Tag: art history

Temples of Tarxien

Temples of Tarxien, Island of Malta

The Temples of Tarxien, date back from 3, 600 B. C. to 2, 800 B. C. These temples are renowned for the detail of their carvings, which include domestic animals carved in relief, altars, and screens decorated with spiral designs and other patterns.

The temples where excavated by the father of archaeology of Malta , Sir Temi Zammit in the beginning of the 20th century and are considered as being the first to be excavated in a scientific method. Most of the original artifacts excavated from the site, today are at The National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta.

Excavation of the site reveals that it was used extensively for rituals, which probably involved animal sacrifice. Especially interesting is that Tarxien provides rare insight into how the megaliths were constructed: stone rollers were left outside the South temple. Additionally, evidence of cremation has been found at the center of the South temple, which is an indicator that the site was reused as a Bronze Age cremation cemetery.

Henry J. Soulen

Henry J. Soulen, “Chan Chi-tan Saw the Flames Jump Up”, Oil on Canvas, 1938, 32 x 36 Inches, Weisman Museum of Art

Henry J Soulen was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He attended the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and later studied with Howard Pyle. For many years, his work appeared regularly in most of the quality magazines, and usually in color – even when the use of color was restricted – because of the brilliance of his pallet.

His work is richly colored and strongly patterned. Each of his pictures is treated in a manner appropriate to the lack of pictorial depth of mural painting, and equally, to a magazine cover. He was given a Peabody Award for his magazine cover designs. During World War II, he gave free art lessons at the Valley Forge Military Hospital, a rehabilitation center for veterans.

The painting “Chan Chi-tan Saw the Flames Jump Up” was on page 19  of the Saturday Evening Post, Volume 210, Number 52 on June 25, 1938.

Daniel Borreto

Daniel Borreto, Unttled, ( Creatures in the Basement ), Photographic Gif Loops

Daniel Borreto is an accomplished photographer and artist. He often uses his art and combines much of his personal art with photography to create some stunning images (photography and illustration). Daniel also creates fascinating Motion Graphics through simple Giff loops. Borreto uses a Canon EOS REBEL T2i for many of his photos. He will typically take the photo and then using Photoshop, create Giff images making a fascinating,visual loop.

Bruce Nauman

Bruce Nauman, “Life Mask”, Lithograph, 1981,, 71.1 x 96.5 cm. Edition of 50, Private Collection

Bruce Nauman was one of the most prominent, influential, and versatile American artists to emerge in the 1960s. Although his work is not easily defined by its materials, styles, or themes, sculpture is central to it, and it is characteristic of Post-Minimalism in the way it blends ideas from Conceptualism, Minimalism, performance art, and video art.

The revival of interest in Marcel Duchamp in the 1960s also clearly influenced Nauman in various ways, from encouraging his love of wordplay to infusing his work with a satirical and sometimes absurdist tone. Despite the impact of Dada, however, he has continued to view his art less as a playful or creative enterprise than as a serious research endeavor, one he likes to carry out in seclusion from the art world, one that is shaped by his interests in ethics and politics.

Cody Swanson

Adam in Clay by Cody Swanson

Cody Joseph Swanson was born in Minneapolis, MN and currently resides in Florence, Italy. Cody holds an M.A. in Liturgy, Sacred Art and Architecture from the European University in Rome, and spent five consecutive years teaching sculpture with the Florence Academy of Art where he also studied sculpture.

Recently Cody has completed three major projects with the acclaimed architect Duncan G Stroik for the Cathedrals of Sioux Falls and Minneapolis along with the Basilica of the National Shrine to Mary of Holy Hill, Wisconsin. He was also given the tremendous honor from the Cardinal of Florence, His Eminence Guiseppe Betori, to produce a 4-meter sculpture depicting St. Emygdius for the Cathedral of Foligno and a silver processional cross for the Cathedral of Florence.

Arch de Triumph

Arch de Triumph, Details, Paris, France

The Arc is located on the right bank of the Seine at the centre of a dodecagonal configuration of twelve radiating avenues. It was commissioned in 1806 after the victory at Austerlitz by Emperor Napoleon at the peak of his fortunes. Laying the foundations alone took two years and, in 1810, when Napoleon entered Paris from the west with his bride Archduchess Marie-Louise of Austria, he had a wooden mock-up of the completed arch constructed. The architect, Jean Chalgrin, died in 1811 and the work was taken over by Jean-Nicolas Huyot.

During the Bourbon Restoration, construction was halted and it would not be completed until the reign of King Louis-Philippe, between 1833 and 1836, by the architects Goust, then Huyot, under the direction of Héricart de Thury. On 15 December 1840, brought back to France from Saint Helena, Napoleon’s remains passed under it on their way to the Emperor’s final resting place at the Invalides. Prior to burial in the Panthéon, the body of Victor Hugo was displayed under the Arc during the night of 22 May 1885.

Matthew Lucas

Four Endless Loop Animation Gifs by Matthew Lucas

Some of the great looping gif animations bY Matthew Lucas.  “The original version of the GIF format was called 87a. In 1989, CompuServe devised an enhanced version, called 89a, which added support for animation delays (multiple images in a stream were already supported in 87a), transparent background colors, and storage of application-specific metadata.“

Many thanks to Andrew Davidson at http://littlelimpstiff14u2.tumblr.com

Matthew Lucas’s site:  http://mathewlucasdesign.tumblr.com

Ian Miller

Ian Miller, Illustration for the Pan edition of Simak’s “The Werewolf Principle”.

In the middle-distant future, Andrew Blake, discovered huddled inside a capsule orbiting a remote star, is brought back to Earth suffering from total amnesia. Over 200 years old, he thinks and acts like a man, but becomes frighteningly aware of two alien beings that lurk within his body – a strange biological computer, and a wolf-like animal. Dangerously possessed, Blake breaks out of the hospital to look for his past… This is a science fiction novel that resonates with today’s science fact so eerily closely, it will challenge and delight readers. This is Sci-Fi Master Simak at his powerful best.

Available as an Audio Book.

David Hockney

David Hockney’s Birthday: July 9

Septuagenarian artist David Hockney is known for a lot of things—his remarkable skills as a painter, photographer, and draughtsman, his contributions to the Pop art movement, and the open exploration in his work of gay love as early as 1961 with such works as “We Two Boys Together Clinging”. Quotes by David Hockney:

“Water in swimming pools changes its look more than in any other form… its colour can be man-made and its dancing rhythms reflect not only the sky but, because of its transparency, the depth of the water as well. If the water surface is almost still and there is a strong sun, then dancing lines with the colours of the spectrum appear everywhere.”

“Bohemia was against the suburbs, and now the suburbs have taken over. I mean, the anti-smoking thing is all anti-Bohemia. Bohemia is gone now. When people say, well wasn’t it amazing saying you were gay in 1960, I point out, well, I lived in Bohemia, and Bohemia is a tolerant place. You can’t have a smoke-free Bohemia. You can’t have a drug-free Bohemia. You can’t have a drink-free Bohemia. Now they’re all worried about their fucking curtains, sniffing curtains for tobacco and stuff like that.”

“Nobody’s taking any notice of the avant-garde any more. They’re finding they’ve lost their authority. They thought they would get authority by damaging the other, earlier establishment. But by doing that you damage all authority.”

“Drawing is rather like playing chess: your mind races ahead of the moves that you eventually make.”

Uno Moralez

Illustrations by Uno Moralez

Uno Moralez is a Moscow-based pixel painter with a sinister and unique take on old computer game aesthetics. He is a Russian enigma whose LiveJournal is written in Cyrllic, whose work is both drawn and published in digital pixels, whose output comes in the form of bizarre and ferociously NSFW image/gif galleries as often as comics or illustrations, and whose name is not even Uno Moralez.

“Unquestionably menacing and monstrous figures lurk smiling in shadowy rooms, bodies and objects arranged in inscrutable ways that nevertheless imply an unimpeachable in-story logic. It’s the logic of nightmares, yes, but whether we’re talking about his standalone images, his animated gifs, or his keyframe-style comics, they give off the sense that what’s happening makes sense to the individuals involved, which is the most fascinating and harrowing thing about Moralez’s work. The distance from here to there seems insurmountable, but he bridges it time and time again, in a lo-fi digital style that makes it seem like these images are woven from the fabric of the Internet itself.” _Sean T Collins, The Comics Journal

Sachin Teng

Sachin Teng, “Making Soup”, Computer Graphics, Illustration Gifs

There are many really gifted graphic artists who do work with gif illustrations. Sachin Teng is one. He mixes realistic styles with the cartoonish and and the glitched-out. Sachin Teng has illustrated for Adidas, Wired, and the New Yorker, among others. He is a freelance illustrator originally from New York but now based in Los Angeles.

Edmondo Senatore

Edmondo Senatore, “Glimpses of Tuscany”

Born in Rome, Italy, Edmondo Senatore started life taking photos with an old Russian camera, which developed into his career in 2003 to a full-time photographer. Initially starting in the digital photographic market, he has since changed to the traditional camera which he carries with him daily. Senatore’s subjects includes landscapes in all its facets, street photography, portraits, and nature photography.

More information on his life and a gallery of his photographs can be found at: https://500px.com/edmondo

 

Edgar Flores (SANER)

Murals and Paintings by Edgar Flores (SANER)

Edgar Flores was born in 1981 in Mexico City, where he is currently based. As a child he developed an interest in drawing and Mexican muralism and began expressing himself through graffiti in the late 1990s. In 2004, Flores received a degree in graphic design from Universidad Autónoma de México. His work has been exhibited in galleries worldwide including Barcelona, Berlin, London, New York and Mexico City. In 2014 he had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Luis Potosí in Mexico.