Geoffrey Laurence

The Artwork of Geoffrey Laurence

Born in Paterson, New Jersey in 1949, Geoffrey Laurence is an American painter, illustrator, educator and designer of both graphic and interior work. Although considered an artist of the realism school, he is more concerned with the emotional responses that can be achieved through various painting techniques. Laurence finds figurative painting to be artificial by its very nature and, thus, an abstraction of the observed life-experience. For him, the goal of all painting is to engage the viewer in an emotional narrative.

Geoffrey Laurence’s parents were naturalized Americans, refugees from Europe and Holocaust survivors. At four years of age, Laurence moved with his family to England where he received his education. In 1965, he entered London’s Byam Shaw School of Art where he studied under geometric painter Bridget Riley. After receiving his London Certificate in Art and Design in 1968, Laurence studied graphic design for a year under poster artist Tom Eckersley at the London College of Printing. In 1969, he studied under Frederick Gore, the Head of the Painting Department, at Saint Martins School of Art where he earned his Bachelor of Arts in 1972.

Laurence moved to New York City in 1992 and attended the New York Academy of Art where he studied with painter and draftsman Eric Fischl and realist painter Vincent Desiderio. Laurence received his Master of Fine Arts Cum Laude in 1995. He worked freelance for the next tweety years in different art-related fields. Laurence was an illustrator for several magazines, including “Woman’s World” and “Look Now”, as well as a graphic designer for such companies as Pineapple and British Petroleum.

In the fashion industry, Geoffrey Laurence created a range of t-shirts for Walt Disney, the British online clothing retailer Burton and the UK-based global retailer French Connection. He also created work for fashion designer Katherine Hamnett and such companies as PampleMouse and Muscle Sport. During the 1990s, Laurence did interior design work for restaurants including London’s Zen restaurant chain. His design work has appeared in Vogue Magazine, the Royal Institute of British Architects magazine and the London Evening Standard. In addition to applying his skills to freelance work, Laurence continued his focus on figurative drawing and painting, work which regularly appeared in exhibitions.

Exposed to art since early childhood, Laurence has always been fascinated with the history of its development from early cave paintings to European masterworks. He sees art, which is older than verbal language, to be a major part of being human, that distinction which establishes human identity and elevates man from mere mechanical life. Laurence’s work has evolved over the course of his career and developed into two general themes. The first is maintaining a balanced link between pre-1900 classical painting and work of a more contemporary nature. The second is the continuation of a meaningful visual response to the Holocaust, a personal dedication resulting from his being the offspring of concentration camp survivors.

Geoffrey Laurence has been painting and exhibiting his work both in the United States and Europe for over forty-five years. In addition to group and solo gallery exhibitions, his work has been exhibited at the Brighton Museum in the United Kingdom; Taos, New Mexico’s Van Vechten-Lineberry Museum; Sacramento’s Center for Contemporary Art; the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art in Wisconsin; and Chicago’s Zhou B Art Center, among others. Laurence was recently a finalist at the 2023 ARC Art Renewal Centre Salon in New York City.

Among Laurence’s many honors have been the 1995 Walter Erlebacher Award, the 2004 Robert Rauschenberg Award, the 2006 George Sugarman Foundation Grant, the 2017 Palm Art Award, the 2018 PoetsArtists/Bauhaus Award, and the 2023 Robert Rauschenberg Grant. Laurence has taught at the Santa Fe Art Institute, the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art, the Santa Fe School of Art at SFCC, Seattle’s Gage Academy of Fine Art, and Santa Fe’s Bettina Steinke Studio. He is currently represented in the United States by Richard J. Demato Fine Arts Gallery in Romeo, Michigan.

Geoffrey Laurence’s website, which includes technical resources for artists, classes, and contact information, can be located at: http://www.geoffreylaurence.com

Second Insert Image: Geoffrey Laurence, “Animal Nature”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 76.2 x 50.8 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Geoffrey Laurence, “The Brother”, 2006, Oil on Canvas, 96.5 x 71.1 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Geoffrey Laurence, “Hold Fast”, 2004, Oil on Canvas, 198.1 x 182.9 cm, Private Collection

Robert Wiene: Film History Series

Robert Wiene, “The Hands of Orlac”, 1924, Silent Horror Film, Running Time 99 Minutes, Cinematography Günther Krampf and Hans Androschin, Producer Pan-Film

Robert Wiene was born in April of 1873 in the German Empire city of Breslau, now the city of Wroclaw in Poland. He was a German film director, producer and screenwriter who worked in a variety of genres including the German Expressionist movement of the early twentieth-century. Wiene was the elder son of theatrical actor Karl Wiene and the brother of Conrad Wiene, who also entered the German film industry.

Wiene traveled during his formative years with his family throughout Central and Western Europe; he lived in Stuttgart, Vienna, Dresden and Prague. Wiene studied law at the University of Berlin and the University of Vienna where he earned his law degree. He practiced law in the central German city of Weimar until 1908. At which time, Wiene relocated to Vienna for a position as manager of a theatrical company; this position gave him the opportunity to perform in its stage productions.

Robert Wiene’s initial participation in the German film industry was writing the screenplay for director Friedrich Müller’s 1913 silent film “Die Waffen der Jugend (The Weapons of Youth)”. This film is now considered a lost film. In the following year, Wiene directed his first film, “Er Rechts, Sie Links (He This Way, She That Way)”, a marital short comedy for the Berlin-based Messter Film. Messter Film became the center of the German film industry and played a prominent role in the development of the longer-running feature film. Between 1914 and 1918, Wiene wrote the screenplays for fifteen movies he directed for Messter Film.

In 1919, Wiene and Austrian film director Heinz Hanus founded the “Association of Film Directors in Vienna”. This association was a member of what would become the Filmbund, a professional support group for the Austrian film industry which was on the verge of collapse. In 1920, Wiene directed what is probably his best known film, the 1920 silent horror film “Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari”, considered the archetypal work of German Expressionist cinema. The script was written by Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz, both pacifists, and was inspired by their experiences with the military during World War I.

After the success of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”, Robert Wiene became an independent director for the remainder of his career. In 1923 for Neumann-Film-Produktion GmbH, he directed and wrote the screenplay for the 1923 silent drama “Raskolnikow”, an adaption of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s epic 1866 novel “Crime and Punishment”. An avant-garde psychological drama, it starred Ukrainian-born actor Gregori Chmara and premiered in Berlin. This film also had a strong influence on the development of German cinema.

Wiene continued to direct and write screenplays for silent films until 1928. His final silent film was the 1928 “Unfug der Liebe (Folly of Love)” for Max Glass Film. Austrian director Max Glass wrote the screenplay and produced the film, which starred Maria Jacobini and the British actor Jack Trevor. Wiene directed his first sound film, the 1930 drama “Der Andere (The Other)”, at Berlin’s Terra Studios. He shot a French-language version entitled “The Prosecutor Hallers” immediately afterwards with different actors at the same studio. Wiene directed three more films in 1931: “Panik in Chicago”, “Der Liebesexpress (The Love Express)”, and in collaboration with French director Pierre Billon, “Nuits de Venise (Venetian Nights)”.

In 1933, Robert Wiene directed “Taifun (Typhoon)”, a drama film based on writer Melchior Lengyei’s 1911 play of the same name. This was Wiene’s last film in Germany. In May of 1933 four months after the National Socialist Party took power, the film was banned. The film was seen by the censors as portraying Asian characters as more noble than Europeans; the censors were also concerned the film’s portrayal of the French justice system as incompetent might undermine the audience’s faith in the German system. The film was heavily reshot with an altered plot under the title “Polizeiakte 909”; the Japanese were now portrayed as unsympathetic villains.

Wiene relocated to Budapest in 1933 and never returned to Germany. In September of that year, he started directing the 1934 “Eine Nacht in Venedig (One Night in Venice)” for Hunnia-Film, at that time the most significant sound film studio in Hungary. Two versions were shot simultaneously, a German language film and a Hungarian version with Hungarian actors. After finishing the film, Wiene traveled to London and finally to Paris where he attempted to make a sound remake of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” with artist Jean Cocteau.

Robert Wiene died in Paris from cancer on the seventeenth of July in 1938, ten days before the end of production on his spy thriller “Ultimatum”. The film was finished posthumously by his friend Robert Sildmak, a prominent film director at Universal Films in Hollywood. Robert Wiene was buried at Paris’s Bagneux Cemetery in a temporary concession plot that was later recycled. There is no trace of his grave today. Only twenty of the ninety films Wiene created are currently known to exist.

Note: Robert Wiene’s 1924 silent horror film “The Hands of Orlac” was based on French writer Maurice Renard’s novel “Les Mains d’Orlac”. It starred Russian Empire-born actress Alexandra Sorina and the prominent German-born British actor Conrad Veidt, who had played the murderous somnambulist in Wiene’s “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”. The film was shot at the studios of Listo Film in Vienna and had its Berlin premiere in September of 1924.

Several reconstructed versions of the film exist today with new sound scores by such composers as Henning Lohner, Paul Mercer, and Donald Sosin. German-émigré film director Karl Freund, as a final assignment with Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, directed a 1935 adaption of Renard’s novel under the title “Mad Love”. This film starred Peter Lorre as Dr. Gogol, Frances Drake as Yvonne Orlac, and Colin Clive, known for his 1931 role of Henry Frankenstein, as the somnambulist Stephen Orlac.

In 1960, French filmmaker Edmond T. Gréville directed both an English and French version of “The Hands of Orlac”, based on his screenplay of Renard’s novel, that starred Mel Ferrer, Dany Carrel, Lucile Saint-Simon and Christopher Lee. The film’s cinematography was done by Desmond Dickinson and featured a score by French pianist and jazz composer Claude Bolling.

Second Insert Image: Robert Wiene, “The Hands of Orlac”, 1924, (Alexandra Sorina and Conrad Veidt), Cinematography Günther Krampf and Hans Androschin

Third Insert Images: Robert Wiene, “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”, 1930, (Conrad Veidt), Cinematography Willy Hameister

Fourth Insert Image: Robert Wiene, “The Hands of Orlac”, 1924, (Conrad Veidt), Cinematography Günther Krampf and Hans Androschin

Bottom Insert Image: Robert Wiene, “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”, 1930, (Werner Drauss and Conrad Veidt), Cinematography Willy Hameister

Steve Huston

The Paintings of Steve Huston

Born in 1959 and raised in Alaska, Steve Huston is an American painter, draftsman and educator. He graduated with his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Prior to graduation, Huston was creating illustrations for such clients as Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Paramount Pictures, Caesar’s Palace, and Universal Studios.

As an academic, Huston taught life drawing and painting, as well as, composition and anatomy at the Art Center College of Design. He later taught such classes at Warner Brothers Studios, Disney’s Animation and Gaming Divisions, Blizzard Entertainment, and DreamWorks Studios. In 1995, Huston began a career as a fine artist; he won top prizes for his work at both the 1995 and 1996 California Art Club Gold Medal Exhibitions.

Passionate about having an artistic life, Steve Huston has created and taught art for the last forty years. He ia a painter of both landscapes and figurative works. Among Huston’s figurative works are scenes of men engaged in activities that require energy and movement, either in labor or sport. He has created an extensive series that depicts the sport of boxing; this Boxer series reveals both the tension and the energy that pervades the sport. Huston’s Worker series presents men intensely engaged in heavy labor work that requires both strength and stamina. These manual workers are depicted in the everyday tasks of carrying wooden beams, lifting large wooden crates, and moving objects.

Among those sources which have influenced Huston’s artwork are the works of Rembrandt and Italian Renaissance painter Titian; the early American Tonalist painters such as George Inness and Charles Eaton; the art projects of the the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration; and the graphic power and heroic character of the American Comic Book form.

Steve Huston’s work has been featured in American Art Collector, Art News, Southwest Art, Harper’s Bazaar, American Artist and Western Art & Architecture, among other publications. His work has been exhibited at the Academy of Art College of the Carnegie Art Museum, the Pasadena Museum of Contemporary Art, London’s Albemarle Gallery, the Sullivan Goss Gallery in Santa Barbara and the Timothy Yargar Fine Art Gallery in Beverly Hills. Huston was also a frequent exhibitor at New York City’s prestigious Eleanor Ettinger Gallery from 1998 to its closing in 2013.

Steve Huston’s website, which features images of his work, livestream classes and limited edition prints, can be found at: https://stevehustonart.com

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Steve Huston”, 2019, Color Print for CGArchives January 2019

Second Insert Image: Steve Huston, Figure Studies from Sketchbook, Brown Ink and Gouache on Paper

Bottom Insert Image: Steve Huston, Title Unknown, (Three Workers), Date Unknown, Worker Series, Oil on Canvas

Gaston Goor

Gaston Goor, “Homere et les Bergers (Homer and the Shepherds)”, 1940, Oil on Panel, 81.3 x 119.4 cm, Private Collection

Born in Lunéville, the capital city of Lorraine in October of 1902, Gaston Goor was a highly accomplished, albeit controversial, French illustrator, painter, muralist and sculptor. He is best known for his illustrations in “Amitiés Particulières (Special Friendships)” and other works by French writer and diplomat Roger Peyrefitte, his primary patron.

The son of Auguste Léon Goor and Marie Angèle Berthe Becker, Goor entered the École des Beaux-Arts at the age of seventeen. He left his native province in 1925 to travel to Paris where he worked in the studio of painter and writer Amédée Ozenfant. In 1917, Ozenfant and painter Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, had founded the doctrine of Purism, a style of art in which elements are represented as robust simplified forms with minimal detail. Through his association with Ozenfant and Le Corbusier, Goor was introduced to modern art and prominent artists such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Jean Lurçat, best known for his tapestries.

During his stay in Versailles, Gaston Goor was introduced by poet André Salmon to author André Gide who guided him to the profession of illustrator. Working with Capitole Editions, Gore became a prominent artist and created illustrations for forty volumes under that title. He created illustrations for Léon Daudet’s “Écrivains et Artistes”, Henry de Montherlant’s “L’Etoile du Soir”, Lucien Daudet’s “Le Voyage de Shakespeare”, and François Mauriac’s “Hommes Devant Dieu”. Goor also provided illustrations for both the Horizons de France and the Trianon editions.

In 1929, Goor was commissioned to produce decorative work for the Colonial Exhibition in Paris. After a study trip to Morocco, he returned Versailles where he worked briefly for its Department of Fine Arts before locating to the resort town of Hyères where his family had settled. Goor’s nude studies of the young model Jean Joerimann caught the attention of writer Jean Renaud Icard who gave him an exhibition in his Lyon gallery. After the exhibition, Goor received a commission to illustrate Icard’s latest book “Mon Page”.

In the 1930s, Gaston Goor received private commissions, both illustrative and decorative, from wealthy clients and art collectors. Among these prominent men was the owner of a large luxury hotel in Hyères, who was the father of Jean Joerimann, the model for the “Mon Page” illustrations and an unreciprocated love interest for Goor. In 1942, he received a commission from architect Maurice Novarina to create murals for the Church of Douvaine in the Auvergne-Rhõne-Alpes regional city of Haute-Savoie.

While in Haute-Savoie, Goor was accused by German police of helping Jewish people to cross the Swiss border; as a result, he was given ‘voluntary worker’ status and sent to the camp near Zittau in Saxony. Noticed for his talents, Goor was employed as an artist; he remained in the camp until February of 1945 when the city of Dresden was destroyed by Allied bombing. After the war, Goor initially returned to Paris before he moved to Cannes for an exhibition of his work.

There is little information available on the remainder of Gaston Goor’s life. This period was marked by several disappointments, including that his other illustrations for the “Satyricon” were not published. It is known that Goor retired and remained in Hyènes until his death from cancer at the French Riviera city of Toulon on the thirteenth of December in 1977.

Note: Gaston Goor’s illustrations for Volume I and Volume II of Roger Peyrefitte’s
“Les Amitiés Particulières” can be found on E. Neagle’s site “Homo Fabula: At the Intersection of Art & Luterature” located at: https://homofabula.blogspot.com/2017/05/front-free-endpaper-gaston-goor.html

Top Insert Image: Gaston Goor, “Mythological Subject”, 1947, Lead Graphite on Paper, 21 x 27 cm, Catherine Gide Collection

Second Insert Image: Gaston Goor, “The Battle of San Romano after Paulo Ucello”, 1970, Oil and Pastel Highlights on Panel, 94 x 121 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Gaston Goor, Mougin Vase, “The Fairy of the Water Lilies”, Height 31 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Gaston Goor, “Eros and Hymenaeus”, 1949, Oil on Canvas, 37 x 45 cm, Private Collection

Michael Walsh: “Whispering to the Nearby Warriors”

Photographers Unknown, Whispering to the Nearby Warriors

At Jeffers Petroglyphs

By their initials and first names
scratched into quartzite

underfoot, I know the culprits: Otto
like a fancy scar

on a buffalo’s flank, Sven
muddling the lines of a glyph,

the meaning of its shape forgotten, and Judy
who needed to record the date

of defacement. I hear her story from the guide:
how she stole her father’s chisel,

chipped her way into a turtle’s back,
how much shame she brought

to her family in this search for the lost meanings
hidden within the shapes of the letters,

written on a shell next to the sun, an attempt,
if I’m generous,

to contrast two languages and find,
in the mixed -up symbols,

the trees of her homeland cut down long ago.
She still lives. I believe, on some days,

wherever she is, she hears the forest mumbling
when the wind blows across the carved twigs

of her name, out here, whispering to the nearby warriors,
asking forgiveness for this trespass.

Michael Walsh, The Kids Who Carved into Petroglyphs, The Dirt Riddles, 2021

Michael Walsh is a poet and writer, an independent scholar, and a creative writing instructor. With an early interest in writing, he began his studies at Illinois’s Knox College in 1993. Walsh studied under Poet-in-Residence Sheryl St. Germain and the Philip Sydney Post Professor of English Robin Metz, both of whom made an impact on his writing career. Supported by his professors, Walsh was able, as a Queer student, to connect and have meaningful conversations with the faculty. He graduated with his Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing in 1997.

After a period of reflection on his past studies during a stay at his family’s farm, Walsh entered the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities from which he graduated with his Master of Fine Arts in Creative and Professional Writing. His first collection of poetry, “The Dirt Riddles”, was published in 2010 by the University of Arkansas Press; this volume won the Miller Williams Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. Walsh’s poetry collections also include two chapbooks through Red Dragonfly Press, the 2003 “Adam Working the Garden” and the 2011 “Sleepwalks”. His 2021 “Creep Love”, published by Autumn House Press, was a Lambda Poetry Award finalist.

Michael Walsh is the editor of the 2022 “Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology”, the first eco-queer anthology of contemporary nature poetry that magnifies and centers LBGTQ+ voices and perspectives. It contains work from over two hundred queer writers from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Expanding the genre of nature poetry and offering new views on queerness and the natural world, the anthology features poets Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Bianco and Allen Ginsber, as well as, emerging poets such as Jari Bradley, Alicia Mountain and Eric Tan.

In recognition for his work, Walsh was awarded a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship in Poetry and a Jerome Foundation Emerging Artist Fellowship. After residing in Minneapolis for more than two decades, Michael Walsh now lives with his husband in the Driftless region of southwest Wisconsin where he continues to develop his eco-queer and literary teachings.

Michael Walsh’s website, which includes information on readings, lectures and poetry manuscript reviews, is located at: https://www.michaeltwalsh.com

Header Image (Eight): Danny Lyon, “Showers”, 1968, Gelatin Silver Print, Detail, 35.6 x 27.9 cm, Private Collection

Top Insert Photo: Adam Nelsen, “Michael Walsh”, Date Unknown, Color Print

Angus McBean

The Photography of Angus McBean

Born in the Monmouthshire city of Newbridge on the eighth of June in 1904, Angus Rowland McBean was a Welsh photographer and set designer associated with the Surrealist movement. He went through two main creative periods in his forty-year career: pre-World War II in which he experimented successfully with surrealist images and post-war when his portraiture photography became more conventional and focused on theatrical and entertainment artists.

Angus McBean was the eldest and only son of Clement McBean, of Scottish descent, and Irene Sara Thomas, of Welsh descent. His father, after his military career in the South Wale Borderers, became a surveyor in the mining industry which necessitated frequently moving his family. McBean had his primary education at the Monmouth School for Boys and later attended the Newport Technical College where he developed an interest in photography. At the age of fifteen, McBean bought his first camera and created sets, props and costumes for the amateur dramatic productions at Monmouth’s Lyceum Theater.

In 1925, McBean’s father died from tuberculosis which he had contracted while fighting in the trenches during World War I. After his fathers death, McBean relocated to London where he worked in the antiques department of Liberty’s, London’s luxury department store on Regent Street. In his free time, McBean engaged in photographing his friends, making masks, and attending theater performances in the West End. He left Liberty’s in 1931, grew a distinctive beard, and began a career in photography. McBean served as an apprentice at the New Grafton Street Studio owned by photographer Hugh Cecil who taught him photographic techniques. After a year, McBean established his own studio on Belgrave Road in Victoria, London.

The turning point in Angus McBean’s career came in 1935 when Welsh actor and dramatist Ivor Novello asked him to create masks for playwright Clemence Dane’s adaption of author Max Beerbohm’s “The Happy Hypocrite”. Pleased with the masks, Novello commissioned McBean to take portrait photographs for the production. In 1937, McBean received a commission from the British weekly illustrated journal “The Sketch” for a photograph of actress Beatrix Lehmann in Eugene O’Neill’s “Mourning Becomes Electra”. This portrait was inspired by the surrealist art of the era. McBean, in collaboration with artist Roy Hobdell, produced a series of surrealist-styled portraits of leading actresses for a weekly series which ran until the beginning of World War II.

After the war, McBean established a new studio on Endell Street in London. One of his first commissions was to photograph the American actress Clare Luce who was appearing in “Anthony and Cleopatra” at Stratford-on-Avon’s Shakespeare Memorial Theater. McBean next produced a series of portraits that incorporated notable objects from the lives of his sitters: Ivor Novello is shown with bound editions of his musicals and Cecil Beaton is surrounded by pages from his scrapbooks. In the 1940s and 1950s, he was the most important photographer of theater and dance personalities. Among his many sitters were Audrey Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Noel Coward, Mae West, Katharine Hepburn, Margot Forteyn and Robert Helpmann.

Angus McBean’s career took a new direction in the 1950s and 1960s as he began shooting color photographs for album covers. He photographed Cliff Richard and the Shadows, Shirley Bassey and the Beverley Sisters, and Spike Mulligan for his album “Milligan Preserved”. McBean also was responsible for the 1963 cover art of The Beatles album “Please, Please Me” which showed the group leaning over the balcony at the EMI offices in London. Six years later, he was to recreate the shot for the the proposed “Get Back” album; however, the recreated shot later appeared on the two retrospectives of the group’s work “1962-1966” and “1967-1970”.

In the 1960s, McBean purchased Flemings Hall in Bedingfield, Suffolk and undertook a major renovation project; this estate would be his home until his death. In this period, he gradually reduced the number of commissions he accepted but continued to work on selected projects. In 1984, McBean appeared as a special guest in musician-composer David Sylvian’s music video “Red Guitar”. Sylvian, who has a strong interest in McBean’s work, was directly inspired by McBean’s 1938 surrealistic portrait of cinema and theatrical actress Flora Robson.

Over the course of his career, Angus McBean produced two hundred and eighty portrait photographs; he was also produced seventy-nine self portraits. In 1990, McBean fell ill on a holiday in Morocco and, after returning to England, died at Ipswich Heath Road Hospital on the 9th of June in 1990, eighty-six years after his birth. His work is in many private and public collections including London’s National Portrait Gallery, the Mander & Mitchenson Collection at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Royal National Theater Archive, and the Shakespeare Center Library and Archive in Stratford-on-Avon.

Note: In the spring of 1942, Angus McBean’s career was temporarily ruined when he was arrested in the city of Bath for criminal acts of homosexuality. He was sentenced to four years in prison; however he was released in the autumn of 1944. After the end of the second World War, McBean was able to successfully resume his career. In the late 1940s, he formed a close, yet brief, relationship with male model Sebastian Minton. McBean helped Minton, who had ambitions of becoming an actor, put together a photographic portfolio for studio presentations.

Note: If anyone knows the identity of the actress in the fourth photo of the header photo array, please send me that information via the contact page. Thank you.

Top Insert Image: Angus McBeam, “Self Portrait”, circa 1951, Bromide Print, 29.4 x 26 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London

Second Insert Image: Angus McBean, “Surrealist Beach Scene with a Male Figure”, circa 1949, Hand-Colored Silver Print, 50.5 x 67.0 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Angus McBean, “Vivien Leigh ‘Twelfth Night’ Old Vic Tour”, 1961, Bromide Print, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Angus McBean, “Choreographer and Dancer Berto Pasuko”, 1947, Gelatin Silver Print, 37.5 x 28.6 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Angus McBean, “Binkie Beaumont, Angela Baddeley and Emlyn Williams”, 1947, Bromide Print, 38 x 29.7 cm, Harvard Theater Collection, Harvard University, National Portrait Gallery

Amalas Rosa

The Artwork of Amalas Rosa

Amalas Rosa is a visual artist known for combining her skills at illustration with story telling. She spent her formative years in Germany where she was exposed to the wide range of European comics, particularly those from France and Belgium: “Tin Tin”, “Lucky Luke”, “Asterix” and “Gaston”. In later years, Amalas discovered the graphic work done in the genre of anime, as well as the illustrative work of manga comics.

Born into a family with strong interest in the arts, Amalas grew up surrounded by artwork and began drawing at an early age, first characters from fairy tales and later the people around her. Through her parents, she was exposed to a wide range of interests: museums, the pleasure of reading, music, photography, and both fine art and illustrations. Although she had an early interest in the field of archaeology, Amalas decided to study for a career as an illustrator, a field which enabled her to use both her writing and drawing talents.

In her studies, Amalas Rosa studied integrated design, which included fashion and product design, as well as typography and illustration. Drawn with an extensive knowledge of color theory, her illustrations are known for their technical perspective and abundance of small detailed objects carefully placed throughout her scenes. Amalas’s characters also are created with the same amount of attention to detail in their dress, posture and expression. Amalas, a skilled photographer, will often shoot images of interesting objects, scenery and architecture for both inspiration and detailed references for her work.

Amalas almost always starts an illustration with her characters and their environment. Once the initial idea is formed, she develops her illustrations through a lengthly and technical process. First, a rough sketch of the setting and the characters is drawn; then the lines of both are cleaned up. Perspective lines are place on the sketch to map and solidify the area. Using these lines, Amalas draws the surface areas that surround the characters.

With these areas established, Amalas Rosa slowly adds all the scene’s objects into the drawing; these range from large tables and cabinets to smaller detailed items such as electrical cables and cups. In the next stage, a block of single color is initially used to establish the drawn characters. Once this is accomplished, Amalas chooses a color palette suitable for the mood of the illustration. The colors of this palette are then applied to the work with consideration to both light and shadow. To finish her work, Amalas applies layered tones as a final adjustment.

Amalas was in her mid-teens when she first created a fantasy story line with two male characters: Aran and Tao. Over time, these characters further evolved into persons of specific heritage: Aran became the Syrian son of a single mother and Tao became a member of a large Taiwanese family. Separated for a period when Tao and his family moved away, the close childhood friends were later reunited to share the experiences and emotions of life in the city. Over time, Amalas continued to expand these characters through her own memories, feelings and experiences. In a collaboration with writer Suzanne Samin, both artist and writer are further developing Aran and Tao into an illustrated graphic novel format that would continue their life story.

Amalas Rosa’s social media sites are located at: https://www.tumblr.com/amalasdraws and https://twitter.com/AmalasRosa

For literary and graphic illustrative work, Amalas Rosa can be contacted through her agent at the Azantian Literary Agency.

Prints of Amalas Rosa’s artwork are available at the online INPRNT gallery located at: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/amalasrosa/

Second Insert Image: Amalas Rosa, “God’s Bathroom Floor”, 2021, Digital Art, Cover Art for Atmosphere’s 7 Inch Vinyl “God’s Bathroom Floor”, Rhymesayers Entertainment, Art Director Alex Everson

Bottom Inset Image: Amalas Rosa, “Sharing Food is Love”, 2021, Aran and Tao as Adults, Digital Art, 4000 x 5000 Pixels, 600 DPI, Artist Collection

Mauritz Stiller: Film History Series

Mauritz Stiller, “Vingarne (The Wings)”, 1916, Silent Film Scenes, Screenwriters Axel Esbensen and Mauritz Stiller, Cinematography Julius Jaenzon, Original Running Time 69 Minutes, Distributor Svenska Biografteatem

Born in July of 1883 in Helsinki, Mauritz Stiller, birth name Moshe Stiller, was a Swedish film director of Finnish Jewish descent known for his pioneering work in the Swedish film industry. His family of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage originally lived in Russia and Poland before settling in Finland. At that time, these countries were autonomous regions of the Imperial Russia under Emperor Alexander III.

Mauritz Stiller was raised by family friends after the death of his father in 1887 and the subsequent suicide of his mother. Interested in acting from an early age, he was offered the opportunity to practice his acting skills in the city theaters of Åbo and Helsinki. In his twenties, Stiller received a draft notice to enter the army of Czar Nicholas II, who as the last Emperor of Russia had ascended to the throne in November of 1894. Instead of entering service, Stiller chose exile and settled in Sweden where he later became a citizen in 1921.

By 1912 at the age of twenty-nine, Stiller had become a member of Sweden’s developing silent film industry. He initially was a scriptwriter, actor and director for short silent films. Stiller appeared as an actor in four films in 1912, his first being the role of a passenger in the 1912 “Trädgårdsmästaren (The Gardener). After these four films, Stiller focused on his writing and directing; he acted in only two more of his films: the 1914 “När Svärmor Regerar (When the Mother-in-Law Reigns)” and the 1916 “Vingarne (The Wings)”.

As his skills developed, Mauritz Stiller began directing feature-length productions. His 1918 feature “Thomas Graals Bästa Bam (The First Child of Thomas Graal)” received critical acclaim. This comedy on the best way to raise children starred actor and director Victor Sjöström and the stage and film actress Karin Molander. By 1920, Stiller had directed more than forty films and was considered a leading figure in the Swedish film industry. Among these films was the 1919 sixteenth-century crime drama “Herr Arnes Pengar (Sir Arne’s Treasure)” based on author Selma Lagerlöf’s 1903 “The Treasure”. This silent film was the first to feature illustrator Alva Lundin’s handwritten artistic title cards.

Stiller met a young actress named Greta Gustafsson at the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm. He cast her in the secondary but important role of Elizabeth Dohna in his 1924 romantic drama film “Gösta Berlings Saga (The Atonement of Gosta Berling)”. In 1925, Stiller accepted an offer from Louis B. Mayer to direct for Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios. He relocated to the United States accompanied by Gustafsson, soon to be given her acting name Greta Garbo, and the actor Einer Hanson, who had appeared in Stiller’s films. Both actors became successful at MGM; although Hanson achieved greater success with his move to Paramount Pictures.

Mauritz Stiller was assigned to direct the 1926 “The Temptress”, Greta Garbo’s second film with Metro Goldwyn Mayer. After repeated arguments with the studio’s executives, he was replaced on the film by Fred Niblo, who had recently finished work as principal director on the 1925 silent epic “Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ”, the third highest-grossing silent film in history. His contract terminated, Stiller was immediately signed by Paramount Pictures for whom he made three successful films in 1927. However because of continuing disagreements with Paramount’s executives, Stiller was terminated in the middle of his fourth film.

Mauritz Stiller returned to Sweden in 1927; he died in Stockholm from pleurisy, an infection in his lungs, at the age of forty-five in November of 1928. His body is interred at the Northern Cemetery in the Solna Municipality of Stockholm. For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Stiller was given a star in 1960 on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. A monument in Stiller’s honor was erected in the southern Swedish city of Kristianstad.

Notes: Mauritz Stiller’s 1916 silent film “Vingarne (The Wings)” was adapted from Danish author Herman Joachim Bang’s 1902 novel “Mikaël”, based on the life of sculptor Auguste Rodin. The novel would serve, eight years later, as the source for director Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1924 silent film “Mikaël: The Story of the Third Sex”. Besides being an early homosexual-themed film, “Vingarne” is noted for its plot presented through flashbacks, as well as its use of a framing story, a main narrative that sets the stage for a set of shorter stories. The film is largely lost; only thirty minutes of its original seventy minute length still survives. There are several versions of the remaining film with added soundtracks on YouTube.

“Vingarne” tells the story of a devious countess (Danish actress Lili Bech) who comes between gay sculptor Claude Zoret (Norwegian actor Egil Eide) and his bisexual lover and model Mikaël (Swedish actor Lars Hanson). This leads to Zoert’s death at the base of a statue depicting Mikaël as the mythological winged Icarus. It should be noted that openly gay Swedish actor Nils Asther, later a Hollywood star, had his first film role, albeit uncredited, in Stiller’s “Vingarne”.

A biography of Nils Asther can be found in the Film History Series archive of this site.

Top Insert Image: Arnold Genthe, “Mauritz Stiller” Date Unknown, Photo Proof

Second Insert Image: Mauritz Stiller, “Hotel Imperial”, 1927, Film Poster, Cinematographer Bert Glennen, Production Famous Players-Lasky, Paramount Pictures

Third Insert Image: Roger Tillberg, “Greta Garbo and Mauritz Stiller”, 1925, Gelatin Silver Print

Fourth Insert Image: Mauritz Stiller, “The Street of Sin”, 1928, Film Poster, Cinematographer Bert Glennon, Harry Fischbeck and Victor Milner, Production Adolph Zucker and Jesse Lasky, Paramount Pictures

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Mauritz Stiller, Pola Negri, George Siegmann”, 1927, Film Set of “Hotel Imperial”, Gelatin Silver Print

Carlos Farneti

Carlo Farneti, Illustrations from “Les Fleurs du Mal” by French poet Charles Baudlaire, 1935 Edition, Publisher Gibert Jeune, Paris

Born in Naples in January of 1892, Carlo Farneti was an Italian artist known for his illustrations. He moved to Paris in 1926 where he illustrated works by notable writers from Europe and the United States. It was in Naples, where he lived, that Farneti had his first solo exhibition at the Galleria Corona in 1924; however, he established his career as an illustrator in France.

Carlo Farneti illustrated a 1927 edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Nouvelles Histoires Extraordinaires (Extraordinary Tales)” with one-hundred forty-eight etchings. He next created original illustrations for Émile Zola’s 1928 “La Terra” which was published in a large quarto format with a limited edition of sixty. For the 1935 edition of poet Charles Baudelaire’s 1857 “Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil)”, Farneti created sixteen color plates and one hundred illustrations. Printed on vellum, the volume had a limited edition of three-thousand numbered copies. For a three volume limited edition set of Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary: Moeurs de Province” published by Javal and Bordeaux, Farneti created over one-hundred original drawings for volume three of this work.

During his career, Farneti provided at the request of wealthy amateurs an impressive number of original drawings. He would often add illustrations to already published works, as well as, augmenting literary volumes with larger compositions in accompanying folders.

In 1933 at the request of a patron, Farneti embellished an existing volume of Mirbeau’s 1927 work “The Garden of Supplices” with two-hundred thirty colored pencil drawings, placed in the margins or in the background of the texts. He also included a folio of ten large pastel compositions on gray Casson plates. In that same year, Carlo Farnet illuminated, with one-hundred five drawings, an original edition of novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s 1932 “Voyage au Bout de la Nuit (Travel to the End of the Night)”.

An accomplished illustrator who worked with notable writers, Carlo Farneti’s died on the tenth of November in 1961.

Bottom Insert Image: Carlo Farneti, Illustration for Théatre du Grand Guignot, “Les Nuits du Bagne”, 1928, Vintage Poster, 58.4 x 38.1 cm, Publisher R. Balestrieri, Paris

Ben Kimura

The Art of Ben Kimura

Born in 1947, Ben Kimura (木村べん) was a Japanese artist known for his gay erotic artwork. As noted by historian and artist Gengoroh Tagame, he and Sadeo Hasogawa were among the central figures in Japan’s resurgence of gay artwork in the 1970s.

Ben Kimura began his career in 1978 as an illustrator and cover artist for “Barazoku”, Japan’s first commercially circulated gay men’s magazine. The monthly magazine, edited by Bungaku Itō, began publication in July of 1971 and published four-hundred issues, the last being in 2008. Kimura was a regular art contributor until his departure in 1989. During this time, he was also a major contributor for cover and story illustrations for “Sabu”magazine.

Kimura also contributed illustrations to the early yaoi magazines “June” and “Allan”, both male to male romance-fiction magazines for a female audience. His work for these magazines placed him among the first gay artists to achieve crossover success with a female audience.

Ben Kimura’s artwork was highly sought after by the Japanese gay publications throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Unique among contemporary Japanese homoerotic artists, his work typically depicted masculine, handsome men rendered in a style that was romantic and sensual rather than explicitly pornographic. Kimura’s fit and stylish young men evoked both familiarity and a sense of nostalgia for life’s past encounters .

In addition to work done for periodicals, Kimura self-published two collections of his homoerotic illustrations. The first collection was the 1997 “Tan-Pan Body (画集)” which was primarily a collection of cover art done for Sabu magazine prior to 1997. Kimura’s second collection “Go-One Boy (作品集)” was published in 1998.

Ben Kimura died from a pulmonary embolism at the age of fifty-six on the eighteenth of February in 2003. As a tribute, a second printing of his “Tan-Pan Body” was reissued shortly after his death. Kimura’s collected works are managed by his partner and artistic executor Kihira Kai.

Mario Stefani: “Victorious We Will Come Out”

Photographers Unknown, Victorious We Will Come Out

Vittoriosi usciremo
Non farmi ricordare i giorni che sono passati
se tu ancora tornerai a me come una volta
vittoriosi usciremo da questa lunga lotta con il tempo
ci attend forse maggiore felicità del passato
(la forza degli occhi il riconoscere in noi
che vivi siamo del nostro amore).

Victorious we will come out
Don’t make me remember the days that have passed
if you will come back to me as it once was
victorious we will get out of this long struggle with time
perhaps greater happiness than in the past awaits us
(the strength of the eyes, the recognition in us
that we live, we are of our love).

Mario Stefani, Vittoriosi Usciremo, Il Male di Vivere, 1968

Born in August of 1938 in Venice, Mario Stefani was an Italian poet and journalist. He graduated with a Master of Arts degree in Literature; his thesis examined the letters of sixteenth-century author and playwright Pietro Aretino, an influential figure in Venice’s art and politics. Stefani worked on Professor Neuro Bonifazi’s literary research team at the University of Urbino. He began a career as a journalist employed by the Venice newspaper “Il Gazzettino” and, later. became a contributor to the “Literary Political Observer”, “Arena”, and “Resto del Carlino”.

Mario Stefani’s poetry is mostly written in Italian. Stefani’s deceptively simple poems are characterized by a clarity of expression that bring forth his own experiences, often imbued with nostalgia. His two collections of Venetian-dialect poetry, written in the late 1960s, were composed of that era’s simple Venetian style without any linguistic experimentation. Prefaces to Stefani’s collections were written by such notables as novelist and essayist Aldo Palazzeschi, biologist and novelist Giuseppe Longo, and poets Giovanni Raboni and Andrea Zanzotto.

In 1960, Mario Stefani published his first collection of poetry “Desiderio della Vita (Desire for Life)”. In the course of his career, over twenty volumes of Stefani’s poetry were published. Included among these collections are the 1961 “Giorno Dopo Giorno (Day After Day)”, the 1968 “Come el Vento ne la Laguna (Like the Wind in the Lagoon)”, and “Il Male di Vivere (The Evil of Living)” published in 1968. Stefani’s “Elegie Veneziane (Venetian Elegies)”, published in 1971, won the first prize Bergamo Award for poetry.

Other notable poetry collections by Stefani include the 1974 “Poesie per un Ragazzo (Poems to a Boy)’, “In Debito con la Vita (In Debt to Life)” published in 1984, and “ Una Quieta Disperazione (A Quiet Despair)”, published posthumously in 2001. In 1981, Stefani’s “Nessun Altro Dio (No Other Gods)”, a collection of fifty-five poems, was translated into English by Anthony Reid, a translator and personal friend of Stefani, and published with annotations by illustrator Martin Pitts.

In addition to his poetry, Mario Stefani also published several short stories: the 1986 “At the Table with Margherita”, “Excellent Cakes and Vicious Virtues” in 1987, and the 1988 “Metamorphosis of a Dog and Other Tales”. In addition to the Bergamo Prize, Stefani was awarded the Prize of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, and prizes at festivals in Milan, Gabicce, and Abano. American writer John Berendt devoted a chapter on the life of Mario Stefani, entitled “The Man Who Loved Others”, in his 2005 non-fiction book of Venice’s interesting inhabitants, “The City of Falling Angels”. In 2013, literary scholar Flavio Cogo published “Mario Stefani and Venice: Chronicles of a Great Love”, which examines Stefani’s love for Venice through his writings and his political and cultural engagements.

Mario Stefani became an openly gay in the 1970s. He worked for a period as an high school teacher of literature and was an active member of Italy’s Radical Party for decades. Stefani also hosted a popular unscripted television show. His poems were included in school text books and set to music in 1973 by composer Roberto Micconi for a performance at the Benedetto Marcello Conservatory of Music in Venice.

In the middle of February of 2001, graffiti featuring the quote “Loneliness is not being alone; it’s loving others to no avail. Mario Stefani” appeared on a wall by Venice’s Rialto Bridge. Three weeks later on the fourth of March, Mario Stefani committed suicide by hanging himself in his kitchen. His estate, valued at one million dollars, was per his request given to the local fruit vendor whose young daughter had inspired Stefani’s work.

In 2002, Stefani created an archive of his work which consists of sixty-eight hundred volumes from his personal library, articles related to his cultural work and twenty-six artworks including paintings and graphics. This archive is housed in the museum collection of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, a cultural institution in Castello, Venice.

Johan Rudolf Bonnet

The Artwork of Johan Rudolf Bonnet

Born in March of 1895 in Amsterdam, Johan Rudolf Bonnet was a Dutch artist who immersed himself in the culture and landscape of the Indonesian province of Bali. Particularly interested in the subject of portraiture, he took great care that his subjects were represented to the highest classical standard. Bonnet was keenly aware the colonial Dutch East Indies’ indigenous populations faced a fragile future in the twentieth-century world.

In the 1920s, Bonnet traveled around Europe and spent a substantial amount of time in Italy, particularly Florence where he learned the art of fresco painting. Inspired by the work of the Italian Renaissance, he sought to capture the emotions and expressions of Balinese life as seen through European eyes that cared deeply for the richness of life the island offered. Bonnet’s body of work draws parallels with the art of Renaissance painter Michelangelo Buonarotti, whom he considered one of his greatest examples, not in the least because they were both trained as mural painters.

Rudolf Bonnet used his draftsman training to create works with a subtle palette and clean lines. His work showed both his keen observation as well as his deep respect for his subjects and their culture. Influenced by the Art Nouveau movement in the early twentieth-century; Bonnet was used to stylizing his model’s faces, often elongating them. Yet, they would never become caricatures; they would always remain dignified and autonomous. It was Bonnet’s way of emphasizing the beauty he perceived.

Born to descendants of a Dutch-Huguenot family, Johan Rudolf Bonnet attended Amsterdam’s State Academy of Fine Arts and its National Arts and Crafts School. In 1920, he traveled to Italy where he produced a collection of drawings depicting village scenes, local people and landscapes. Bonnet rented a studio for several months in Rome and, during his stay in the city, met Dutch painter and printmaker Wijnand Otto Jan Nieuwenkemp. As the first European artist to visit Bali, Nieuwenkemp persuaded Bonnet to explore that country which had so impressed him. Bonnet first traveled to North Africa; the paintings exhibited and sold on this trip enabled him to continue his voyage to Bali.

Rudolf Bonnet arrived in Balit in 1929 and met German artist Walter Spies and the Dutch musicologist Jaap Kunst. With Kunst, he made a trip to the Indonesian island of Nias, which lies off the western shore of Sumatra. Upon his return to Bali in 1930, Bonnet was invited to live in town of Ubud by Cokorda Gde Raka Sukawati, an elected member of the Volksraad, the People’s Council. In 1936, Bonnet, along with Walter Spies, Cokorda Sukawati, and painter and sculptor I Gusti Nyoman Lempad, formed the Pita Maha (Great Spirit, Guiding Inspiration) artist association to select artists whose work could be exhibited and sold throughout the Indies, the Netherlands, and the United States.

After the outbreak of the war in Europe, Bonnet remained free in Bali until 1942 when the Japanese invaders ordered him sent to the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. He spent the remainder of the war inside internment camps in Bolong, Para-Para and Makassar. Walter Spies was arrested as a German national and was interred by the Dutch authorities in Bali as an enemy alien. In 1942, he and four hundred seventy-seven other German internees were deported by the Dutch to Ceylon. Their ship was bombed by Japanese planes; Spies and most of the other prisoners died at sea.

In 1947, Rudolf Bonnet returned to Bali where he built a house and studio in the Campaun area of southeastern Bali. Although the Dutch and Indonesian governments were in a period of worsening relations, he was able to reside in Bali due tohis relationship with President Sukarno, who had collected fourteen of Bonnet’s paintings. Bonnet founded the Golongan Pelukis Ubud (Ubud Painters’ Group) and created designs for Bali’s Museum Puri Lukisan, the Royal Museum of Paintings.

In 1957, Bonnet was expelled from Indonesia after he refused to finish President Sukarno’s portrait. He did not return to Bali until 1972, two years after Sukarno’s death. Upon his return, Bonnet assisted in the Royal Museum’s expansion and organized its opening exhibition. He died in Laren, Holland in April of 1978 after a long illness. Johan Rudolf Bonnet was cremated and the ashes brought to Bali. These ashes were combined with the ashes of his long-time friend Cokorda Gde Agung Sukawati, who had died in 1967, and were burnt together in a great cremation ceremony.

Rudolf Bonnet’s work is housed in many private collections and the collections of the Rijksmuseum Kroller-Muller in Amsterdam, the Neka Art Museum in Bali, and the Singer Museum in Laren, Holland. Founded in 1980 and supported by donations, the Rudolf Bonnet Foundation Netherlands supports Balinese artists and brings their work to the Netherlands for exhibitions.

Second Insert Image: Johan Rudolf Bonnet, “Self Portrait”, 1927, Pastel on Paper

Third Insert Image: Johan Rudolf Bonnet, “Male Torso”, Date Unknown, Color Pastels and Watercolor on Paper, 63.5 x 50 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Johan Rudolf Bonnet, “Self Portrait”, 1976 , Crayon and Pastel on Paper

James Searle Dawley: Film History Series

James Searle Dawley, “Snow White”, 1916, Silent Fantasy Film, Cinematographer and Producer H. Lyman Broening, Running Time 63 Minutes, Starring Marguerite Clark and Creighton Hale, Production Company Famous Players Film Company

Born at Del Norte, Colorado in October of 1877, James Searle Dawley was an American film director, screenwriter, producer, stage actor and playwright. During his career, he directed over three-hundred short films and fifty-six features with such actors as Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Harold Lloyd, and John Barrymore. Dawley also wrote several Broadway productions as well as plays for repertory companies.

The youngest of three sons born to James Andres Dawley and Angela Searle, James Dawley received his initial education in Denver and later attended the city’s Saxton College of Oratory. As a child, he permanently lost the vision in his right eye, an injury which challenged his later career as actor and film director. At the age of seventeen, Dawley had his first stage performance as François in the Lewis Morrison Company’s 1895 New York City production of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s “Richelieu”. Three years later, now billed as J. Searle Dawley, he served both as performer and stage manager for the Morrison Company’s productions.

Dawley left the Morrison Company and performed on the vaudeville circuit from 1899 to 1902. He returned to the theatrical stage as a member of the Edna May Spooner Stock Company based in Brooklyn. Actress and playwright Edna May Spooner and her family were a fixture in Brooklyn’s theater life and operated its Bijou Theater for several years. Recognized for his past production experience, Dawley both performed on stage and managed the company’s productions. He also wrote and produced fifteen plays during his five years with the company.

In May of 1907, J. Searle Dawley made the decision to start a career in the rapidly expanding motion-picture industry. He was hired by Edwin Porter, the production head at Edison Studios, to serve as director for the company’s main film facilities in the Bronx, New York. His first project as director was the now-lost 1907 comedy “The Nine Lives of a Cat”. After experiencing some initial frustrations, Dawley quickly established himself as a reliable director who could produce a wide range of releases, often two or more films in a single week. Through his career with Edison Studios, he directed over two-hundred single-reel films. Among these were “Bluebeard”, adaptions of both “Michael Strogoff” and “Faust”, and “Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest”, noteworthy for its special effects and an early screen appearance by film director D. W. Griffith.

By 1910, Dawley was directing increasingly elaborate productions for the Edison Company. Although they were still one-reel films, they included the 1910 Charles Dickens “A Christmas Carol” and two presentations of historic naval battles: “The Stars and Stripes”, a depiction of John Paul Jones’s victory in 1779, and “The Battle of Trafalgar”, the story of British Admiral Lord Nelson’s 1805 triumph over the French and Spanish warships. In both of these productions, Dawley oversaw the creation of large maritime sets inside Edison’s Bronx studio, construction of the ships’ decks, and simulated views of the battles using small-scale models and silhouettes.

In 1910, J. Searle Dawley was screenwriter and director for the longer running (fourteen minute) silent horror “Frankenstein”, the earliest known screen adaption of Shelley’s novel. Staged and filmed in three days at the Bronx studio in mid-January, Dawley used special effects for the creation of the monster. A burning papier-mâché human figure was shot on red film, separately and in reverse, and then spliced into the master negative for the final print. This reverse action produced a creation scene in which the monster forms slowly as it rises from a cauldron of blazing chemicals.

In the same year, Dawley traveled to California and set up Edison Studios at Long Beach. This new arrangement required him to write more screenplays and direct film productions on both coasts. Dawley made several attempts to create films longer than the fifteen-minute one-reel film; however, Edison had little confidence in the attention span of the audience. In 1913, Edwin Porter hired Dawley to work with him at Adolph Zuckor’s new studio, Famous Players Film Company. Dawley directed its first thirteen releases, among which was the romantic comedy “An American Citizen”, the first feature film for actor John Barrymore.

After leaving Famous Players in May of 1914, James Searle Dawley, along with Frank L. Dyer and J. Parker Read Jr, established the film company Dyreda. In the fall of 1914, arrangements were made with World Film Corporation to distribute their releases; Dyreda would later merge with Metro Pictures, a forerunner of Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Dawley returned in 1916 to Famous Players, later Paramount Pictures, for two years. During this period, he directed over a dozen films, including “Mice and Men” and “Snow White”, both in 1916; two 1917 films “”Bab’s Diary” and “The Seven Swans”; and the 1918 “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, a five-reel film produced by Adolph Zucker and Jesse L. Lasky.

Dawley freelanced as a director for several years before joining Fox Films in 1921. The last feature film he directed was the 1923 drama “Broadway Broke”, produced by Murray W. Garsson and distributed by Lewis J. Selznick. Months later, Dawley made his final directorial works in collaboration with the inventor of the first practical electronic amplifier Lee de Forest. Their two experimental sound films, “Abraham Lincoln” and “Love’s Old Sweet Song”, were both released in 1924. Dawley worked through the late 1920s and 1930s in radio broadcasting, journalism, and sound-film technologies.

James Searle Dawley married Grace Owens Givens in June of 1918; the couple remained together over thirty years until Dawley’s death, at the age of seventy-one, in March of 1949. He died of undisclosed causes at the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles. Dawley’s ashes were interned in the columbarium at the Chapel of the Pines Crematory. Silent film star Mary Pickford and director Walter Lang spoke at the service. Dawley’s personal papers, scrapbooks and several Edison production scripts are housed in the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, California.

Note: Dawley’s 1916 “Snow White” was considered a lost-film destroyed in a vault fire. A substantially complete print with Dutch subtitles, albeit missing a few scenes, was located in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 1992. It was subsequently restored through the work of the George Eastman House, the world’s oldest museum dedicated to photography.

Second Insert Image: James Searle Dawley, “The Harvest Moon”, 1920, Film Poster, Six-Reel Silent Film, Cinematographer Bert Dawley

Third Insert Image: James Searle Dawley, “Frankenstein”, 1910, Film Poster, One-Reel Silent Film, Cinematographer James White

Fourth Insert Image: James Searle Dawley, “A Virgin Paradise”, 1921, Film Poster, Eight-Reel Silent Film, Cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg and Bert Dawley

Bottom Insert Image: “Marguerite Clark and Creighton Hale”, Silent Film Clip Photo, “Snow White”, 1916, Five-Reel Silent Film Director James Searle Dawley, Cinematographer H. Lyman Broening

Hans Holbein the Younger

Hans Holbein the Younger, “An Unidentified Man”, circa 1535, Black and Colored Chalks, White Gouache, Pen and Ink, Metapoint, Royal Collection Trust, England

Born in 1497 in the city of Augsburg, Hans Holbein the Younger was a German-Swiss portraitist and printmaker who worked in the Northern Renaissance style that occurred in Europe north of the Alps. The culture and influence of the Italian Renaissance was brought to northern Europe’s local art movements by the trade and commerce between Italy and the Low Countries in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Considered one of the greatest sixteenth-century portraitists, Holbein also produced religious art, Reformation propaganda, and book designs.

Hans Holbein the Younger was the second son of painter and draftsman Hans Holbein the Elder. He and his brother, Ambrosius, trained at their father’s Augsburg art and craft workshop until 1515 when they, as journeyman painters, traveled to Basel, the Swiss center of education and the printing trade. Apprenticed to Basel’s leading painter and printmaker Hans Herbster, they found work as designers of metal cuts and woodcuts for the city’s printers. In 1515, the Holbein brothers received a commission from theologian Oswald Myconius to create margin drawings for that year’s edition of scholar Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam’s Latin essay “In Praise of Folly”.

In 1517, Holbein traveled to Switzerland’s central city of Lucerne where he worked with his father on murals for merchant Jakob von Hertenstein; he also created designs for stained glass works. In the winter of that year, it is suspected Holbein journeyed to northern Italy where he studied the fresco works of Andrea Mantegna, a painter who had experimented in the art of perspective. Holbein, upon his return to Lucerne, painted two panels at Hertenstein’s house with copies of Mantegna’s large egg tempera canvases.

Hans Holbein relocated to Basel in 1519, joined the Painters’Guild, and became a citizen of the city. In this productive period, he created internal murals for the Council Chamber at the Town Hall, a series of religious paintings and designs for stained glass windows. Working in book design through publisher Johann Froben, Holbein created woodcut designs for the “Dance of Death”, a late Middle Age allegory of death; illustrations of the Old Testament; and the title page of Martin Luther’s Bible. He also designed twelve alphabet fonts ornamented with depictions of Greek and Roman gods, and the heads of Caesars, poets and philosophers.

While in Basel, Holbein painted a series of portraits, among them the portrait of the young scholar Bonifacius Amerbach, son of the printer Johannes Amerbach, and a double portrait of Basel’s Mayor Jakob Meyer and his wife, Dorothea. Sent to the Court of England by Antwerp’s secretary Pieter Gillis, Holbein painted two portraits of Sir Thomas More, one with his family; a portrait of William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury; the German astronomer and mathematician Nicholas Kratzer, a member of Thomas More’s scientific circle and tutor to More’s children; and courtiers such aa Lady Anne Lovell and Comptroller of the Royal Household Sir Henry Guildford and his wife, Lady Mary.

In England circa 1536-1537, Hans Holbein officially entered the service of King Henry VIII. One of his first commissions was a 1537 mural for the Palace of Whitehall. It was the first life-size full-length portrait of a monarch to be created in England. A fire in the seventeenth-century destroyed the mural; however several copies of the section depicting Henry VIII survive. Holbein was often sent to Europe to sketch portraits of potential brides for the king due to his skill at rendering faces. A series of his drawings dated between 1526 and 1543 were bound in a book and are kept within the Royal Collection, a majority of these portraits being housed at Windsor Castle.

In most of his drawings, Holbein tended to concentrate on the face of the sitter and left more abstract lines to delineate the clothing. Depending on the part of the portrait he was sketching, he would often change mediums. Scholars believe he began his portraits with red chalk and then worked on subtle shading for facial contours. Holbein next applied fine lines of colored chalk for the features and finished with dark black ink for blocks of flat tone on the hats. Due to the darker handling of key facial features, the changing mediums created a more complex rendering of the face.

Hans Holbein utilized a colored ground in his portrait sketches. He had a range of prepared drawing papers ready for use and selected the tone most apt for the complexion of his sitter. Using this method, Holbein quickly established the color accuracy of his sitter’s face; this also became the established practice later used by watercolorist William Turner for his open-air landscape paintings. Holbein used touches of watercolor or gouache to further extend the value range and to enhance a particular feature, such as the eyes or beard. He also employed a method known as silverpoint, drawing fine lines with a silver stylus on a prepared ground; the effect of which are marks that tarnish into warm brown tones through oxidization over time.

After entering King Henry VIII’s service, Holbein altered his paintings’ portrait style. He focused more intensely on his sitter’s facial features and largely omitted props and settings. Holbein applied this clean technique to the miniature portraits of Princess Christina of Denmark and Jane Pemberton Small, the wife of a London cloth merchant. At Burgau Castle, he later painted the portrait of the prospective bride of King Henry, Anne of Cleves. For this portrait, Holbein decided to paint her full-faced and elaborately attired. Aside from his official duties, Holbein continued to paint many private portrait commissions of merchantmen and courtiers.

Hans Holbein the Younger died, at the age of forty-five, in London near the end of 1543. Although Flemish art historian Karel van Mander stated in the early 1600s that Holbein died of the plague, it is more likely he died from an infection as friends attended his bedside. Holbein, in October of 1543, had made a signed and witnessed will; however it was not witnessed by a lawyer. John Antwerp, a goldsmith and friend, legally undertook the administrations of Holbein’s last wishes, settled the debts, provided for Holbein’s family, and dispersed his remaining effects. Holbein’s gravesite is unknown. Not one note or letter from his hand survives.

Top Insert Image: Hans Holbein the Younger, “Portrait of Unidentified Woman”, circa 1532-1543, Black and Colored Chalk, Pen and Ink on Pale Pink Prepared Paper, Royal Collection Trust, England

Second Insert Image: Hans Holbein the Younger, “An Unidentified Man”, circa 1535, Black and Colored Chalks, Pen and Ink, Brush and Ink on Pink Prepared Paper, 27.2 x 21 cm, Royal Collection Trust, England

Third Insert Image: Hans Holbein, “John More, Son of Thomas More”, circa 1526-1527, Black and Colored Chalks on Prepared Paper, Royal Collection Trust, England

Foourth Insert Image: Hans Holbein the Younger, “Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey”, circa 1532-1533, Black and Colored Chalk with Pen and Ink on Pale Pink Prepared Paper, Royal Collection Trust, England

Bottom Insert Image: Hans Holbein, “Lord Thomas Vaux”, Date Unknown, Detail, Black and Colored Chalk, Pen and Brown Ink, Black Was and White Opaque Watercolor on Pink Prepared Paper, Royal Collection Trust, England

Ross Jones

The Artwork of Ross Jones

Born in 1966 in the small community of Otaki, Ross Jones is a painter from New Zealand whose works are intermixed with elements of surrealism. All of his carefully designed paintings contain hints that lead the viewers to various narratives. Jones combines objects, vintage toys, and personal photographs with his childhood memories to depict worlds of whimsy, remembrance and personal freedom.

Ross Jones spent his early years in Otaki, a town of five-thousand people that remained basically unchanged through the years. He graduated from the School of Design Innovation at the Victoria University of Wellington, previously Wellington’s School of Design. Ross spent the next fifteen years creating commissioned work for private individuals and companies, including New York’s Penguin Books, Bank of America, The Wall Street Journal and Time Incorporated. He currently paints personal work full time from his studio overlooking the Hauraki Gulf north of Aukland.

Over the years, Jones has been inspired by the work of both fine artists and commercial illustrators. Among these artists are Winslow Homer, Howard Pyle, Edward Hopper, David Hockney, the Wyeth family, and Maxfield Parish. Jones was particularly attracted to the composition and unique blending of color in Parish’s work. He was also drawn to the clean lines featured in Art Deco furniture and the seemingly effortless design compositions of vintage French posters.

An important factor in his choice of painting subjects is Ross Jones’s fascination with everyday objects, those most often taken for granted, as well as those extraordinary occurrences that happens in one’s life. He includes just enough detail in his work to initiate a story; the goal being that the viewer complete the narrative through their own experiences. Working with a carefully researched color palette, Jones uses every opportunity to play with the light in his paintings. He shapes the mood of each painting by his attentive use of multiple light sources, linear and aerial perspectives, and stretched shadows. Jones often distorts both shapes and architecture to increase the drama and compositional dimensions.

Ross Jones’s work is held in private collections in England, Ireland, North America, Australia and New Zealand. His work has been regularly featured and sold at many New Zealand gallery exhibitions including the Boyd-Dunlop Gallery in Napier; the Parnell Gallery in Parnell, Aukland; the Central Art Gallery in Queenstown; the RedSea Gallery in Brisbane City; and the Flagstaff Gallery in Devonport, Aukland.

Notes: Ross Jones’s website, which includes exhibitions, contact information, and both original work and limited edition prints for purchase, is located at: https://jonesthepainter.com

The Central Art Gallery has an online article in which Ross Jones discussed his style and techniques, as well as those artists who have inspired and influenced him. This article can be found at: https://centralart.co.nz/collections/ross-jones-1

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Ross Jones and 2018 Maiden Voyage”, Color Print

Bottom Insert Image: Ross Jones, “Anonymous Delivery”, 2012, Oil on Linen, 95 x 115 cm, Private Collection