Calendar: June 20

A Year: Day to Day Men: 20th of June

Double Eagles

June 20, 1833 was the birthdate of French painter Leon Joseph Florentin Bonnat.

Leon Bonnat was born in Bayonne, southwest France; but in his teen years he lived in Madrid where his father had a bookshop. While tending the shop, he copied engravings of works by the Old Masters, developing a passion for drawing. In Madrid, Bonnat studied and trained at the atelier of  Realistic painter Raimundo Madrazo. Traveling to Paris, he developed a reputation as a portraitist and was given many commissions. Bonnat’s portraits show the influence of the Spanish painter Velázquez, and Van Dyke and Titian, whose works he studied in the Prado.

Bonnat received a scholarship from his native Bayonne, enabling him to live independently in Rome from 1858-1860. It was there he became friends with Edgar Degas, Gustave Moreau and the sculptor Henri Chapu. Bonnat won the Grand Officer of the Legion d’honneur and became a professor at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in 1882. He was quite popular with the international students, being able to speak his native French, as well as Spanish, Italian and English. In May of 1905 Bonnat became director of the Ecole des Beauz Arts.

The vivid portraits of contemporary celebrities are Bonnat’s most characteristic works; but his powerful religious scenes are arguably his most important works. His “Christ on the Cross” is now in the Musee du Petit Palais in Paris, his “Job” is in the Musee Bonnat, and the “Saint Vincent Taking the Place of Two Gallery Slaves” is at the Church of Saint Nicholas des Chanps in Paris. Bonnat, however, received few commissions in his life for religious or historical paintings. Most of his work is consists of portraits.

Leon Bonnat was an academic painter following the movements of Neoclassicism and Romanticism. He had a quest for truth to nature, a pursuit for accuracy. On of his students, Gustof Cederstrom said that Bonnat was a scientific observer of the real world who measure the heads and distances between the facial features of his sitters as if he were a scientific researcher. Bonnat went to great effort to capture the realism of his model, sometimes requiring his subjects to sit fifty or more times before completing portraits.

Students chose Bonnat’s atelier over others for a few reasons and a focus on painting was one of them. Though Bonnat always maintained that drawing was important, a student went to his atelier not to learn how to draw but how to paint. His atelier differed from most of its contemporaries in another way: paint mixing. Rather than prepare a set palette before the sitting, Bonnat taught his students to mix their colors directly, in front of the model.

Mark Doty: “The Physical Reinvention of the World is Endless”

Artist Unknown, (Passage), Computer Graphics, Film Gifs

“The physical reinvention of the world is endless, relentless, fascinating, exhaustive; nothing that seems solid is. If you could stand at just a little distance in time, how fluid and shape-shifting physical reality would be, everything hurrying into some other form, even concrete, even stone.”
― Mark Doty

Reblogged with thanks to http://peacelovinguniverse.tumblr.com

Parmigianino

Parmigianino, “Portrait of Pier Maria Rossi di San Secondo”, Museo de Prado, Madrid, Spain

Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, also known as Parmigianino was an Italian Mannerist painter and printmaker active in Florence, Rome, Bologna, and his native city of Parma. His work is characterized by a “refined sensuality” and often elongation of forms and includes the 1527 “Vision of Saint Jerome” and the iconic  the 1534 “Madonna with the Long Neck”. He remains the best known artist of the first generation whose whole careers fall into the Mannerist period.

He produced outstanding drawings, and was one of the first Italian painters to experiment with printmaking himself. While his portable works have always been keenly collected and are now in major museums in Italy and around the world, his two large projects in fresco are in a church in Parma and a palace in a small town nearby. He painted a number of important portraits, leading a trend in Italy towards the three-quarters or full-length figure, previously mostly reserved for royalty.

His prodigious and individual talent has always been recognised, but his career was disrupted by war, especially the Sack of Rome in 1527, three years after he moved there, and then ended by his death at only 37.

Florian Hetz

Photography by Florian Hetz

German photographer Florian Hetz deconstructs, dissects and sexualizes the bodies of his models. He mainly shows body fragments and details: muscles, hair, faces, and genitals fill the photos.

Florian Hetz previously managed the Panorama Bar at the legendary Berlin techno club Berghain. He is based in Berlin and travels Europe photographing in the cities of the continent. The images from his shooting during December to February in 2018 in Los Angeles is available in a limited edition book titled “Echo Park”.

Image reblogged with thanks to http://eenvanvelen.tumblr.com

Source: digitalaidsss

Calendar: June 19

A Year: Day to Day Men: 19th of June

The Sky Encompassing the Earth

On June 19, 1603, Merga Bien, a citizen of the town of Fulda, Germany, was arrested and accused of witchcraft.

Merga Bien was a German woman born in the town of Fulda Germany. She was married three times and was the heiress of her first two husbands upon their deaths. In 1588, she married Blasius Bien and moved from the city; but they returned to Fulda after a conflict with her husband’s employers.

At that time, Prince Abbot Balthasar von Dembach, a Benedictine monk born into a family of knights, returned to power in 1602 after a long exile. Twenty six years earlier he had been forced to abdicate by an alliance of magistrates and knights against his religious prosecutions of the Protestant movement. Upon his return, Balthasar continued his policy of counter-reformation and achieved a complete restoration of Catholicism in the city and the principality.

Starting in 1602, Balthasar von Dembach ordered an investigation of witchcraft in the city and started trials which were presided over by Balthasar Nuss, who had attached himself to the abbot during his exile and was now appointed judge. In March 1603, the first arrests of  suspected witchcraft practitioners occurred in the city. On 19 June of that year, Merga Bien was arrested and put in jail.

Her husband protested before the High Judge in Speyer, a city at the center of the Reformation movement, and pointed out that she was pregnant; but Merga Bien was not released. In jail, Merga Bien was forced by coercion to confess to the murder of her second husband and her children with him and one member of the family of her husband’s employers, and that she had taken part in a sabbath of Satan.

Merga Bien’s pregnancy was considered an aggravating circumstance; she and her husband had had no children although they had been married for fourteen years. She was forced to confess that her current pregnancy was the result of intercourse with the Devil.

Merga Bien was judged guilty of witchcraft and was burned alive at the stake in Fulda in the autumn of 1603. The Fulda witch trials continued from 1603 until 1605, resulting in the deaths of approximately 250 people. After Balthasar von Dembach’s death in 1606, the presiding judge Nuss was arrested by the new Prince-Abbot and spent 12 years in prison before being beheaded in 1618.

The Lake’s Shoreline

 

Artist Unknown, (The Lake’s Shoreline)

“Someone told me once, ‘It’s time to get you a pair of overalls, boy.’ But I don’t believe in summing up nothin’ – I let my experiences speak for themselves – and even if I did, a synopsis should be singular. That’s why every time I go out to work in the fields, I work naked. It lets my neighbors speak of my experiences for me.”
― M.C. Humphreys

Tomer Hanuka

Tomer Hanuka, Illustration from the book “The Divine”, 2015

At age twenty-two, Tomer Hanuka, an Israeli illustrator, moved to New York City. Following his graduation from the School of Visual Arts, he quickly became a regular contributor to many national magazines. His clients include Time Magazine, The New Yorker, Spin, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, MTV, and Saatchi & Saatchi.

Tomer co-created “Bipolar” with his identical twin brother Asaf for Alternative Comics. “Bipolar” is an experimental comic book series for which Tomer was nominated for the Eisner, Harvey and Ignatz awards. In 2006, Tomer published “P;acebo man” published by Alternative Comics), which compiles much of his work from “Bipolar”. He currently lives in New York City.

Published in 2015, “The Divine” is a graphic novel written by Lavie and illustrated by the twin illustrators Asaf Hanuka and Tomer Hanuka. It’s the story of Mark, an explosives expert who, despite his better judgment, signs onto a freelance job with his old army friend, Jason. In Quanlom, a fictional Southeast Asian country, the pair are assisting the military when Mark is lured in by a group of child-soldiers, led by 9-year-old twins nicknamed “The Divine”, who are intent on forcing a showdown between ancient magic and modern technology.

Jean-Daniel Allanche 

Art Brut: Jean-Daniel Allanche

Born in Tunisia, Jean-Daniel Allanche returned to France for his studies, and ultimately became a professor of physics at the Faculty of Sciences Paris 7. In 1975 he bought an apartment on the Rue des Ciseaux, a small street in Paris’s central area of Saint-Germain.

In the late 1970s Allanche began embellishing his apartment with his paintings. After working for years, ultimately all available surfaces, including the ceilings, floors, cabinet doors, and step treads, along with the walls, were covered with polychrome works featuring whimsical motifs.

There are also occasional texts interspersed with the visuals, offering Allanche’s personal views, and on one of the doors he has painted his surname. The majority of the paintings, however, appear to have a more targeted decorative function; this is in line with a notation in one of his vast collection of notebooks, where he wrote that he believed he had managed to reveal the intimate relationship between musical harmony and colors.

Others of his notebooks included additional texts and aphorisms, but also hundreds of pages with sequences of numbers, referencing Allanche’s passion for gambling and his efforts, as a professor of physics, to model disorder.

Although Allanche’s artistic activity must have played an important role in his life, he was not very talkative about it, so his decorated apartment remained largely unknown. After Allanche died in Paris in August 2015, his heirs decided that they would retain it as a private apartment. Removable frescoed elements such as the doors have been preserved and the remainder of the apartment has been basically restored to its original state.

Jerzy Marek

Jerzy Marek, “Spots”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas

Jerzy Marek was born in Poland in 1925 and showed early promise in both art and woodcarving.  But the outbreak of World War II in 1939, when he was only fourteen, put a complete hold on his artistic career for many years.  He ended the War with the British Army in Italy and finally settled in the United Kingdom in 1948.  For the next many years, Jerzy pursued a successful career as a civil engineer and bridge designer.

He started painting in oils in 1970 and initially spent much of his leisure time encouraging other artists locally in the Preston area where he eventually found himself.  This group became known as the “Marek Circle” and even included his mother-in-law Margaret Baird who subsequently became a successful primitive artist in her own right.  After taking early retirement in 1983, Marek began to concentrate on his painting.

His early work featured sporting themes; but these soon gave way to pastoral themes and then close-ups of animals and birds, all painted from memory. Jerzy Marek’s work has been exhibited in galleries worldwide including Glasgow, Paris, Hamburg and many other cities.  Reference to his work is made in the Rona Guide to the World of Naïve Art as well as Muller’s World Encyclopedia of Naive Art.  Jerzy Marek died in early 2014 at the age of 90.