Tag: graphics

Talon Abraxas

The Artwork of Talon Abraxas

Born in South London, England in 1980, Talon Abraxas is a symbolist artist, writer and occultist whose work consists of both traditional and digital images. Symbolism in painting was a fantastic, often mystic, style that emerged as a reaction to the naturalism of realist and impressionist trends. Symbolist painters believed that art should reflect an emotion or idea rather than represent the natural world in an objective, quasi-scientific manner. This style of painting emphasized the world of dreams and the religious traditions of human transformation; it placed the appearance of literature, music and the arts over their functions.

A self-taught artist, Talon Abraxas regards an artist as a spontaneously developed initiate (Greek: μύστης) whose work conveys spirituality and religious mysteries to the world. The inspiration for his work is drawn from past mystic artists and writers, including English artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare, Belgian symbolist painter and author Jean Delville, Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, and Polish surrealist painter and sculptor Zdislaw Beksiński.  

The Talon Abraxas Facebook site contains many images of Talon Abraxas’s work as well as other contemporary artists: https://www.facebook.com/p/Talon-Abraxas-100050477380184/

Notes: Archons are the  supernatural builders of the physical universe, each one related to one of the seven classical planets visible to the naked eye: the Sun, Moon, Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, and Saturn, ordered according to their brightness. Abraxas is the term for the “Great Archon” in Gnostic Christianity. The word is found in such Gnostic texts as the “Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit” and the “Apocalypse of Adam”. Saint Epiphanius of Salamis, the Eastern Orthodox Catholic Bishop of Salamis, Cyprus at the end of the fourth-century, designated Abraxas (Biblical Greek: ἀβραξάς) to be “the power above all, and First Principle” and “the cause and first archetype” of all things.

Archon (Greek: ἄρχων) is the Greek word that means “ruler”. It is the masculine present participle of the verb stem αρχ-, meaning “to rule, to be first”. Throughout Greek history, the term Archon referred to the chief magistrates of various Greek cities. In the Byzantine empire, the term was used to denote a powerful noble or magnate, both domestic and foreign. Today, in Orthodox Christianity, archon is a honorific title given to someone who has served and promoted the Orthodox Church faith and tradition, a sworn duty of the archon. As it is a significant religious position, the faith and dedication of a candidate for the role are reviewed extensively during consideration.

Top Insert Image: Talon Abraxas, “Phoibos (Phoebus) Apollon”, Date Unknown, Digital Art

Bottom Insert Image: Talon Abraxas, “New Jerusalem”, Date Unknown, Digital Art

Rockwell Kent

The Wood Engravings of Rockwell Kent

Born in Tarrytown, New York in June of 1882, Rockwell Kent was an American painter, graphic artist, writer and adventurer. A profoundly independent and thoughtful man, he acquired through his personal experience and skills a great respect for the dignity of labor and an appreciation of indigenous societies and cross-cultural encounters.

In his formative years, Rockwell Kent spent much of his life in the area of New York City. He attended the Horace Mann School, a private school and member of the Ivy Preparatory School League. In the fall of 1900, Kent studied composition and design at the Art Students League under painter, printmaker and curator Arthur Wesley Dow. He studied in the summers between 1900 and 1902 at one of the first plein air painting schools in America, Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art, under Impressionist painter William Merritt Chase. 

In the fall of 1902, Kent entered the New York School of Art, founded by William Chase, where he studied under painter Robert Henri, one of the pioneers of the Ashcan School of American realism. He became an apprentice during the summer of 1903 to painter and naturalist Abbott Handerson Thayer, one of the first to write about disruptive patterning to break up an object’s outlines, now known as Thayer’s Law. Kent earned his Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from New York’s Columbia University which prepared him for occasional work as an architectural renderer and carpenter. While at Columbia, Kent developed a close friendship with Carl Zigrosser who later founded New York’s Weyhe Gallery and became Curator of Prints and Drawings at Philadelphia’s Museum of Art.

Rockwell Kent was a transcendentalist and mystic in the tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. He found his inspiration in the austerity and primordial beauty of the wilderness. After his five-year residence on Monhegan Island in Maine, Kent lived for extended periods in Minnesota, Newfoundland, Alaska, Vermont, Tierra del Fuego, Ireland and Greenland. His landscapes and seascapes from these locales show a Symbolist viewpoint of the natural world. Kent published ten memoirs, complete with illustrations, of his travel years. The first of these volumes was the 1920 “Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska”, an account of his and his eldest son’s 1918 fall and winter exploration of Fox Island in Alaska’s Resurrection Bay. 

Kent spent his early years as a painter in New Hampshire where he painted a series of landscapes and several views of Mount Monadnock, the most prominent mountain peak in southern New Hampshire. These works were first shown at the Society of American Artists in a 1904 New York City exhibition. In 1905, he began his five-year stay on Maine’s Monhegan Island; the series of paintings he produced during this period were shown in 1907 at New York’s Clausen Galleries to critical acclaim. The New Hampshire and the Monhegan paintings are the foundation for Kent’s reputation as an early American Modernist painter. 

In the 1920s, Rockwell Kent began a career in illustration and contributed drawings for the covers of many leading magazines. Acknowledging Kent’s success with his 1920 illustrated “Wilderness”, publisher George Palmer Putnam and others incorporated Kent as ‘Rockwell Kent, Inc” to support him in his Vermont homestead while he completed his Alaskan paintings for a 1920 exhibition at New York’s Knoedler Galleries. Approached by publisher Thorne Donnelley for an illustrated version of “Two Years Before the Mast”, Kent suggested he instead illustrate an edition of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick; or, The Whale”. After researching whaling lore and visiting whaling museums, Kent created two-hundred and eighty illustrations for the 1930 three-volume set of “Moby Dick”, of which one thousand copies were printed by Donnelley’s Lakeside Press. 

In 1927, Kent purchased Asgaard, an Adirondack farmstead in upstate New York, which became his residence and studio for the remainder of his life. In the summer of 1929, he traveled to Greenland on a painting expedition. Determined to paint and write, Kent spent two years between 1931 and 1935 living in a tiny fishing settlement above the Arctic Circle. His paintings from this period include some of the largest and most lauded of his career. Becoming more politically active as World War II drew near, Kent, on commission from the Treasury Department, painted two murals at the Federal Triangle Post Office in Washington DC that supported, in small letters of a Native Alaskan language, the decolonization of Puerto Rico.  

In spite of his critical views on American foreign policy, Rockwell Kent remained America’s foremost draftsman of the sea. He produced a series of pen and ink maritime drawings for the American Export Lines during World War II. In 1946, Kent completed a second series for the Rahr Malting Company, a worldwide supplier to breweries, wineries and distilleries. These works were published in the 1946 “To Thee!: A Toast in Celebration of a Century of America 1847-1947”, a volume Kent wrote and designed to celebrate American freedom and democracy and the important role immigrants play in forming America’s national identity. 

In 1948, Kent was elected to the National Academy of Design as an Associate member; he became a full Academician in 1966. Kent passed away due to a heart attack at his Adirondacks home in March of 1971 at the age of eighty-eight. He had participated in the 1936 formation of the American Artists’ Congress and later served as an officer of the Artists’ Union of America as well as the Artists’ League of America. In 1948, Kent had sought election as a New York Congressman under the American Labor Party banner. 

New York’s Columbia University houses Rockwell Kent’s personal collection of thirty-three hundred working sketches and drawings, most of which were unpublished. The Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution houses an extensive collection of Kent’s correspondence. His work is contained in many private collections and is both housed and exhibited in major museums throughout the United States. 

Notes: A May 2023 online edition of “Modernism/modernity” has an excellent and extensive article, written by Colgate University Visiting Professor of Writing and Rhetoric Jonathan Najarian, entitled “And Words Were Images to Him; Narrative Remediation in Rockwell Kent” located at: https://modernismmodernity.org/articles/najarian-narrative-remediation-rockwell-kent 

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Rockwell Kent”, circa 1920, Vintage Print

Second Insert Image: Rockwell Kent, “Dan Ward’s Stack, Ireland”, 1926-1927, Oil on Canvas, 86 x 112 cm, Hermitage State Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

Third Insert Image: Rockwell Kent, “Workers of the World, Unite!”, 1937, Wood Engraving on Paper, Cover Illustration for 1937 Issue of the New Masses, 20.3 x 15.2 cm, Plattsburgh State Art Museum, New York

Fourth Insert Image: Rockwell Kent, “Endless Energy for Limitless Living”, 1946, Oil on Canvas on Board, 111.8 x 121.9 cm, Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio

Bottom Insert Image: Rockwell Kent, “Mountain Climber”, 1933, Wood Engraving on Paper, 20 x 14.9 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum

David Kindersley

The Lettering of David Kindersley

Born in Codicote in 1915, David Guy Barnabas Kindersley was a British typeface designer and stone letter-carver, the grandson of the Arts and Crafts potter Sir Edmund Elton. He was educated at St. Cyprian’s School, a preparatory school for boys in Eastbourne, and later, attended Marlborough College for three years, at which time he left due to rheumatoid arthritis. 

Kindersley traveled to Paris and enrolled at the Academie St. Julian where he studied French and sculpture; he continued his sculptural studies under the Induni brothers, Peter Guiseppe and Joseph Vincent, both of whom were marble carvers in London. In December of 1934, Kindersley became an apprentice to Arts and Crafts sculptor and typeface designer Eric Gill at his workshop in the market town of High Wycombe. While at the workshop, he worked on several important commissions, including St. John’s College in Oxford, London’s Dorset House, and Bentalls, a department store designed by architect Maurice Webb and located in Kingston upon Thames. 

David Kindersley left Gill’s workshop in 1936 and opened his own shop on the River Arun, where he continued commission work sent by Gill. On the death of Eric Gill in 1940, he settled Gill’s affairs and continued work at his own shop until 1945, at which time he relocated to the county of Cambridgeshire. Here Kindersley developed his own style and methods, his decorative carving embellishments, his use of heraldic ornamentation, and his taste for carving lettering on slate.

In addition to teaching calligraphy at the Cambridge Art School in the late 1940s, Kindersley received a major commission for carved relief imaps to be placed in the American War Cemetery. He also became a consultant for film titles, through the influence of his cousin Sir Arthur Elton, documentary filmmaker and head of film production at Shell Oil. A major commission under taken by Kindersley 

In 1946, Kindersley established his first completely equipped letter-cutting workshop at Dales Barn in the village of Barton. He was joined by his wife and stone-cutter, Lida Lopes Cardozo, in 1976. A major commission undertaken by Kindersley and his wife was the distinctive large metal gates of the British Library which transformed its artistic “British Library” metal letters into a functional use. This project was followed by the gates at Queens’ College’s porter lodge; inspired by the same principle, the gates are composed of the letters “Queens College” wrought out of metal. 

David Kindersley is known for his accurate letter-spacing system. He designed the “Mo T Serif” typeface in 1952, which was originally submitted for the British Ministry of Transport for road signs. Kindersley created the “Itek Bookface” and, in collaboration with Will Carter, designed the book typeface “Octavian” for the Monotype Corporation in 1961. The Cardozo Kindersley Workshop publishes a number of typefaces based on Kindersley’s work, including the 2005 “Kindersley Street”, also known as “Kindersley Grand Arcade”, which is based on his 1952 “Mo T Serif”. 

David Kindersley authored two major works on typeface, the 1976 “Optical Letter Spacing for New Printing Systems” and the “Computer-Aided Letter Design”. Very interested in Sufism, he also published a book “Graphic Sayings” which contains his typeface plates bearing sayings by the Sufi mystics taken from the writings of Sufi author Idries Shah. 

Note: Kindersley’s workshop, now known as The Cardozo Kindersley Workshop, relocated to Victoria Road, Cambridge, in 1977. Upon Kindersley’s death in 1995, Cardozo, along with Graham Beck and a crew of five, continued the design, carving, printing and gild work.

Second Insert Image: Granville Davies, “David Kindersley”, Gelatin Silver Print, Printed 2005

Bottom Insert Image: Rory Cooron, “David Guy Barnabas Kindersley”, 1989, Bromide Fiber Print, 45.5 x 27.8 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London

Salem Beiruti

Salem Beiruti, “Cernunnos”, 2020, Digiatal Art Print with Watercolor and Gold Gouache

Born in Lebanon, Salem Beiruti is a conceptual artist and illustrator residing in Madrid. Working after graduation as an art director in the fields of advertising, graphics, and fashion design, he has more than seventeen years of client and freelance work. Upon his move to Madrid, Beiruti became a full=time illustrator and artist.

Beiruti’s skillful digital illustrations are unique and inspired by such artists and photographers as Patrick Fillion, Paul Freeman, Issauro Cairo, and Francisco Prato. His project  of mixed-media works “Morphosis” is a result of his personal journey as a man of an Arabic mid-eastern culture and its traditions to the man he is today. The art book was published in June of 2017 by German publisher Bruno Gmnuender.

Salem Beiruti’s “Cernunnos” is based on model Francesc Gascó.

For those interested in purchasing a print, Art of Salem is offering all prints at a 40% discount for Easter 2021. Please reference Ultrawolves when ordering. Thank you.   https://www.instagram.com/artistsalem/

Conan Chadbourne

Digital Mathematical Images by Conan Chadbourne

Born in 1978, Conan Chadbourne received his BA in Mathematics and Physics from New York University in 2011. He has worked in the fields of experimental physics research, digital imaging and printing, graphic design, and documentary film production.. Chadbourne lives in San Antonio where he works as a freelance graphic designer and documentary film producer.

Chadbourne  draws inspiration for his work from his experience in mathematics and the sciences. He is motivated by his fascination with the occurrence of mathematical and scientific imagery in traditional art forms, and the mystical, spiritual, or cosmological significance that is often attached to such imagery. 

Mathematical themes both overt and subtle appear in a broad range of traditional art: Medieval illuminated manuscripts, Buddhist mandalas, intricate tilings in Islamic architecture, restrained temple geometry paintings in Japan, complex patterns in African textiles, and geometric ornament in archaic Greek ceramics. Often this imagery is deeply connected with the models and abstractions these cultures use to interpret and relate to the cosmos, in much the same way that modern scientific diagrams express a scientific worldview.

Conan Chadbourn’s works have been exhibited at the Grace Museum in Abilene, Texas; The Art Center of Corpus Christi,;the Museum of Geometric and MADI Art in Dallas, Texas; and the Bridges Conference for Mathematics in the Arts.

“There are 212,987 distinct ways to partition a 4×4 grid of square tiles into component shapes composed of contiguous tiles, assuming any two such partitions are considered equivalent if they differ only by a symmetry transformation such as a rotation or reflection. There are exactly thirteen of these configurations which partition this grid of sixteen tiles into two component shapes of equal area, each composed of eight tiles. This image presents this set of thirteen equal divisions of this group of tiles.”

—Conan Chadbourne, Discussing his image “Concise Lesson in Uniform Partitions”

Sergei Eisenstein

Drawings and Sketches by Sergei Eisenstein

People who are passionate about cinema are familiar with Sergei Eisenstein’s films and cinema theory; fewer people know of his enthusiasm for drawing. Ever since his childhood in the Latvian city of Riga, Eisenstein has been drawing, eventually producing five thousand works over the course of his lifetime, with only a short break in the 1920s when he made his first films. The drawings were playful, funny, provocative, and inventive. 

Drawing for Eisenstein was a means to develop a visually effective language, which he applied in his work as film director. He drew circus scenes, story boards for his films, sketches to map out his filming process, as well as erotic, sacrilegious, and sexual scenes. The drawings were private affairs to Eisenstein, sources for his amusement and also a form of freedom, emotionally and artistically, from the pressures, often political, he experienced in his work. Some of the drawings were in-jokes meant to be shared with close friends; and some drawings were given away as gifts.

In 1931, Sergei Eisenstein worked in various locations of Mexico on the film project “¡Que viva México!”, produced by Upton Sinclair and a small group of investors. During this time, which included an intimate affair with his Guanajuato guide Jorge Palomino y Cañedo, the production of Eisenstein’s drawings resulted in a dramatic increase. His interest in line and the interplay of figures showed his connection to the work of Mexican muralists including Diego Rivera, whom Eisenstein first met in 1927, and whose work he greatly admired. At the end of his Mexican adventure, he told his friend Anita Brenner, that drawings were just as important to him  as film writing and film production.

“it was in Mexico that my drawing underwent an internal catharsis, striving for mathematical abstraction and purity of line. The effect was considerably enhanced when this abstract, ‘intellectualized’ line was used for drawing especially sensual relationships between human figures.” —Sergei Eisenstein, 1947

Drawings done after Eisenstein’s return to the Soviet Union are no less provocative than the Mexican ones, but they are more sparsely articulated. In these later works, Eisenstein used line only, minimizing the shading and shaping of figures. Included in these, we find two sketches for an unrealized film on Alexander Pushkin; several drawings done during the filming of his “Ivan the Terrible”; and а series that appears to have been inspired by George Grosz’s images of maimed war veterans.

After Eisenstein’s death, his widow, Pera Atasheva, gave most of his drawings to the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art. She did not release a relatively small cache of about 500 drawings that had sexual subject matter, because Atasheva feared that they might be considered harmful to the Eisenstein’s legacy. Later, she passed them for safekeeping to Andrei Moskvin, a friend and the cameraman who had worked with Eisenstein on the filming of “Ivan the Terrible”. After perestroika, Moskvin’s descendants sold the drawings to a private collector in the west. 

Eisenstein’s drawings kept at the Russian State Archive were first shown in 2000 at the Drawing Center, a not-for-profit art institution, in Soho. New York, A first-show  exhibition of the drawings, once held safely by Andrei Moskvin, were shown at the contemporary art gallery Alexander Gray Associates in New York in early 2017.

Shepard Fairey

Shepard Fairey was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1970. He graduated in 1988 from the Idyllwild Arts Acacemy in Palm Springs, California. Fairey earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1992. He is one of the most infuential street artist of our time. His art ranges from screen prints, stencils, and stickers to posters, paintings and murals. His most famous art includes the Obey trademark, images of Andre the Giant, and the propaganda poster of Barack Obama.

Shepard Fairey’s work combines the elements of graffiti, pop art, business, Marxist theory and advertisement. The imagery is conveyed in strong graphic renderings with a color pallette of mostly reds, blacks, and whites. His art is distinctly political in nature and supportive of social causes.

Martin Copertari

Martin Copertari, “As Lovers Went By”, 2013, Lithograph Composed of Collage of Etchings with Gouache, Dimensions Unknown

A Briton who lived in Barcelona, Martin Copertari made collages using images from the Victorian era. He often used a gravure printing technique, which he did by hand. The collages are all hand made with original etchings from 19th century publications, lithographic prints from the early 20th century and retouched with gouache.

Reblogged with many thanks to https://artqueer.tumblr.com

Source: martincopertari-blog-blog

Mel Odom

The Artwork of Mel Odom

Mel Odom majored in illustration at Virginia commonwealth University and then attended Leeds Polytechnic Institute of Art and Design in England, He moved to New York City in 1975.

His artwork with its Art Deco style established him as a commercial artist initially with erotic illustrations for magazines such as “Blueboy, “Viva”, and Pllayboy”. During the 1980s, Odom’s work covered a wide range of commercial media: record and book covers, Illustrations for the sci-fi magazine “Omni”, and a front cover for one of the 1989 “Time Magazine”.

Note: More Images of Mel Odom’s work, both drawings and paintings, can be found at the artist’s Instagram site located at: https://www.instagram.com/mel.odom/

Sigmar Polke

Sigmar Polke, “Kandinsdingsda”, 1976, Gouache, Acrylic and Collage on Paper Mounted on Canvas, Artist’s Estate

Sigmar Polke was born in Oels, an east German region, in 1941. His family soon fled to west Germany in 1953, settling in Dusseldorf where Polke studied at the Dusseldorf Art Academy between the years 1961 and 1967. While still in school, Polke, along with Gerhard Richter and Konrad Fischer, founded the Captialist Realism movement.

The Capitalist Realism movement incorporated aspects of American Pop Art’s interest in consumer and popular imagery with abstraction and an emphasis on a progressive use of mediums. The movement also instilled into their works satirical commentary about consumerism, the political climate in Germany at the time: the movement’s name was a play on the Russian art movement of Socialist Realism.

Polke’s artistic practice embraced and incorporated mistakes such as drips, tears, and copy printing errors into his paintings. His experimentation with photography in the 1970s intentionally disregarded the standard rules: dropping the wrong chemicals onto the paper, turning on the light during development, brushing the developer on selectively, using exhausted fixer. Polke would then use these ‘mistakes’ to explore his interest in abstract pictorial space.

Polke’s irreverence for classical artistic practices made for an innovative and stylistically uncategorizable body of work that used photography and printed materials as source material, silkscreened layers on top of painterly expanses, chemical substances and other non-art materials within a collage-like aesthetic.

Laurent Durieux

Laurent Durieux, “Rear Window”, Date Unknown, Silk Screen

Laurent Durieux is a Brussels illustrator and graphic artist who has spent two decades as a designer and a teacher. His retro-futuristic movie posters have caught the world’s attention after the 2013 release of his “Jaws” poster. He considers illustrator Jean Girard, who drew the “Moebius’ and “L’Incal” comic books, and Belgian illustrator Luc Van Malderen as his mentors.

In 2011, Laurent Furieux was named one of the world’s Best Illustrations by the international advertising magazine Lurzer’s Archive. That same year, his short animated film “Hellville” was screened at several world film festivals.