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Archive for the ‘Neat Stuff’ Category

Jan Toorop

Posted in Influences, Neat Stuff, Painting, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 21, 2015| 4 Comments »

Jan_Toorop_Fatalisme 1893I recently came across the work of the artist Jan Toorop and really found myself attracted to his imagery.  I hadn’t heard of him but at the first glimpse immediately wanted to see more.  Toorop  was another of those artists who have not garnered as much attention outside his home in the Netherlands as you might expect when you consider the work and the influence it had on other artists of the time. Toorop’s work largely influenced the work of Gustav Klimt and other Symbolist painters of Northern Europe.  You can see this in the piece above, Fatalisme.

Jan Toorop was a Dutch-Indonesian artist born on Java in 1858 who moved to the Netherlands as boy.  He worked in many styles in his early career, sometimes in pure Realism but often following the trends of the time.  He produced work in a decidedly Pointillist style as well as work that was purely Impressionistic.  But in the early 1890’s he began to develop the style that garnered the attention of many other artists.  It was Symbolist imagery based on Javanese motifs carried by dense and curvilinear line work.  Eventually, this led to him working in an Art Nouveau style later in his career.

Toorop died in 1928.  There is a Jan Toorop Research Center that has a site that displays the wide range of his work in a chronological fashion. I like this way of showing the work as you can see the evolution in style over time.  His daughter, Charley Toorop, was a celebrated painter as well who produced a series of wonderful self-portraits throughout her life and had another very accomplished painter for  a son (and grandson of Jan), Edgar Fernhout.  A very talented family, indeed.

Compelling work for you to consider…

Jan Toorop Oh Grave Where is Thy Victory 1892 Jan Toorop Three Brides Jan_Toorop_-_The_New_Generation_ 1892 Jan Toorop The Song of Time 1893

 

 

 

 

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The Aerialist

Posted in Motivation, Neat Stuff, Photography, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 9, 2015| 1 Comment »

Grand Prismatic Spring Yellowstone Wyoming Photo by Jassen T.I am in the last full day of preparing my work for my show, Home+Land, for the West End Gallery before delivering it tomorrow. This last day is always one filled with a great sense of relief and just a bit of anticipation as I begin to envision the whole of it in the gallery.  Over the last several days, I’ve began to feel very good about this group and am eager to see it hanging together.

But this morning I didn’t want to think about it at all and scanned some of my favorite sites to see what’s new.  Well, new to me.  I went back to the National Geographic site and came across some photos by a San Francisco based photographer named Jassen T.  I wish I had more info to share on him but his work on the Nat Geo site is great, mainly aerial imagery including the one above, a shot looking down on Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.  Love the jewel-like colors and the organic flow of the forms.  Just a great image.

Another of his aerial shots is the one at the bottom of a salt marsh in the San Francisco Bay.  It has a very painterly look, reminding me in some ways of another Bay area artist, Wayne Thiebaud.  I find myself constantly moving my eyes back to this image, taking in the forms.  I know what it is in reality but my mind wants to continuously interpret in many other ways.  It just sparks all sorts of thoughts which must be the sign of a good image.

Thanks, Jassen T., for the great images.  They were very refreshing this morning.  Hope to see more of your work in the future.

Salt Marsh San Francisco Bay Photo by Jassen T.

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Deadvlei

Posted in Neat Stuff, Photography, tagged , , , , on July 2, 2015| 2 Comments »

Deadvlei Namibia Photo By Christopher R. Gray- Natl Geo Traveler Photo Contest 2015I came across this wonderfully stark image this morning, an entry in the National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest from photographer Christopher R. Gray.  It is a night scene from an area of the Namib Desert in the African nation of Namibia called Deadvlei.

Located in a region of salt marshes periodically fed by the Tsauchab River, Deadvlei ( which translates as “dead marsh“) was cut off from the river’s feed nearly 1000 years ago from flooding then climate change.  This left  it a huge  dry and hard salt plain nestled among some of the highest sand dunes on the planet, some towering over 1300 feet in height.  The trees, mainly camel thorns,  that were there all those centuries ago remain, darkly scorched tree bones that do not decompose in the arid conditions.

This area’s remoteness also gives it some of the darkest skies on the planet, making visible all the many stars and galaxies that have become invisible to us in the more populated parts of the world.  That night sky makes for a pretty striking image with the single tree set against the silhouette of the sand dunes.

It’s kind of a natural Ozymandias, a reminder of our own mortality set against the eternal nature of the Earth.  Great photo.

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AERMETRY

Posted in Neat Stuff, Photography, Video, tagged , , , , , on June 26, 2015| Leave a Comment »

AERMETRY - Photographer Nicolaus WegnerThere was an interesting video recently online called Art of the Storm from photographer Nicolaus Wegner that featured a fantastic time lapse of a super cell forming over the Black Hills of South Dakota earlier this month.  While it was beautiful and awe inspirng, it was a link at the end of the video to some of his other time lapse films that caught my eye.  One in particular stood out.

Called AERMETRY,  it features storm and cloud formations and movements that are mirrored as they move across the screen, creating kaleidoscopic images that are fascinating.  Definitely hard to look away, especially if, like me, you are one of those people who try to identify things in random patterns.  There is however a photosensitive seizure warning attached so if you are susceptible to such things please take note.

You can see more of the work of Nicolaus Wegner, including more sensational time lapses, at  his website, Light Alive Photography.

AERMETRY from Nicolaus Wegner on Vimeo.

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Story’s Purpose/ Neil Gaiman

Posted in Motivation, Neat Stuff, tagged , , , , on June 16, 2015| 2 Comments »

NeilGaiman-by-AdrienDegganI tend to think that all forms of art– music, literature, dance and the visual arts– somehow transmit information or knowledge of some sort that enhances our lives as humans.  It is something beyond the sheer pleasure it offers, something deeper and necessary.

In the most recent post from Maria Popova‘s wonderful site, Brain Pickings,  there is an outline ( and an available full Soundcloud recording) of a recent lecture from author Neil Gaiman ( of Sandman fame among many other things) where he speaks on the purpose and lives of stories, how stories grow and spread through time and cultures.

One of my favorite bits from this post came as Gaiman illustrates the purpose of story telling in telling an anecdote about his cousin Helen, a 97-year-old Holocaust survivor:

A few years ago, she started telling me this story of how, in the ghetto, they were not allowed books. If you had a book … the Nazis could put a gun to your head and pull the trigger — books were forbidden. And she used to teach under the pretense of having a sewing class… a class of about twenty little girls, and they would come in for about an hour a day, and she would teach them maths, she’d teach them Polish, she’d teach them grammar…

One day, somebody slipped her a Polish translation of Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind. And Helen stayed up — she blacked out her window so she could stay up an extra hour, she read a chapter of Gone with the Wind. And when the girls came in the next day, instead of teaching them, she told them what happened in the book.

And each night, she’d stay up; and each day, she’d tell them the story.

And I said, “Why? Why would you risk death — for a story?”

And she said, “Because for an hour every day, those girls weren’t in the ghetto — they were in the American South; they were having adventures; they got away.

I think four out of those twenty girls survived the war. And she told me how, when she was an old woman, she found one of them, who was also an old woman. And they got together and called each other by names from Gone with the Wind…

We [writers] decry too easily what we do, as being kind of trivial — the creation of stories as being a trivial thing. But the magic of escapist fiction … is that it can actually offer you a genuine escape from a bad place and, in the process of escaping, it can furnish you with armor, with knowledge, with weapons, with tools you can take back into your life to help make it better… It’s a real escape — and when you come back, you come back better-armed than when you left.

Helen’s story is a true story, and this is what we learn from it — that stories are worth risking your life for; they’re worth dying for. Written stories and oral stories both offer escape — escape from somewhere, escape to somewhere.

I think that is a wonderful example of how art serves as a template or pattern that we can follow in order to survive life in general.  And as I said, that is one of the great purposes of art.

Please check out the full article on Brain Pickings.

 

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“Native Voice” Preview

Posted in Motivation, Neat Stuff, Recent Paintings, tagged , , , , , , on May 19, 2015| 4 Comments »

American Art Collector GCM Article May 2015 sIn the new June issue of American Art Collector, there’s a nice preview of my upcoming solo show, Native Voice, which is opening June 5 at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria, VA.

It’s a brief overview of the show and my career as well as the significance of the show’s title to me.  Most pleasing to me is the fact that the three paintings they chose to display in the article show themselves very well , giving what I think is a good indicator of the look and feel of this show.

Another pleasing aspect is a short paragraph, written by a couple from the Bay Area of California who collect my paintings, which describes their views on the work. As an artist, it’s always interesting to get a view of how people honestly react to what you’re doing.  And for myself, it’s great to  get  affirmation that the belief I have in the reality of the internal world I am trying to express in my work has translated successfully and is coming across as a similar reality to others.  That’s very heartening and inspiring to me in the studio.

That being said, it’s time I get back to work.  There’s still much work to be done before the show is complete.

 

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Uyuni and the Big Quiet

Posted in Neat Stuff, Video, tagged , , , on May 6, 2015| Leave a Comment »

Salar de Uyuni- Enrique Pacheco FilmI came across a terrific video from travel cinematographer and time-lapse specialist Enrique Pacheco called Reflections From Uyuni.  It is a film that has time-lapse views of Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flats located in the Andean highlands of Bolivia.  The flats cover an area over 4000 square miles in size ( much larger than Yellowstone, more than twice as large as the Grand Canyon and about 90 times larger than our Bonneville Salt Flats) at an altitude of over 11,000 feet, with only a few feet of variance over the entire area.  Very flat indeed.  With its crust of salt, it is obviously a great source of salt as well as lithium, of which it is estimated to hold well over 50% of the world’s reserve.

But all that said, for me, these strikingly beautiful images are filled with a sense of silence that I find so intriguing and often find myself trying to embed in my own work. The Big Quiet as I call it. Take a few moments to judge for yourself.  Also, please check out Enrique Pacheco’s other films at his Vimeo page or his website.  Truly stunning work.

 

Reflections from Uyuni from Enrique Pacheco on Vimeo.

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The Backwards Brain Bike

Posted in Neat Stuff, tagged , , , , on May 2, 2015| 2 Comments »

Smarter Every Day Backwards Brain BikeCame across an interesting video from Smarter Every Day, a science based website from aerospace engineer Destin Sandlin that, in his words, attempts to find the unexpected.  This video concerns a bicycle made  with a gear that turns the wheel in the opposite direction.  That sounds simple enough and I am sure most of you who have rode a bike think that you could master riding this bike fairly quickly.  Just a little concentration and a push of the pedals and you would be off, maybe a little shakily at first but on your way.

Not so quick.  

It turns out that there are so many factors at play in riding a bike that are hardwired into our brains once we learn how to ride one that dramatically altering any one of them makes riding a bike almost impossible, as you will see in this video.  A very interesting example of the way our brain learns and adapts. Or not.

Take a look for yourself:

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What Makes a Hero?

Posted in Favorite Things, Influences, Motivation, Neat Stuff, Quote, Video, tagged , , , , , on May 1, 2015| 1 Comment »

Joseph Campbell quoteI’ve been a fan of the late mythologist Joseph Campbell for many, many years.  In his many books on myth, including his classic The Hero With a Thousand Faces, as well as a great PBS series, The Power of Myth,  with Bill Moyers , Campbell documented myths from around the world but more importantly showed how intimately they related to our individual lives.  Campbell showed us that we all had lives that very much followed the patterns that ran through the classic myths of all cultures.

In short, we are all, in our own way, heroes.  We may not slay dragons or find great treasures, but we all at a point experience some form of the hero’s journey.

There’s a wonderful animated short film called What Makes a Hero?  from TED Ed and educator Matthew Winkler that succinctly illustrates Campbell’s premise, including the eleven stages of the hero’s journey.  It’s a delightful short that will hopefully help you to begin to see the mythic elements that make up your own life.

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Budapest

Posted in Influences, Music, Neat Stuff, Video, tagged , , , on April 19, 2015| 2 Comments »

Sandor Galimberti- Tában Cityscape in Budapest (1910)It’s funny how you sometimes come across things.

I had heard the song Budapest from George Ezra recently and had decided to share it on my Sunday music interlude.  It just has an infectious sound that seemed like a good way to start what looks to be a beautiful day.  Plus I liked the fact that he lists Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly as influences– kind of unexpected from a 20-something Brit.

So I began looking for something visual to accompany this lead-in to the music and punched in Budapest painting into my search engine.  Up came many lovely watercolor-y  images of the beautiful  grand riverfront along the Danube.  They were nice but tucked in among them was a rougher, more modernistic cityscape that really stuck out to me.

Red roofs.  Simple forms and dark linework.  A path leading in and up.  Even the tree that divided the upper right section of the scene looked familiar.  It looked like something that could have easily been tucked away somewhere  in my own body of work.

The painting, shown above  was titled Taban Cityscape in Budapest and the artist was listed as Sandor Galimberti.  Looking deeper, there was little info on Galimbert’s life except that he was Hungarian, born in 1883.   From a rough translation on a Hungarian site, I gleaned that he studied with Matisse and  had began to achieve notoriety for his work around Europe before World War I.  Married to another artist, he lived in Paris then finally Amsterdam before returning to Hungary to enlist in the army during the early days of the war.  In 1915, Learning that his wife had contracted lung cancer, Galimberti returns from the battlefield and his wife then dies.  Hour later, he takes his own life at the age of  32.

Yet another tragic story of what may have been an epic career cut short.  Looking at his work online (including his final work, Amsterdam, shown at the bottom) I am impressed on so many levels and can only imagine what may have come from an artist just reaching his maturity in the aftermath of the war.  We might be talking of him in the same terms as Matisse and Picasso and other modern masters.  But a tragic fate intervened and he is little known outside of a few certain circles.

So what began as a simple search for an image gives me a new artist to wonder at and study- perhaps my Hungarian cousin?  So many hidden treasures in this world.  Enjoy the song, enjoy the day and be glad for those things that bring you joy.

Sandor Galimberti- Amsterdam 1914

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