Gulaan, “Nodel Perofeta”

Gulaan, “Nodei Perofeta”

Gulaan is the stage name of Edouard Guïnedr Gulaan Wamedjo from New Caledonia, an accomplished musician and vocalist who plays guitar, drums, bass, keyboards and percussion. Gulaan first won acclaim in the mid 1990s as singer with the group Ryos OK, who released several albums in New Caledonia. His debut award winning solo album, “The Spirit of Yesterday”, was a warm and peaceful tribute to the land of his ancestors and his romances.

Gulaan’s guitar playing and voice are presented in all their stripped-back simplicity, showcasing his use of arpeggio and his striking vocal style. Gulaan enjoys making music in solitude, close to his source of creativity. His performances are moments of pure escapism, inspired by memories of his grandmother, his Baha’ï beliefs and his love of freedom. Gulaan hopes to discover new horizons as he exports his music throughout the world.

Phyllis Stapler

Phyllis Stapler, “The Moon Hare”

“Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamic of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problems and solutions sown are directly valid for all mankind.”

         Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

Ivan Pinkava

Photography by Ivan Pinkava

Ivan Pinkava was born in 1961 in Náchod, located in northeast Bohemia. He graduated from secondary school specializing in graphic art, and took his post-secondary training in photography at Prague’s FAMU. He is especially interested in the ambiguous character of the human being affected by suffering. His work is inspired by mythology, ancient tales, religious stories and theatre.

Pinkava regularly exhibits in Europe and the United States. His works are part of  public collections both in the Czech Republic and abroad. In 2005 Pinkava was appointed the head of the Studio of Photography at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. He is represented by the Leica Gallery, Prague, Czechia.

Gallery: https://www.lgp.cz/en.html

Art Books: “Ivan Pinkave: Remains” and “Ivan Pinkava” http://www.artbook.com/catalog–photography–monographs–pinkava–ivan.html

Danny Quirk

Danny Quirk, Title Unknown, From the “Faces of War” Series, Watercolor

Danny Quirk is an artist and recent graduate from the Pratt Institute. He specializes in photo realistic watercolors and painting what the camera can’t capture.

“My work is perceivably on the darker side, but the actually is, it’s about exploration. My two current bodies of work are of military, and anatomical themes. The military pieces were derived from countless interviews with military personnel deployed overseas, in the attempts to illustrate what they went through, the war in their eyes. My anatomical works combine classic poses, in dramatic chiaroscuro lighting, with a very contemporary twist… illustrating what’s underneath the skin, and the portrayed figure dissects a region of their body to show the structures that lay beneath.” – Danny Quirk

Nicolas Pain

Nicolas Pain, “Octopus III”, 2016, Bronze, 1 x 1 x 1 Foot

After graduating in 1990 with a  B.A. in Graphic Design, English sculptor Nicolas Pain pursued a career as a graphic designer though his interest and ability in three dimensional work drew him into the to the video game industry in the late nineties. This allowed him to support his life long interest in both SCUBA diving and marine wildlife that proved to be the trigger for his sculptural work which he began in 2005.

Calendar: July 9

A Year: Day to Day Men: 9th of July

Apollo on the Bed

July 9, 1858, was the birthdate of the German-American anthropologist Franz Uri Boas.

In 1887 Franz Uri Boas emigrated to the United States, where he first worked as a museum curator at the Smithsonian. In 1899 he became a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, where he remained for the rest of his career. Through his students, many of whom went on to found anthropology departments and research programs inspired by their mentor, Boas profoundly influenced the development of American anthropology.

Franz Boas was one of the most prominent opponents of the then-popular ideologies of scientific racism, the idea that race is a biological concept and that human behavior is best understood through the typology of biological characteristics. In a series of groundbreaking studies of skeletal anatomy, Boas showed that cranial shape and size was highly malleable depending on environmental factors such as health and nutrition, in contrast to the claims by racial anthropologists of the day that held head shape to be a stable racial trait.

Boas also worked to demonstrate that differences in human behavior are not primarily determined by innate biological dispositions but are largely the result of cultural differences acquired through social learning. In this way, Boas introduced culture as the primary concept for describing differences in behavior between human groups, and as the central analytical concept of anthropology.

Among Boas’s main contributions to anthropological thought was his rejection of the then-popular evolutionary approaches to the study of culture, which saw all societies progressing through a set of hierarchic technological and cultural stages, with Western European culture at the summit. Boas argued that culture developed historically through the interactions of groups of people and the diffusion of ideas; and that consequently, there was no process towards continuously “higher” cultural forms. This insight led Boas to reject the “stage”-based organization of ethnological museums, instead preferring to order items on display based on the affinity and proximity of the cultural groups in question.

Boas also introduced the ideology of cultural relativism, which holds that cultures cannot be objectively ranked as higher or lower, or better or more correct; but that all humans see the world through the lens of their own culture, and judge it according to their own culturally acquired norms. For Boas, the object of anthropology was to understand the way in which culture conditioned people to understand and interact with the world in different ways. To do this, it was necessary to gain an understanding of the language and cultural practices of the people studied.

Carmine Santaniello

Carmine Santaniello, “Amore”, Lithograph, 9 x 12 Inches

Collage is an integral part of New York City-based Carmine Santaniello’s art and is usually the starting point for each work. Employing the traditional method of cut and glued paper, he creates new faces out of amassed facial images. He incorporates elements of his own photographs of exterior environments such as graffiti or street art. Some works remain as collage, some become drawings, some artist books or articulated paper dolls, but most become monoprints utilizing lithography.

Through the juxtaposition of techniques and mediums, he creates evocatively charged works of art. These new works have an erotic edge with a voyeuristic feel to them. Each subject is confined behind a the vale of marred graffiti-like images.

Reblogged with many thanks to the artist’s site: http://carminesantaniellofineart.blogspot.com    and   https://www.etsy.com/in-en/listing/585432108/original-art-monoprint-lithograph-gay

Wallace Stegner: “Touch. It is Touch That is the Deadliest Enemy of Chastity”

Photographer Unknown, (Thumb)

“Touch. It is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy, gentility with its codes and conventions and restraints. By touch we are betrayed and betray others … an accidental brushing of shoulders or touching of hands … hands laid on shoulders in a gesture of comfort that lies like a thief, that takes, not gives, that wants, not offers, that awakes, not pacifies. When one flesh is waiting, there is electricity in the merest contact.”

― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

Charles Simonds

Charles Simonds: Sculpture with Clay

Charles Simonds majored in art at the University of California at Berkeley and after graduation, taught college art in New Jersey. There he discovered an area of clay pits that had once provided the raw material for some of Manhattan’s older buildings. He literally immersed himself in the subject, burying himself naked in a pool of wet clay to get a feel for the material. Back in New York, where he still lives, he experimented with clay and sand, learning to capture the look of the American Southwest or an African savanna.

Simonds’s sculptures are mostly enchanting miniature architecture and landscapes with small chambers and towers; some are abstract organic shapes, bulbous or phallic in form. Indoors, his sculptures are protected from immediate destruction, but permanence is not what his work is about.

The enduring value of his work – the art of it – comes across in the stories he tells and in the stories others tell about him. Like Robert Smithson, a friend and artist he respected, he embraces entropy. He builds his objects (at least his early work) for destruction, and he takes no measures to insure their survival. He said in the 1980s, “Their effect is enhanced by their destruction and disappearance.”