Tag: art history

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.

Albert Gleizes

Albert Gleizes, “L’Homme au Balcon”, Man on a Balcony (Portrait of Dr. Théo Morinaud), 1912, Oil on Canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Albert Gleizes was a French artist, theoretician, philosopher, a self-proclaimed founder of Cubism and an influence on the School of Paris. In 1912 Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger wrote the first major treatise on Cubism, Du “Cubisme”. Gleizes was a founding member of the Section d’Or group of artists.

He was also a member of Der Sturm, and his many theoretical writings were originally most appreciated in Germany, where especially at the Bauhaus his ideas were given thoughtful consideration. Gleizes spent four crucial years in New York, and played an important role in making America aware of modern art.

Jean Paul Mallozzi

Jean Paul Mallozzi, “We Come Here Often”, Oil on Panel on Cradled Wood

Jean Paul Mallozzi broadens his fascination with the human condition and the inherent, nuanced complexities of personal relationships, specifically intimate male relationships, which are often hyper-sexualized and informed by society’s rigid and conflicting constructs of masculinity, sexuality and identity.

“We Come Here Often is a personal piece that highlights the emotional bond the couple shares between themselves over a quiet bluff overlooking a cityscape in the distance. The light is coming from both men’s emotional states made visible and crossing over into each other merging together at that moment.” -John Seed, Huffington Post

Francesco Borromini

Baroque Architecture of Francesco Borromini

Francesco Borromini, byname of Francesco Castelli, was an Italian architect born in today’s Ticino who, with his contemporaries Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Pietro da Cortona, was a leading figure in the emergence of Roman Baroque architecture.

A keen student of the architecture of Michelangelo and the ruins of Antiquity, Borromini developed an inventive and distinctive, if somewhat idiosyncratic, architecture employing manipulations of Classical architectural forms, geometrical rationales in his plans and symbolic meanings in his buildings.

He seems to have had a sound understanding of structures, which perhaps Bernini and Cortona, who were principally trained in other areas of the visual arts, lacked. His soft lead drawings are particularly distinctive. He appears to have been a self-taught scholar, amassing a large library by the end of his life.

Probably because his work was idiosyncratic, his subsequent influence was not widespread but is apparent in the Piedmontese works of Camillo-Guarino Guarini and, as a fusion with the architectural modes of Bernini and Cortona, in the late Baroque architecture of Northern Europe.

Cesare Nebbia

Cesare Nebbia, The Dome of the Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome, 1585-1590

Cesare Nebbia was an Italian painter from Orvieto, Italy, who painted in the style of Mannerism, a European style that emerged in the latter part of the Italian High Renaissance. This style emerged around 1520 and lasted until the end of the 16th century in Italy, replaced by the Baroque style. While the Renaissance art emphasized proportion, balance and ideal beauty, Mannerism exaggerated such qualities, leading to asymmetrical or unnaturally elegant compositions, which favored compositional  tension and instability.

The Mannerist interior decoration of the Santa Maria Maggiore’s Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament was completed from 1587-1589 by a large team of artists, directed by Cesare Nebbia and Italian Draughtsman and painter Giovanni Guerra. Recent scholarship found that the hand of Nebbia drew preliminary sketches for many, if not all, of the frescoes that cover the walls.

Ian Ingram

Mixed-Media Work by Ian Ingram

Ian Ingram’s self-portraits are autobiographical reflections of meaningful events, such as his wedding or the birth of his child; that is, times when a decision or an action changes one’s worldview. Beyond serving as a vehicle to relay his feelings to the outside world, Ingram’s drawings become unflinching windows into his subconscious, and serve as a tool for his own self-reflections and ruminations. His hyper-realistic and intensely emotional self-portraits arrest the viewer with a direct gaze that at times seems almost uncomfortably intimate.

Ian Ingram’s tightly rendered canvases are dreamlike, the result of Ingram’s use of a range of techniques. From careful cross-contours, grids and lines to amorphous passages of blended charcoal, each method plays a role in building Ingram’s expression of the human face’s subtleties. Working with charcoal, pastel, ink and watercolor, Ingram also incorporates more unconventional materials such as beads, beeswax, metallic thread, silver leaf, string and even butterfly wings.