A Gay-Oriented Collection of Art Works, Literary Quotes, Songs, Films, and Male Images. Please be aware thet there is mature content on this blog. Information and links to sources will be provided unless unknown. Enjoy your visit.
Martin Wittfooth, “Bacchanal”, 2016, Oil on Canvas, 78 x 60 Inches
Martin Wittfooth was born in 1981 in Toronto, Canada. He spent his childhood in Finland, before moving back to Canada as a teenager. It was in Toronto that he earned his BAA in illustration at Sheridan College in 2003. Wittfooth then moved to New York City where he received his MFA at the School of Visual Arts.
In his recent works, Wittfooth explores the ancient art of shamanism and the current renaissance it is enjoying around the globe. The optimism which emanates from his new works is a product of Wittfooth’s gradual uncovering of enlightening shamanic practices, which he has observed as holding the power to break us free fromthe status quo and the dark path it has lead us down.
Peter Diamond is a Canadian illustrator based in Vienna, Austria. born in Oxford, England, He received his BFA in Fine Arts at NSCAD University located in Halifax, Nova Scotia. In addition to his freelance work, Diamond teaches drawing at Illuskills and works with the international illustration community through the European Illustrators Forum. He is represented internationally by The Loud Cloud.
Peter Diamond’s work owes much of its character to the album covers and self-published comics that were his special focus in art school and the early years after graduation, as well as the punk gig posters of his teenage years.
Addison 2 “Waterfall” Catalin Art Deco Radio, 1940, Dark Green and Butterscotch
The Addison 2 was made circa 1940 by Addison Industries Limited in Canada. It had an Art Deco unique styling and bold use of color; in this model it featured a marbleized dark green-black case and butterscotch trim. This streamlined radio design featured the famous “waterfall” speaker grill trim and surround “bumpers” at the base with speed-lines. A fairly small radio for the period, it measures 10.25 inches x 6 inches high x 5 inches deep.
Franklin Carmichael, ‘Snow Clouds’, 1938, Oil on Canvas
Franklin Carmichael was a Canadian artist and the youngest original member of the Group of Seven. Carmichael arrived in Toronto at the age of twenty and entered the Ontario College of Art, where he studied with William Cruickshank and George Reid. In 1911, he began working as an apprentice at Grip Ltd for $2.50 a week. He then joined Tom Thomson and other painters who were training to become serious artists, joining them on weekend sketching trips.
He moved to Belgium in 1913 to study painting but due to the war soon returned to his native Ontario to rejoin the other artists. Carmichael was greatly influenced by Tom Thomson and shared space with him at the Studio Building in 1914. He was also on the fringe of the group because of his difference in age and was closely associated with the newer members of the Group of Seven.
The AU4, the Audio / Visual Creative Collective formed in 2004 in Canada , including the three brothers Ben Wylie, Aaron Wylie, Wylie Nathan and their friend Jason Nickel, which began from an early age to study music at the Royal Conservatory of Music of Toronto . Later, in high school, they took part in the groups of alternative rock , continuing his musical studies as well as participating in the productions of jazz , choral and theatrical .
In particular, Nathan and Jason Wylie Nickel later attended the Capilano University , based in Squamish and Sechelt, north of Vancouver, deepening their knowledge and practice of jazz, while Ben Wylie and his brother Aaron were dedicated to electronic music. The experiences of this period would then merged to form the future of the group’s style.
Partly inspired by the spread of electronic music in the 1990s, as well as from the albums milestones of the Underworld , Massive Attack , Björk , AIR , Nine Inch Nails , Mogwai and M83, Ben and Aaron began to compose and shape of the productions both musical and visual, accumulating an amount of work that would later find her suitable accommodation in their debut album on: Audio, and their live show on: Visual.
The Hidden Cameras are a Canadian indie pop band. Fronted by singer-songwriter Joel Gibb, the band consists of a varying roster of musicians who play what Gibb once described as “gay church folk music”. Their live performances have been elaborate, high-energy shows, featuring go-go dancers in balaclavas, a choir, and a string section.
The band’s new album Age was released in January 2014. The lead single “Gay Goth Scene” was released in July, 2013. The video for the single was directed by Kai Stänicke, who received the “Short Film Award for Human Rights” at San Marino International Film Festival awards, “Tadgell’s Bluebell Honor Award”, being named “Best Short Film About/For Youth” at the 16th Auburn International Film Festival for Children and Young Adults in Sydney, Australia, and best German short at the International Queer Film Festival Hamburg, Germany.
Maskull Lasserre was born in Canada in 1978, and spent his early childhood in South Africa. He has a BFA from Mount Allison University (Visual Art and Philosophy), and an MFA from Concordia University in sculpture.
Lasserre’s drawings and sculptures explore the unexpected potential of the everyday through allegories of value, expectation, and utility. Elements of nostalgia, accident, humor, and the macabre are incorporated into works that induce strangeness in the familiar, and provoke uncertainty in the expected.
Lasserre is represented in the collections of the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, and Government of Canada amongst others. He has exhibited across Canada, in the United States and in Europe, including at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, and the GRASSI Museum in Germany. He is also a recent participant in the Canadian Forces War Artist Program in Afghanistan.
San Base is a Canadian artist, born in Russia. Since early childhood, he showed an aptitude toward arts, and at the age of 12 he was accepted into a Fine Arts school. Soon after, he discovered another passion – the mathematics. As an admirer of both art and science, he faced a tough decision as an adolescent – to accept an offer to Surikov Academy of Fine Arts (one of the most prominent art schools in Russia) or to go to a technical university. In the end, he selected a program in applied science and graduated as a cybernetics engineer, but he never gave up painting.
He moved to the Ukraine and excelled in his as a programmer. Meanwhile, San Base dedicated all of his free time to painting and perfected his artist skills. In the early ‘90s, Base invented the concept of Dynamic Painting by combining his two strengths – programmer’s skills and love of art. He immigrated to Canada in the mid ’90s and over the last decade he perfected the technology behind Dynamic Paintings. And now, brilliant results of his genius work can finally be discovered in galleries throughout the world.
Richard Lukacs was born in Alberta in 1962. After spending ten years living and working in Berlin, he relocated to New York in 1986. He left New York in 2001 to live and work in Hawaii.
His 1999 exhibition, Arbor Vitae, dramatically differed in subject to his earlier bodies of work, but ultimately shared a common theme of looking at art historical traditions and references. These elegant paintings provide the viewer with a more introspective and private message.
In 2003, Lukacs returned with a vengeance to earlier themes of homosexuality, social deviance, sexual aggression, punishment and male supremacy in Of Monkeys and Men.
Mark Summers has been a full-time freelance illustrator since graduating from the Ontario College of Art in 1978. He has devoted the past 35 years of his career to the technique of scratchboard, a onetime popular medium which had become all but obsolete by the mid 70’s. Author and illustration historian Steven Heller credits Summers giving the medium a second life.
Mark’s career started off primarily in the newspaper industry, with clients like the New York Times, the Chicago Times, the Wall Street Journal and many others, but quickly moved into all forms of publication. He has worked for every major magazine, and has contributed work for Rolling Stone, Newsweek, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated and numerous covers for Time. He has also written and illustrate short articles for Vanity Fair. Mark has contributed covers for most of the major publishers in the world and has collaborated with James Michener and Issac Asimov amongst others.
He has also done lavishly illustrated volumes of Poe, Dickens, “Moby Dick”, “Gulliver’s Travels” as well as writing and illustrateing two book of his own. His work is best remembered for his decade long collaboration with Barnes and Noble, where he created the visual persona of their stores, doing portraits of famous authors that decorated their walls.
Jen Mann is a Canadian artist from Toronto, Ontario. Mann’s dreamy, acrylic paintings are inspired by illusions and memories of her childhood. She experiments with a variety of different effects with color combinations and saturation to capture innocence and beauty.
“I am fascinated by the subconscious, the soul, identity, and the way they interact to form meaning and beauty, or nonsense everything and nothing. I am inspired by existentialism, history, language, and nature. In my newest series of works I challenge limitations to acceptable beauty. Limitations are death to creativity”.- Jen Mann
Michael James Owen Pallett is a Canadian composer, violinist, keyboardist, and vocalist, who performs solo as Owen Pallett or, before 2010, under the name Final Fantasy. As Final Fantasy, he won the 2006 Polaris Music Prize for the album He Poos Clouds.
From the age of 3, Pallett studied classical violin, and composed his first piece at age 13. A notable early composition includes some of the music for the game Traffic Department 2192; he moved on to scoring films, to composing two operas while in university. Apart from the indie music scene, he has had commissions from the Barbican, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, National Ballet of Canada, Bang on a Can, Ecstatic Music Festival, the Vancouver CBC Orchestra, and Fine Young Classicals.
On his Final Fantasy releases, Pallett has collaborated with Leon Taheny, who is credited as drummer and engineer. Following the release of Heartland, Pallett has toured with guitarist/percussionist Thomas Gill and more recently with his former collaborators in Les Mouches, Rob Gordon and Matt Smith.
Pallett has been noted for his live performances, wherein he plays the violin into a loop pedal. Pallett uses Max/MSP and SooperLooper to do multi-phonic looping, which sends his violin signal to amplifiers across the stage.
Pallett believes his work is implicitly influenced by his sexuality, saying, “As far as whether the music I make is gay or queer, yeah, it comes from the fact that I’m gay, but that doesn’t mean I’m making music about it.”
Rotten stumps, broken branches, invasive species, ravaged trees as well as polar opposites and dysfunctional objects; these are the things that excite Floyd Elzinga. He has made a career out of highlighting and glorifying these through three dimensional sculpture, relief work and environmental installations for over 15 years. Current themes in his work focus on broken landscapes, portraits of trees and the aggressive nature of seeds.
Floyd received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design in Halifax, NS. He was initially drawn to steel, due to its malleable, plastic and forgiving nature, and he continues to utilize its range of colours as well as the way light plays off the surface. He has been exploring traditional metal working techniques to create textures and depth the same way a painter would use a paintbrush.
Elzinga’s Pine Cone Colony installation was featured at The Campbell House Museum during Toronto’s 2010 Nuit Blanche ( Bottom two images of steel pine cone in a fire). Public commissions of his work can be seen in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Toronto, as well as Rockcliffe Park Village Green, Ottawa, and the Canadian side of the Queenston-Lewiston Bridge.
Born in 1952, Paul Hannon is an American born artist, who lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he paints urban and coastal scenes of Atlantic Canada. Hannon’s primary interest lies in the observation of light and its influence on form within the landscape. He responds to low-angled, northern light with long, deep shadows, and the depiction of this light plays a critical role in creating the mood of his narrative urban portraits.
Hannon cites Edward Hopper as a significant influence, and his painting practice follows the tradition of the Ashcan School of Art, an art movement best know for a style of oil painting that portrayed the realism of everyday life in New York.
Jesse Garbe is an artist that is based in Vancouver in, British Columbia. He is an 2004 alumni of Emily Carr University and a 2008 graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design’s MFA Program in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Garbe received the Joseph Beuys Memorial Award in 2007..
Garbe’s paintings are vigorous psychological studies of his self and the individuals around him. He has a continued interest in studying his own relationships, as well as the relationship between painter and sitter. Garbe’s paintings depict the people he knows such as his family, friends and fellow artists.
Jesse Garbe’s style has been influenced by the painting techniques of Rembrandt, the prints of the German artist Käthe Kollwitz and the figurative drawings and paintings of the 20th century British artists Lucian Freud and Euan Uglow.
Canadian-born painter Attila Richard Lukacs’s large-scale paintings are steeped in art-historical references and homoeroticism. Evoking mythological rites of passage, with oddly shifting perspectives, Lukacs’s recent paintings find inspiration in Persian and Indian miniatures and the studied order of Renaissance composition..
Lukacs was part of a group of artists in the 1980s known as the Young Romantics. He became famous for his large-scale highly controversal canvases of skinheads and military cadets in the 1980s. His works make adept use of Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro techniques and the flattened gold-leaf planes of the Symbolist painters. Over the years, his work has shifted between abstraction and figuration, sometimes integrating both.
