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.
Carlos Soto, “Libertad”, Linocut
Carlos Soto is a New York-based artist. Soto is a theatre maker, performer and designer concerned with the body as a site in which narrative threads of the personal, sexual, social and political become knotted; focusing on the poetics of the moving body and its opposition to language; broaching the unspeakable: absence, solitude, the monstrous, anger, horror and pleasure.
Photographer UnknownAbandoned Train Station, Buffalo, New York
James Maher, “Night Tunnel in Snowstorm, Central Park”
Four Paintings by Elizabeth Coyne
Elizabeth Coyne was born in Minnesota and raised in California, Canada and Indiana. In the early 1980′s, she moved to New York where she had numerous exhibitions in the 1980′s and 1990′s. She has Masters of Fine Arts in painting from the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York and a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts from Purdue University. Elizabeth Coyne has also studied and lectured at the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently working on a series of paintings based on the images from her monoprints which deal with tangible and intangible realities.
‘My paintings offer contemplation into life and into possibilities of existence. For me making art is about not only seeing and looking at the world around me- but also knowing that world and absorbing it. I have developed a personal invented language of images and symbols based on the natural world. This visual language is collected from connections that I make in an ethereal way, mental images built from the logic of the materials I work with.
This world I make in a painting, describes abstract places and relationships and it is a physical transcriptive process, where each painting is a synthesis of the mind. An image is composed from different sources, both products of my imagination and transcriptions based on my perceptions. Painting has become a way of mapping my thoughts and experiences – a type of private cartography. “ – Elizabeth Coyne
Forrest Williams, “Interval”, 2001, Oil on Canvas, Private Collection
Forrest Williams studied English and Art History at Edinburgh University, Scotland. He graduated from the New York Academy of Art, New York, with a MFA in Painting. Williams currently works and lives in New York.
“My paintings are about men: about being a man as I see it and about relationships between men. They depict individual men, but they’re not portraits. The men inhabit a particular place, but it isn’t real. It’s an ambiguous, interior territory, where things are and are not what they seem.”
The paintings are staged scenarios, theatrical moments, and the men who inhabit them are the actors. The reality lies in the emotional core of this world — intensely felt but highly contained. My model Lorenzo called it “emotional purgatory.”
Although they’re a group of anonymous men, they’re at the same time self-portraits I suppose. Perhaps these are worlds of their own making — worlds with outsides and edges and unknown terrains beyond. This is the region where desire and doubt, longing and reticence, intimacy and uncertainty coexist. It speaks of absence as much as presence.” – Forrest Williams
Reblogged with many thanks to https://k250966.tumblr.com
Paintings by Alyssa Monks
Alyssa Monks’s paintings are of a representational narrative genre. She portrays a specific place and time with simultaneous empathy and detachment.
Monks is part of the Continuing Education Faculty at the New York Academy of Art, where she teaches Flesh Painting. She currently is also an instructor at the Montclair State University.
She earned her BA from Boston College and an MFA in painting from the New York Academy of Art, Graduate School of Figurative Art. At the New York Academy of Art, Alyssa studied with Vincent Desiderio, Jenny Saville, Wade Schuman, Brenda Zlamany, John Jacobsmeyer, Harvey Citron, Deane Keller, Edward Schmidt, Steven Assael, and Lisa Bartolozzi. She additionally studied at Montclair State College, the New School, and Lorenzo de’Medici in Florence. She completed an artist in residency at Fullerton College.
Stephen Greene, “The Mourners”, Oil on Canvas, 1946, 50.8 x 76.2 cm, Private Collection
Stephen Greene was a painter from Valley Cottage, New York, known for his abstract paintings and in the 1940′s for his social realist figure paintings. Greene taught at Princeton University for many years where he was teacher to many well-known figures in the art world including Frank Stella and art critic and historian Michael Fried.
Greene had more than 2 dozen solo exhibitions of his work in leading art galleries in New York City. He also taught at the Art Students League of New York for several decades. After the mid-1950s and until his death Greene’s mature work was related to abstract expressionism, color field painting and surrealism.
“I have always wanted to achieve a profoundly moving image, to make of paint and canvas a visual fact worth dealing with on many levels. Art does set up a particular world and the one that suits my vision of what I see, know, deals with the dark side of experience as well as its enchantment and pleasures. In art, our hopes and desires shape our visions of fulfillment for more than the actual experiences that we may have.
My use of color and light that is mysterious is of an interior perception. My formal stance is very much involved with an underlying structure that is insistent to the life of the work. I remain subject ridden and how a vertical divides the space from top to bottom, from my earliest works to the present, is as much subject matter as overt reference to the known world. I prefer to make paintings that are sufficiently individual to be granted their own place.” — Stephen Greene, Valley Cottage, New York, 1999.
Reginald Marsh, “Flying Concellos” , Etching and Engraving, Date of Plate 1936, Edition of 100, 8 x 10 in. Collection of the Art Students League of New York
Reginald Marsh is one of the best known chroniclers of 1930s and 40s New York. It has been said that Marsh was to New York what Daumier was to Paris and Hogarth was to London. His paintings, drawings, and prints capture the aura and pace of the ever-changing city at a particularly exciting time in its history.
Marsh was fascinated with the seedier aspects of New York, and he was an obsessive explorer of the great metropolis. It was in places such as Coney Island, the burlesque parlors and dance halls of Fourteenth Street, the Bowery, the streets, and the subway that the Yale educated, financially comfortable Marsh found the subjects he was looking for – Bowery bums, burlesque queens, musclemen, bathing beauties, and streetwalkers. Marsh returned repeatedly to his favorite locations, usually working on the spot with sketchbooks and taking photographs that were used as the source material for completed works back in his Fourteenth Street studio.
David Kassan, “Self Portrait in Motion, Oil on Panel, 2010, 101,6 x 66 cm, Private Collection
David Jon Kassan is a contemporary realist painter best known for his life-size realist portraits. The paintings combine figurative subjects with abstract background textures he says are inspired by such painters as Franz Kline and Robert Rauschenberg. Kassan says, “my effort to constantly learn to document reality with a naturalistic, representational painting technique allows for pieces to be inherent contradictions; paintings that are both real and abstract.”
David Kassan currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches painting classes and workshops at various institutions around the world. He received his B.F.A. in 1999 from Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY where he studied with Jerome Witkin. He continued his studies at The National Academy, and the Art Students League of New York, both in Manhattan. He is currently represented by Gallery Henoch in New York
Oil Paintings by Jake Berthot
Jake Berthot was born in Niagara Falls, NY in 1939. He attended the New School for Social Research and Pratt Institute in the early 1960s. The artist held teaching positions at Cooper Union, Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, and The School of Visual Arts. Jake Berthot died December 30, 2014 and bequeathed 12 works to the Phillips Collection, Washington DC.
Berthot began exhibiting in the mid-1960s, at a time when Abstract Expressionism, Pop and Minimalism were part of the aesthetic environment. Berthot’s early work was geometric and the color was subdued. Over the following years, his color intensified and the underlying grid opened to include an oval (some thought a portrait or a head). In 1992, Berthot moved to upstate New York where he wrote a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson on the wall of his new studio: ‘We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation. Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, or spirit, or poetry – a narrow belt.”
There, Berthot began to incorporate the landscape into his paintings – the land that held him and demanded his care. Although his step away from abstraction to figuration seemed radical, the tenets that characterized his work remained the same: his torqued underlying grid, his distinctive brushwork (an admirer of Milton Resnick), and his sensitive color.
Photography of Vivian Dorothy Maier
Vivian Dorothy Maier was an American street photographer. Maier worked for about forty years as a nanny, mostly in Chicago’s North Shore, pursuing photography during her spare time. She took more than 150,000 photographs during her lifetime, primarily of the people and architecture of New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles, although she also traveled and photographed worldwide.
During her lifetime, Maier’s photographs were unknown and unpublished, and she never printed many of her negatives. A Chicago collector, John Maloof, acquired some of Maier’s photos in 2007, while two other Chicago-based collectors, Ron Slattery and Randy Prow, also found some of Maier’s 
prints and negatives in her boxes and suitcases around the same time. Maier’s photographs were first published on the Internet in July 2008, by Slattery, but the work received little response.
In October 2009, Maloof linked his blog to a selection of Maier’s photographs on the image-sharing website Flickr, and the results went “viral”, with thousands of people expressing interest. Critical acclaim and interest in Maier’s work quickly followed, and since then, Maier’s photographs have been exhibited in North America, Europe, Asia and South America while her life and work have been the subject of books and documentary films.
Netflix Streaming has a great documentary about Vivian Maier’s life and discovery and subsequent printing of her work. There are also many interviews with families who employed Vivian Maier as a nanny. A great film about a little known very talented artist.
Notes: Header images 5 and 9 are self-portraits.
Maciek Jasik, “Secret Lives”
Maciek Jaskik is a photographer and pyrotechnician from Gdansk, Poland and living and working in New York City. He received his Bachelor of Arts from John Hopkins University in 2000 and has since been in many photographic exhibitions. He “seeks to understand society’s relationship with the natural world and explore ideas of identity, gender and the self while working in a parallel world of endless color and bewildering physical phenomena.”
“The modern world has separated us from the origins and uses of fruits and vegetables; we know them only for the flavors and textures they provide. Until only very recently, each held its own mystique, mythology, symbolism and connection to the culture and afterlife.
This series aims to reintroduce these mystical, invisible qualities to fruits and vegetables that have been lost amidst the clamor of nutritional statistics. Each offers its own indelible powers beyond our narrow habits of thought.”
Leanne Staples, Title Unknown, The Fire Escape
Leanne Staples is primarily a street, social documentary, urban landscape photographer & artist. She was given her first camera at the age of 12 by her father. For many years her concentration was mainly as an architectural photographer. It was, as she has said, “an obsessive pursuit for an unreal purity.” One day, after being annoyed by people walking into her shot, she decided not to fight it anymore, to shoot people passing by the buildings. Without knowing it, that began her venture into street photography!
She started out in film and after some skepticism about digital, she finally made the transition in 2006. A self-described gonzo photog, you can find her on the streets with camera in hand searching for the perfect backdrop in which to shoot. A few things that she is always seeking out are shadows, reflections, patterns, motion blur, clouds, graffiti, interesting people and of course architecture.
If reflagging, please credit Leanne Staples. Thanks.
Claude Buck, “Sunburst”, Gouache, Watercolor, Pencil, Pen and Colored Ink on Paper, 1913, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Renwick Gallery, Washington DC
Claude Buck was born in New York City on July 3, 1890. His father was a traditionally trained, commercial artist, and introduced Buck to drawing at age 4. The young Buck copied Greek classics at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and at age 14 entered the National Academy of Design, taking classes in still life with Emil Carlsen, figure drawing with Francis Jones, and figure painting George DeForest Brush. He studied there until age 22, receiving eight prizes. Buck then studied in Munich and upon his return began a busy schedule of exhibitions.
He moved to Chicago in 1919, teaching painting for some years at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago (SAIC), and becoming a leading member of an avant-garde symbolist artists’ group known as the Introspectives. The group, whose members shared an approach to expressing subjective emotion and experience in their work, included, both Rudolph Weisenborn and Emil Armin. Buck, a modernist, was influenced by writers Edgar Allen Poe and William Blake and eccentric visionary painters Ralph Blakelock and Albert Pinkham Ryder.
He often depicted allegories and literary themes drawn from Romantic sources such as Poe’s poetry, operas by Richard Wagner, as well as classical mythology and the New Testament. He made highly finished still lifes and “hyperrealistic” portraits to support himself and his family. Buck spent the last years of his life in Santa Cruz, and is often considered a California artist despite his deep connections to Chicago.
Photographers Unknown, Matthew Camp, Photo Shoots
Gif collection reblogged with many thanks and a hello to: http://cevans75.tumblr.com/archive