Tag: biography

Calendar: July 29

A Year: Day to Day Men: 29th of July

Stripping Among the Cattails

July 29, 1954 was the publishing date for Tolkien’s “Fellowship of the Ring”.

“The Lord of the Rings” started as a sequel to J. R. R. Tolkien’s work “The Hobbit”, published in 1937. The popularity of “The Hobbit” had led George Allen & Unwin, the publishers, to request a sequel. Tolkien warned them that he wrote quite slowly, and responded with several stories he had already developed; however the publishers thought more stories about hobbits would be popular. So at the age of 45, Tolkien began writing the story that would become “The Lord of the Rings”.

Persuaded by his publishers,Tolkien started the new Hobbit series in December of 1937. After several false starts, the story of the One Ring emerged. The idea for the first chapter , which became entitled “A Long-Expected Party” arrived fully formed, although the reasons behind Bilbo’s disappearance, the significance of the Ring, and the series title “ The Lord of the Rings” did not arrive until the spring of 1938.

Originally, Tolkien planned to write a story in which Bilbo had used up all his treasure and was looking for another adventure to gain more; however, Tolkien remembered the Ring and its powers and thought that would be a better focus for the new work. As the story progressed, he also brought in elements from his “Simarillion” mythology.

Because J.R.R. Tolkien had a full-time academic position and needed to earn further money as a university examiner, his writing on the project was slow. Tolkien abandoned writing the series during most of 1943 not restarting it until April of 1944. This spate of writing became a serial for his son Christopher, who was sent chapters as they were written while he was stationed with the Royal Air Force in South Africa. Tolkien made another concerted effort in 1946, and showed the manuscript to his publishers in 1947. The story was effectively finished the next year, but Tolkien did not complete the revision of earlier parts of the work until 1949. Finished after twelve years, the original manuscript totaled 9,250 pages.

A dispute between Tolkien and his publisher George Allen and Unwin led to the book being offered to Harper Collins Publishers in 1950.  After Milton Waldman, Tolkien’s contact at Collins, expressed the belief that the book urgently needing “cutting”, Tolkien demanded that they publish it in 1952, Collins did not; so Tolkien took it back to Allen and Unwin, stating that he would consider it being published in parts.

For publication, the book was divided into three volumes to minimize any potential financial loss due to the high cost of type-setting and modest anticipated sales: “The Fellowship of the Ring“(Books I and II), “The Two Towers” (Books III and IV), and “The Return of the King”(Books V and VI plus six appendices). Delays in producing appendices, maps and especially an index led to the volumes being published later than originally hoped. The first volume of the “Fellowship of the Ring” was finally published in the United Kingdom on July 29th of 1954.

Robert Whitman, “Prince”

Robert Whitman, “Prince at Age Nineteen”, 1977, Gelatin Silver Print

Robert Whitman was born in New York City. He attended Columbia University in New York and graduated with a BA from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. He currently lives and works in Warwick, New York.

This photograph is from a series created during three separate photoshoots for a press kit that then 26-year old Robert Whitman made of Prince during 1977. Whitman photographed Prince in his Minneapolis studio, Owen Husney’s Linden Hills Boulevard home and on the street of downtown Minneapolis, including in front of the mural of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony painted on the side of the Schmitt’s Music store. Only 15 copies of the press kit weries were ever produced. The photographs from these sessions have rarely been seen.

​This photograph is a select from that series made by the Robert Whitman in 2013 from the three shoots taken in 1977. The photos in that press kit series, Prince’s first with a professional photographer, mark an instrumental moment in his career and the creation of his style and persona.

Please credit the photographer Robert Whitman when reblogging. Thanks.

Calendar: July 26

A Year: Day to Day Men: 26th of July

The Dock of the Bay

July 26, 1895 was the birthdate of American comedian Gracie Allen.

Gracie Allen, born in San Francisco, made her first appearance on stage at the age of three and was given her first role on the radio by Eddie Cantor. She attended the Star of the Sea Convent School, at which time she became a talented dancer. She soon began performing Irish folk dances with her three sisters, billed as “The Four Colleens”. In 1909, Allen joined her sister as a vaudeville performer.

At a vaudeville performance in 1923 in Union City, New Jersey, Gracie Allen met George Burns, a vaudeville performer who usually did a comedy routine  and a dance with a girl partner. The two immediately launched a new partnership called “Burns and Allen” with Gracie playing the role of the ‘straight man’ and George delivering the punchlines as the comedian. Burns knew something was wrong when the audience ignored his jokes but snickered at Gracie’s questions. Burns cannily flipped the act around.

Gracie Allen’s part was known in vaudeville as a “Dumb Dora” act, named after a very early film of the same name that featured a scatterbrained female protagonist, but her “illogical logic” style was several cuts above the Dumb Dora stereotype. She and George Burns took the act on the road, gradually building a following. The act was so consistently dependable that vaudeville bookers elevated them to the more secure “standard act” status, and finally to the Palace Theater in New York. After three years together, Gracie Allen married Burns in Cleveland, Ohio in January of 1926.

In the fall of 1949, Jack Benny convinced Gracie Allen and George Burns to join him in the move to the CBS network. The “Burns and Allen” radio show, which had run from the early 1930s, became part of the CBS lineup and a year later a television program. They played themselves, as television stars, bewildering the guest stars and their neighbors, Harry and Blanche Morton, with Gracie Allen’s illogical logic. Each show began with a brief monologue by George Burns about Gracie’s activities on that day. Audiences continued to love Allen’s character, who combined the traits of naivety, zaniness, and total innocence.

Gracie Allen retired in 1958 due to her health. She fought a long battle with heart disease, ultimately dying of a heart attack in Hollywood on August 27, 1964, at the age of 69. Her remains are interred in a crypt at the Freedom Mausoleum at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, in Glendale, California.

Gracie Allen Quotes:

“I was so surprised at being born that I didn’t speak for a year and a half.”

“I read a book twice as fast as anybody else. First, I read the beginning, and then I read the ending, and then I start in the middle and read toward whatever end I like best.”

“You speak it the same way you speak English, you just use different words.”

Calendar: July 25

A Year: Day to Day Men: 25th of July

Splashes of Light

July 25, 1870 was the birthdate of the painter and illustrator Maxfield Parrish.

Born in Philadelphia Pennsylvania, Maxfield Parrish was the son of painter and etcher Stephen Parrish. His parents encouraged his drawing talent and took the young Parrish in 1884 on a trip to Europe. Parrish was exposed to the architecture and the paintings by the old masters, as he toured England, Italy and France. The family returned to the United States in 1886.

Maxfield Parrish attended the Haverford School, a private school for boys, and later studied for two years at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. After graduating, he shared an art studio with his father in Annisquam, Massachusetts. A year later Parrish attended the Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry.

Early in his career, Parrish did illustrations for “Harper’s Bazaar” and “The Scribner’s Magazine”. He also illustrated in 1897 the children’s book “Mother Goose in Prose”, written by L. Frank Baum, who went on to write and publish “The Wizard of Oz” three years later. By 1900, Parrish, now a  member of the Society of American Artists, traveled to Europe again to visit Italy.

Parrish worked with many popular magazines throughout the 1910s and 1920s. He also created advertising artwork for companies such as Colgate and Oneida Cutlery. Parrish received an exclusive contract with Collier’s and worked for them from 1904 to 1913. By the 1920s, however, Parrish decided to concentrate on his painting and stopped his illustrative commercial work.

In his forties, Parrish did paintings for children’s books and began working on large murals. His most popular work was the painting “Daybreak” which was produced in 1923. Featuring a scene of a columned portico with two female figures, it had undertones of the now famous Parrish blue color. The print of this work is regarded as the most popular print in the American 20th century based on the number of prints sold, equal to one for almost every four households.

Parrish’s art is characterized by vibrant colors. He achieved such luminous color through the process of glazing. This process involves applying alternating bright layers of oil color separated by varnish over a base rendering, usually a blue and white monochromatic underpainting. He would often project photographs of his draped models onto the canvas, allowing him to accurately represent the distortion of patterns of the draping.

The National Museum of American Illustration in Newport, Rhode Island, claims the largest body of his work, with sixty-nine works by Parrish. However, you can also see works by Parrish at the Hood Museum of Art in New Hampshire and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Parrish’s painting “Daybreak” has changed owners several times but has always been in private collections.

Richard Dadd

Richard Dadd. “Portrait of a Young Man”, 1853, Oil on Canvas, Tate Museum, London

Nineteenth century English painter Richard Dadd was a promising young artist who trained at the Royal Academy Schools,, Dadd undertook a grand tour of the Eastern Mediterranean between 1842 and 1843, encompassing Italy and Greece as well as the Ottoman Empire.

Upon his return, Richard Dadd’s life unravelled. Insanity ran in the family, and Dadd started showing signs – not least believing that he was under the power of the Egyptian god Osiris.

Then, in the summer of 1843, Dadd stabbed his father to death in Cobham Park, near Chatham, and escaped to France. Eventually, he was caught and extradited to England, where he spent the rest of his life in criminal lunatic asylums, first at Bethlem Hospital in South London, and then at Broadmoor. During more than four decades of confinement, Dadd produced many paintings.

Maynard Dixon

 

Maynard Dixon, “Lone Bull”, 1918, Oil on Canvas, Private Collection

Maynard Dixon’s stay at Cut Bank Creek, on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, ended in early October, 1917 when snow and biting cold arrived forcing him to return to San Francisco. Energized by his experience, he started to produce work drawn from his experiences in the Glacier Park and on the Blackfeet Reservation. For several years afterwards, some of Dixon’s most notable Native American- themed paintings emerged from his Montgomery Street studio, among them “Lone Bull”.

In this 1918 painting, Dixon has captured the image of a young Blackfeet man astride his horse, dressed in only a breechcloth and leggings, relaxed but keeping a close watch over the camp’s horse herd. Beyond them the vast Montana prairie rolls toward the horizon. The Montana stay unleashed a period of creative accomplishments for Dixon as he shifted from a quasi-impressionist approach to a post-impressionist style defined by strong brush strokes, bold color patterns, and careful design.

Like a number of other artists of his generation, Dixon embraced the idea that the Native American stood as a counterpoint to the destructive forces unleashed by the rise of an industrial-oriented America. For Dixon, the Indian lived and moved and had their being drawn from an older, better way of knowledge and behavior. The theme in “Lone Bull” was replicated in 1920 when Dixon painted “Pony Boy”, one of his most iconic images.

Calendar: July 22

A Year: Day to Day Men: 22nd of July

Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright

July 22, 1947 was the birthdate of actor, comedian and producer Albert Brooks.

Albert Brooks led a new generation of self-reflective comics appearing on NBC’s “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson”. His onstage persona was  that of an egotistical, narcissistic, nervous comic, one who tore himself down before an audience by disassembling his mastery of comedic routine. He once performed a humorless, five-minute stand up comedy routine on “The Tonight Show” in 1962 that didn’t produce a single laugh until the punchline – when he explained to the audience that he had been working as a stand up comic for five years and had run out of material. Johnny Carson swore the hilarity which followed this set-up lasted a full minute.

Brooks appeared in 1976 in his first mainstream movie role as Tom in Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” , where Scorsese allowed him to improvise much of his dialogue. Brooks directed his first feature film, “Real Life”, in 1979, playing the lead role as a man obnoxiously filming a typical suburban family in an attempt to win an Oscar as well as a Nobel Prize. His film, “Lost in America”, released in 1985, was one of his best-received productions. It featured Brooks and Julie Hagerty as a couple of yuppies who drop out and travel in a motor home, meeting obstacles and disappointments in their dream.

Albert Brooks received good reviews for his films in the 1990s, showing his off-beat style and his seamless successions of shots in his filming. His “Defending Your Life” comedy with Meryl Streep portrayed an after-life trial of Brooks to determine his cosmic fate. Brooks received positive reviews for “Mother” in 1996 as a middle-aged writer moving back home to his mother, played by Debbie Reynolds. His 1999 film “The Muse” featured him as a Hollywood screenwriter who lost his edge and finds an authentic muse, played by Sharon Stone, to give him inspiration.

Brooks played an insecure, supremely ethical network television reporter in James L. Brooks’ hit “Broadcast News”. For this role he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He also appeared as the vicious gangster Bernie Rose, the main antagonist in the motion picture “Drive”, a role given much critical praise and positive reviews.

Albert Brooks did voiceover work in the Pixar film “Finding Nemo” in 2003, voicing the character of Marlin, one of the film’s protagonists. He reprised the role of Marlin in the 2016 sequel “Finding Dory”. Brooks also appeared as a guest voice on “The Simpsons” five times during its run, always under the name of A. Brooks, and is particularly known for his role as super-villain Hank Scorpio in the episode “You Only Move Twice”. He later also voiced the character of Russ Cargill, the central antagonist of “The Simpsons Movie”.

Michael Pajon

The Collage Artwork of Michael Pajon

Michael Pajon, born in 1979 in Chicago, currently lives and works in New Orleans. He attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, graduating in 2003 with a focus in printmaking. Eventually gravitating to the graphic nature of the medium that closely resembled the comics he loved, Pajon worked closely as an assistant/studio manager to renowned artist Tony Fitzpatrick.

During this time, Pajon started making assemblages of the bits and pieces he had accumulated from alleys, junkshops, and thrift stores, slicing up old children’s book covers and rearranging their innards into disjointed tales of Americana. Pajon’s work has been exhibited in various venues worldwide, including the Illinois State Museum; Chicago Cultural Center; Adam Baumgold Gallery, New York; Nau-haus Art Space, Houston, and Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, New Orleans.

“These maps, postcards, children’s book illustrations, matchbooks, sheet music, and calling cards are the guts and gristle of common things people collected over a life, spared the fate of being buried in the rubble and shadows of once prosperous towns. This group of work contemplates the most humble of human remains: old matchbooks from junk shops, antique postcards and books, sheet music, cracker jack toys, and other objects once treasured, lost and resurrected. By collaging these elements amidst drawings and other media, I create small relationships to arrive at a whole image. Like delicate strands of DNA, these tiny pieces in combination hold the key to unique identity – the common as well as the fantastic.” – Michael Pajon

Calendar: July 21

A Year: Day to Day Men: 21st of July

Gathering Apples on High

July 21, 1920 was the birthdate of Constant A. Nieuwenhuys, a painter turned architect and one of the founders of the Situationist International.

Constant Nieuwenhuys was a Dutch artist born in Amsterdam and one of the founding members of the Situationist International formed in 1957. He is also known for his utopian project, New Babylon, on which he worked for nearly twenty years starting in 1956. Constant was one of the theoretical drivers behind the Situationists alongside Guy Debord. It was a widening gulf between their two positions that eventually led Constatnt Nieuwenhuys to leave the group in 1960.

The Situationists were an overtly political group whose critique of the alienation of capitalist society has had a lasting effect on contemporary culture. They saw modern society as a series of spectacles, discrete moments in time, where the possibility of active participation in the production and experience of lived reality were eluded.

The rift between Constant and Debord focused on the structuralist tendencies of Constant. Through his exploration of “unitary urbanism”, Constant focused not only on the atmosphere and social interactions of the Situationis city, but also on the actual production of the city as a built space. His project New Babylon is today considered and exemplary expression of a Situationist city.

Designed around the abolition of work, New Babylon was a city based on total automation and the collective ownership of land. With no more work, citizens were free to move around; New Babylon being designed to facilitate a nomadic lifestyle. Divided into a series of interconnected sectors, the city operated on a network of collective services and transportation.

Through a large number of models, drawings and collages, Constant explored the various sectors, floating above ground on stilts, interconnected with bridges and pathways. Traffic flowed above and below; while the inhabitants traveled by foot from section to section. The degree to which the details of the city had been worked out and Constant’s own discourse showed that he viewed this as a concrete proposal for a future city rather than just a polemical project.

Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon focused on the social construction of space with every aspect of the city controllable by its citizens in order that they could construct new atmospheres and situations within the given infrastructure. It was a dynamic environment that could easily be adapted and changed, allowing inhabitants to explore their creativity through play and interaction. Constant, ultimately, did not see New Babylon as a city, but rather as a design of a new culture.

Guy Billout

The Illustrations of Guy Billout

French artist Guy Billout’s universe of ironic illustrations has a tendency to magnify one’s anxieties, whilst offering humor and a look into a bizarro version of society. His work is overall minimal, but the subject in each piece offers scenarios that makes you think of countless outcomes and possibilities.

His work has been featured in numerous magazine publications such as Yhe New Yorker, and most recently, The Atlantic. He also writes and illustrates childrens books.

Calendar: July 20

A Year: Day to Day Men: 20th of July

A World of Blue Tiles

July 20, 1938 was the birthdate of English actress, Dame Enid Diana Elizabeth Rigg in Yorkshire, England.

Diana Rigg’s career in film, television and theater has been wide-ranging. Her professional debut was in the production of “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” at the York Festival in 1957. She made her Broadway debut with the play “Abelard and Heloise” in 1971, earning the first of three Tony Award nominations for Best Actress in a Play. She received her second nomination in 1975 for her role in “The Misanthrope”.

In the 1990s, Diana Riggs had triumphs with roles at the Almeida Theater in Islington, England, including “Medea” in 1992, which moved to Broadway where she received the Tony Award for Best Actress, “Mother Courage” at the National Theater in 1995, and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” at the Almeida Theater in 1997. In 2011 Riggs played Mrs. Higgins in “Pygmalion” at the Garrick Theater in the West End of London; in February of 2018 she returned to Broadway in a non-singing role of Mrs. Higgins in “My Fair Lady”.

Diana Rigg appeared in the British 1960s television series “The Avengers” from 1965 to 1968 opposite Patrick McNee as John Steed, playing the secret agent Emma Peel in 51 episodes. Rigg auditioned for the role on a whim, without ever having seen the program. Although she was hugely successful in the series, she disliked the lack of privacy that it brought. Also, she was not comfortable in her position as a sex symbol, She also did not like the way that she was treated by the Associated British Corporation (ABC).

In 2013, Diana Rigg secured a recurring role in the third season of the HBO series “Game of Thrones”, portraying Lady Olenna Tyrell, a witty and sarcastic political mastermind popularly known as the Queen of Thorns, the grandmother of regular character Margaery Tyrell. Her performance was well received by critics and audiences alike, and earned her an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series for the 65th Primetime Emmy Awards in 2013.

Diana Rigg reprised her role in season four of “Game of Thrones” and in July 2014 received another Guest Actress Emmy nomination. In 2015 and 2016, she again reprised the role in seasons five and six in an expanded role from the books. The character was finally killed off in the seventh season, with Rigg’s final performance receiving critical acclaim.

Chen Fei

Chen Fei, “Big Model”, 2017, Acrylic on Linen, 290 x200 cm.

Initially, Chen Fei’s work is narrative-driven. Before painting, Chen creates a fictional story. Each painting is a culmination of a series of events occurring to Chen’s characters and Chen captures them at a significant point in the narrative. Like people we meet on the street, the elements that coalesce into the painting’s scene are unseen forces forming unexpected results.

Chen Fei’s work shares qualities with comic books and film storyboards with figures outlined in solid black, accentuating the form, while individuals are caught mid-action in the middle of a scene. The is very oftern a blending of Chinese and Western aesthetic cultures in his work, similiar to what one sees in China, where popular bath houses are styllized with Greco-Roman themes.

“The readability of painting is as a form of language. After I complete a work, how the reader interprets or gets inspired or discerns another perspective is out of my control. What I’m capable of is to convince or even exceed myself during the practice more frequently, which is one of the few approaches to express my thoughts.” – Chen Dei

Source: thunderstruck9

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol, “Querelle”, Silkscreen Series, 1982

Andy Warhol was commissioned by the German film director Rainer Fassbinder to design the poster for his filmed adaptation of Jean Genet’s novel, “Querelle”, which follows a young sailor’s sexual escapades in a French port. Warhol took a polaroid of two young men as a starting point for his silk-screen print, but idealized the young boy’s features and marked with a bright blue the other man’s tongue. The image’s sensuous character distills Genet’s erotic tale.

Calendar: July 18

A Year: Day to Day Men: 18th of July

Stylized Flowers

July 18, 1937 was the birthdate of American journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson.

Hunter S. Thompson carved out his niche in creative writing early in life. He was born in 1937, in Louisville, Kentucky, where his fiction and poetry earned him induction into the local Athenaeum Literary Association while he was still in high school. Thompson continued his literary pursuits in the United States Air Force, writing a weekly sports column for the base newspaper. After two years of service, Thompson endured a series of newspaper jobs, all of which ended badly, before he took to freelancing from Puerto Rico and South America for a variety of publications. The vocation quickly developed into a compulsion.

In 1967, Thompson published his first nonfiction book, “Hell’s Angels”, a harsh and incisive firsthand investigation into the infamous motorcycle gang then making the heartland of America nervous. He spent a year of research living and riding with the motorcycle gang to write the account of their experiences.

In 1970 he wrote an unconventional magazine feature entitled “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” for Scanlan’s Monthly magazine which both raised his profile and established him as a writer with counter-culture credibility. It also set him on a path to establishing his own sub-genre of New Journalism which he called “Gonzo,” which was essentially an ongoing experiment in which the writer becomes a central figure and even a participant in the events of the narrative.

“Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”, which first appeared in Rolling Stone in November 1971, sealed Thompson’s reputation as an outlandish stylist successfully straddling the line between journalism and fiction writing. The book tells of a savage journey to the heart of the American Dream in full-tilt gonzo style, Thompson’s hilarious first-person approach, and is accented by British illustrator Ralph Steadman’s appropriate drawings.

Thompson completed “The Rum Diary”, his only novel published to date, before he turned twenty-five. Bought by Ballantine Books, the novel was finally published to glowing reviews in 1998. The story, written when Thompson was twenty-two, involves a journalist who, in the 1950s, moves from New York to work for a  major newspaper in Puerto Rico. It was Thompson’s second novel, preceded by the still-unpublished “Prince Jellyfish”.