A fine art, film, history and literature site oriented to, but not exclusively for, the gay community. Please be aware that there is mature content on this blog. Information on images and links to sources will be provided if known. Enjoy your visit and please subscribe.
Tattoo Art in Motion: Part Two
“Our problem isn’t that we’re individualists. It’s that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven’t done, or been, what we thought; that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion.”
― ahe Education of the Stoic
Artists Unknown, (A Private Point of View), Gay Film Gifs
“There is no single form or style of portraiture. Portraiture means individualism and as such means diversity, self-expression, private point of view. The most successful images seem to be those which exist on several planes at once and which reflect the fantasy and understanding of many.”
-Peter Bunnell, Creative Camera International Year Book 1977, 1976, p. 167
The Parts and Pieces Making a Whole: Set Seven
“Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual”, points out when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggest that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, you will have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. The whole thing gears together as one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature.”
—Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
Photographer Unknown, (The Journeyer)
“I let no chance go by untaken. I never hesitated to follow where my curiosity beckoned. I willingly went where there was danger in beauty and beauty in danger. I had experiences in plenty. Many were enjoyable, some were instructive, a few I would rather have missed. But I had them, and I have them still in memory. If, as soon as tomorrow, I go to my grave, it will be no black and silent hole. I can paint the darkness with vivid colors, and fill it with music both martial and languorous, with the flicker of swords and the flutter of kisses, with flavors and excitements and sensations, with the fragrance of a field of clover that has been warmed in the sun and then washed by a gentle rain. . .”
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Duane Michals, “Narcissus”, 1986, Photo Shoot, Model Unknown
Duane Michals was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, on February 18th, 1932. After taking art classes at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, he attended the University of Denver, receiving his undergraduate degree in 1953. In 1956 after his military service, Michals moved to New York where he studied at Parsons School of Design, later working as a graphic designer for magazines “Dance” and “Time”.
A 1958 Russian tour of portraiture photography started Michals’ artistic career. His photographs in the mid-1960s consisted of mainly deserted sites in New York. In 1966, Michals started to structure his photographs as multiframe compositions, with subjects enacting set narratives. The writing of captions in the margins of his photographs began in 1974 and, later in 1979 the incorporation of paint into his treatment of the printed images.
Duane Michals’s narrative pieces rely on the sequencing of multiple images to convey a sense of alienation and disequilibrium. In his world, the literal appearance of things is less important than the communication of a concept or story. In his portraiture, however, Michals relies wholly on his subjects’ appearance and self-chosen poses to establish their identity. He believes in a direct approach for his portraiture instead of his usual metaphoric approach.
Photographers Unknown, The Colors: Pink and Blue
“The word itself has another color. It’s not a word with any resonance, although the e was once pronounced. There is only the bump now between b and l, the relief at the end, the whew. It hasn’t the sly turn which crimson takes halfway through, yellow’s deceptive jelly, or the rolled-down sound in brown. It hasn’t violet’s rapid sexual shudder or like a rough road, the irregularity of ultramarine, the low puddle in mauve like a pancake covered in cream, the disapproving purse to pink, the assertive brevity of red, the whine of green.”
—William Gass, On the Color Blue
William Gass, born in July of 1924 in North Dakota, was an American novelist, essayist, short-story writer, critic, and a philosophy professor, He taught for four years at the College of Wooster in Ohio, Perdue University for sixteen years, and Washington University in Saint Louis, where he was the David May Distinguished Professor in the Humanities from 1979 to 1999.
Gass wrote three novels, three collections of short stories, a collection of novellas, and seven volumes of essays. Three of these essay collections won Nation Book Critics Circle Award prizes and one collection the 2006 “A Temple of Texts” won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. His 1995 novel “The Tunnel”, a bleak novel about the human condition which took twenty-six years to write, received the American Book Award. His novel “Middle C”, published in 2013, won the 2015 William Dean Howells Medal awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Gif images reblogged with thanks to a great visual site: https://thouartadeadthing.tumblr.com
Photographers Unknown, (Writings on the Body)
“Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message on to my skin, tap meaning into my body.”
–Jeanette Winterson, Writing on the Body
Photographer Unknown, (Wet was the Light), Model Unknown
“Green was the silence, wet was the light,
the month of June trembled like a butterfly.”
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Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, known best by his pen name Pablo Neruda, was a Nobel Prize winning Chilean poet and diplomat. He became known nationally as a poet when he was thirteen years old, writing in various styles. He wrote surrealist poems, political manifestos, historical epics, an autobiography, and love poems of great passion. Often considered the national poet of Chile, Neruda wrote the collection “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair” in 1924 at the age of twenty. The poem above is from his collection “100 Love Sonnets”, published in 1959.
Faces of Man: WP Photo Set Six
“I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment. They become in a sense. . .symbolic of themselves. I often feel that people cone to me to be photographed as they would go to a doctor or a fortune teller- to find out how they are. So they are dependent on me. I have to engage them. Otherwise there is nothing to photograph. The concentration has to come from me and involve them.
Sometimes the force of it grows so strong that sounds in the studio go unheard. Time stops. We share a brief, intense intimacy. But it is unearned. It has no past. . .no future. And when the sitting is over- when the picture is done -there is nothing left except the photograph. . .the photograph and a kind of embarrassment. They leave. . .and I don’t known them. I have hardly heard what they have said.
If I meet them a waek later in a room somewhere, I expect they won’t recognize me. Because I don’t feel I was really there. At least the part of me that was. . .is now in the photograph. And the photographs hava a reality for me that the people don’t. It is through the photographs that I know them. Maybe it is in the nature of being a photographer. I am never really implicate. I don’t have to have any real knowledge. It is all a question of recognitions.”
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Chris Teel, Model Unknown, (Hanging Philodendron), Computer Graphics, Film Gifs
Chris Teel is a well-known professional photographer, based in Toronto and New York City, who has specialixed in images and video work of the male form. His work has been published in numerous online and print media.
Parva Scaena (Brief Scenes); Set Fifteen
“Is the beauty of the Whole really enhanced by our agony? And is the Whole really beautiful? And what is beauty? Throughout all his existence man has been striving to hear the music of the spheres, and has seemed to himself once and again to catch some phrase of it, or even a hint of the whole form of it. Yet he can never be sure that he has truly heard it, nor even that there is any such perfect music at all to be heard. Inevitably so, for if it exists, it is not for him in his littleness.
But one thing is certain. Man himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme that makes music also of its vast accompaniment, its matrix of storms and stars. Man himself in his degree is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things. It is very good to have been man. And so we may go forward together with laughter in our hearts, and peace, thankful for the past, and for our own courage. For we shall make after all a fair conclusion to this brief music that is man.”
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His Butt: Beguiling the Senses and Enchanting the Mind: Photo Set Eight
“He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars.”
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The Parts and Pieces Making a Whole: Set Six
“In our opinion, it is analytically correct, although—to use Hans Castorp’s phrase—“terribly gauche” and downright life-denying, to make a “tidy” distinction between sanctity and passion in matters of love. What’s this about “tidy”? What’s this about gentle irresolution and ambiguity? Isn’t it grand, isn’t it good, that language has only one word for everything we associate with love – from utter sanctity to the most fleshly lust? The result is perfect clarity in ambiguity, for love cannot be disembodied even in its most sanctified forms, nor is it without sanctity even at its most fleshly. Love is always simply itself, both as a subtle affirmation of life and as the highest passion; love is our sympathy with organic life, the touchingly lustful embrace of what is destined to decay – caritas is assuredly found in the most admirable and most depraved passions. Irresolute? But in God’s good name, leave the meaning of love unresolved! Unresolved – that is life and humanity, and it would betray a dreary lack of subtlety to worry about it.”
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Photographers Unknown, Parva Scaena (Brief Scenes): Set Fourteen
“Consciousness of self was an inherent function of matter once it was organized as life, and if that function was enhanced it turned against the organism that bore it, strove to fathom and explain the very phenomenon that produced it, a hope-filled and hopeless striving of life to comprehend itself, as if nature were rummaging to find itself in itself – ultimately to no avail, since nature cannot be reduced to comprehension, nor in the end can life listen to itself.”
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Photographers Unknown, Faces of Man: WP Photo Set Five
“The anthropologist Clifford Geertz says that humans are ‘symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-seeking’ animals. In our species, he says, ‘the drive to make sense out of our experience, to give it form and order, is evidently as real and as pressing as the more familiar biological needs.’ To Geertz, a human being is an organism ‘which cannot live in a world it is unable to understand.”
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