Leilani Bustamante

Leilani Bustamante, Title Unknown, Acrylic and Gouache on Panel

Born in Santa Rosa, California, and graduate of the Academy of Art University, Leilani Bustamante’s paintings combine symbolic portraiture with a mixture of  themes that take the viewer into strange realities and eerie fantasies. Integrating a sepia palette of acrylic and gouache on wood panel, the ghostly deities and creatures of nature possess a haunting beauty as thought-provoking as it is sensual.

Source: k250966

Calendar: June 4

A Year: Day to Day Men: 4th of June

Modern Man in the Ancient Wood

On June 4, 1783, a hot-air balloon was demonstrated by Joseph and Jacques Montgolfier.

The Montgolfier brothers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne were born into a family of paper manufacturers founded in 1534 in Annonay, France. Of the two brothers, it was Joseph who was first interested in aeronautics: as early as 1775 he was building and experimenting with parachutes. He first contemplated building machines when he observed laundry drying over a fire incidentally form pockets that billowed upwards.

While living in Avignon in November of 1782 he made his first definitive experiments. Joseph Montgolfier built a box-like chamber out of very thin wood, and covering the sides and top with lightweight taffeta cloth. He crumpled and lit some paper under the bottom of the box. The contraption quickly lifted off its stand and collided with the ceiling.

Joseph recruited his brother Jacques to balloon building. They built a similar device, however scaled up to three times the dimensions of the original, making it 27 times greater in volume. They did their first test flight on December 14, 1782, lighting wool and hay underneath. The lifting power was so great, that they lost control of the craft. The device floated nearly two kilometers and was destroyed, after landing, by a passerby.

To make a public demonstration and to claim its invention the brothers constructed a globe-shaped balloon of sackcloth tightened with three thin layers of paper inside. The envelope could contain nearly 28,000 cubic feet of air and weighed 500 pounds. It was constructed of four pieces (the dome and three lateral bands) and held together by 1,800 buttons. A reinforcing fish net of cord covered the outside of the envelope.

The Montgolfier brothers flew the balloon at Annonay on June 4, 1783 in front of a group of dignitaries. The flight covered 2 km (1.2 mi), lasted 10 minutes, and had an estimated altitude of 5,200-6,600 feet. Word of their success quickly reached Paris. Étienne went to the capital to make further demonstrations and to solidify the brothers’ claim to the invention of flight.

On September 19, 1783, the Montgolfiers’ new balloon Aerostat Revelillon was flown with the first living beings in a basket attached to the balloon: a sheep called Montauciel, a duck and a rooster. The flight covered two miles at an altitude of 1500 feet and lasted eight minutes: it landed safely with all aboard surviving. Since the animals survived, King Louis XVI, who had witnessed the flight, allowed flights to proceed with human passengers.

Fernando Pessoa: “Images Locked Away in Books”

Photographers Unknown, Ten Images from the Black and White Collection

“There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality. There are passages from my own writing that chill me with fright, so distinctly do I feel them as people, so sharply outlined do they appear against the walls of my room, at night, in shadows… I’ve written sentences whose sound, read out loud or silently (impossible to hide their sound), can only be of something that acquired absolute exteriority and a full-fledged soul.” 

–Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

A biography of Fernando Pessoa entitled “Fernando Pessoa: “Life that Wants Nothing Can Have No Weight”, published in November 2020, can be found on this site.

Bonobo, “No Reason”

Bonobo, “No Reason”, Featuring Nick Murphy

Simon Green , known by his stage name Bonobo, is a British musician, producer, and DJ based in Los Angeles.  He debuted with a trip-hop aesthetic, and has since explored more upbeat approaches while experimenting world music and jazz. His electronic sound incorporates the use of organic instrumentation, and is recreated by a full band during his live performances.

Victor Brauner

Victor Brauner, “La Pétrification de la Papesse”, 1945, Oil and Wax on Masonite, Private Collection

Victor Brauner was born on June 15, 1903, in Piatra-Neamt, Romania. His father was involved in spiritualism and sent Brauner to evangelical school in Braïla from 1916 to 1918. In 1921 he briefly attended the School of Fine Arts in Bucharest, where he painted landscapes in the style of Cézanne. He exhibited paintings in his subsequent expressionist style at his first solo show at the Galerie Mozart in Bucharest in 1924.

Brauner helped found the Dadaist review “75 HP” in Bucharest. He went to Paris in 1925 but returned to Bucharest approximately a year later. In Bucharest in 1929 Brauner was associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist review “UNU”. Brauner settled in Paris in 1930 and became a friend of his compatriot Constantin Brancusi. Then he met Yves Tanguy, who introduced him to the Surrealists by 1933. André Breton wrote an enthusiastic introduction to the catalogue for Brauner’s first Parisian solo show at the Galerie Pierre in 1934.

The exhibition was not well-received, and in 1935 Brauner returned to Bucharest, where he remained until 1938. That year he moved to Paris, lived briefly with Tanguy, and painted a number of works featuring distorted human figures with mutilated eyes. Some of these paintings, dated as early as 1931, proved gruesomely prophetic when he lost his own eye in a scuffle in 1938.

At the outset of World War II Brauner fled to the South of France, where he maintained contact with other Surrealists in Marseilles. Later he sought refuge in Switzerland; unable to obtain suitable materials there, he improvised an encaustic from candle wax and developed a graffito technique.

Brauner returned to Paris in 1945. His postwar painting incorporated forms and symbols based on Tarot cards, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and antique Mexican codices. In the fifties Brauner traveled to Normandy and Italy, and his work was shown at the Venice Biennale Exhibitions in 1954 and in 1966. He died in Paris on March 12, 1966.

Calendar: June 3

 

A Year: Day to Day Men: 3rd of June

Firmness of Purpose

On June 3, 1839, Governor-General Lin Tse-hsu destroyed 1.2 million kilograms of opium confiscated from British merchants.

Lin Tse-hsu, or Lin Zexu, was a Chinese scholar and official of the Qing Dynasty of China. In 1811, he obtained the position of a jinshi with a degree in Literature in the imperial examination, and in the same year gained admission to the Hanlin Academy founded by Emperor Xuanzong. He rose rapidly through the various grades of provincial service, opposed the opening of China to foreigners, and became Governor-General of the provinces of Hunan and Hubei in 1937.

In March 1839, Lin arrived in Guangdong Province to take measures that would eliminate the opium trade. He was a formidable bureaucrat known for his competence and high moral standards, with an imperial commission from the Daoguang Emperor to halt the illegal importation of opium by the British. Upon arrival, he made changes within a matter of months. He arrested more than 1,700 Chinese opium dealers and confiscated over 70,000 opium pipes. He initially attempted to get foreign companies to forfeit their opium stores in exchange for tea, but this ultimately failed.

Lin resorted to using force in the western merchants’ enclave. A month and a half later, the merchants gave up nearly 1.2 million kilograms (2.6 million pounds) of opium. Beginning on the 3rd of June, 1839, five hundred workers labored for 23 days to destroy it, mixing the opium with lime and salt and throwing it into the sea outside of Humen Town on the Pearl River Delta. Lin composed an elegy apologizing to the gods of the sea for polluting their realm.

In 1839, Lin also wrote an extraordinary memorial to Queen Victoria in the form of an open letter published in Canton, urging her to end the opium trade. He argued that China was providing Britain with valuable commodities such as tea, porcelain, spices and silk, with Britain sending only “poison” in return. Lin appears to have been unaware that opium was not banned in the Middle East, Europe and the Americas, and was commonly used for its medicinal rather than recreational effects. The letter to the Queen never reached her.

Neither Lin nor the Daoguang Emperor appreciated the depth or changed nature of the problem. They did not see the change in international trade structures, the commitment of the British government to protecting the interests of private traders, and the peril to British traders who would surrender their opium.

Open hostilities between China and Britain started in 1839 in what later would be called the the First Opium War. The immediate effect was that both sides banned all trade. A series of military and naval engagements were fought between the United Kingdom and the Qing Dynasty of China over conflicting viewpoints on diplomatic relations, trade, and the administration of justice in China, ending in the 1842 Treaty of Nanking.

Jakob Bohme

Jakob Bohme, “Theosphische Wercke (Theosophical Work)”, 1682, Amsterdam

Jakob Bohme was a German mystic, philosopher and Christian theosophist. His influence was evident in Germany, the Netherlands and England, as well as in Sweden and Finland. Among the Quakers in the United States, he also found enthusiastic followers. In 1682, fifty-eight years after his death,  all of his works were published together for the first time. This image illustrates the wheel of properties of the seven planets.

Bill Domonkos

Bill Domonkos, Untitled, (Fear of Sharks), Computer Graphics. Gifs, Endless Loop

Bill Domonkos is a filmmaker, GIF maker and stereoscopist from San Francisco, USA. The artist combines 2D and 3D computer animation, special effects, photography and manipulated archive film footage to create unique moving images, each telling a different, surreal story.

“I experiment by combining, altering, editing and reassembling using digital technology, special effects, and animation to create a new kind of experience. I am interested in the poetics of time and space—to renew and transform materials, experiences, and ideas. The extraordinary thing about cinema is its ability to suggest the ineffable—it is this elusive, dreamlike quality that informs my work.”- Bill Domonkos