Category: figurative

Daniel Graves

 

Daniel Graves, “The Power of Wisdom and Beauty”, 2013, Oil on Linen, 70 x 50 cm

Born in 1949, Daniel Graves graduated with honors in 1972 from Balimore’s Maryland Institute College of Art, where he studied anatomy and painting under painter  Joseph Sheppard and sculptor Frank Russell. He traveled to Florence, Italy, studying history painting and etching with classical artist Richard Serrin at Florence’s Villa Schifanoia Graduate School of Fine Art from 1972 to 1973.

Moving to Minneapolis, Minnesota, Daniel Graves studied in the atelier of classical realist painter Richard Lack from 1975 to 1976, where he associated with a thriving circle of classical realist painters trained by Lack and Ives Gammell, a classical realist painter of symbolic images. Graves moved to Florence in 1978, decided to remain there and began working under Nerina Simi, renowned painter and drawing teacher. During that time he became acquainted with portrait and fresco painter Pietro Annigoni, who has received praise for his classical portraits of Queen Elizabeth II.

In 1982, Daniel Graves, with his compatriot, painter and historian Charles H Cecil, a student of Ives Gammell, opened a teaching atelier in Florence which they operated together until 1990. Graves created the Florence Academy of Art in 1991 to train artists in the materials, techniques, and craftsmanship of figurative realism. Today the Academy operates ateliers in Jersey City, New Jersey, and in Mölndal, Sweden.

“When we look into the eyes of a Rembrandt self-portrait, how much closer can we get to knowing the soul of another human being? Rembrandt’s hands mixed the paint we see, but what is actually before us is a blend of his image with ours and that of every human. There is no substitute for this experience.”  —-Daniel Graves

Image reblogged with thanks to https://danielgravesart.com

The Florence Academy of Art’s website is https://www.florenceacademyofart.com

Dejan Stojanović: “The World is Always Open”

Photographers Unknown, A Collection; Th World is Always Open

“The world is always open, 

Waiting to be discovered.” 

—-Dejan Stojanović, Circling: 1978-1987

Born in March of 1959 in Peć, Serbia, Dejan Stojanović is a poet, writer, essayist, and former journalist. He attended the University of Pristina at Kosovo, earning a law degree although he was predominantly interested in the arts and philosophy. Stojanović began to privately write poetry in the late 1970s, not publishing any work until four years later in several Serbian literary magazines. In 1983, he joined his hometown literary club Karagać, first becoming its secretary and, later, its president.

Stojanović finished writing his first book of poetry,”Krugovanje (Circling)” in 1983; however, it was not published until 1993, with several poems replaced by newer ones. In early 1990, he joined the writing staff of the Serbian magazine Pogledi (Viewpoints), beginning a series of interviews with Serbian writers in Belgrade, including Momo Kapor and Nikola Milošević. 

In May and June of 1990, Stojanović conducted interviews in Paris with surrealist painter Ljubomir Popović and expressionist painter Petar Omčikus. In December of 1990, he traveled to the United States to do interviews with prominent American writers, including Saul Bellow. His series of interviews, published as “Conversations” in 1999 by the Belgrade publisher Književna Reč, won the Rastko Petrović Award, presented by the Association of Writers of Serbia.

Stojanović’s poetry collections are characterized by sequences of compact, dense poems, organized carefully in a simple yet complex structure. This is especially evident in his books, such as “The Sign and Its Children”, “Oblik”, and “The Creator”, in which a relatively small number of words are repeated in different contexts. Stojanović builds new perspectives and meanings to the topics in his poems, often placing them together with a level of absurdity and paradox. Some of his collections of poems, however, have common themes, making the books, in essence, on long poem.

Walker Kirtland Hancock

Photographer Unknown, “Walker Hancock Working on His Angel of the Resurrection”, 1950, Silver Gelatin Print

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1901, Walker Kirtland Hancock studied for one year at Washington University’s School of Fine Arts, before transferring to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts where he studied under sculptor Charles Grafly from 1921 to 1925. Awarded the Prix de Rome fellowship, he studied at the American Academy in Rome from 1925 to 1928. Upon Grafly’s recommendation, Hancock became head of the sculpture department of the Pennsylvania Academy in 1929, a position he held until 1967, except for his military service and his years at the American Academy.

During World War II, Hancock served with the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program formed under the Civil Affairs and Military Government Sections of the Allied Armies, to help protect cultural property and fine works of art located in the war areas. He was assigned to the French section, working alongside architect Captain Bancel LaFarge, preparing the list of monuments in France to be exempt from military use and to be considered for protection.

One of only ten MFAA officers attached to the British and American armies in northern Europe at the time, Walker Hancock located numerous hidden depositories of works of art, arranged for their safeguarding during combat, and evacuated their contents to collecting points run by the U.S. Army. Among the depositories discovered was the vast collection in a copper mine at Siegen in early April of 1945. This repository contained, among other artworks, the relics of Charlemagne from the Aachen Cathedral; these artworks were all evacuated and transferred safely under the direction of Hancock himself.

After the war, Hancock’s commissioned medallic works include the Army and Navy Air Medals and the U.S. Air Mail Flyers Medal. His numerous portrait sculptures include the statue of General Douglas MacArthur at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and a bust of President George H.W. Bush for the U.S. Capitol Building rotunda in Washington, DC. Hancock also sculpted the Angel Relief at the Battle Monument Chapel in St. Avold, France, and the Flight Memorial at the West Point Academy.

For his artwork, Walker Hancock received the George D. Widener Memorial Gold Medal from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1925, the Herbert Adams Medal of Honor from the National Sculpture Society in 1954, the National Medal of Art conferred by the President in 1989, and the Medal of Freedom in 1990. Hancock lived and worked in Gloucester, Massachusetts until his death on December 30, 1998.

Considered to be Walker Hancock’s masterpiece, the thirty-nine foot tall bronze monument “Angel of the Resurrection” is located in the main concourse of Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station. Dedicated by General Omar Bradley on August 10, 1952, the monument’s black granite pedestal bears the names of all 1,307 Pennsylvania Railroad employees who perished in World War II.

Insert Image: Walker Hancock, “Angel of the Resurrection”, 1952, Bronze Casting with Black Granite Base, 365.9 cm in Height, Main Concourse, 30th Street Station, Philadelphia

Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres

Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, “The Ambassadors of Agamemnon in the Tent of Achilles”, Detail and Full Canvas, 1801, Oil on Canvas, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts

The monumental history painter Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres was born in August of 1780 in the southern French town of Montauban. After receiving early instruction from his artist father, he was enrolled at the Academy of Toulouse, studying under neo-classical painter Guillaume-Joseph Roques. In 1797 Ingres left for Paris to study with Jacques-Louis David, who recognized his talent and allowed Ingres to assist on his “Portrait of Madame Récamier”.

Admitted to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Ingres won the Rome Prize in 1801 with his first major work, “The Ambassadors of Agamemnon in the Tent of Achilles”. Living in Paris and studying medieval church sculptures and the works of early Italians and Flemings at the Louvre, Ingress drifted away from the classicism he studied under Roques and David. He developed a new style, intricately designed with nearly shadowless figures, formed of distinct areas of color. Ingress exhibited four works at the Salon of 1806; though three were ignored by the critics, his “Napoleon on the Imperial Throne”,with its hard Gothic-styled artificiality and symmetry, scandalized them.

Between 1806 and 1814, Ingress spent his time painting in Italy, surviving on a four year stipend from the French Academy of Rome, painting portraits, before receiving patronage from, among others, Caroline Murat, sister of Emperor Napoleon and Queen of Naples. His works during this time includes “Oedipus and the Sphinx” and the “Valpincon Bather”, both executed in 1808 and now in the Louvre. Ingres was also among the painters charged with decorations for the Quirinale Palace, the residence of Napoleon’s infant son, king of Rome, producing two large paintings: the romantic 1813 “The Dream of Ossian” and the 1812 tempera painting “Romulus Victorious over Acron”.

Ingres received his first major commission from the Restorative government for two major works: an altar piece for the church of Santa Trinita dei Monti in Rome and, for the cathedral of Montauban, a painting to depict King Louis XIII’s vow to consecrate his kingdom to the Virgin Mary in Her Assumption. “The Vow of Louis XIII” achieved critical success at the Paris Salon of 1824, establishing Ingres’s reputation as the main classical artist. He was awarded the Legion of Honor and elected to the Royal Academy, staying in France and opening a teaching studio in 1825.

After the Revolution of 1830, Ingres received honors but little work from the liberal monarchy of Louis-Philippe. He labored for ten years on a commission for the Autun Cathedral entitled “Martydom of Saint Symphorian”, only to find dismissal from the critics at the 1834 Salon as outmoded in subject matter and style. Ingress departed for Rome, staying for six years, returning only after the popular success of his 1840 “Antiochus and Stratonice”, painted for the Duke of Orlénas, the king’s eldest son.  

In the 1840s and 1850s, despite spending much of his energy on large mural works, Ingress achieved his honors from his portraits of society women, including the portraits of “Baroness Rothschild” in 1948,;“Madame Moitessier” in 1851 and now in the National Gallery of Art; and “Princess de Broglie” in 1853. For the government of Napoleon III, he painted “Apotheosis of Napoleon I” and was honored with a retrospective exhibition at the Universal Exposition of 1855.

Ingress finished his painting “Turkish Bath” in 1862 at the age of eighty-two; in the same year, he was appointed to the French Senate. He died, after a brief illness, in January of 1867, of natural causes at the age of eighty-seven. His daring individual style, often criticized, was dedicated to an idea of beauty based on the relationship between forms, and harmonies in the use of line and color.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: “The Lived and Preceived Worlds”

 

Photographer Unknown, (The Lived and Perceived Worlds)

“Everything that I know about the world, even through science, I know from a perspective that is my own or from an experience of the world without which scientific symbols would be meaningless. The entire universe of science is constructed upon the lived world, and if we wish to think science rigorously, to appreciate precisely its sense and its scope, we must first awaken that experience of the world of which science is the second-order expression. Science neither has, nor ever will have the same ontological sense as the perceived world for the simple reason that science is a determination or an explanation of that world.

Scientific perspectives … always imply, without mentioning it, that other perspective – the perspective of consciousness – by which a world first arranges itself around me and begins to exist for me. To return to the things themselves is to return to this world prior to knowledge, this world of which knowledge always speaks, and this world with regard to which every scientific determination is abstract, signitive, and dependent, just like geography with regard to the landscape where we first learned what a forest, a meadow, or a river is.”

—-Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Preception

Rateb Seddik

 

Rateb Seddik, “Sans Titre”, 1940. Oil on Wood, 120 x 220 cm, Musee Rateb Seddik Le Caire, Egypt

Founded in December of 1938, the Art et Liberté group in Egypt provided a young generation of intellectuals, artists and activists with a platform for promoting political and cultural reform, with the members playing an active role in the network of the Surrealist movement. At the start of the second World War, the Art et Liberté became part of the international movement defying fascism, nationalism, colonialism, including the British colonial domination of Egypt.

In line with Surrealism’s rejection of the alignment of art with political propaganda, the Art et Liberté rebelled against the merging of art and national sentiment. With their December 1938 manifesto entitled “Vive L’Art Dégéneré (Long Live Degenerate Art)”, the group declared their opposition to the reactionary attacks on art in Hitler’s Germany, epitomized by Munich’s 1937 Entartete Kunst exhibition which ridiculed modern art,  and attacks elsewhere, notably in Vienna and Rome.

Rateb Seddik completed his formal artistic education at Chelsea College of Art in London, where he was a student of the English surrealist painter Robert Medley, and later continued his studies in Cairo. Seddik became a member of the Art et Liberté and participated in the group’s fourth exhibition, entitled “For Independent Art”, that was held on May 12, 1944, at the Lyceé Francais School in Cairo. Despite obstacles that occurred, the show was able to exhibit 150 works of art, including painting, sculpture and photography.

Rateb Seddik’s 1940 “Sans Titre (Untitled)” combines his passions for opera and ancient Egyptian art. The oil-on-wood painting depicts a group of diversely featured human beings who are all equally united by a white cloth symbolizing death or suffering. While the scene resembles a Turkish bathhouse, it also references Stravinsky’s opera of the tragedy of Oedipus Rex. This surrealist masterpiece is a prime example of an artwork that is at once locally rooted and universally informed.

Joseph Stella

Joseph Stella, “The Virgin”, 1926, Oil on Canvas, 100.8 x 98.4 cm, Brooklyn Museum, New York

Joseph Stella, “Purissima”, 1927, Oil on Canvas, 193 x 145 cm, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia

Born in Muro Lucano, Italy, in 1877, Joseph Stella came to the United States at the age of nineteen to study medicine. He soon, however, abandoned his medical studies and entered the New York School of Art, studying with painter and teacher William Merritt Chase. A remarkable draftsman, Stella worked from 1905 to 1909 as an illustrator, publishing drawings in magazine periodicals. He continued expressing himself in drawings throughout the different phases of his career.

Beginning his career as a Realist, Stella made a visit to Italy in 1909, and associated with artists involved in the Italian Futurism and Modernism art movements. He traveled to Paris in 1911 , often attending Gertrude Stein’s salon and meeting artists there. Stella began to incorporate Futurist principles into his artwork; however, he was also interested in the structure of the Cubists and the dynamic color of the Fauvists.. 

In January 1913, just after his return to New York from Paris, Stella submitted five works to the Armory Show’s Domestic Committee for possible inclusion in the February exhibition; they selected his oil on canvas “Still Life”.  In New York during the 1920s Stella, fascinated with the geometric architecture, assimilated the elements of  Cubism and Futurism in his works, an example of which is his “Brooklyn Bridge” with its sweeping diagonal cables. Working for the Federal Art Project, a WPA project in the 1930s,  he traveled extensively around the world, painting through a series of styles from realism to abstraction to surrealism.

By the late 1930s, Stella’s work attracted less attention than it had in the past decades, his style no longer relevant to the time. He became emotionally cut off from the New York art world. Stella’s 1939 retrospective exhibition at the Newark Museum, though successful as a presentation, was less enthusiastically reviewed than expected. Diagnosed with heart disease in the early 1940s, subject to periods of anxiety, Joseph Stella succumbed to heart failure in November of 1946. 

At the same time that Stella was painting his Italian Futurist works, he was also working in pastel colors producing works with stylized birds and landscapes with long, curvilinear rhythms and sharp silhouettes. It was from this style that Stella developed his Madonna paintings in the 1920s. His paintings, “The Virgin” and “Purissima”, with their naturalistic faces and totally stylized figures, are part of that series. These complex allegorical and religious works, with elaborate floral motifs, demonstrate Stella’s devotion to 15th century Italian painting and familiarity with the aesthetics of Catholic rituals.

Fabio Dolce

Photographer Unknown, Fabio Dolce: Underwater Dance

Born in Palermo, Sicily, Fabio Dolce started dancing at eleven years of age with ballroom dances. At sixteen, he began his ballet training and contemporary dance at the “Teatro Massimo di Palermo, later participating in several years of competitive Latin ballroom dancing. Dolce completed his studies of ballet at the National Academy of Rome. joining upon graduation the Cannes Jeune Ballet where he danced works by choreographers Jean-Christophe Maillot, George Balachine, Marc Ribaud, and Edward Cook. 

Joining the CCN Ballet de Lorraine at age twenty-one, Dolce performed for nine years, dancing a varied repertoire of works by Emanuel Gat, Merce Cunningham, and Vronislava Nijinska, among others. At thirty years old, he joined DeNada Dance Theater in 2017 for the company’s second national tour of  choreographer Carlos Pons Guerra’s seductive and provocative “Ham and Passion”, where Dolce  danced the roles of Anna in “Passionaria” and the role of Maria in “O Maria”. 

After working internationally for many years, Fabio Dolce is now a freelance dance artist, choreographer, and teacher, working in England and France. In France, he is a collaborative director with the dance company Antonino Ceresia, seeking funding for the new work “La Commedia Divino”. Dolce is also involved with the EU funded project “Lifelong Dancing”, a series of learning pathways about dance for adult educators.

Fabio Dolce’s website is located at: http://fabiodolce.com

Thomas Eakins

Thomas Eakins, “Between Rounds”, 1898-99, Oil on Canvas, 127 x 101cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Most of Thomas Eakins’s paintings after 1886 were probing portraits; however, he returned to sporting subjects in the late 1890s with a series that he began after attending professional boxing matches at the Philadelphia Arena, which was then located diagonally across from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The resulting canvases were as revolutionary in their subject matter as his rowing scenes had been more than two decades earlier.

Thomas Eakins’s boxing and wrestling paintings are, however, even bolder in their subject matter than his early rowing pictures. Although the popular press, starting about 1900, featured images of prize fighting and accounts of boxers such as the famous John L. Sullivan, most artists turned away from depicting ring sports, which were associated with sanctioned violence, gambling, and alcohol.

Eakins fastidiously planned his “Between Rounds”. Every person portrayed in the painting posed for him. Eakins invited Billy Smith, a local featherweight, to pose for the boxer, asked other figures from the boxing world to re-enact their real-life roles in his Chestnut Street studio, and enlisted friends and relatives to pose for the spectators. The interior scenic location was the actual hall used by the fighters. 

Although the painting does not depict a specific bout, Thomas Eakins combined details from several to give it verisimilitude and worked diligently to capture the atmospheric effects of dust and smoke in the arena. As usual, he minimized the drama, showing Billy Smith catching his breath rather than struggling against Timothy Callahan, his unseen, and ultimately successful, opponent.

Henry Miller: “We All Derive from the Same Source”

His Butt: Beguiling the Senses and Enchanting the Mind: Photo Set Eleven

“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.” 

—Henry Miller

Louis Eugene Larivière

Louis Eugene Larivière, “Academic Drawing of a Nude Male with Arm Raised”, 1820, Black Pencil, Charcoal, and Stump on Paper, 58.6 x 43.7 cm, Private Collection

Born in Paris in December of 1800, Louis-Eugene Larivière was the second son of the painter André Philippe Larivière, and grandson of Charles Lepeintre, Painter to the Duke of Orleans. Three years separated Eugene from his elder brother, Charles-Philippe. The sons having   demonstrated natural abilities for painting, the father placed both with French painter Anne-Louis Girodet who in turn presented them to the Special School for Fine Arts: Charles-Philippe in 1813 and Louis-Eugene in February 1816.

Following in his older brother’s footsteps, Louis-Eugène Larivière participated in the historic composition competition as Girodet’s student. Ranked thirteenth, he did not enter the second round, but was noticed and, as a painter, was exempted from military service. Unfortunately, illness prevented Larivière from competing again in 1823; and the illness finished by carrying him off prematurely in June of 1923 at the age of twenty-one years old. 

A few family portraits by Louis-Eugène Larivière survive: one full of candor of his sister Pamela-Eugenie conserved at the Louvre; a protrait of his brother Edmond Larivière, and a “Self-Portrait”, both at the Museum of Picardy in Amiens. The works come from the collection of the painter Albert Maignan, the artist’s nephew by marriage who donated them to the Amiens Museum from the contents of the Lariviere brothers’ studio. 

A few male acacemy drawings by Eugene can be found at the Amiens Museum  similar to the image above. One of them is inscribed on the verso, “Eugène Larivière. 18 août 1817”, and countersigned by his teacher, the painter Pierre-Narcisse Guérin ,who corrected the student exercises of the Fine Arts students that day. Another academy drawing, dated 1818, and a few anatomical studies are know to exist in private collections. 

Salem Beiruti

Paintings by Salem Beiruti

Born in Lebanon, Salem Beiruti is a conceptual artist and illustrator residing in Madrid. Working after graduation as an art director in the fields of advertising, graphics, and fashion design, he has more than seventeen years of client and freelance work. Upon his move to Madrid, Beiruti became a full=time illustrator and artist. 

Beiruti’s skillful digital illustrations are unique and inspired by such artists and photographers as Patrick Fillion, Paul Freeman, Issauro Cairo, and Francisco Prato. His project  of mixed-media works “Morphosis” is a result of his personal journey as a man of an Arabic mid-eastern culture and its traditions to the man he is today. The art book was published in June of 2017 by German publisher Bruno Gmnuender.

For those interested in purchasing a print, Art of Salem is offering all prints at a 40% discount for Easter 2021. Please reference Ultrawolves when ordering. Thank you.   https://www.instagram.com/artistsalem/

Jesús Holguin: “The Sense of Secrets”

Parva Scaena (Brief Scenes): Set Nineteen

“What i like about Photography is that it takes moments that should have been forgotten, and just freezes them, and allows us to share it with everyone and share it with future generations. But there is also the sense of secrets in the picture, or the stuff you don’t know, or don’t see. You don’t really know what happened before or after a picture; its time is just frozen in that moment.” 

—Jesús Holguin

Pierre Grivolas

Pierre Grivolas  “ Les Flagellants au XIVe Siècle (Procession of Flagellants in the Fourteenth Century)”, 1867, Oil on Canvas, 175 x 208 cm, Calvet Museum, Avignon, France

Born in Avignon, France, in September of 1823, Pierre Grivolas was a French painter known for portraits, landscapes and genre scenes. Recognizing Grivolas’s early talent for drawing, his parents enrolled him in art classes. He won first prize in the 1843 Biennial Design Contest, sponsored by Avignon’s art foundation, La Foundation Calvet, a collection of historical and art legacies. The prize included a cash award which enabled Grivolas to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. 

At the École des Beaux-Arts, Grivolas met and was influenced by leader of the French Romantic movement Eugène Delacroix, neo-classical painter Dominique Ingres, and Hippolyte Flandrin, known today for his monumental decorative paintings. The outbreak of the February Revolution in 1848 forced Grivolas to return to his Avignon. Six years later, he became one of the first members of the Félibrige, a literary and cultural association founded by Frédéric Mistral and other writers to promote and defend the Provençal language.

In 1877, Pierre Grivolas became a founding member, along with writer Baptiste Bonnet, sculptor Jean Barnabé Amy, and others, of the Societa Belibrenco dé Paris. whose literary arm was the journal “Lou Viro-Souléu”, The monthly literary journal, published from 1889 to 1912, contained literary texts, and reports of the poetry Floral Games and other Parisian festivals. 

Pierre Grivolas became Director of the École des Beaux-Arts d’Avignon from 1878 until his death. During his tenure, he emphasized plain air, or outdoor, painting over the prevalent Academicism, and became credited with creating the art movement known now as “Novelle École d’Avignon”, In 1894 to 1896, Pierre Grivolas, sometimes accompanied by his younger brother Antoine, a still-life painter, traveled through the small villages of France, living like shepherds and capturing the colors of the mountain landscapes in their paintings. Provencal French painter 

Pierre Grivolas passed away in Avignon on February 5, 1906. His works are in many museums, including “Procession of Communiantes” at the Alauch Museum, the 1858 “Interior of a Spinning Mill” at the Louis Vouland Museum, and “Self-Portrait” at the Palace of the Roure.