Fogbow

Discover Leonora Carrington, Britain’s Lost Surrealist Painter

In some ways, Surrealist Leonora Carrington’s story is a familiar one, given her gender and generation.

A creative young woman, stifled by her conventional upbringing, escapes to Paris, falls in love with an older male artist, gains a degree of recognition destined always to be smaller than that of her celebrated lover’s, suffers hardships, continues working, lives a very long time and is the subject of nearly as many exhibitions in the decade and a half following her death as in the 70 years preceding it.

Certainly, Carrington, who died in 2011, would be deeply rankled by this, or any attempt to condense her narrative into an easily-grasped package. Witness the brusque way she rejects her younger cousin Joanna Moorhead‘s invitations, above, to describe the inspiration behind various canvases:

You’re trying to intellectualize something, desperately, and you’re wasting your time! That’s not a way of understanding to make …a sort of mini logic. You’ll never understand by that road.

The story of how Moorhead connected with her notorious cousin is a fascinating one.

An Introduction to the Painting That Changed Georgia O’Keeffe’s Career: Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock-Hills

Public recognition is an all too rare reward for many artists, but it carries with it a risk of being widely misunderstood.

Georgia O’Keeffe gained renown for her large-scale flower paintings in the 1920s, selling six images of calla lilies for $25,000.

Her husband Alfred Stieglitz, an influential photographer and gallery owner 24 years her senior, created a sensation when he exhibited these floral images alongside his sensuous nude portraits of her, fomenting an erotic association that has been near impossible to shake.

By the time she began work on it [Ram's Head, White Hollyhock - Hills], O’Keeffe had forged a deep, spiritual connection to the New Mexican desert. Its alien landscape offered respite from Stieglitz’s extra-marital affairs and the mental health issues that had plagued her in New York.

The Southwest provided abundant fresh subject matter. She drove her Ford Model A for miles across the desert, stopping to collect the bleached bones of animals who had perished under drought conditions. Unlike Farm Security Agency photographers such as Arthur Rothstein, O’Keeffe was not interested in using these bones to document the catastrophe of the Dust Bowl, or even to meditate on mortality:

The bones do not symbolize death to me. They are shapes that I enjoy. It never occurs to me that they have anything to do with death. They’re very lively. . . .They please me, and I have enjoyed them very much in relation to the sky.

“I’ll tell you what went on in my so-called mind when I did my paintings of animal skulls” she told the New Yorker’s Calvin Tomkins in a 1974 interview:

There was a lot of talk in New York then—during the late twenties and early thirties—about the Great American Painting. It was like the Great American Novel. People wanted to ‘do’ the American scene. I had gone back and forth across the country several times by then, and some of the current ideas about the American scene struck me as pretty ridiculous. To them, the American scene was a dilapidated house with a broken-down buckboard out front and a horse that looked like a skeleton. I knew America was very rich, very lush. Well, I started painting my skulls about this time. First, I put a horse’s skull against a blue-cloth background, and then I used a cow’s skull. I had lived in the cattle country—Amarillo was the crossroads of cattle shipping, and you could see the cattle coming in across the range for days at a time. For goodness’ sake, I thought, the people who talk about the American scene don’t know anything about it. So, in a way, that cow’s skull was my joke on the American scene, and it gave me pleasure to make it in red, white, and blue.

Mr. Bean Hilariously Inserted into Historical Paintings
Illustrator and caricature artist Rodney Pike shows off his superb photo manipulation skills with these hilarious insertions of the beloved character Mr. Bean into historical portraits. It's an amusing surprise to discover the British man's expressive face peering out from underneath a feathered cap, a head of long golden hair, or the recognizable coif of George Washington's.

Pike expertly matches colors, lighting, and texture in order to seamlessly incorporate the face of Rowan Atkinson's character into the traditional portraits, making sure that the Photoshopped portions share the same painterly quality as the original works of art. In addition to his effort to make each image as convincing as possible, Pike also adds extra details to make each digital manipulation even more delightful, such as the sneaky appearances of a pair of panties and Mr. Bean's trademark teddy bear.

Italian historian claims to have identified bridge in Mona Lisa backdrop
Bridge painted by Leonardo da Vinci is the mostly destroyed Romito di Laterina bridge in Arezzo, says Silvano Vinceti

Angela Giuffrida in Rome
Wed 3 May 2023 15.37 BST

A small town in Tuscany is revelling in excitement after it was claimed that the bridge painted in the backdrop of the most famous portrait in the world – Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa – belongs to the town.

The Italian historian Silvano Vinceti said he had no doubt that the Romito di Laterina bridge in the province of Arezzo was what Leonardo had painted into the countryside landscape behind the enigmatic Mona Lisa, which would end a mystery that has fuelled countless disputes over the years.

Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa in Florence in the early 16th century, and the identity of the woman featured in the oil painting – widely believed to be Lisa del Giocondo – has triggered as much speculation as the distant backdrop.

Theories in the past have identified the bridge as Ponte Buriano, close to Laterina, as well as Ponte Bobbio in the northern Italian city of Piacenza.

Using historical documents and drone images, and by making comparisons between the painting and photographs of the area, Vinceti said it was “the Etruscan-Roman bridge, Romito”.

The most telling detail, he told reporters at the foreign press association in Rome, was in the number of arches: the bridge in Leonardo’s painting had four arches, as did the Romito. Ponte Buriano, on the other hand, has six arches, while Ponte Bobbio has more than six.

Only one arch of the Romito, which stretched across the Arno river, remains, as do the foundations of the bridge on the opposite side of the riverbank.

Documents belonging to the Medici family that were found in Florence’s state archives showed that between 1501 and 1503 the bridge was “a very busy, functioning bridge”, Vinceti said. He added that it was precisely at that time that Leonardo was in the Val d’Arno area, first at the service of Cesare Borgia, a cardinal from the most notorious noble family in Renaissance Italy, and then for Piero Soderini, a statesman of the Republic of Florence.



https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesig ... a-backdrop

Chilidog wrote: ↑Fri May 05, 2023 12:43 pm It's a mixed media print. I was able to track down the artist. It was produced ~1985 or so.

According to an e-mail from the artist "This piece was done based on the feelings that followed a broken dream or hope. It is a hand colored etching with gold ink and collaged papers in red."

Not bad for $50

Annrc wrote: ↑Sat May 06, 2023 12:48 pm Love this! Is this the Navajo Mine? I imagine this is for reclamation? Cool!

bill_g wrote: ↑Sat May 06, 2023 1:15 pm

Annrc wrote: ↑Sat May 06, 2023 12:48 pm Love this! Is this the Navajo Mine? I imagine this is for reclamation? Cool!

Yes, it is for NTEC (Navajo Transitional Energy Co). How Navajo it is I don't know, but it is a very active mine. The exposed coal face is almost two miles wide and 100ft tall. "Reclamation" occurs concurrently. The overburden is removed and placed in closed areas. Here's a Google Earth screen capture from July of 2022. The satellite was overhead at the moment they blasted in the West Pit. That's about one half square mile.

bill_g wrote: ↑Sat May 06, 2023 11:47 am Though not fine art, I did get paid a small sum to produce a series of propogation plots for the Antelope Mine in Wyoming. Here's a sample. I think it would look good 10ft across and 5ft high on a great wall at the airport or such.

northland10 wrote: ↑Sun May 07, 2023 7:09 am Data art.

Two exceptionally rare Rembrandt portraits long forgotten by scholars of the Dutch master have been rediscovered after almost two centuries by a British auctioneer, who stumbled upon the works during a routine valuation of a family’s private art collection.

The oval-shaped oil portraits, signed and dated by Rembrandt van Rijn in 1635, depict a wealthy elderly couple in Leiden, Netherlands. The two were linked to the painter through their son, who had married into Rembrandt’s family.

“The pictures were completely absent from the Rembrandt literature in the 19th and 20th centuries, which was extraordinary,” Henry Pettifer, an expert in Old Masters at Christie’s auction house, said in announcing the find Monday. “They have intimacy about them, a dignity. They’re extraordinary.”

The original paintings were last seen by the public in 1824, the year they were sold to the ancestors of their current owners, who Christie’s said were unaware that both were confirmed originals.

Tiredretiredlawyer wrote: ↑Tue May 16, 2023 8:41 am https://www.openculture.com/2023/05/how ... hetic.html

‘Mad and offensive’ texts shed light on the role played by minstrels in medieval society
The Heege Manuscript which ‘pokes fun at everyone, high and low’ is among the earliest evidence of the life and work of a real minstrel

Sarah Shaffi
Wed 31 May 2023 06.00 BST

From mocking kings and priests to encouraging audiences to get drunk, newly discovered texts at the National Library of Scotland have shed light on the role played by minstrels in medieval society.

Containing the earliest recorded use of the term “red herring” in English, the texts are part of a booklet known as the Heege Manuscript. Dr James Wade of the University of Cambridge, who discovered them, said echoes of minstrel humour can be found “in shows such as Mock the Week, situational comedies and slapstick”.

“The self-irony and making audiences the butt of the joke are still very characteristic of British standup comedy,” he added.

Throughout the middle ages, minstrels travelled between fairs, taverns and baronial halls to entertain people with songs and stories. Although fictional minstrels are common in medieval literature, references to real-life performers are rare, and the Heege Manuscript is among the first evidence of the life and work of a real minstrel.

Dr James Wade: ‘To get an insight into someone like that from this period is incredibly rare and exciting.’ Photograph: University of Cambridge
Wade, from Cambridge’s English faculty and Girton College, said that most “medieval poetry, song and storytelling has been lost”.

“Manuscripts often preserve relics of high art,” he continued. “This is something else. It’s mad and offensive, but just as valuable. Standup comedy has always involved taking risks and these texts are risky! They poke fun at everyone, high and low.”

The texts consist of a tail-rhyme burlesque romance entitled The Hunting of the Hare, a mock sermon in prose and an alliterative nonsense verse The Battle of Brackonwet. They were copied circa 1480 by Richard Heege, a household cleric and tutor to a Derbyshire family called the Sherbrookes, from a now lost memory-aid written by an unknown minstrel performing near the Derbyshire-Nottinghamshire border.



https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/ ... al-society

johnpcapitalist wrote: ↑Tue May 16, 2023 3:19 pm

Tiredretiredlawyer wrote: ↑Tue May 16, 2023 8:41 am https://www.openculture.com/2023/05/how ... hetic.html

What I remember about Nagel's works more than the artistic value was the massive industry he built. When he was hot in the early 1980s, I had neighbors who were extremely passionate collectors. Every wall had a Nagel something on it. You could never tell whether something was an original one-off piece, a limited edition, a serigraph, or any one of numerous semi-mass-produced pieces that had some varying degree of exclusivity and a correspondingly varying price point. The appeal was to less-sophisticated collectors with a certain amount of money but not well-developed tastes of their own who wanted something that their friends would recognize, and which would afford them a certain amount of cachet.

I put Nagel in with other art empires like R. C. Gorman (Southwest art), Thomas Kincade (schmaltzy Old English country and Christmas scenes) and Dale Chihuly (glass art). Kincade's exploits in opening up a chain of galleries to sell his stuff were rife with financial fraud that brought the wrath of the SEC down on the company in the 1990s. I was also amused by Kincaid's targeting of the evangelical crowd, when he tuned many of his works to incorporate angels and other religious symbolism. Other than his philandering, alcoholism and financial misbehavior, he was a perfectly upstanding man of God.

Gorman just cranked out so much stuff that his $5,000 paintings never appreciated in price while he was alive (not sure it's gone through the roof after his demise, either). It all looked the same after a while. While I liked SW art in the 1980s, I'm glad I didn't save up for one of those. Instead, I bought one original Southwestern themed work from a lesser-known artist that I enjoy every time I walk in my front door.

Chihuly is a special case. He more or less singlehandledly rescued the practice of studio glass art in the country from the brink of death in the 1960s with extremely innovative forms that nobody else was doing. Virtually everyone in studio glass today owes him a massive debt. His early stuff is (appropriately) highly coveted by collectors because of its importance in the history of the movement. However, he turned into a complete commercial whore and has countless apprentices cranking out huge volumes of product within carefully prescribed guidelines, which he signs and charges lots of money for. My sister has met him and confirms that he's a thoroughly unpleasant human being with a mammoth ego. I abhor his years of rampant commercialism, but I have to honor who he was in the early days at the same time. Tough cognitive dissonance there.