based on sketches and watercolors he made during travels around Japan. Hasui’s work depicted not only those famous places typical of early ukiyo-e masters, but also featured locales which were obscure in urbanizing Japan. Unlike other artists, he did include the captions and titles that were standard in traditional ukiyo-e prints. Among Hasui’s most original and best known works were his snow scenes rendered with naturalistic light, shade and texture. 

During a career which spanned over forty years, Hasui designed approximately six hundred-twenty prints and worked closely with publisher Shōzaburō Watanabe, an advocate of the shin-hanga movement. Through the efforts of American art patron Robert Miller, his work became widely known in the West. In late 1953, the government Committee for the Preservation of Intangible Cultural Treasures commissioned Hasui to make a collection of traditionally-made prints. The production of these works were carefully documented and, in 1956, he was named a Japanese Living National Treasure. 

Hasui Kawase died on November 27, 1957 at the age of seventy-four. He left a large collection of his woodblock prints and watercolors, many of which are linked to the woodblock prints, oil paintings, traditional hanging scrolls, and several folding screens. In 1979, Author Narazaki Munishige published Hasui’s biography and compiled the first comprehensive, annotated listing of all his known works

Miquel Barcelo

Works by Miquel Barcelo

Miquel Barceló was born in 1957 in Felanitx on the island of Mallorca. In 1974, Barceló made his first trip to Paris, leaving the constrained environment of Franco’s Spain for the first time. Impressed by the paintings of the avant-garde, Barceló was particularly struck by the works of Jean Dubuffet, Art Brut, and Art Informel. After taking classes at the Decorative Arts School in Palma de Mallorca that year, Barceló enrolled at the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona in 1975, where he attended classes for a few months before returning to Mallorca.

Back in Mallorca, Barceló joined the conceptual avant-garde group, “Taller Lunatic,” participating in their vanguard demonstrations and happenings enabled by the changed political circumstances after Franco’s death. At this time, Barceló experimented with making conceptual works that explored the behavior of matter and decomposition; early works included wooden and glass boxes that contained decaying foods and unorthodox, organic materials.

Over the past four decades, Barceló has explored a variety of styles, from neo-expressionist canvases to colorful still lifes and pale, thickly textured abstract paintings. An artistic nomad, Barceló draws inspiration from his time spent in varying locations; though he always returns to his native Mallorca, over the years Barceló has also worked in Barcelona, Portugal, Palermo, Paris, Geneva, New York, the Himalayas, and West Africa. Working across a wide range of mediums, including paintings, works on paper, ceramic, and bronze, Barceló has continued to experiment with the materials of his art, frequently incorporating materials from his extensive travels into his paintings.

Across this diverse body of work, there are several recurring themes. He has continued to be fascinated by the natural world, creating richly textured canvases that recall the earthly materiality of Catalan painters such as Antoni Tapies and Joan Miro, as well as compositions that study the effects of light and the ever-changing colors of the sea. He has also explored the history and traditions of painting, exploring the medium’s traditional subjects and technical challenges through his experimentation with the treatment of light, color, perspective, and composition.