Tag: art history

Vladimir Semensky 

Four Paintings by Vladimir Semensky

Born in 1968, Russian artist Vladimir Semensky creates paintings with a vibrant sense of spontaneous movement and naturalistic, individual gesture.  Dynamic poses and unguarded scenarios characterise his work.  Semensky’s paintings are large scale canvases and are born of the same spontaneous unique body movements he articulates in his compositions.  The movements of a person are almost eccentric in their singular relation to that person’s personality, surroundings and state of mind.

Semensky describes this with disarming frankness and allows a strangely intimate view that would never be afforded by a photorealistic painting.  This results in a chaotic and exciting sense that is usually absent in static imagery or posed, formal painting.  He captures the transience of things, private fleeting moments that we are usually only sensitive to in those we are closest to.

Thomas Jackson

Thomas Jackson,  “Emergent Behavior”, Tree and Cheese Balls

Photographer Thomas Jackson has continued his “Emergent Behavior” series where he photographs airborne swarms of common objects like Post-It notes, cheese balls, and plates in environments where you would least expect them. He also reverses the concept, shooting items from nature like sticks and leaves against an urban backdrop.

“I have struggled with the role of Photoshop in my work. I can’t make my images without it, yet I don’t really want it to be an integral part of my creative process. So I’ve set up some rules of the road for myself, and I’ve stuck to them while creating all my recent images. Basically I want the images to be as “in camera” as possible, so instead of employing PS to composite or more things around, I simply use it to remove elements I don’t want to be there.” -Thomas Jackson

Jeremy Barnard

Infra-Red Photography by Jeremy Barnard

Jeremy Barnard is a New England based photographer who has been taking photos for forty years.

“The new work I’ve been doing since 2006 is the infrared work. The infrared that I do isn’t startlingly surreal. Upon initial viewing, they look almost as if they are black and whites. But then you begin to notice some of the tonalities are reversed. A lot of people tend to think they are negative images or that they are solarized. I love the infrared. It has become my passion.

Our portion of the light spectrum that we can perceive is between 700 and 900 nanometers; just above that – from 900 to 1,200 nanometers – is the area of the light spectrum called near-infrared. What the army uses for night vision is heat infrared. We cannot with our eyes see near-infrared but there are species of animals, specifically insects, that can. Bees see infrared and some predatory birds can see infrared, including owls.

I am particularly interested in the fact that bees see it. I titled my infrared collection, “Through the Eyes of Bees.” What makes it interesting is that chlorophyll in plants is able to reflect infrared radiation almost 100 percent. Because leaves and organic things like plants and grasses reflect the radiation at almost 100 percent, they appear white.  A lot of the landscapes – people say to me, “Was this an ice storm?”  “Was this freshly fallen snow?” The photos end up looking a bit surreal.

Man Ray

Man Ray, “Glass Tears (Les Larmes)”, 1932, Collection of Elton John

Tate Modern today announces a major new exhibition, “The Radical Eye: Modernist Photography from the Sir Elton John Collection”, opening on 10 November 2016. The show will be drawn from one of the world’s greatest private collections of photography and will present an unrivalled selection of classic modernist images from the 1920s to the 1950s. Featuring over 150 works from more than 60 artists the exhibition will consist entirely of rare vintage prints, all created by the artists themselves.

It will showcase works by seminal figures such as Man Ray, André Kertész, Berenice Abbot, Alexandr Rodchenko and Edward Steichen, offering the public a unique opportunity to see remarkable works up close. The quality and depth of the collection will allow the exhibition to tell the story of modernist photography in this way for the first time in the UK. It also marks the beginning of a long term relationship between Tate and the Sir Elton John Collection.

 

Frank Buchwald

Frank Buchwald, Machine Light Number Three

Frank Buchwald is a interior designer and manufacturer of furniture, lights, and objects. He studied design at the University of the Arts in Berlin. He is also a painter and freelance illustrator.

Machine light number 03 is made of burnished steel and burnished brass with a  tube 60 watt lamp bulb. It is 24 inches long and 11 inches high.

Rich Stadler

Rich Stadler, BILLETSPIN Tops

BILLETSPIN spinning tops are precision crafted and custom designed by Rich Stadler, an engineer with over 25 years of experience. BILLETSPIN started in April of 2015; the tops are designed and manufactured in Wisconsin. The company is considered the most iconic custom spinning top company in the world, creating unique sophisticated designs that perform on the highest level.

Each BILLETSPIN top is machined from premium materials such as steel, bronze, copper and exotic materials like damascus, super conductor and mokume. Each top design goes through rigorous research and design stages before finally being machined by state-of-the-art CNC machines.

With dozens of unique designs, BILLETSPIN tops range from simple 1-piece models to more intricate 3-piece and higher. The tops are forged together and meticulously tested and inspected by hand for optimal performance and balance. All BILLETSPIN tops utilize high-quality ceramic or ruby ball bearings which allow for spin times of up to 20 minutes and higher.

Franz Kline

Franz Kline, Black and White Abstracts

An excerpt from the interview with British critic David Sylvester recorded March 1960 in New York City. It was edited for broadcasting by the BBC and first published in “Living Arts” in the spring of 1963:

FRANZ KLINE: It wasn’t a question of deciding to do black-and-white painting. I think there was a time when the original forms that finally came out in black and white were in colour and then as time went on I painted them out and make them black and white. And then, when they got that way, I just liked them, you know. I mean there was that marvellous twenty-minute experience of thinking, well, all my life has been wasted but this is marvellous – that sort of thing.

DAVID SYLVESTER: During the time that you were producing only black-and-white paintings, where you ever colour and then painting over it with black?

FRANZ KLINE: No, they started off that way. I didn’t have particularly a strong desire to use colour, say, in the lights or darks of a black-and-white painting, althought what happened is that accidentally they look that way. Sometimes a black, because of the quantity of it or the mass or the volume, looks at though it may be a blue-black, as if there were blue mixed in with the black, or as though it were a brown-black or a red-black. No, I didn’t have any idea of mixing up different kids of blacks. As a matter of fact, I just used any black that I could get ahold of.

DAVID SYLVESTER: And the whites the same say?

FRANZ KLINE: The whites the same way. The whites, of course, turned yellow, and many people call your attention to that, you know; they want white to stay white for ever. It doesn’t bother me whether it does or not. It’s still white compared to the black.

Ritchelly Oliveira

Five Illustrations by Ritchelly Oliveira

Ritchelly Oliveira is a visual artist from Brazil. Since his teen-age yeas, Oliveira has been working with the portrait, which began as an outlet of his personal experiences with relationships, family, and his insecurities.

“The photo becomes part of my work process. Until recently I was always looking for images that somehow had a dialogue with my artistic process, but it was very difficult, because I did not always find relevant images with my narrative. And over time I felt the need to produce my own images. I always try to photograph close friends, or people who inspire me in some way, and from this photo, I build the image that gives voice to my works.” – Ritchelly Oliveira

The artist’s site: https://ritchellyoliveira.tumblr.com

Daniel Crespi

Daniel Crespi, “Cain Killing Abel”, Oil on Canvas, 1618-1620

This striking image, depicting the struggle between Cain and Abel, is an early work of the artist, datable to circa 1618/20.  Its recent cleaning has allowed its assesment as a signed work by the artist.

Despite his short career (the artist died in his early 30’s), Crespi’s pictoral style developed markedly, and drew on a wide spectrum of sources.  This Cain and Abel shows traits of his work in the last years of the second decade of the 17th Century, with lingering mannerist traces of the influence of  Cerano and Giulio Cesare Procaccini.  It has been suggested that it is part of a group of drawings and paintings wherein Crespi was working through issues of anatomy and movement, and all are related in their sense of dynamism.

Included in this group are two drawings of anatomical studies in the Ambrosiana  as well as a drawing in a private collection.  These studies are not necessarily preparatory for the present canvas, but appear to show Crespi working through issues that he faced with the compostion.  A lost painting by Crespi of the Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew, known through copies, demonstrates similar concerns.

Chiesa di Sant’Ignazio di Loyola

Chiesa di Sant’Ignazio di Loyola, Church of St. Ignatius of Loyola, Rome, Italy

Andrea Pozzo, a Jesuit lay brother, painted the grandiose fresco that stretches across the nave ceiling (after 1685). It celebrates the work of Saint Ignatius and the Society of Jesus in the world presenting the saint welcomed into paradise by Christ and the Virgin Mary and surrounded by allegorical representations of all four continents.

Pozzo worked to open up, even dissolve the actual surface of the nave’s barrel vault illusionistically, arranging a perspectival projection to make an observer see a huge and lofty cupola (of a sort), open to the bright sky, and filled with upward floating figures. A marble disk set into the middle of the nave floor marks the ideal spot from which observers might fully experience the illusion.

A second marker in the nave floor further east provides the ideal vantage point for the trompe l’oeil painting on canvas that covers the crossing and depicts a tall, ribbed and coffered dome. The cupola one expects to see here was never built and in its place, in 1685, Andrea Pozzo supplied a painting on canvas with a perspectival projection of a cupola. Destroyed in 1891, the painting was subsequently replaced.

The chapel just to the right of the church’s presbytery (at the south-east corner) houses the funeral monuments of Pope Gregory XV and his nephew, Cardinal Ludovisi, the church’s founder. Pierre Legros and Pierre-Étienne Monnot made Gregory XV’s monument some sixty years after Gregory’s death.

Antonio Canova

Antonio Canova, Head of Napoleon Bonaparte, 1803-1806, Marble

In 1802 Antonio Canova (1757-1822) sculpted a bust and statue of the first consul of France, Napoleon Bonaparte. The Italian sculptor, whose works emulated the greatest images from the ancient world, was to return several times to his subject and produced a number of portraits in marble and bronze.

This colossal bust of the conqueror of Europe remained in Canova’s bedroom in his Rome house until his death in 1822. Afterwards it was purchased by the 6th Duke of Devonshire’s friend, Anne, Marchioness of Abercorn (d. 1827), who left it in her will to the Duke.

The Duke considered that this bust was the only authentic one of Napoleon carved by Canova himself. It was made from his model for the colossal full-length nude statue of Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker commissioned, but later rejected, by Napoleon. The statue is now in Apsley House, the London home of the Duke of Wellington. The 6th Duke placed this bust in the centre of the Sculpture Gallery at Chatsworth, facing a bust of the great conqueror from Antiquity, Alexander the Great.

William Baziotes

William Baziotes, “Dwarf”, 1947, Oil on Canvas, 106.7 x 91.8 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York

William Baziotes was a New York painter whose lyrical and often mysterious works relied heavily on subject matter derived from biomorphism and Symbolist poetry. He was an integral part of the Abstract Expressionist circle and exhibited with them frequently. Like his peers, he was deeply committed to concerns of paint application and abstracted forms.

Yet his interest in the medium of paint was combined with many sources for his imagery to produce works that evoked particular moods, or dream-like states – often more closely related to European Surrealism than to Abstract Expressionism. This duality in his work was described as “biomorphic abstraction” and was influential to artists such as Mark Rothko.

Baziotes was one of the few Abstract Expressionist artists who remained committed to the figure. He took his early Surrealist-inspired explorations further by creating strange, primitive imagery that seems to have been pulled from the darkness of the subconscious. His works in this vein were described as “biomorphic abstraction” because of his use of organic forms and other figurative elements that were not easily identifiable.

Unlike his Abstract Expressionist peers, even Baziotes’ most experimental canvases contain a structured, almost grid-like composition that was influenced by early Cubism and the artist’s work with stained glass. In conjunction with this underlying structure, however, Baziotes also felt that art should evoke emotions and moods through color, shape, and paint application.