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.

Samurai Champloo

“Samurai Champloo” is a Japanese anime series developed by the Japanese animation and production company Manglobe. The production team was lead by director Shinichiro Watanabe, character designer Kazuto Nakazawa and mechanical designer Mahiro Maeda. This series was Watanabe’s first directorial effort for an anime television series after his critically acclaimed “Cowboy Bebop”.  “Samurai Champloo” ran for twenty-six episodes from May of 2004 until March of 2005.

The series blended historical Edo-period backdrops with modern styles and references. The show dealt with the Shimabara Rebellion in Edo-era Japan, the restriction of Japanese foreign relations exclusive of the Netherlands, the art of ukiyo-e painting, and fictionalized appearances of real-life Edo-era personalities. Artistic license trumped accuracy and the music score used contemporary music.

Paul Jacoulet

Paul Jacoulet, “Boy with Dragonfly”, Date Unknown, Woodblock Print

Paul Jacoulet is renowned for his stunningly intricate designs, his eloquently romantic subjects and his complex printing techniques.  He was born in Paris in 1902 and moved to Japan with his family at the age of four. He developed skills in drawing, music and languages early on, speaking Japanese, French and English fluently. World War One and the devastating 1923 earthquake that effectively leveled Tokyo had a profound effect on Jacoulet.

Jacoulet left his job as a translator and resolved to focus entirely on his true passion: art.  Having been intensely moved by the works of Gauguin on a recent visit to Paris, Jacoulet departed for the South Seas, visiting Saipan, Truk, Rota, Titian and dozens of small atolls, where he filled up several sketch books with copious drawings and notes of the local people and landscapes. By 1930, he had added subjects from Korea, Mongolia and Manchuria.

Jacoulet produced his first woodblock print in 1934.  His technical requirements for the craftsmanship of his prints were so demanding that he could only work with the best, most talented printers.  He employed some very elaborate techniques and materials, including features such as embossing, lacquers, micas and the use of metal pigments and powdered semi-precious stones. Jacoulet was involved in very facet of the production and published many of his prints himself, selling them by way of subscription.  To keep costs down, he would print only enough to fill the subscriptions, and so often printed far less than the proposed edition number would suggest.

Jacoulet was a self-promoter and sent prints to famous people to enhance his reputation. Mrs. Douglas MacArthur received an annual Christmas gift, and Jacoulet’s work hung in the general’s headquarters in Tokyo and later at the Waldorf-Astoria. Jacoulet was flamboyantly and openly gay at a time when that was not accepted. His sexual orientation and gender fluidity are clearly reflected in his work. Near the end of his life Jacoulet was barred from entering the U.S. due to his “undesirability” as a gay person. Undeterred, he dressed up in a white suit and, carrying a silver-headed cane, walked into the U.S. at Niagara Falls.

In Jacoulet’s best work, images of the most extravagantly aristocratic exoticism stand beside spare studies of the very poor.  This balance of sentiment and objectivity, spiced by imagination, is the life work of an eccentric and passionate artist who was influenced by both the East and West, yet stands firmly and defiantly outside of both traditions.

Tara Geer

 

Top Image: Tara Geer, “Trying to Fly”, 2013, Charcoal, Pencil and Pastel on Paper, 47 x 55.25 Inches

Bottom Image: Tara Geer, “Fluent in Darkness”, Date Unknown, Charcoal, Pencil and Pastel on Paper, 30 x 40 Inches

Tara Geer was born in Boston, and received from Columbia University both her BA – a double major in Art and Art History, graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa – and her MFA, receiving a teaching fellowship as well as the Louis Sudler Prize for excellence in the arts and the Joan Sovern Prize from Columbia’s School of the Arts.

Currently, she is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at Columbia and in Art and Art Education at Teachers College. Geer also trains teachers and staff in “Visual Thinking Strategies” at the Brooklyn Museum, El Museo, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation, among others.

From observation, Tara explores life’s quiet details, the heft of an object, the spaces between close parts, the feel of a thing – externally informed but internally impelled. Her drawings are often large and kinetic charcoal universes, neither bodies nor landscapes but microcosmic resolutions of form and psyche. Sometimes they are exploding webs of cells and scaffolding, thumbprints and scrawl, while other times they are more figurative, familiar, discrete.

 

Bi Jianye

 

Born in 1985, Bi Jianye is an emerging artist originally from Dandong city in the Liaoning province of China.  He now lives and works in Shenyang. Jianye has been showing with Platform China,  one of Beijing’s most important contemporary art galleries, since graduating in 2008 from the Department of Oil Painting at the LuXun Academy of
 Fine Arts in Shenyang.

Bi Jianye’s recent paintings feature scenes from nature, but with a difference, as they reveal an out-of-place still life motif, or box, carefully placed into the composition. The box may be a comment that refers to the artist as a lonely and isolated figure in society, or perhaps refers to humanity’s forceful intervention with nature and the environment.

Bi Jianye uses thick paint that reveal carefully painted surfaces, using a muted palette of browns and creams to create quiet and assured compositions made by an artist confident in his art.

Mikael Joansson, “Ezra Miller”

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Mikael Joansson, “Ezra Miller”, from Interview Magazine November 2017

Mikael Jansson is a leading fashion photographer/director currently living in London and working worldwide. During the mid-nineties he gained notoriety creating epic features for some of the leading avant-garde publications of the era. He is renowned for his technical prowess and emotionally charged images, spanning across all genres.

Among his influences he credits legendary master photographer Richard Avedon who he worked with in the late eighties. Mikael Jansson’s spirit of adventure and travel has taken him to spectacular locations around the world on assignment for publications such as W Magazine, Vogue, Vogue Paris and Vogue Nippon. He regularly contributes to Interview Magazine, shooting celebrity cover features as well as influential actors, musicians and designers.

Fabiola Forns Art: A Stunning Bird

Fabiola Forns, “Wedding Bells (Great Egret in Mating Display)”, 2012, Color Print

Fabiola Forns Art is a husband and wife team of photographers who share a passion for nature photography.  Fabs teaches photography at Miami-Dade College and Alfred has a successful dental practice. They are both award winning photographers, with Nature’s Best and NANPA selecting their work. Since joining the Photographic Society of America, the team has became Mentors for new members.

Images from Fabiola Forns Art can be found at the FineArtAmerica site located at this link: for nature photography

Joseph Campbell, “Forms and Conceptions . . .”

Photographers Unknown, Forms and Conceptions

“The function of ritual and myth is to make possible, and then to facilitate, the jump—by analogy. Forms and conceptions that the mind and its senses can comprehend are presented and arranged in such a way as to suggest a truth or openness beyond. And then, the conditions for meditation having been provided, the individual is left alone. Myth is but the penultimate; the ultimate is openness—that void, or being, beyond the categories —into which the mind must plunge alone and be dissolved. Therefore, God and the gods are only convenient means—themselves of the nature of the world of names and forms, though eloquent of, and ultimately conducive to, the ineffable. They are mere symbols to move and awaken the mind, and to call it past themselves.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

David Agenjo

Paintings by David Agenjo

Born in Madrid, Spain, David Agenjo is a painter who lives and works in London. In the context of contemporary figurative painting, he is best known for his compelling colour palette where personal colour arrangements and interpretations take his subjects beyond realism. Throughout Agenjo’s career, he has evolved his practice from an intimate exploration of the human form, to a broader contextualisation of figures and, most recently, to still life paintings.

David Agenjo studied painting and printmaking at the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid from 2000 to 2006, combining his artistic practice with his profession as a graphic designer before moving to Dublin in 2007 as an independent artist. Three years later he moved to London, establishing his studio in an artist community, where he still lives and works. Agenjo has worked with galleries in major cities such as Dublin, London and New York and his paintings and private commissions have been auctioned and sold to collectors worldwide. He has been awarded artist residencies in Shenzhen, China (2013) and Mumbai (2015). David Agenjo’s site: https://davidagenjo.com.

Erik de Jong

 

Erik de Jong, “Owl (Eule)”, Date Unknown, Oil on Panel

Born in 1958, Erik de Jong finished his studies at the Minerva Academie in Groningen, Netherlands. In 1984 he decided to move to Amsterdam. De Jong had his first solo exhibition in Galerie Mokum. which has been a critical site for the exhibition of Dutch Realist painting.

De Jong has a preference for the theme of the human set in a landscape or in an interior. The people that he depicts are mostly men that are lost in thought or that are stilled in motion. In de Jong’s paintings, a distance is created between the spectator and the imaged figures in his paintings. This provides a moment of rest; but still there is a feeling of tension. The question arises as to whether there has already been an action performed or does that action still have to come.

Reality has always been the starting point of Erik de Jong’s paintings; but the border between reality and what is suggested is very thin. This is something that can be clearly seen in most of his recent paintings. Usually there are several hidden layers in the work of De Jong, requiring that the viewer look beyond the archetype images he has learned.