Ashim Shanker: “In Union Shall You Drift”

Photographers Unknown, In Union Shall You Drift

“There will be times in which things appear hopeless. You will begin to doubt everything around you. You will even begin to doubt yourself. You will think things will never look up and you may be in the deepest, darkest, loneliest place in the world. Everything which had once been infused with wonder may appear disappointing and harsh. You may grow cynical and come to believe that this is simply the way the world is…that one must bear with the unforgiving realities of the world and only hope that it doesn’t get worse. You might grow suspicious of others, as adults tend to do, and close yourself off from the rest of the world. You might just look to the past and reminisce about better days…or you might just dwell in one place for a little too long and become nostalgic for the future. Just remember—regardless of where you are, what experiences you have, and who you have become—that there will always be those who have loved you. Those whom you may have taken for granted, but have nonetheless, always had you in their hearts and in their hopes and wishes. Lives that you have touched: whether you realize it or not. To separation you may venture, but indissolubly in union shall you drift…you will always be at the whims of forces, both great and small, and far beyond your capacity to control. That’s how all our stories go. Innumerable arcs intersect and scatter into a vast indefinite sea.”

—Ashim Shanker, Don’t Forget to Breathe

Born in Allentown, Pennsylvania to Indian immigrants, Ashim Shanker graduated from Pennsylvania State University and briefly worked in the wireless communications industry in New York. He struggled early in life with the complexities of identity and found writing to be a suitable outlet for analyzing the many contradictions he faced on a daily basis. The page became the medium for all the questions that had no particular answer.

Shanker relocated to Japan in 2003 and spent the next eleven years as a teacher and a content planner for textbooks and software. While working at several jobs, he continued to write and, in 2008, published his first novel of his absurdist Migrations fiction series, “Don’t Forget to Breathe”. Still living in Japan, Shanker finished the second installment of the series, “Only the Deplorable”, in 2013, as well as his first book of short stories and poems, “Sinew of the Social Species”, which was published in 2014.

Ashim Shanker moved back to the United States for his graduate work and completed a Master’s Degree in International Educational Policy at Harvard University. His teaching experience in international and public school environments have contributed to his fervent advocacy for systemic reform in global educational policy and delivery.

Shanker contributed to educational research publications in collaboration with UNICEF and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). He also contributed to a collection of educational case studies profiled in the 2018 book. “Building Bridges to the Future”.

In 2019, Ashim Shanker completed his third novel in the Migrations series, “Inward and Toward”, and released his second book of short stories entitled “branches para parallax leapfrog” in 2020.

Eden Yerushalmy, “Yuval Sliper”

Eden Yerushalmy, “Yuval Sliper”, 2020, Eroticco Magazine

Eden Yerushalmy is a professional hair stylist and photographer of portraits and fashion; he is living and working in Tel Aviv, Israel. Yerushalmy has done work for: the clothing company Urban Outfitters and the online magazines Graveravens, Maxculine Dosage, Kaltblut Magazine, Yup Magazine, and The Male Fashion..

Yeurshalmy”s exclusive photo shoot of Yuval Sliper, an Israeli model with the BOLD talent agency, was posted in the November 2020 issue of the online Eroticco Magazine, located at: https://eroticcomagazine.com..

For information on Eden Yerushalmy’s work, a link to the artist’s sites is located at: https://www.instagram.com/edenyeru/

Travis Chantar

Photography by Travis Chantar

Born in California and raised in the mountains of Idaho by two moms, Travis Chantar studied music in Minnesota and settled in Brooklyn, New York, as an artist and freelance photographer. He first developed a passion for decorating and portrait photography in high school, after which he progressed to creating poster imagery for shows in college. Upon graduation, Chantar combined his enthusiasm for painting and portraiture to produce a solo exhibition entitled “Tribe”, a body painting series which resulted in a published art monograph of the same name. A subsequent series entitled “Flowers” consisted of images of nude sitters adorned with flower and petal arrangements.

In 2014, Chantar began assisting Ryan Pfluger, a New York and Los Angeles based freelance photographer, in his high-profile shoots for publications such as Vogue, New York Times, Billboard, Elle, Netflix, and other image oriented companies. Chantar’s work has included both book and album covers, product campaigns, and portfolio work for creative agencies. Most recently, Chantar published editorials in Risk Magazine, Out Magazine, FGUK Magazine, Natural Pursuits Magazine, Kaltblut Magazine, and VMAN Magazine.

For more information and images, the artist’s website is located at: http://www.chantarphotography.com

Domenico Baccarini

The Artwork of Domenico Baccarini

Born in December of 1882 at Faenza, Italy, Domenico Baccarini studied sculpture at Faenza’s School of Arts and Crafts under Massimo Campello and drawing under the sculptor and medalist Antonio Berti, who introduced him to the renowned ceramic crafts of the city. Since the Middle Ages, Faenza was considered an excellent ceramic center which was known for its high-quality majolica pottery. After graduating and obtaining a study grant from the city of Faenza, Baccarini attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence between 1900 and 1903.

During this period in Florence, Baccarini associated with many artists including symbolist illustrator and print maker Adolfo De Carolis, painter and engraver Giovanni Costetti, and painter and poet Lorenzo Viani. He produced several sculptures in the years 1901 and 1902, which are now housed in the collection of the municipality of Forli’s Aurelio Saffi Library. These include his sculptural works “Bust of a Young Woman”, “Spring”, “Nymphs”, and “Sensations of the Soul”.

Baccarini visited the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts, held in Turin in 1902, and, in the following year, attended the Fifth International Biennial of Art in Venice. Settling in Rome in the autumn of 1903, Baccarini worked as an illustrator for the La Patria newspaper, which later organized an exhibition of his work at its headquarters in summer of 1904. During this time in Rome, Baccarini was in a relationship with the future model for many of his works, Elizabetta Santolini known as Bitta,, who would in 1905 give birth to their daughter Maria Teresa.

In the beginning of 1904, Baccarini achieved admission to the Nude School of the French Academy located in central Rome’s Villa Medici. He often frequented the home of monumental and frieze sculptor Giovanni Prini and met with other artists, such as painters and sculptors Umberto Boccioni and Giacomo Balla, both leading members of Futurist movement, and musician and composer Alberto Gasco, a proponent of musical Modernism. Baccarini exhibited his work in 1904 with success at the Romagna Regional Exhibition of Ravenna.

Returning to Faenza in 1905, Domenico Baccarini began to work in the medium of ceramics. As part of the Art Nouveau and the late symbolism period of Faenza ceramics, he was responsible for some of the most interesting artistic, ceramic and decorative concepts at the turn of the twentieth century. Baccarini played a key role in the renewal of Faenza’s ceramic production, especially that of the Fabbriche Riunite Ceramiche workshop of Achille Calzi and the Manifatture Fratelli Minardi owned by the Minardi brothers, Virginio and Venturino.

While working in ceramic design, Baccarini continued his own drawing and sculptural works, of which three were presented at the Sixth Venice Biennale. He was very engaged in his artwork throughout 1905: exhibiting in Milan’s Fine Art Exhibition for the opening of the Sempione and at the first Exhibition of the Società del Risveglio Cittadino in Faenza. Baccarini also produced illustrations for Rome’s L’Avanti della Domenica magazine and started collaborating with writer and journalist Antonio Beltramelli on illustrations fo the author’s short stories.

After being abandoned by Bitta and suffering economically, Domenico Baccarini returned to Rome where he received a commission from the charity institution, Casa del Pane, for a series of drawings to illustrate their workers in the field. During this second stay in Rome, his already poor physical condition worsened rapidly, which forced his return to his hometown of Faenza. It was there that Domenico Baccarini died on January 31 of 1907, at the age of twenty-four.

For the celebration of the centennial anniversary of the passing of Domenico Baccarini, the Municipal Art Gallery of Faenza held two exhibitions of his paintings and drawings in their collection. On the same occasion, the Museum of Art of Ravenna held an exhibition entitled “Domenico Baccarini: A Meteor of the Early Twentieth Century”, which retraced his life through his work.

Paul Marc Joseph Chenavard

Paul Marc Joseph Chenavard, “The Divine Tragedy”, Full Canvas and Detail, 1865-1869, Oil on Canvas, 400 x 550 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Paris

Painter Paul Marc Joseph Chenavard was born in Lyon on December 9, 1808, to a bourgeois family of comfortable circumstances. After considering all his possible careers, he decided in favor of art, which took him to Paris in 1825 to begin his studies. Chenavard entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1825, and studied, alongside his friend and fellow painter Joseph Guichard, in the studio of neoclassicist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and later in the studios of painters Louis Hersent and Eugène Delacroix.

On the advice of Ingres, Chenavard traveled to Italy in 1827 to study the works of the master painters in Florence, Milan, Rome and Venice. In addition, he took interest in the work of the German school, even copying the Nazarene movement’s Johann Friedrich Overbeck’s murals at the Villa Massimi. After two years Chenavard returned to Paris, where he executed his first historical painting, “Luther Before the Diet of Worms”, in which Luther refuses to recant his writings before the assembly of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

For the 1831 decorative competition of the Salle des Séances de la Chambre in the Bourbon Palace, Chenavard’s painting, “Marat Apostrophizing the Marquis of Dreaux-Brezé”, received praise from Delacroix and historical painter Antoine-Jean Gros, but it was not acceptable by King Louis Philippe V. In 1841, some time after returning from Rome, Chenavard exhibited his “Martyrdom of St. Polycarpus”, which was followed five years later by the painting “Dante’s Hell”, similar in style to the dynamic composition and illusionistic perspective seen in the work of Antonio da Correggio.

An interest in the story of society rapidly became a dominant force in Chenavard’s life to such an extant that he felt contemporary art failed because it ceased to concern itself with greater concepts. Under the influence of German philosophy and painting, he considered art’s aim had to be humanitarian and civilizing. In 1848, the forthcoming decoration work for the Pantheon gave him the opportunity to fulfill that force in his life. Chenavard gathered several assistants, all former students of the Academy in Rome, each of which assisted individually in the design work, whose ideas he combined and redesigned.

In April of 1848, Paul Chenavard presented his plans for the decoration of the Pantheon with a circle of historical subjects. The sketches were approved by Ledru-Rolliin, the Minister of the Interior in the new French revolutionary government. However, a movement soon developed to return the Pantheon to the Church; the Archbishop of Paris, upon seeing Chenavard’s plans, declared the ideas too anticlerical to be accepted, and discontinued the project. In 1885 when the Saint Genevieve church once more became the Pantheon, Chenavard was both too old and angry to resume the task; French art had also, at that time, moved away from his esoteric historical romanticism.

In 1853, Paul Chenavard was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor; and two years later, at the Universal Exposition in Paris, where a large number of his paintings were shown, he received a first class medal. His next, and last, Salon painting was the 1869 “The Divine Tragedy”, which expressed in veiled terms his anti-religious sentiments and his faith in human reason. Originally placed in Paris’s Salon Carrée where it attracted much attention, it was later moved, possibly at the instigation of the clerical authorities, to an obscure gallery in the rear. With this last disappointment, the public career of Chenavard virtually came to an end.

Paul Chenavard retired to a life of a gentleman of leisure in Lyon, traveling occasionally, but painting very little. His sketches of the Pantheon project were shown together in Lyon in 1876 for the last time, accompanied with a brochure by his friend Charles Blanc. To the city of Lyon, Chenavard left his money, his prints, and his own works. He died in Paris in 1895 and was buried in Lyon’s new Loyasse Cemetery, an burial area with elaborate graves in various architectural styles.

Insert Images:

Top: Felix Bracquemond, “Paul Chenavard”, 1860, Etching on Thin Paper, 9.8 x 14.9 cm, British Museum, London

Bottom: Gustave Courbet, “Paul Chenavard, Munich”, 1869, Oil on Canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon, France

T M Davy

The Artwork of T M Davy

Born in New York, New York in 1980, T M Davy is a painter whose body work is characterized by realistic oil portraits. Davy studied at the National Academy of Design in New York in 2001, and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York where he currently teaches. In 2012 , he was an artist in residence at BOFFO in Fire Island, New York.

T M Davy’s work relies on scenes that are directly connected to his life and surroundings. Persistent themes in his work are the issues of intimacy, love, and friendship. Past subjects in his work have included candle-lit scenes of domestic life with family, his husband Liam, and his circle of friends. Davy has also painted a series of images centered on horses, inspired by the time he spent on a relative’s farm, and a series of images of candles lit in darkness.

The consistency of Davy’s technical execution and the sophistication of its realism are apparent in his oil on canvas work, whether in a small or a large-scale format. A connecting link in all of his paintings is his use of the chiaroscuro effect, a technique used also by painters Caravaggio and Anthony van Dyck, which emphasizes the interaction of light and shadow.He has also worked in the mediums of pastel and gouache, with which he produced several series of open air spontaneous drawings in a smaller scale format.

In his work produced on Fire Island, New York, Davy portrays many of his beachside figures entering or in the water, exemplifying the union of bodies with nature, a prominent theme of the artist. His portraits celebrate his inseparable communion with his husband, Liam Davy, as well as the intimacy and bond among close friends. His “Fire Island” series are a meditation on the power and freedom born from togetherness—between figure and landscape, mind and body, human and human.

Davy’s work has been included in group exhibitions at the “No Soul for Sale” exhibition at theTate Modern in London; the “B-Out” exhibition at the Andrew Edlin gallery in New York; the 2009 “Nudes” exhibition at Galeria Fortes Vilaca in São Paolo; and the 2019 “Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall” at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, among others. He has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Thomas Fuchs in Stuttgart, Germany in 2018: the Exile gallery in Berlin, Germany, 2012; and gallery 11R in New York in 2014 and 2017.

“We exist in an age of complete transition. The time is now to communicate the beauty of queer love around the world. A paradigm shift in people’s conception of love is happening. If I can, I want to play a small part in that–in revealing how true and how eternal it is. Transcendence is a movement to the broadest spectrum. “ —T M Davy, 2019

Information of T M Davy’s work and exhibitions can be found at the artist’s site: http://www.tmdavy.com

Naur Calvalcante

Photography by Naur Calvalcante

Naur Cavalcante is a designer and photographer, specializing in portraiture and commercial advertising, working in both Três Lagoas and São Paulo, Brazil. His work has been presented in the magazines: “Revista Planter”, “Revista Ella”, “Em Focco”, and the online magazines “Image Amplified” and “Morphosis”.

More information on the artist’s work can be located at: https://naurcavalcante.46graus.com

Harald Kreutzberg

Hans Robertson, “Portrait of Harald Kreutzberg”, 1931

Born in Liberec, Czech Republic in December of 1902, Harald Kreutzberg was a modern dancer and choreographer, known for his roles in both traditional ballets and expressive dance dramas. He played a major role in the development of the expressionist modern dance in Germany.

Trained at the Dresden Ballet School, Kreutzberg studied under two of the most important figures in modern dance, Mary Wigman and Rudolf Laban, and was a critical link in the aesthetic lineage that gave rise to American choreographer and composer Alwin Nikolais, choreographer and dance educator Hanya Holm, and many other U.S. choreographers.

In 1926, Harald Kreutzberg was in Swiss theater choreographer Max Terpis’s “Don Morte”, a version of Edgar Allen Poe’s novel “The Masque of the Red Death”. A year later, he appeared in the plays “Turnadot and Jedermann” and as Puck for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, both directed by Max Reinhardt. Kreutzberg accompanied Reinhardt to New York City where he began a tour of the United States, Canada, and Europe with the dancer Yvonne Georgi.

While his impact on expressionist modern dance was sweeping Europe, in the United States, Kreutzberg was considered by many as a major force in the development of the male modern dancer. He was not afraid to challenge the gender norms in his time. Kreutzberg tended to incorporate feminine movements and costuming in his performances, especially alongside his dance partner Yvonne Georgi. He specifically inspired male dancers by breaking the stereotypical roles of princes, birds, and mythical gods.

With their international tours from 1928-1931, Kreutzberg and Yvonne Georgi exposed the public to the style of expressionist dance. Many gay male dancers in Germany also pursued their careers during the years of the National Socialist government. He was the most notable among them as his long-term partnership with his accompanist and composer Friedrich Wilckens was an open secret. While other gay men were imprisoned and forced to wear a pink triangle, Kreutzberg was allowed to tour throughout Germany and abroad.

In 1943, Harald Kreutzberg appeared as a jester in Georg Willhelm’s film “Paracelsus”, in which he performed a modern hypnotic dance. Choreographer George Balanchine and writer Lincoln Kirstein invited him to share a program with the New York City Ballet in the late 1940s. Kreutzberg established his own dance school in 1955 in Bern, Switzerland, and retired from the stage in 1959. He continued to choreograph for others and teach at his school until his death in Bern on April 25, 1968.

Insert Image: German photographer Hans Robertson, who specialized in the genre of dance, took this photo, on December 11, 1902, showing Harald Kreutzberg wearing a headdress for a performance at the Volksbühne in Berlin.

Stephen Busken, “Jesse Metcalfe”

Stephen Busken, “Jesse Metcalfe”, 2014, Photo Shoot, Styled by Monty Jackson

Stephen Busken, the son of a bakery owner in Cincinnati, Ohio, is a portrait, fashion, and architecture photographer living and working in East Los Angeles. Known for injecting his energetic personality into his work, he combines his technical knowledge with his artistic sense to create both soulful and elegant images.

Busken has done a long series of portrait work, shooting images of interior designer Jeremiah Brent, multi-media artist Petra Cortright, floral designer Eric Butterbaugh, and painter Zachary Crane, among others. He has also done corporate work for such clients as Lexus, Bravo, Vogue, Interview, Traditional Home, Esquire, Interiors Magazine, and MM Magazine.

This series of photographs is the second photo shoot by Stephen Busken of actor Jesse Metcalfe. The first shoot was a black and white image series for the June 20th, 2015 issue of Flaunt, a digital American satirical fashion and cultural magazine which engages art with technology.

Henry Scott Tuke

Henry Scott Tuke, “T.E. Lawrence as a Cadet”, 1921-22, Oil on Canvas, 42.5 x 52.7 cm, Clouds Hill Dorset, National Trust

Born in York on June 12th of 1858 into a prominent Quaker family, Henry Scott Tuke was an English visual artist, both a painter and photographer. His father was Daniel Hack Tuke, a well-known medical doctor specializing in psychiatry, who campaigned for the humane treatment of the insane. In 1859 the Tuke family moved to Falmouth, where Daniel Tuke established a practice.

Encouraged to draw and paint from an early age, Henry Scott Tuke was enrolled in 1870 at Irwin Sharpe’s Quaker school in Weston-super-Mare, where he remained until the age of sixteen. In 1875, he enrolled at the Slade School of Art under etcher and painter Alphonse Legros and historical painter Sir Edward Poynter. Tuke won a scholarship which supported his training at the Slade and his 1880 studies in Italy. Between 1881 and 1883, he was in Paris where he met Realist movement painter Jules Bastien-Lepage, who was associated with the beginning of Naturalism. It was Bastien-Lepage who encouraged Tuke to paint en plein air, painting outdoors within the landscape.

While studying in France, Tuke decided to move to Newlyn Cornwall where many of his Parisian and Slade School friends, including painters Thomas Cooper Gotch and Albert Chevallier Tayler, had already formed the Newlyn School of painters. Attracted to the fishing village’s fantastic light, cheap living and the availability of inexpensive models, these artists were fascinated by the everyday life in the harbor and nearby villages and took this as the subject of many of their paintings.

After he exhibited his work at London’s Royal Academy of Art, Tuck received several important commissions. With his style of rough, visible brushstrokes, more impressionistic than those of the other painters, he distanced himself after a short time from the Newlyn School. During the 1880s, Tuke became friends with Oscar Wilde and other prominent poets and writers including poet and cultural historian John Addington Symonds. In 1885, Tuke returned to Falmouth, a secluded part of Cornwall with a mild climate where many of his major works were produced.

In his time at Falmouth, Tuke focused on maritime scenes and portraits, earning most of his income from his work as a maritime painter. He used a converted old fishing boat as a studio and living quarters in the summer and, in winter, rented two rooms in a cottage situated between Pennance Point and Swanpool Beach. This cottage remained Tuke’s permanent base until his death. While living there, he produced his 1888-89 “All Hands to the Pumps”, showing sailors manning the pumps during a rough sea storm; “The Sailing Lesson” in 1892; and the 1914 ship portrait “Four Masted Barque”, commissioned by its owner.

Henry Scott Tuke became an established artist and was elected to full membership of the Royal Academy in 1914. Sometime in 1923, he visited Jamaica and Central America. There he created from 1923 to 1924 several watercolor scenes, such as “Tobacco Cay, British Honduras”. However in penetrating the interior of Belize, Tuke became ill and was forced to return home, where he never fully recovered his health. After a long illness and suffering a heart attack in 1928, he died, a year later, in March of 1929. In his will Tuke left generous amounts of money to some of the men, who as boys, had been his models.

Moving between Cornish-based artist colonies and the London art scene, Tuke presented a stylistic fusion of progressive en plein air paintings executed with a vivid palette and loose impressionistic handling of lighting and brushwork. Although remembered today mainly for his oil paintings of young men, Tuke, in addition to his achievements as a figurative painter, produced as many portraits of ships as he did human figures. A prolific artist, he produced over thirteen-hundred known works during his career.

Note: Among Henry Scott Tuke’s friends and models was a high school cadet, T. E. Lawrence, who later became famous as the iconic Lawrence of Arabia. In the painting “T. E. Lawrence as a Cadet”, done at Newporth Beach, near Falmouth, Tuke painted the young Lawrence getting dressed after a swim. As Lawrence was in his thirties in the early 1920s, it is most likely that this scene was composed using an earlier sketch drawn by Tuke, possibly from 1905.

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Henry Scott Tuke”, Date Unknown, Vintage Print, Tate Museum, London

Second Insert Image: Henry Scott Tuke, “Jamaica”, 1924, Oil on Panel, 39.5 x 32 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Henry Scott Tuke, “The Green Waterways”, 1926, Oil on Canvas, 122 x 112 cm, Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool, Lancashire, England

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “William Ayers Ingram and Henry Scott Tuke, Pennance Point”, Date Unknown, Vintage Print, Tate Museum, London

Mikolaj Kaczmarek

Photographer Unknown, “Combattants de la Grande Polgne (Fighters of Greater Poland)”, 1918-19, Colorization by Mikolaj Kaczmarek

Mikolaj Kaczmarek is a Polish graphic artist and photographer. Recognized for the quality of his colorization work on historical photos, he now works in conjunction with Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance and the Polish National Fund.

Examples of Kaczmarek’s work, including photos and histories of Polish freedom-fighters during World War II, can be found at: https://www.facebook.com/KolorHistorii/?ref=page_internal

William Strang

William Strang, “Lady with a Red Hat”, 1918, Oil on Canvas, 102.9 x 77.5 cm, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, Scotland

William Strang, born in February of 1859, was a Scottish painter and printmaker, known for his illustrating the works of writer and preacher John Bunyan, poet Samuel Coleridge, and novelist Joseph Rudyard Kipling.

At an early age, Strang attended Dumbarton Academy, a mixed secondary school, after which he worked in a counting-house of a shipbuilding firm for fifteen months. He left for London, at the age of sixteen, in 1875 to study art at the Slade School, under painter and etcher Alphonse Legros. Strang achieved success as an etcher, and became assistant master in the etching class. An original member of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers in 1880, he exhibited his work at their first show in 1881.

Strang worked in a multiple of techniques, including etching, drypoint, mezzotint, engraving, lithography, and wood cut. A privately produce catalogue of his engravings contained more than three hundred items. His work on poet William Nicholson’s “Ballad of Aken Drum” is known for its strong drawing and clear,

delicate shadow tones. Strang provided fourteen illustrations for the 1910 edition of John Bunyan’s series “The Pilgrim’s Progress”, and produced a series of etchings and woodcuts, from 1896 to 1903, illustrating Samuel Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”.

William Strang painted a number of portraits, nude figures in landscapes, and groups of peasant families. These were exhibited at several German exhibitions, at The International Society, and at the Royal Academy. His decorative biblical series of Adam and Eve, commissioned for the private library of the Hodson family in the West Midlands, was exhibited at the Whitechapel Exhibition in 1910.

In later years Strang developed a style of drawing in red and black chalk, with the whites and high lights rubbed out, on paper stained with water color. His method gave his work the qualities of delicate modeling, and refined form and gradations. Strang drew portraits in this manner of many members of the Commonwealth’s Order of Merit for the royal library at Windsor Castle.

William Strang was elected a member of The International Society in 1905, elected as an associate engraver of the Royal Academy in 1906, and became a master of the Art Workers Guild in 1907. He died in April of 1921 and was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery in London. In 1955, his son David, also an artist, gifted impressions of the bulk of William Strang’s etchings to the National Gallery of Scotland.

Note: William Strang’s “Lady with a Red Hat” is a portrait of author and garden designer Vita Sackville-West. The strong colors of her outfit and her assertive pose with elbow extended conveys her flamboyant personality. An independent thinker, stylish and assertive, Vita Sackville-West shocked Edwardian society by her affairs with other women.

Vita Sackville-West published more than a dozen collections of poetry and thirteen novels. She was twice awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Imaginative Literature: in 1927 for her epic “The Land” and in 1933 for her “Collected Poems”. She was the inspiration for the protagonist of the 1928 “Orlando: A Biography” by her friend and lover Virginia Woolf.

Insert Note: When William Strang exhibited his self-portrait at the Royal Academy in 1919, he gave it the simple title “A Painter”. Drawing on Impressionism and Symbolism, he had been one of the innovators of the modern style in Britain; but the symmetry of this work and the figure’s direct gaze is very reminiscent of the self-portraits of Rembrandt. Here, in his old age, Strang refers to a traditional model of the artist as a workman secluded in his studio. The painting is in the collection of the Tate Museum, London.

Émile Fabry

Émile Fabry, “Portrait de Suzanne (Fabry) et de Barthélémy”, 1920, Lithograph Colored with Gouache on Wove Paper, 37.5 x 46 cm, Private Collection, Belgium

Born in Verviers, Belgium in 1865, Émile Fabry was an artist who studied under portrait and landscape painter Jean-François Portaels, who is regarded as the founder of the Belgian Orientalist school. An influential artist of the Symbolist movement in Belgium, Fabry was a member of prominent artist groups such as Pour L’Art (Art for Art’s Sake) and La Rose+Croix, a series of Symbolist art salons hosted in Paris in the 1890s.

With the advent of World War One in continental Europe, Émile Fabry sought refuge in St. Ives, England. The issues of war and peace became recurrent themes in his work, continuing even after the battles had ended. In 1919, Fabry, along with Jean Delville, Albert Ciamberlani and Constant Montald, founded L’Art Monumental, an idealistic artist group which evolved from the Symbolist movement. Using classical forms and iconographic traditions, the group desired to elevate the spirit of the people by a shared sense of beauty in the construction of new monuments and public buildings.

Émile Fabry’s 1920 hand-colored lithograph “Portrait of Suzanne (Fabry) and Barthélémy” is an overlay image of two profiles, one of his son Barthélémy and one of his daughter Suzanne. Illustrative of his creative process, the soldier and young woman are depicted in an idealized way, with the stoic, long gaze reminiscent of the rigidity of a sculpture. Fabry used a indistinct, dotted technique of coloring, combining elements of Pointillism and Symbolism, to give the figures a sense of liveliness.

Émile Fabry regularly used his family members as models for his work. There is an existing photo of Suzanne Fabry posing for this work which shows how Fabry focused his composition on her profile. Drawn to the subject of the war on several occasions, Fabry used his own children as models for this work to create a more personal portrayal of the war.

In addition to his paintings, Émile Fabry did the decorative mosaic work in pavilions of the 1880 National Exhibition at the Cinquanteniare of Brussels and, with Belgian architect Victor Horta, the decorations in the large Art Nouveau townhouse, the Hotel Solvay. In 1932, Émile Fabry was made a Commander in the Order of Leopold, the oldest and highest order in Belgium, founded by King Leopold in 1832. He died in 1966 at the age of one hundred and one years old.

Tope Insert Image: Émile Fabry, “Printemps”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 219 x 130 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Émile Fabry, “The Faun’s Song”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 138.1 x 122.5 cm, Private Collection

George Washington Lambert

George Washington Lambert, “The White Glove”, 1921, Oil on Canvas, 106 x 78 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

Born in September of 1873 in St. Petersburg, Russia, George Washington Thomas Lambert was an Australian portrait artist and a war artist during the First World War. After the death of his father, he and his English mother moved to Württemberg, Germany, to stay with Lambert’s maternal grandfather. Lambert received his education at Kingston College in Somerset, England, after which the family emigrated to Australia, arriving in Sydney in January of 1887.

In 1894, George Lambert began exhibiting his work at the Art Society and the Society of Artists in Sydney. After drawing pen and ink cartoons for a year at The Bulletin magazine, he began painting full time in 1896. Lambert won the Wynne Prize for his 1899 painting “Across the Blacksoil Plains”, a depiction of a heavily laden wagon pulled by a team of draft horses.

Lambert studied at the Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney until 1900, after which he won a government traveling scholarship from New South Wales. He spent a few years traveling, first to Paris, and later to London where he exhibited work at the Royal Academy. At an exhibition in Barcelona in 1911, Lambert won a silver medal for his painting “The Sonnet”.

During the years of the First World War, George Lambert served as an official war artist. His painting “Anzac”, depicting the 1915 landings of forces on the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey, is now in the Australian War Memorial collection located in Australia’s capital Canberra. In 1920, Lambert painted another notable work “A Sergeant of the Light Horse”, which he executed in London after retuning from Palestine.

Returning to Australia in 1921, Lambert had a successful solo show in Melbourne at the Fine Art Society. This was the year he painted “The White Glove”, a oil portrait depicting Miss Gladys Neville Collins, the daughter of lawyer J. T. Collins, trustee of the Public Library, Museums, and National Gallery of Victoria.

George Lambert posed Miss Collins in a manner suggestive of John Singer Sargent’s 1905 work “Portrait of Ena Wertheimer, ‘a vele gonfie”, with its black white-feathered hat and hand raised in front of chest. Miss Collins’s tilted head, half closed eyes, half open mouth, and almost bare right arm suggests individual sensuality, but also a form of codified behavior. Significantly different from the in-vogue contemporary brown-toned portraits, George Lambert, himself, described it as a wild, dashing portrait.

In 1922, the Art Gallery of New South Wales acquired the painting for six hundred guineas ( $53,000 in 2019), at the time the highest price paid by a public gallery for a portrait by an Australian artist. The work remains a part of its collection.

Ricardo Rico

Photography by Ricardo Rico

Ricardo Rico is a self-taught photographer working and living in São Paulo, Brazil. He is currently working on “The Lonely Project”, dealing with masculine beauty in physical and emotional forms. To date, there are nineteen issues of “The Lonely Project” available.

Ricardo Rico’s website is located at: https://www.ricardorico.com

The Lonely Project website is located at: https://thelonelyproject.com.br/revista/