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Archive: ART

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JRR 404: Photobus

Daniel Meadows, "Digital Storyteller" and University Lecturer, has produced a charming and interesting video on his adventure with documentary photography. Watch his video here

Dawn in Suffolk (u.K.)

Newmarket on Saturday

A handsome colt in the parade ring

NYC Abstract

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A Tomotada Netsuke

Japanese artists starting in the 17th century cleverly invented the miniature sculptures known as netsuke to serve a very practical function. (The two Japanese characters ne+tsuke mean "root" and "to suspend or hang" in reference to the roots and twigs used as toggles before carved netsuke were produced.) Traditional Japanese garments - robes called kosode and kimono - had no pockets. Men who wore them needed a place to keep personal belongings such as pipes, tobacco, money, seals, or medicines.

The elegant solution was to place such objects in containers (called sagemono) hung by cords from the robes' sash (obi). The containers might take the form of a pouch or a small woven basket, but the most popular were beautifully crafted boxes (inro), which were held shut by ojime, sliding beads on cords. Whatever the form of the container, the fastener that secured its cord at the top of the sash was a carved, button-like toggle called a netsuke.

Read more from Wikipedia

Netsuke's are often charming, but are rarely as powerful and beautiful as the one pictured above, created by Izumiya Tomotada, one of the most important artists in the history of netsuke. This one is to be sold at Sotheby's in London on July 13th. The estimate is £40,000–45,000.

European Starlings

Beautiful photos of European starling formations in Denmark, thanks to Bjarne Winkler, can be found here (hat tip to boingboing)

June Newton, wife of Helmut

The above photo is an early one of June, taken by Helmut. Though not as famous as her late husband, she, too, is an accomplished photographer, and The Guardian (UK) has an interesting interview with her.

"I looked at the pictures on the wall and I fell in love with them," recalls June of her first visit to Helmut's studio, where she hoped to make some extra money as a model. "From that moment, I went to work. I've never stopped since. That's why I'm here in Berlin." In his autobiography, Helmut wrote that "it was a totally different affair from any I'd had with any other girl. All the other girls were really only about fucking. With her there was another dimension."

"Photography will always be my first love," Helmut told her, "but you will be my second."

Read the full interview here

NYC Nap

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Exceptional Imagery

While I've seen examples of the work of many fine art photographers, very few inspire me to the same degree as the Finnish artist Pentti Sammallahti. You can view a variety of his images at the photoeye galleries

Neige, trois arbres

Winter, three trees, is a painting by MAURICE DE VLAMINCK (1876-1958) which caught my eye. It's being sold at Christie's on May 24th, and is expected to bring between €60,000 - 80,000.

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Panorama

Hans Nyberg, a commercial photographer based in Denmark, does remarkable work with panoramas. Here's a site on which he creates fantastic interactive panaromas of cities such as Yokohama (pictured above). In order to manipulate the photos (which allows both rotating and zooming!), you must have QuickTime installed. Here's a link to Nyberg's site.

NYC angles and planes

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"Books matter. Stories matter."

Rebecca Solnit, writer, art critic, museum exhibition curator, and political activist, recently gave the Commencement address to the Department of English at the University of California at Berkeley. Here's the beginning:

Some of you here today receiving degrees took time off to explore the world, work for a cause, or earn enough money to get to college, but I suspect the great majority of you went straight through from high school and thus were likely born in 1984. What does it mean to be born in 1984, the ominous year that hung over humanity for 36 years after George Orwell made? those four numbers a synonym for totalitarianism; what does it mean to be born atop the high wall at the end of the grim future of the imagination?

I thought of that as soon as I was invited to give this talk, thought about the enormous gap between when Orwell, on the beautiful isle of Jura in Scotland, wrote this bleakest of anti-utopian novels in 1948, and the actual 1984, as well as the no less profound chasm between 1984, real and imagined, and the present moment. To contemplate those chasms is to recognize, in the most literal sense, just how utterly unpredictable the future is. To recognize that is to realize that a rapidly changing world requires an ability to appreciate uncertainty, and what in books we call wild plot twists, at least as much as the wobbly gift of prophesy.

I thought of these things with the tools with which we English majors graduate into the world - not the tools that enable you to splice genes, cantilever bridges, or make piles of money, but those that enable you to analyze, to see patterns, to acquire a personal philosophy rather than a jumble of unexamined, hand-me-down notions; those that enable you not to make a living but maybe to live. This least utilitarian of educations prepares you to make sense of the world and maybe to make meaning; for one way to describe the great struggle of our time is as the endeavor to become a producer of meanings rather than a consumer of them - in an age when meaning as advertising and marketing, as others' definitions of pleasure and terror, is daily forced down our throats.

To make meaning, to change the world, or just to read it thoughtfully (which can itself be insurrectionary)… And never has our world been so overloaded, so rapidly changing, and so full of surprises that require us to change our minds, rethink possibilities, and then do so again; never has it required such careful reading. In my own case, the kind of critical reading I first learned to do with books, then with works of art, turned out to be transferable to national parks, atomic bombs, revolutions, marches, the act of walking - a skill transferred not only to feed my writing but my larger path through the world.

Read the whole speech at truthout.org

And English wasn't his first language

The huge black clock hand is still at rest but is on the point of making its once-a-minute gesture; that resilient jolt will set a whole world in motion. The clock face will slowly turn away, full of despair, contempt, and boredom, as one by one the iron pillars will start walking past, bearing away the vault of the station like bland atlantes; the platform will begin to move past, carrying off on an unknown journey cigarette butts, used tickets, flecks of sunlight and spittle; a luggage handcart will glide by, its wheels motionless; it will be followed by a news stall hung with seductive magazine covers—photographs of naked, pearl-gray beauties; and people, people, people on the moving platform, themselves moving their feet, yet standing still, striding forward, yet retreating as in an agonizing dream full of incredible effort, nausea, a cottony weakness in one's calves, will surge back, almost falling supine.

–Nabokov, the opening paragraph from his novel King, Queen, Knave (1968)

Spring in NYC

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Juan Goytisolo

"People ask, 'Why do you live in Marrakesh?' " Goytisolo told me with a chuckle. "I ask them, 'Have you seen it?' " In Jemaa el Fna, Goytisolo explained, he finds all the heterogeneity that is in danger of disappearing from Western cities. "In the 70's, when I was very poor, I was offered a permanent teaching post at Edmonton. I realized I would rather starve in Marrakesh than be a millionaire in Alberta."

Those quotes, by the Spanish expatriate novelist, are taken from a very interesting article on Goytisolo in the NY Times Magazine. (thanks to Morgan at 3quarksdaily)

Krain

Benjamin Krain, of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is an exceptional photojournalist. See a selection of his work, including moving shots of post-Katrina New Orleans, and Afghanistan, on his website

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