Category: murals

Howard S Sewall

Howard S. Sewall, “In the Garden”, Oil on Canvas, 1937, Timberline Lodge, Oregon

Timberline Lodge is a mountain lodge on the south side of Mount Hood in Clackamas County, Oregon, about 60 miles (97 km) east of Portland. Constructed from 1936 to 1938 by the Works Progress Administration, it was built and furnished by local artisans during the Great Depression.

Howard S. Sewall was born in Minneapolis, MN, in 1899 and moved to Oregon in 1920. From the 1930s to the early 1940s, Sewall taught at the Salem Art Center and at various art studios in Portland and also worked as a WPA artist.

Sewell is well known for his abstract mural paintings which include images of common working people. Two murals depicting iron and wood workers are in the Timberline Lodge collection and Sewall painted sixteen murals for Oregon City High School in the 1930s. Sewall also produced textiles and hand loomed rugs. He died of cancer in 1975.

John Augustus Walker

John Augustus Walker, “Science and Invention”, Mural, 1935

John Augustus Walker (1901-1967) was a well-known Alabama Gulf Coast artist of the Depression era who was commissioned to undertake several art projects for the Works Progress Administration. Walker’s preferred subject matter ranged from Mardi Gras, fantasy and historical themes to landscapes and portraiture.

The murals are on display in the History Museum of Mobile lobby located in Mobile, Alabama.

Edgar Flores (SANER)

Murals and Paintings by Edgar Flores (SANER)

Edgar Flores was born in 1981 in Mexico City, where he is currently based. As a child he developed an interest in drawing and Mexican muralism and began expressing himself through graffiti in the late 1990s. In 2004, Flores received a degree in graphic design from Universidad Autónoma de México. His work has been exhibited in galleries worldwide including Barcelona, Berlin, London, New York and Mexico City. In 2014 he had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Luis Potosí in Mexico.

Cacaxtia’s Venus Temple

Detail of Battle Mural in Cacaxtia’s Venus Temple

Cacaxtla is the name of a Late Classic to Epiclassic (AD 600-900) city in the Puebla Valley, Tlaxcala, Mexico. It was a sprawling palace containing vibrantly colored murals painted in unmistakable Maya style. The nearby site of Xochitecatl was a more public ceremonial complex associated with Cacaxtla. Cacaxtla and Xochitecatl prospered 650-900 CE, probably controlling important trade routes through the region with an enclave population of no more than 10,000  Olmeca-Xicalanca people.

The most famous of Cacaxtla’s preserved paintings is the “Battle Mural”, or Mural de la Batalla, located in the northern plaza of the basamento. Dating from prior to 700, it is placed on the sloping limestone wall of a temple base and is split in two by a central staircase. It depicts two groups of warriors locked in battle: on the one side are jaguar warriors, armed with spears, obsidian knives, and round shields, who are locked in battle with an army of bird warriors (some of whom are shown naked and in various stages of dismemberment).

Dean Cornwell

Two Murals by Dean Cornwell, The Raleigh Room of the Warwick Hotel, 68 West 54th Street, New York City, 1937

Dean Cornwell was an American illustrator and muralist. His oil paintings were frequently featured in popular magazines and books as literary illustrations, advertisements, and posters promoting the war effort. Throughout the first half of the 20th century he was a dominant presence in American illustration. At the peak of his popularity he was nicknamed the “Dean of Illustrators”.

In 1937 William Randolph Hearst commissioned Cornwell to create murals for The Raleigh Room, the restaurant inside his new residential hotel. Cornwell complied with a series of scenes of the life of Raleigh, depicting the explorer-courtier throwing down his cloak over a mud puddle for Queen Elizabeth, receiving a charter from her, and landing on Roanoke Island. After Cornwell had completed the murals, however, he and Hearst disagreed about compensation, and in revenge, the artist added obscene elements to the paintings, including an Indian with bare buttocks and men urinating on both Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth. Fortunately, he painted out these elements once the dispute was resolved. Over time the murals darkened, but they were brilliantly restored in a renovation in 2004.

DELeast

Street Art by DELeast

ALeast was born in 1984 in Wuhan, China and is currently based in Cape Town, South Africa. He studied Sculpture at the Institute of Fine Arts and began making art in public spaces in 2004. His murals can be found in cities around the world including the U.S., Switzerland, Namibia, France, Israel, Australia and China.

The dark imagery found in DALeast’s art is undeniably captivating, woven with intricate detail while focusing on the simple subjects in his pieces. Each of his pieces of art is created using paint to look like thousands of metal shards are coming together to form beautiful shapes, often animals or humans. Within every piece of DALeast’s art, a pop of color observed in the background brings his subject to life. This allows him to focus on the intricacy of his technique while delivering his final product. The use of fractured imagery and contrasting backgrounds serve to give his art a breath of energy and soul that can sometimes be lost in art with a more somber subject matter.

A majority of DALeast’s art utilizes animals as the subject matter. In many of his works, less pronounced line work in the background serves as a shadowing effect for the images illustrated in the forefront. The overall artistic effect of utilizing a dark base while simultaneously highlighting in fragmented, brighter lines is to make the images appear to leap off the wall or canvas; It is the artist’s skillful layering of lines that leads the viewer to be able to visually interpret the image in many different ways.

Nouvelle Vague, “In a Manner of Speaking”

Nouvelle Vague, “In a Manner of Speaking”, Live in Lisbon

Wishing everyone a Happy New Year!

I started this blog in February and have passed 500 followers with many more people visiting and even more liking my posts. My thanks to all. I will try my best to keep it interesting and filled with images, songs and art to enjoy. My thanks also to all those blogs which I visited and those from which I reblogged posts. You have added new things to my life. My best wishes to you.

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

Jared French

Jared French, “Lunchtime with Early Miners”, 1938, Mural in the Plymouth US Post Office Building in Pennsylvania, New Deal Public Works of Art Project

Nudity was to be avoided, and Treasury Department Section Director Edward Bruce was emphatic about this point. “Anybody who wanted to paint a nude ought to have his head examined!” he declared. Bruce’s officials were quick to advise artists to remove or tone down anything that might be deemed risqué. Once again, however, depictions of Native Americans proved to be an exception to the rule. Artists who specialized in figurative art could portray muscular, nearly naked Native Americans in poses deemed inappropriate for whites.

Jared French (1905–1987), an artist who devised an unusual pictorial language to explore human unconsciousness and its relation to sexuality, could not resist testing the boundaries. In 1937, he was working on two post office murals, one for Plymouth, Luzerne County, and the second for Richmond, Virginia. For the Richmond commission, he proposed depicting a group of Confederate soldiers in various states of undress preparing to cross a stream to flee advancing Union forces. The Section advised French that the figures must be clothed. “You have painted enough nudes in your life so that the painting of several more or less should not matter in your artistic career,” wrote a Section administrator. French capitulated on the Richmond mural—he wanted to be paid after all—but as a final jab at Rowan and the Section, he did manage to paint one more nude.

Before finishing the Plymouth mural, “Mealtime with the Early Coal Miners”, French inserted into the background a male figure piloting a barge, inexplicably unclothed. The nude pilot, like the union buttons of the railcar workers, went undetected by Treasury Department officials. The offending image appeared too small to be detected in the final eight-by-ten-inch photographs, and “Mealtime” became the only example of full-frontal nudity in a United States post office.

Note: For those interested in more information on Jared French, I recommend Emily Sachar’s “Jared French’s State Park: A Contextual Study”, which was submitted for his Master of Arts degree. It includes a chapter of French’s artistic circle of friends, including his freindship with Paul Cadmus, as well as several images of French’s most notable works. The article can be found at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1289&context=hc_sas_etds

Stockholm Subway System

The Underground Art of the Stockholm Subway System

Certain stations in Stockholm’s T-Bana system, primarily along the city’s Blue Line, are singularly spectacular due to the city’s geology. Due to characteristics of the bedrock beneath the watery city, instead of boring, the metro’s stations and tunnels are simply blasted away – oddly fitting in the birthplace of Alfred Nobel. As a result, the system’s stations are grand cavernous spaces not wholly unlike certain Washington stations in scale, but, with the bedrock left exposed, they feature an eerie, cave-like atmosphere.

T-Centralen is the metro’s central station, located directly under downtown, where the system’s three lines meet. The older station, servicing the Red and Green lines, is rather utilitarian. But the connected Blue Line platforms form an extraordinary cavern covered in abstract patterns in bright blue and white designed by Swedish artist Per Olov Ultveldt in 1975.

Kungsträdgården station  takes a different tack, giving the sense of a Roman archaeological dig. Water drips down the walls behind statuary. Walking across a bridge near one entrance to the station, you look down into an overgrown garden of columns and fallen finials. The bedrock walls are left mostly exposed, hidden only by bold murals in red and green and black and white.

Solna Centrum station, farther outside the city center, is blindingly red. As seen in green and black murals along the track’s edge, Solna Centrum is meant to evoke the country’s spruce forests and the towns that harvested their lumber.

Aryz and Os Gemeos

Aryz and Os Gemeos, Title Unknown, Mural on Building, Lodz, Poland

Aryz and Os Gemeos painted a collaborative mural in Lodz, Poland for the Urban Forms Festival. Pairing Aryz, the young street artist from Spain, with the experience of the Os Gemeos twins has certainly paid off as the resulting mural is pretty awesome with OsG’s character coming out of the building in some sort of embrace with Aryz’s skeletal beauty.

Duncan Grant: The Saint Blaise Chapel Murals

Duncan Grant, Mural, Detail of the West Wall, St Blaise Chapel, Lincoln Cathedral, Lincoln, Lincolnshire, England

Duncan Grant, born from Scottish aristocratic roots, was an influential artist of the early 20th century, conscientious objector in the First World War and member of the Bloomsbury Group, whose attitudes towards feminism, pacifism and sexuality brought them great notoriety. Though homosexual, he had a daughter, Angelica, by his 40-year largely platonic relationship with Vanessa Bell (sister of Virginia Woolf), and had several notable lovers including Bloomsbury set fellows, the economist John Maynard Keynes and writer David Garnett. His later life was spent with another Bloomsbury associate, poet and translator of the classics, Paul Roche.

The mural paintings in The Russell Chantry, St.Blaise Chapel in St.Mary’s Cathedral are dedicated to St.Blaise, patron Saint of wool workers and depict a fanciful quayside scene in 15th century Lincoln. They were painted in 1958, when Grant was in his early seventies and were embroiled in controversy from the start. His initial designs were amended, and his open homosexuality and history as a conscientious objector were frowned upon in the early post-war years.

The Chapel was kept locked from around 1964 to 1977 when the first colour Cathedral guidebook made no mention of the murals. The chapel continued to be locked and used as a storeroom with cupboards against the walls covering the murals until 1990. Some people objected to the near nudity of the figure of Christ, modelled on Grant’s homosexual lover Paul Roche and the athletic young porters loading bales of wool on the quayside. Even today, some Cathedral guides omit the St.Blaise Chapel and Grant’s marvellous murals from their tour.

Diego Rivera

Sketches and Finished Murals by Diego Rivera

Diego Rivera made large preparatory drawings, which served as drafts for the final murals.. Placed alongside the panels they inspired, the exuberant charcoal sketches he called “cartoons” reveal how Rivera translated his broad strokes into the final scenes.

Diego Rivera had some success as a Cubist painter in Europe, but the course of world events would strongly change the style and subject of his work. Inspired by the political ideals of the Mexican Revolution (1914-15) and the Russian Revolution (1917), Rivera wanted to make art that reflected the lives of the working class and native peoples of Mexico. He developed an interest in making murals during a trip to Italy, finding inspiration in the Renaissance frescos there.

Returning to Mexico, Rivera began to express his artistic ideas about Mexico. He received funding from the government to create a series of murals about the country’s people and its history on the walls of public buildings. In 1922, Rivera completed the first of the murals at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria in Mexico City.