Giovanni Domenico Campiglia

Giovanni Domenico Campiglia, “Bacchus and Ampelos”, Post-1731

This engraving by Campiglia is an image of a Roman Statue in the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence. This was most likely published in 1734 in the “Museum Florentium”.

Giovanni Domenico Campiglia was an Italian painter and engraver from Florence, active under the patronage of the House of Medici. He initially trained under Tommaso Redi and Lorenzo del Moro, then in Bologna under Giovanni Gioseffo dal Sole, Campiglia worked with Antonio Francesco Gore for over a decade on the “Museum Florentium”, a collection of images of all the famous artists of Florence. His contributions were published in 1734, which induce Pope Clement XII to bring him to Rome, where Campiglia did engravings for artist Bottari’s multi-volume “Musei Capitolini”.

Calendar: September 14

A Year: Day to Day Men: 14th of September

Hand Over Hand

September 14, 1910 was the birthdate of Korean author Kim Hae-Gyeong, known by his pen name Yi Sang.

Yi Sang graduated in 1922 from the Gyeongseong Engineering High School with training as an architect and was employed as a draftsman in the public works department of the Governor-General of Korea. In December of 1929, Yi Sang won first prize in a design contest for the cover of “Korea and Architecture” and third prize for the cover of the journal of the Korean Architecture Society.

Yi Sang joined the “Circle of Nine” whose core members included Kim Girim, Lee Taijun and Jung Jiyong, taking the position of editor of the journal. Several of Yi Sang’s works were published in the journal, including his poems “Paper Gravestone” and “Condition Serious” and the stories “Wings”, “Meetings and Farewells”, and “Children’s Skulls”.

In November of 1936, Yi Sang went to Japan, where he was arrested by Japanese police in early 1937. This was during the time that the Korean Empire had been officially annexed by Japan with the signing of the Japan-Korea Annexation Treaty. Japan officially ruled Korea, which was deprived of the administration of all its internal affairs. Yi Sang was eventually released on bail and admitted to the Tokyo University Hospital, where he died on April 17, 1937 at the age of twenty-six.

Yi Sang was perhaps the most famous avant-garde writer of the colonial era. In his work he experimented with language and interiority, the separation from inside one’s self as well as from the outer world. His poems, particularly, were influenced by Western literary concepts including Dadaism and Surrealism. Yi Sang’s history in architecture also influenced his work, which often included the languages of mathematics and architecture including, lines, dots, number systems, equations and diagrams.

Yi Sang’s literary legacy is punctuated by his modernist tendencies seen throughout his collected works. His poems reveal the desolate internal landscape of modern humanity and, as in the well known “Crow’s Eye View Poem”, utilize an anti-realist technique to show the themes of anxiety and fear. Yi Sang’s stories disjoint the form of traditional fictional writing to show the conditions of the lives of modern people. His most famous story “Wings” utilizes a stream-of-consciousness technique to express these conditions in terms of the alienation of modern people.

Yi Sang never received much recognition for his writing during his lifetime, but his works began to be reprinted in the 1950s. In the 1970s Yi Sang’s reputation soared as more people became aware of his work. The Yii Sang Literary Award, established in 1977, is sponsored by the Korean publisher Munhaksasangsa and has become one of the most prestigious literary awards in South Korea.

Alice Lex-Nerlinger

Alice Lex-Nerlinger, “Racecar Driver”, 1926, Vintage Silver Print from an Original Photogram, Private Collection

Alice Lex-Nerlinger, was born in 1893 to the owner of a gas lamp factory on Moritzplatz in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Between 1911 and 1916, she studied painting and graphic art at the Teaching Institute of the Museum of Arts and Crafts under painter and lithographer Emil Orlik and other teachers.

Personal experience of the First World War and the atmosphere of artistic experiment in 1920s Berlin created provided a source of ideas for Alice Lex-Nerlinger’s artistic works: heroism versus the soldier’s death, man and machine, capital and labour, state and censor, and not least, the misogynist. She found stimulus and confirmation in groups of artists with similar attitudes such as the Abstrakten (the Abstracts) and the Association of Revolutionary Fine Artists in Germany founded in 1928. Like Alice Lex, these groups rejected Expressionism, Cubism and Dadaism as bourgeois art. She expressed her political convictions by joining the German Communist Party (KPD) along with her husband Oskar Nerlinger in 1928.

Photographs, newspaper clippings and strikingly contrasted colors, such as red and blue, provided the ingredients for Lex-Nerlinger’s socially critical montages, specializing in photomontages and colored spray painting. Her work was often produced in sequential series creating rhythm and multi-dimensionality. Lex-Nerlinger succeeded in translating the complexity of political statements into simply structured individual images or compositions which prompted discussion and inquiry.

In 1933 Lex-Nerlinger was expelled from the German Association of Fine Artists by the National Socialists and banned from practicing her profession and from exhibiting her artwork. Censorship and this ban on her artwork drove her into engaging in underground political activities against the regime.

Alice Lex-Nerlinger did manage to survive during National Socialism in Germany; but, fearful of persecution and house searches, she destroyed some of her artworks. After the Second World War, she worked in the German Democratic Republic primarily on official portrait commissions. She was honored with a honorary pension in 1960, which she received with the support of the Germany Academy of Arts, and was honored with the Patriotic Order of Merit of the GDR in 1974.

Calendar: September 13

A Year: Day to Day Men: 13th of September

The Wayfarer

September 13, 1903 was the birthdate of French-born American actress Claudette Colbert.

Claudette Colbert starred in the successful 1929 film “The Lady Lies” and followed tthe film with another hit that year “The Hole in the Wall”. She starred opposite Fredric March in the 1930 “Manslaughter”, a remake of the earlier silent film. Colbert was again paired with March in the 1931 “Honor Among Lovers”, a romantic story which faired well at the box office.

Cecil B. Demille cast Claudette Colbert in his last great work “The Sign of the Cross”, released in 1932. She played the Empress Poppaea, wife to Emperor Nero Claudius Caesar played by Charles Laughton. Later in 1932 Colbert was paired with Jimmy Durante in the “Phantom President”, a musical comedy by George M. Cohen. By this time Claudette Colbert’s name symbolized good movies and crowds gathered in the theaters to see her next film, the acclaimed 1933 dramatic love story “Tonight is Ours”.

Claudette Colbert had two very successful movies which increased her stardom in 1934. The first was her starring role as Cleopatra in Cecil B. DeMille’s spectacular 1934 “Cleopatra”. This was a difficult role for Colbert; having contracted appendicitis on her previous film, she was only able to stand a few minutes at a time during the shooting. She also was fearful of snakes, so the death scene shooting was delayed as long as possible. Not one of DeMille’s best films, it nevertheless was a financial success.

Claudette Colbert’s second role in 1934, the one which would immortalize her, was the character of Ellie Andrews, in the now famous “It Happened One Night”. Paired with Clark Gable, the madcap comedy was a mega-hit all across the country. It resulted in Colbert being nominated for and winning the Oscar that year for Best Actress. In 1935, she was again nominated for her role as Doctor Jane Everest, a staff member at a mental institution, in the film “Private Worlds”. Starring as Anne Hilton in the 1944 “Since You Went Away”, she received her third nomination for Best Actress. Claudette Colbert was now a sure drawing card for virtually any film she was in.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Claudette Colbert appeared in the early television medium as well as in theaters. She appeared in the 1955 western film “Texas Lady”; however, Colbert was not on the big screen again until the 1961 “Parrish”, playing a mother on a tobacco plantation in the Connecticutt River Valley. This was her final performance on the big screen; Colbert returned to her original acting career of stage productions. After a series of strokes, Colbert divided her time between living in New York and Barbados, where she passed on July of 1996 at the age of 92.

Calendar: September 12

A Year: Day to Day Men: 12th of September

The Garden Wall

September 12, 1898 marks the birthdate of the social realist artist Ben Shahn.

Ben Shahn began his path to becoming an artist when his family left Lithuania and moved to Brooklyn, New York. He was trained in his early years as a lithographer and graphic designer; his experience in these fields would be apparent in his future works, combining text with images. Although Shahn attended New York University as a biology student in 1919, he left to pursue art at City College in 1921 and later at the National Academy of Design.

Ben Shahn’s twenty-three gouache paintings of the trials of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti communicated the political concerns of his time. Shahn followed the trial closely and believed, like many people worldwide, that the two men were not given a fair trial. Shahn participated in protests and made his gouache paintings in 1931 and 1932. Many were based on photographs appearing in the newspapers. “The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti” was exhibited in 1932 and received acclaim for both the public and the critics.

Ben Shahn’s work came to the attention of Diego Rivera. In May and June of 1933, Shahn served as an assistant to Rivera while Rivera executed his New York Rockefeller Center mural. During the Depression years, Shahn worked for the Resettlement Administration and the Farm Security Administration, photographing the American south; his social documentary style emphasized the people’s living and working conditions. Shahn also painted many fresco murals for schools, post offices, and government buildings; the art he made affirmed his social justice ideals and the legacy of the Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Shahn mixed different genres of art; however, his body of work is distinctive for its lack of traditional portraits, still lifes, and landscapes. He used both expressive and precise visual languages, which he united through the consistency of using a strong line in his work. Shahn’s background in lithography contributed to his devotion to detail; his work is also noted for his use of unique symbolism, often compared to the imagery in Paul Klee’s drawings.

Ben Shahn’s social-realist vision informed his approach to art; his examination of the status quo inspired his creative process. Although Shahn often explored contested themes of modern urban life, organized labor, immigration and injustice, he did so while maintaining a compassionate tone. Shahn identified himself as a communicative artist, challenging the esoteric pretensions of art, which he believed disconnect the artists and their work from the public.

Calendar: September 11

A Year: Day to Day Men: 11th of September

Packing Heat

September 11, 1972 marks the passing of Polish-American animator and film producer Max Fleischer.

By 1914 the first commercially produced animated cartoons started to appear in movie theaters. Max Fleischer devised an improvement in animation through a combined projector and easel for tracing images from live action film. This device, known as the Rotoscope, enabled Fleischer to produce the first realistic animation since the initial works of Winsor McCay. The patent to Fleischer and his two brothers was granted in 1917.

Max Fleischer started working with The Bray Studios, which had a contract with Paramount Pictures, after World War I. His initial series, the “Out of the Inkwell” films featuring “The Clown” character, was first produced at The Bray Studios. The films featured the novelty of combining live action and animation and served as semi-documentaries with the appearance of Max Fleischer as the artist who dipped his pen into the ink bottle to produce the clown figure on his drawing board. While the technique of combining animation with live action was already established by others at The Bray Studio, it was Fleischer’s clever use of the technique combined with Fleischer’s realistic animation that made his series unique.

It was during this time that Max Fleischer developed the Rotograph, a means of photographing live action film footage with animation cels for a composited image. This was an improvement over the method used by Bray Studios where a series of 8″ x 10″ stills were made from motion picture film and used as backgrounds behind animation cels. The Rotograph technique went into more general use known as “Aerial Image Photography” and was a main staple in animation and optical effects companies for making titles and various forms of matte composites.

In 1924, Fleischer partnered with Edwin Miles Fadiman, Hugo Riesenfeld and Lee DeForest to form Red Seal Pictures Corporation, which owned 36 theaters on the East Coast, extending as far west as Cleveland, Ohio. During this period, Fleischer invented the “Follow the Bouncing Ball” technique in his “Ko-Ko Car Tune” series of animated sing-along shorts. The series lasted until early 1927, becoming very popular with theater goers.

Max Fleischer’s most famous character was Betty Boop, born out of a cameo caricature in the early animated films. The “Betty Boop” series began in 1932, and became a huge success for him. However, Fleischer’s greatest business decision came with his licensing of the comic strip character Popeye the Sailor, who was introduced to audiences in the 1933 Betty Boop cartoon, “Popeye the Sailor”. Popeye became a box office hit and was one of the most successful screen adaptations of a comic strip in cinema history. Much of this success was due the perfect match of the Fleischer Studio style combined with its unique use of music. By the late 1930s a survey indicated that Popeye had eclipsed Mickey Mouse in popularity, challenging Disney’s presence in the market.

Jason Van Duyn

Jason Van Duyn, Van Duyn Woodwork: Wooden Cremation Urn

Van Duyn Woodwork in Edenton, North Carolina, has been crafting wooden vessels, unrs, bowls and sculptures since 1949. The cremation urns are handmade, turned primarily of various southern domestic hardwoods. These hardwoods are sourced typically at the end of their life cycle; often the tree has died from disease, advanced age, storm damage, and pests. In many cases various interesting textures, tones, and patterns have developed as a result of those conditions. Each urn is sealed with a hand-threaded finial and is finished with Danish oil.

Their site is https://vanduynwoodwork.com

Source: browndresswithwhitedots

Hideki Koh

Hideki Koh, Title Unknown, Date Unknown

Hideki Koh was born in Mie Prefecture, Japan in 1951. In 1998 he began drawing pictures with a special focus on boys and young men. From 2000 Koh has introduced his art through solo and group exhibitions in Tokyo, Osaka, London, Melbourne, and other cities around the world.

Through his oil paintings, drawings, and other works of art Koh expresses the freshness and liveliness of the boys and young men he depicts. He often includes in his works the lives of small animals and insects. The aesthetic world he creates provides constant fascination and charm for his growing number of fans.

In addition to his paintings and drawings, Koh is a well-known doll-maker who creates stunningly realistic dolls and accessories. Beginning with his first solo doll exhibition titled “Hitogata” in 2004, his reputation as a talented doll-maker has steadily increased both in Japan and world-wide.

In addition, the multi-talented Koh does body painting for stage actors and at art gallery events. In 2013 Koh started an art and drawing school in Tokyo. He also organizes sketching workshops around the city where he teaches and mentors young artists.

Calendar: September 10

A Year: Day to Day Men: 10th of September

Lost in Thought

September 10, 1914 was the birthdate of American film director Robert Wise.

Robert Wise initially sought a career in journalism and attended Franklin College, a small liberal arts college in Indiana, on a scholarship. In 1933 due to his family’s poor financial situation, he moved to Hollywood where his younger brother had gone several years earlier. His brother David found him a job at RKO Studios where he eventually became an editor.

Wise began his career at RKO as a sound and music editor. As he gained experience, he became more interested in editing film content, rather than sound, and started working for RKO film editor William Hamilton. Wise assisted Hamilton on Alfred Santell’s “Winterset” and later on the 1937 “Stage Door” and the 1939 “The Story of Vernon and Irene Castel”. Wise received his first screen credit for a feature film, shared with Hamilton, for editing on “Fifth Avenue Girl” released in 1939.

At RKO Robert Wise worked with Orson Welles on “Citizen Kane” and was nominated for the 1942 Academy Award for Film Editing. Orson Welles had used a deep-focus technique on his film, in which heavy lights are employed to achieve sharp focus for both foreground and background in the frame. Wise later use this technique in films he directed. Wise also worked as editor on Welles’ next film “The Magnificent Ambersons”, and shot additional scenes for the film.

At RKO, Wise got his first credited directing job in 1944 while working for Hollywood horror film producer Val Lewton. He replaced the original director on the horror film “The Curse of the Cat People”, when it fell behind schedule. The film was a well received horror film which made a departure from the genre at that time. Wise used, as in many of his future films, a vulnerable child or childlike character to challenge a dark, adult world. He began a collaboration with Lewton that led to the production of the 1945 horror film “The Body Snatcher” starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.

In the 1950s Robert Wise proved adept in several genres, including melodrama in “So Big”; westerns in “Tribute to a Bad Man” starring James Cagney; epics in “Helen of Troy”; and science fiction in “The Day the Earth Stood Still” which became one of the most enduring sci-fi films ever made, and among the first produced by a major studio.

Robert Wise has been viewed as a craftsman, inclined to let the story concept set the style of the film. He meticulously prepared his films, putting an effort into the research and detail of his projects. While doing research, he would often scout background shot locations for his second-unit crews. Directing more than forty films in his career, Robert Wise won Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture for both the 1961 “West Side Story” and the 1965 “The Sound of Music”. He also directed and produced “The Sand Pebbles” which was nominated for 1967 Best Picture.

Adolph Carl Johannes Brütt

Adolph Carl Johannes Brütt, “Schwertmann (Swordsman)”, 1912, Bronze, circa 300 cm, Rathausmarkt, Kiel, Germany

Born the coastal North Sea town of Husum in May of 1855, Adolph Carl Johannes Brütt was a German sculptor and the founder of the Weimar Sculpture School and its bronze foundry. Originally trained as a stonemason in the city of Kiel, he worked on several projects, including the Linderhof Palace, the smallest of three palaces built by King Ludwig II of Bavaria. A stipend from the Sparkasse Kiel enabled Brütt to study at the Prussian Academy of Art in Berlin. After graduating in 1878, he became a student of German sculptor Leopold Rau and worked in the studio of Karl Begas the Younger.

Brütt married in 1883 and opened his own studio. In 1893, he broke away from the mainstream Munich Artists’ Association and joined the newly formed Munich Secession, a cooperative to promote and defend their art against official paternalism and conservative policies. Brütt and his close friend Felix Koenigs, a banker and art collector, promoted the Secession through exhibitions at the National Gallery, shows which included works by sculptor Auguste Rodin and the French Impressionists.

In 1900, Adolph Carl Brütt traveled with his close friends Koenigs and printmaker Max Klinger to the Paris Exposition Universelle where he entered his bronze “Sword Dancer”. This female nude wielding two swords won a gold medal and secured Brütt’s international reputation. Unfortunately, Felix Koenigs became ill at the exposition and died in Paris. Brütt later helped convey Koenigs’s estate to the National Gallery where it is now housed in the “Foundation of Modernism” collection.

Brütt became a Professor at the Prussian Academy and also taught at Berlin’s private Fehr Academy which, devoted to the ideals of the Munich Secession, was founded by Danish painter and sculptor Conrad Fehr in 1892. Other artists who taught at Fehr Academy included German landscape painter and designer Walter Leistikow and copper artist Gustav Ellers. In 1905, Brütt was appointed a Professor at the Weimar Grand Ducal Saxon School of Art where he created its division for sculpture and bronze casting.Working with his students, he created the marble reliefs which decorate the lobby of the new Weimar Court Theater.

Adolph Carl Brütt returned to Berlin in 1910 when German sculptor Gottlieb Elster, a studio co-worker, succeeded him at the Weimar Art School. For the 1916 Summer Olympics in Germany, his “Sword Dancer” was moved from its location in Kiel to Berlin. In 1928, Brütt was awarded with a honorary citizenship to the German spa town of Bad Berka, the second biggest city in the Weimarer Land district. Adolph Carl Johannes Brütt passed away in Bad Berka in November of 1939. His sculpture school became part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996.

Among Adolph Brütt’s bronze and stone sculptures are the 1887 “Der Fischer (The Fisherman)”, a bonze sculpture in front of Berlin’s Old National Gallery; the 206 cm bronze “Schwerttänzerin (Sword Dancer)” in Kiel; the 1902 granite fountain “Asmussen-Woldsen-Brunnen” in the Husum Marketplace; the 1907 “Nacht (Night)”, an openly erotic marble statute at the Grand Ducal Saxon School of Art in Weimar; the 1909 marble statue of a seated Theodor Mommsen at the Court of Honor in Humboldt University; and the 1912 bronze “Schwertmann (Swordsman)” at the Rathausmarkt in Kiel.

Reblogged with thanks to https://hatecolours.tumblr.com

Second Insert Image: Adolph Carl Johannes Brütt, “Schwertmann (Swordsman)”, 1912, Bronze, circa 300 cm, Rathausmarkt, Kiel, Germany

Bottom Insert Image: Louis Held, “Adolph Brütt in Front of His Marble Theodor Mommsen”, circa 1903

Yasuhiro Ishimoto

Yasuhiro Ishimoto, “Snow and Car”, 1948-1953, Chicago

Born in San Francisco to Japanese parents on June 14, 1921, Yasuhiro Ishimoto went with his parents to Japan at age three and grew up in Kochi, Japan. He returned to the United States in 1939 in order to study agriculture at the University of California, but was detained at the Amachi Internment Camp in Armach, Colorado from 1942 to 1944.

After World War II, Ishimoto moved to Chicago to study architecture at Northwestern University (1946). He transferred to the Institute of Design in 1948 to study photography, earning a BS in 1952. A student of Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, Yasuhiro Ishimoto was an important figure in the cross-pollination of photographic ideas and styles between American and Japanese photography.

Ishimoto’s portrait of a city, “Chicago, Chicago”, published as a book in 1969, is a rich study full of the details of time and place. The cluster of white mannequin busts in the background of one of his photographs highlights Ishimoto’s strength in using environmental details to question or add subtle commentary about the individuals portrayed – and about their relationship to society at large.

Yasuhiro Ishimoto was a part of the time and place of his subject, a fact of photography that is simultaneously restrictive and beneficial. Moving through Chicago as both citizen and visitor, he presented highly original visual documents that speak eloquently for the culture of the city in the 1950s and 1960s.

Calendar: September 7

A Year: Day to Day Men: 7th of September

Refrigerator Door Open

September 7, 1937 was the birthdate of American actor John Phillip Law.

John Phillip Law moved to New York after graduating from the University of Hawaii and studied with Elia Kazan’s Lincoln Center Repertory Theater. While there he had a small role in the 1962 comedy “Come on Strong”. Looking for another way to enter the movie business, Law moved to Italy, where he acted in several films. Director Norman Jewison, seeing one of these films, cast Law in the role of a young Soviet sailor in the 1966 comedy film “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming”.

Law next costarred with Michael Caine and Jane Fonda in the 1967 American drama “Hurry Sundown” produced and directed by Otto Preminger. Law then returned to Europe playing the lead in two films: “Spaghetti Western, Death Rides a Horse” and “Danger: Diebolik”, a crime action film based on the Italian comic book series “Diabolik”. Law’s best known role was his 1968 appearance in Roger Vadim’s comic book-based science fiction movie “Barbarella” , cast in the now famous role of Pygar, the blind angel who had lost the will to fly.

John Phillip Law costarred with Rod Steiger in the 1968 drama film “The Sergeant” directed by John Flynn. Law played Private First Class Swanson, the object of Steiger’s character’s, Sergeant Callan, secret sexual attraction. This film differs from the original book, becoming the Sargeant’s self-discovery instead of Private Swanson as was written. “The Sergeant” ends in defeat and suicide that once were so obligatory in popular, homosexual literature and films like “The Children’s Hour” and “The City and the Pillar”.

In 1971, Law co-starred in Roger Corman’s film “Richthofen and Brown, playing Manfred von Richthofen opposite actor Don Stoud’s Roy Brown. He was trained by Canadian pilot Lynn Garrison in the basics of flying to land and take off, making some of the movie footage more realistic. From the 1970s until the fall of 2003, the mult-lingual Law traveled and worked abroad appearing in films and television series.

John Phillip Law was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in December of 2007. He died five months later at his home in Los Angeles. Law’s body was cremated and his ashes were scattered at sea.

Some of John Phillip Law’s movies have become cult classics, including “The Love Machine”, “The Golden Voyage of Sinbad” and the World War ii drama “Attack Force Z”. Mystery Science Theater included in its series two of Law’s films: “Space Mutiny” and “Danger” Diabolik”.

Gonkar Gyatso

Gonkar Gyatso, “Ambivalent Resolution”, 2013, Stickers, Paper Collage, Pencil, Marker, Polyurethane Finish on Resin Sculpture, 32 Inches in Height

One of the most important contemporary artists from Tibet working today, Gonkar Gyatso is renowned for his lyrical and ironic pop montaging in sculpture, printmaking, collage and painting. Executed in 2013, “Ambivalent Resolution” is an example of Gyatso’s pioneering modernism, negotiating the juxtaposition of traditional Buddhist imagery and poignant symbols of pop culture.

Gonkar Gyatso has appropriated the iconic Buddha figure as the seminal image of his work. “Ambivalent Resolution” features a seated Buddha figure, whose elegant limbs follow traditional 14th century Buddhist iconometrical standards of proportion. The sculpture is digitally scanned, digitally manipulated and then turned into a mould from which the resin sculpture is cast.

Rather than the familiar, erect posture of meditation associated with imagery of the Buddha, Gyatso’s figure sits slouched, headless. The surface of the sculpture is covered in the artist’s trademark stickers—a mixture of American, European, Tibetan and Chinese decals featuring images of religious leaders, newspaper headlines, manga characters and superheroes, corporate logos and excerpts from Tibetan texts, all engulfed in cartoon flames.

Born in Lhasa in 1961, Gonkar Gyatso trained in traditional brush painting at the Central University for Nationalities in Beijing from 1980 to 1984 as well as traditional Tibetanthangka painting in Dharamsala. He later received his MA in Postmodern Art at the Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. In 2003, Gonkar Gyatso founded the Sweet Tea House in London, dedicated to promoting contemporary Tibetan art and bringing together artists from inside Tibet and from abroad.

Harriet Horton

Harriet Horton: Sleep Subjects

Repulsed by the fusty impala torsos procured by macho trophy-hunting and goths shrinking squirrel heads to wear on velvet necklaces alike, taxidermist Harriet Horton has gone on her own way. Strictly ethical about procuring already deceased animals, she takes regular trips to her parental home in near-rural Stratford-Upon-Avon and makes use of a deep-freezer in her east London home.

Horton’s approach to taxidermy has always set out to explore animals in a foreign environment from their original habitat. The animals are stuffed, dyed then positioned on marble and concrete plinths, lit by luminescent halos of neon. The site-specific installations are then soundtracked with eerie industrial-classical music. Horton’s 2015 “Sleep Subjects” exhibition, shown in a crypt in Euston, was very successful.

“I was playing around with different aesthetics and thought of incorporating neon. When I used it, I realised its warm temperature and how relaxing it feels. It changes both your mood and that of the piece, and it makes the taxidermy less about death. I really don’t like the gothic side of taxidermy, it’s not for me. So instead I’ll place a magpie under simple white neon arc and the wings are down but the body’s curved perpendicular to the neon. It’s surreal but unless you know a lot about ornithology it wouldn’t look very weird; it’s just a subtle change to its posture.”- harriet Horton

Craig Larotonda

Craig Larotonda, “The Blessing”, Date Unknown, Acrylic on Panel, 8 x 11 Inches, Private Collection

Craig LaRotonda is a painter, sculptor, and illustrator who was born and raised in Buffalo, New York. A graduate of the University of Buffalo, Craig received his BFA while studying with world-renowned illustrator Alan Cober. He is now a very present part of Buffalo, New York’s artistic communities, as gallery-owner of the 1995 founded Revelation Studios and the 2016 founded Revolution Gallery, frequent exhibitor, and participant in regional art festivals.

LaRotonda’s personal art is heavily inspired by the nature of consciousness and the struggles of humanity. His provocative and richly layered paintings incorporate mixed media and aging techniques, ultimately creating surreal figurative works with a dark narrative and a grotesque elegance. His distorted creatures are subjects captured in a timeless space; surviving the brutality and beauty of existence.

LaRotonda’s work in sculpture follows a similar trend. The construction of the sculptures is reminiscent of an old Italian technique incorporating earth clay for the original design, and then casting the work in gypsum, paper, and glue, he then adds found objects to it, such as bones and other materials that are a mix of old and new.