Archive for August, 2010

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August 31, 2010

Chris Ofili


Chris Ofili (born 10 October 1968) is a Turner Prize winning British painter best known for artworks referencing aspects of his Nigerian heritage, particularly his incorporation of elephant dung. He was one of the Young British Artists, and is now based in Trinidad.

Ofili was established through exhibitions by Charles Saatchi at his gallery in north London and the traveling exhibition Sensation (1997) becoming recognized as one of the few British artists of African/Caribbean descent to break through as a member of the Young British Artists group. Ofili has also had numerous solo shows since the early 1990s including the Serpentine Gallery. In 1998, Ofili won the Turner Prize, and in 2003 he was selected to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale of that year, where his work for the British Pavilion was done in collaboration with the architect David Adjaye.

No Woman No Cry by Chris Ofili (1998). The painting stands on two dried, varnished lumps of elephant dung. A third is used as the pendant of the necklace.

In 1992 he won a scholarship which allowed him to travel to Zimbabwe. Ofili, who is of Nigerian descent, studied cave paintings there, which had some effect on his style. Though Ofili’s detractors often state that he “splatters” elephant dung on his pictures, this is inaccurate: he sometimes applies it directly to the canvas in the form of dried spherical lumps, and sometimes, in the same form, uses it as varnished foot-like supports on which the paintings stand.

Ofili’s painting also reference blaxploitation films and gangsta rap, seeking to question racial and sexual stereotypes in a humorous way. His work is often built up in layers of paint, resin, glitter, dung (mainly elephant) and other materials to create a collage.

Ofili has been founder and prime mover behind the short-lived Freeness Project. This involved the coming together of artists, producers and musicians of minority ethnic groups (Asian and African) in an attempt to expose the music that may be unheard in other spaces.

Freeness allowed the creativity of unsigned contemporary British ethnic minority artists to be heard. The result of months of tours to 10 cities in the UK resulted in Freeness Volume 1 – a compilation of works that were shown during the tour.

Ofili is represented by Victoria Miro Gallery, London and David Zwirner, New York.

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August 30, 2010

Robert Indiana

Robert Indiana was born Robert Clark in New Castle, Indiana. His family relocated to Indianapolis, where he graduated from Arsenal Technical High School. He moved to New York City in 1954 and joined the pop art movement, using distinctive imagery drawing on commercial art approaches blended with existentialism, that gradually moved toward what Indiana calls “sculptural poems”.

In 1962, Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery hosted Robert Indiana’s first New York solo exhibition. He has since enjoyed solo exhibitions at over 30 museums and galleries worldwide. Indiana’s works are in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including Museum of Modern Art, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Schiedam, The Netherlands; Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; Detroit Institute of Art, Michigan; Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; Brandeis Museum, Waltham, Massachusetts; Albright-Knox Gallery of Art, Buffalo, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C.; Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and the Los Angeles County Museum, California, among many many others.

Indiana’s work often consists of bold, simple, iconic images, especially numbers and short words like EAT, HUG, and, his best known example, LOVE.  Ahava (אהבה “love” in Hebrew), Cor-ten steel sculpture by Robert Indiana (American), 1977, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel

Indiana’s iconic work LOVE was first created for a Christmas card for the Museum of Modern Art in 1964 and later was included on an eight-cent United States Postal Service postage stamp in 1973, the first of their regular series of “love stamps.” Sculptural versions of the image have been installed at numerous American and international locations. In 1977 he created a Hebrew version with the four letter word Ahava (אהבה “love” in Hebrew) using Cor-ten steel, for the Israel Museum Art Garden in Jerusalem, Israel.

In 2008, Indiana created an image similar to his iconic LOVE (letters stacked two to a line, the letter “o” tilted on its side), but this time showcasing the word “HOPE,” and donated all proceeds from the sale of reproductions of his image to Democrat Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, Raising in excess of $1,000,000. A stainless steel sculpture of HOPE was unveiled outside Denver’s Pepsi Center during the 2008 Democratic National Convention. The Obama campaign sold T-shirts, pins, bumper stickers, posters, pins and other items adorned with HOPE. Editions of the sculpture have been released and sold internationally and the artist himself has called HOPE “Love’s close relative”.

Other well-known works by Indiana including: his painting the unique basketball court formerly used by the Milwaukee Bucks in that city’s U.S. Cellular Arena, with a large M shape taking up each half of the court; his sculpture in the lobby of Taipei 101, called 1-0 (2002, aluminum), uses multicoloured numbers to suggest the conduct of world trade and the patterns of human life; and the works he created in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks and exhibited in New York in 2004 called the Peace Paintings.

Indiana has lived as a resident in the island town of Vinalhaven, Maine since 1978. Indiana has been a theatrical set and costume designer, such as the 1976 production by the Santa Fe Opera of Virgil Thomson’s The Mother of Us All, based on the life of suffragist Susan B. Anthony. He was the star of Andy Warhol’s film Eat (1964), which is a 45-minute film of Indiana eating a mushroom in his SoHo loft.

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August 30, 2010

Piero Fornasetti


Piero Fornasetti (November 10, 1913-1988) was an Italian painter, sculptor, interior decorator and engraver.

He lived most of life in Milan, attending the Brera Art Academy from 1930-32 when he was expelled for insubordination. During World War II, he went into exile in Switzerland from 1943-46. He created more than 11,000 items, many featuring the face of a woman, operatic soprano Lina Cavalieri, as a motif. Fornasetti found her face in a 19th century magazine. “What inspired me to create more than 500 variations on the face of a woman?” asks Italian designer, Piero Fornasetti of himself. “I don’t know,” he admits, “I began to make them and I never stopped.” The “Tema e Variazioni” (theme and variation) plate series based on Cavalieri’s face numbered more than 350.

Other common features in his work include heavy use of black and white, the sun and time. His style is reminiscent of Greek and Roman architecture, from which he was heavily influenced.

Today it is most common to see Fornasetti’s style in fashion and room accessories such as scarfs, ties, lamps, furniture, china plates and tables.

His son, Barnaba Fornasetti, continues to design in his father’s name.

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August 30, 2010

Josef Albers

Josef Albers (March 19, 1888 – March 25, 1976) was a German-born American artist and educator whose work, both in Europe and in the United States, formed the basis of some of the most influential and far-reaching art education programs of the 20th century.

He studied art in Berlin, Essen, and Munich, before enrolling as a student at the prestigious Weimar Bauhaus in 1920. He began teaching in the preliminary course of the Department of Design in 1922, and was promoted to Professor in 1925, the year the Bauhaus moved to Dessau. His work at this time included designing furniture and working with glass. At this time he married Anni Albers (née Fleischmann) who was also a student at the Bauhaus.

With the closure of the Bauhaus under Nazi pressure in 1933, Albers emigrated to the United States and joined the faculty of Black Mountain College, North Carolina, where he ran the painting program until 1949. At Black Mountain his students included Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Ray Johnson and Susan Weil. Weil remarked that as a teacher, Albers was “his own academy” and said that Albers claimed that “when you’re in school, you’re not an artist, you’re a student”, though he was very supportive of self-expression when one became an artist and began his or her journey.Albers produced many woodcuts and leaf studies at this time.

In 1950 Albers left Black Mountain to head the Department of Design at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. While at Yale, Albers worked to expand the nascent graphic design program (then called “graphic arts”), hiring designers Alvin Eisenman, Herbert Matter and Alvin Lustig.Albers worked at Yale until he retired from teaching in 1958. In 1962, as a fellow at Yale, he received a grant from the Graham Foundation for an exhibit and lecture on his work. At Yale, Richard Anuszkiewicz and Eva Hesse were notable students.  Albers also collaborated with Yale professor and architect King-lui Wu in creating decorative designs for some of Wu’s projects. Among these were distinctive geometric fireplaces for the Rouse (1954) and DuPont (1959) houses, the façade of Manuscript Society, one of Yale’s secret senior groups (1962), and a design for the Mt. Bethel Baptist Church (1973). Also, at this time he worked on his structural constellation pieces. In 1963 he published Interaction of Color which presented his theory that colors were governed by an internal and deceptive logic. Also during this time, he created the abstract album covers of band leader Enoch Light’s Command LP records. Albers continued to paint and write, staying in New Haven with his wife, textile artist Anni Albers, until his death in 1976.

Accomplished as a designer, photographer, typographer, printmaker and poet, Albers is best remembered for his work as an abstract painter and theorist. He favored a very disciplined approach to composition. Most famous of all are the hundreds of paintings and prints that make up the series Homage to the Square. In this rigorous series, begun in 1949, Albers explored chromatic interactions with flat colored squares arranged concentrically. Painting usually on Masonite, he used a palette knife with oil colors and often recorded colors used on the back of his works.

In 1971 (nearly five years before his death), Albers founded the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, a non-profit organization he hoped would further “the revelation and evocation of vision through art.” Today, this organization not only serves as the office Estate of both Josef Albers and his wife Anni Albers, but also supports exhibitions and publications focused on Albers works. The official Foundation building is located in Bethany, Connecticut and “includes a central research and archival storage center to accommodate the Foundation’s art collections, library and archives, and offices, as well as residence studios for visiting artists.”The U.S. copyright representative for the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation is the Artists Rights Society. The executive director of the foundation is Nicholas Fox Weber, an author of fourteen books.The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation is represented by The Pace Gallery, New York.

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August 12, 2010

Millau Viaduct France – Extreme Engineering

Millau Viaduct France (In French le Viaduc de Millau) is one of the most awesome civil engineering project. It is a large cable-stayed road-bridge that spans the valley of the River Tarn near Millau in France. It was designed by structural engineer Michel Virlogeux and architect Norman Foster.  One of the summit of this bridge is at a height of 343 meters)1125 ft) which makes it is the tallest vehicular bridge in the world.
The Millau Viaduct consists of an eight-span steel roadway supported by seven concrete pylons. The roadway weighs 36,000 tons and is 2,460 m (8,100 ft) long, measuring 32 m (100 ft) wide by 4.2 m (14 ft) deep, making it the world’s longest cable-stayed deck. The six central spans each measure 342 m (1,120 ft) with the two outer spans measuring 204 m (670 ft). The roadway has a slope of 3% descending from south to north, and curves in a plane section with a 20 km (12 mi) radius to give drivers better visibility. It carries two lanes of traffic and one safety lane in each direction.

The pylons range in height from 77 m (250 ft) to 246 m (810 ft), and taper in their longitudinal section from 24.5 m (80 ft) at the base to 11 m (36 ft) at the deck. Each pylon is composed of 16 framework sections, each weighing 2,230 tons. These sections were assembled on site from pieces of 60 tons, 4 m (13 ft) wide and 17 m (56 ft) long, made in factories in Lauterbourg and Fos-sur-Mer by Eiffage. The pylons each support 97 m (320 ft) tall masts.

The pylons were assembled first, together with some intermediate temporary pylons, before the decks were slid out across the piers by satellite-guided hydraulic rams that moved the deck 600 mm every 4 minutes. Then the masts were driven over the new deck, erected on top of the pylons, connected to the deck and the temporary pylons removed.

Construction began on 10 October 2001 and was intended to take three years, but weather conditions put work on the bridge behind schedule. A revised schedule aimed for the bridge to be opened in January 2005. The viaduct was inaugurated by President Chirac on 14 December 2004 to open for traffic on 16 December, several weeks ahead of the revised schedule.


Article from engineeringcivil.com

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August 5, 2010

James Coburn

James Harrison Coburn, Jr.(August 31, 1928 – November 18, 2002) was an American film and television actor who appeared in nearly 70 films and made over 100 television appearances during his 45-year career.He played a wide range of roles and won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor as Glen Whitehouse in the film Affliction.

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August 5, 2010

Slim Aaron


Slim Aarons, born George Allen Aarons (October 29, 1916, Manhattan – May 29, 2006, Montrose, New York), was an American photographer noted for photographing socialites, jet-setters and celebrities.

At 18 years old, Aarons enlisted in the U.S. Army, working as a photographer at West Point and later serving as a combat photographer in World War II and earning a Purple Heart. Aarons said that combat had taught him that the only beach worth landing on was “decorated with beautiful, seminude girls tanning in a tranquil sun.”

After the war, Aarons moved to California and began photographing celebrities. In California, he shot his most praised photo, Kings of Hollywood, a 1957 New’s Year’s Eve photograph depicting Clark Gable, Van Heflin, Gary Cooper and James Stewart relaxing at a bar in full formal wear. Aaron’s work appeared in Life, Town & Country and Holiday magazines.

Aarons never used a stylist, or a makeup artist.

Aarons made his career out of what he called “photographing attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places.” “I knew everyone,” he said in an interview with The (London) Independent in 2002. “They would invite me to one of their parties because they knew I wouldn’t hurt them. I was one of them.” Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Rear Window, whose main character is a photographer played by Jimmy Stewart, is set in an apartment reputed to be based on Aarons’s apartment. He died in 2006, and was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Poolside with Slim Aarons

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August 5, 2010

Truman Capote

Truman Capote September 30, 1924 – August 25, 1984) was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) and In Cold Blood (1965), which he labeled a “nonfiction novel.” At least 20 films and television dramas have been produced from Capote novels, stories and screenplays.

Capote rose above a childhood troubled by divorce, a long absence from his mother and multiple migrations. He discovered his calling by the age of eleven, and for the rest of his childhood he honed his writing ability. Capote began his professional career writing short stories. The critical success of one story, “Miriam” (1945), attracted the attention of Random House publisher Bennett Cerf, resulting in a contract to write Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). Capote earned the most fame with In Cold Blood (1965), a journalistic work about the murder of a Kansas farm family in their home, a book Capote spent four years writing.A milestone in popular culture, it was the peak of his career, although it was not his final book. In the 1970s, he maintained his celebrity status by appearing on television talk shows.

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August 5, 2010

Lise Sarfati

Link

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Lise Sarfati was born in 1958.   Four years ago, the French photographer traveled across the United States, photographing young adults, and published them in a book called The New Life. The photographs are dramatic, while ordinary. She portrays her subjects in a highly charged light – even if they seem bored, the photographs are anything but boring. She attempts to examine the complex emotional states of mind of her subjects.

In an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian, Lise talks about her process of photographing, as well as this particular image [girl in the red wig]

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August 5, 2010

Gram parsons

Nudie Cohn and Gram Parsons.

Gram Parsons (November 5, 1946 – September 19, 1973) was an American singer, songwriter, guitarist and pianist. Parsons is best known for his work within the country genre; he also mixed blues, folk, and rock to create what he called “Cosmic American Music”. Besides recording as a solo artist, he also worked in several notable bands, including the International Submarine Band, The Byrds and The Flying Burrito Brothers. His career, though short, is described by Allmusic as “enormously influential” for both country and rock, “blending the two genres to the point that they became indistinguishable from each other.”

Born in 1946, Parsons emerged from a troubled childhood to attend Harvard University. He founded the International Submarine Band in 1966, and after several months of delay their debut, Safe at Home, was released in 1968, by which time the group had disbanded. Parsons joined The Byrds in early 1968, and played a pivotal role in the making of the seminal Sweetheart of the Rodeo album. After leaving the group in late 1968, Parsons and fellow Byrd Chris Hillman formed The Flying Burrito Brothers in 1969, releasing their debut, The Gilded Palace of Sin, the same year. The album was well received but failed commercially; after a sloppy cross-country tour, they hastily recorded Burrito Deluxe. Parsons was fired from the band before its release in early 1970. He soon signed with A&M Records, but after several unproductive sessions he canceled his intended solo debut in early 1971. Parsons moved to France, where he lived for a short period at Villa Nellcôte with his friend Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones. Returning to America, Parsons befriended Emmylou Harris, who assisted him on vocals for his first solo record, GP, released in 1973. Although it received enthusiastic reviews, the release failed to chart; his next album, Grievous Angel (released posthumously in 1974) met with a similar reception, and peaked at number 195 on Billboard. Parsons died of a drug overdose on September 19, 1973 in a hotel room in Joshua Tree, California, at the age of 26.

Since his death, Parsons has been recognized as an extremely influential artist, credited with helping to found both country rock and alt-country. His posthumous honors include the Americana Music Association “President’s Award” for 2003, and a ranking at #87 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 Most Influential Artists of All Time.

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