Category: landscape

Machado Silvetti

Machado Silvetti, “Asian Art Study Center”, 2016, Terra-Cotta Facade, Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida,

The Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, is famed for its ornate Venetian-Gothic mansion named “Cà d’Zan”, meaning “House of John” referring to John Ringling, one of the famed owners of the Ringling Brothers Circus, who resided in the mansion with his wife. Construction started in 1924 on the mansion that was designed by New York architect Dwight James Baum. Baum’s design embodied the palazzos that line the Venice canals, emulating the Italian decor that the Ringlings fell in love with on their many trips to the Mediterranean.

The Boston firm Machado Silvetti used the showpiece structure of the mansion as a precedent for their design for the museum’s extension of the Asian Art Study Center. This new project included the conversion of approximately 18,000 square feet of preexisting gallery space from a temporary exhibition area to permanent galleries. Catering to the museum’s developing Asian collection, the scheme also included a gut renovation of the west-wing galleries, located to the southwest.

The most visually striking aspect of the project is the shimmering terra-cotta facade of the new addition. Asked for a monumental entrance to museum, Machado Silvetti created something unique to the site. More than three thousand jade-colored tiles clad the elevated extension, the color a nod to the  natural surroundings but in opposition to the original pink Italian buildings. The facade with the tiles’ large mass helps combat heat gain while also acting as a barrier wrapping the extension from the elements.

Studio Libeskind

Studio Libeskind, “Vanke Pavilion”, 2015 Milan Expo

The Vanke Pavilion is an exhibition hall and event space, designed by Daniel Libeskind’s architectural studio,  that was built for 2015 Milan Expo. Its design, based on the theme of the event, “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life,” draws inspiration from ancient Chinese dragons which, legend has it, wielded power over weather and agriculture in early China.

The twisting exterior is clad in over 4,000 faceted porcelain tiles, resembling the scales of a gargantuan reptile. Each is embossed with a geometric motif and treated with a custom metallic glaze. This reflective coating causes the pavilion take on a fiery glow that shifts from red to gold depending on the angle of the sun. Ingeniously, the glaze also contains titanium dioxide which, when exposed to direct sunlight, breaks down organic deposits in the atmosphere, purifying the air around the pavilion.

Dariusz Klimczak

The Surreal Photography of Dariusz Klimczak

Polish photographer Dariusz Klimczak composes dreamlike landscapes that hypnotize with their surprise and weirdness. The photographer’s digital photo manipulations open the door to his imaginative world, where a desolate desert is brought to life by quirky and playful characters. Everyday items clash in odd compositions with animals and humans, conflicting with gravity and the other physical laws without which our common sense would collapse.

Dariusz Klimczak has been a professional photographer for 30 years, a few of which he spent creating photo manipulations. The artist prefers monochromatic images which present the scenes with a more authentic and mystical quality.

Ando Hiroshige

Ando Hiroshige, “Suido Bridge and Suruga Hill”, Number 63 from the “One Hundred Views of Famous Places in Edo” Series, 1857, Color Woodcut, Chazen Museum of Art

Ando Hiroshige was a Japanes ukiyo-e artist, considered the last great master of that tradition. He is best known for his landscapes, such as the series “The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido” and “The Sixty-Nine Stations of the Kiso Kaido”, and for his depictions of birds and flowers. The subjects of his work was atypical of the genre, whose typical focus was on beautiful women, popular actors, and scenes of the urban pleasure districts of Japan’s Edo period.

In 1856, Hiroshige retired from the world,  becoming a Buddhist monk; this was the year he began his “One Hundred Views of Famous Places in Edo” series.  He died aged 62 during the great Edo cholera epidemic of 1858 and was buried in a Zen Buddhist temple in Asakusa.

The Ghost Trees

Artist Unknown, (The Ghost Trees), Computer Graphics, Gif

“Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread. Each leaf he passed he’d never pass again. They rode over his face like veils, already some yellow, their veins like slender bones where the sun shone through them. He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day that ever was and he was riding to his death.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Child of God

Jeffrey Milstein

Jeffrey Milstein, Five Photographs from His Series LANY: Aerial Photographs of Los Angeles and New York, Published by Thomas & Hudson,

Using the highest-resolution cameras available mounted to a stabilizing gyro, Milstein leans out of helicopters and does steep circles in small airplanes over Los Angeles where he grew up and over New York where he now lives, looking for shapes and patterns of culture from above, continually awed by the difference between the aerial view and the view on the ground.

Millstein emphasizes the abstraction of pattern and reveals aspects of urban design and planning of both cities at the same time as he offers an intensification of detail and an abundance of information. He composes his images so that the viewer is still vividly aware of the human scale.

Please credit photographer when reblogging. Thanks.

Shifting Sands

Photographer Unknown, (Shifting Sands of Time)

“The desert could not be claimed or owned–it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names… Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, left nothing behind, not an ember. All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

Reblogged with many thanks to https://oznagni.tumblr.com

Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer, “Abendland (Twilight of the West)”, 1989, Lead Sheet, Polymer Paint, Ash, Plaster, Cement, Earth, Vanish on Canvas and Wood, 400 x 380 x 12 Centimeters, National Gallery of Australia

The huge scale of “Twilight of the West” creates a confrontational impact on the viewer that is not achieved with smaller easel paintings. Kiefer constructs works of this size with an underlying skeleton of broad gestural marks reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism. He adopts a wide variety of pictorial devices, in particular the nineteenth-century Romantics’ use of the symbolic landscape to create a drama of epic proportions.

Kiefer uses his camera as a sketching tool: a number of his works are painted directly onto enlarged photographs or are based on photographs. The image of the railway tracks was recorded during his visit to Bordeaux perhaps as early as 1984. The sky is a vast sheet of lead above the horizon line. The metal sheet is worked, wrinkled and crumpled like paper. Lead is a powerful metal, both as a protection against radiation and as an industrial pollutant. It also has associations with alchemy as the base metal that might be transmuted into gold and, as such, it parallels the idea of metamorphosis that underlies Kiefer’s art.

Like the lead curtain, the landscape below it is near monochromatic. The limited range of colour reproduces the muting effect of twilight, with its dominance of red-browns and raking illumination. The sun, an impression of a manhole cover stamped in the soft lead sheet, is low on the horizon. Twilight, and a leaden veil of darkness, descends on our civilisation in this painting. But just as the manhole suggests a way out, so the sun will follow the night.