segunda-feira, 22 de novembro de 2010

Elihu Vedder










Biography
Elihu Vedder (1836, New York City - 1923) was an American symbolist painter, book illustrator, and poet.

After studying in Europe, Vedder returned to the USA, penniless, during the American Civil War, and made a small living by undertaking commercial illustrations. In the USA he sought out and became friends with Walt Whitman, Herman Melville and William Morris Hunt. Vedder became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1865.

At the end of the Civil War he left America to live in Italy. He married an American student in Italy in 1866. He had a home in Rome and - after the financial success of his 1884 Rubaiyat work - on the Isle of Capri, then a haven for gay male aesthetes. Like Oscar Wilde, he was married and fathered children; but is now widely considered to have been a gay artist.

Vedder visited England many times, and was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, and was a friend of Simeon Solomon. He was also influenced by the work of English and Irish mystics such as William Blake and William Butler Yeats. In 1890 Vedder helped establish the In Arte Libertas group in Italy.

Tiffany commissioned him to design glassware, mosaics and statuettes for the company. He decorated the hallway of the Reading Room of the Washington Library of Congress, and his mural paintings can still be seen there.

He occasionally returned to the USA, but lived only in Italy from 1906.

sexta-feira, 5 de novembro de 2010

Ícaros, ou mitos de chão - Natalia Gennadievna Govorkova






Deadline

Carta aos Coríntios

Tendão de Aquiles / Ахиллесова пята

BACH Toccata & Fugue D minor BWV 565

Fuga do Minotauro / Побег Минотавра

Porta de Tróia

Ícaros
Natalia Gennadievna Govorkova, Lisboa, Novembro 2010

Sensualité et volupté au noveau musée départemental de Flandre



Découvrez "Sensualité et volupté" au nouveau musée départemental de Flandre sur Culturebox !

Patrick Marty auteur de la BD franco chinoise Juge Bao



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Martine Frizza et ses corps de femmes nus



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L`Iceberg, un spectacle sur la délinquance financière coécrit par Denis Robert



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segunda-feira, 1 de novembro de 2010

Frank Kortan







http://www.frank-kortan.com/en/oel.htm

An artist of transcendental intimacy
When perceiving the artistic creation of Frank Kortan we are down, if we want to apply the methods and clichés of classical art history. We have to turn to the newest spiritual and theoretical conceptions from various fields of anthropology. We are led to it by honest intentions to get into the aesthetics of Frank Kortan. The inspirations of artistic creation of this painter are near to the surrealistic aesthetics of free imaginations and associations, the experience of subconscious and nonconscious defined by Freud. But not everything created by Kortan can be explained in this way. According to him antitheses cease to be "real or imaginative"; he is a follower of the relativity of existence. When contemplating of Kortan's artistic creation we remember the words of André Breton from the Second Manifesto of Surrealism. He says that the aim of a surrealistic activity is to define "a certain spiritual point from which life and death, real and imaginative, past and present, notifiable and unnotifiable, high and low cease to be perceived as antitheses." Kortan's everyday motives express his love of dreaming which has been named "via regia" - nonconsciousness. Nevertheless, we cannot confine the perception of Kortan to classical psychoanalysis. It seems to us that the most thruthful are concepts, which Gaston Bachelard applied in his Phenomenology of Dreaming where he distinguished the values of dream. In this respect Kortan is a master of absolute dream and half-dream. In his paintings full of "old" and "new" eternity we register something, which is named "dreaming about dreaming". Kortan's absolute dream of a night sleep is in fact a Universe. We acquaint with Kortan's animism: nothing is death in his still lives - everything is live. The activity of subconsciousness is evident: one motive is replaced by another; psychical accents are transferred to other ones. Aesthetic condensation defined by psychoanalyses is substantial: two - or more - imaginations combine and create more complex imagination with deeper meaning and stronger energy. We register out-of-sensuous perception, especially the transfer of aesthetic meanings. As a matter of fact, Kortan is one of world avant-gardists because his paintings are near to "individual mythology" which is focused on the retrospective classification of the past and inspired by the "tracks of human civilisation" and which emphasises "the re-vitalisation of fragments". While Anne and Patrick Poirier look for archeological inspirations, Nikolaus Lang depicts the atmosphere of a Bavarian family and Jürgen Brodwolf paints miniature shop-windows, Frank Kortan confines himself neither to a metaphor nor a concrete event. We have to point out to Kortan's aesthetics, which reflects the out-of-sensuous psychology of C.A.Mace who presupposes the existence of a "psychical ether" through which the waves of thought spread and in which the tracks of events remain. In addition, the aspect of temptation is presumed. If he did not admire the symbolic-sexual aspects of a woman nude, he would not be a surrealist. Nevertheless, in his artistic creation these aspects oscillate between latent, evident and mysterious. These are the symbols of woman. As noncousciousness follows the principles of delight and not reality - as we know from psychoanalysis - Kortan expresses the eternity of delight. He reminds the words by Nietzsche on his tablet in Sils-Maria See in Upper Engadin: "Every delight is eternity". Kortan invites to introspection and purification from the sentimentality of civilisation. He wants a man to be immune against any tie resulted from work and the world of things. In this respect he is "transcendental". In this respect we can cite an idea from Indian spiritual culture: "A work which does not cause any tie is a work with transcendental result, i.e. karma-yoga." Kortan does not aim at the Absolute Personality of the Deity: he represents a happy soul and wants everybody to be like him ...Prof. Dr. Miroslav Klivar, member of The American Society for Aesthetics


Sanna Tomac


Sanna Tomac has painted all her life, but moved by the war in Croatia, she became a Red Cross registered nurse in 1995. She studied drawing and painting at the Florence Academy of Art, in Florence, Italy from 1996-1998 and afterward studied with the painter Odd Nerdrum in Norway. In 2001, along with her husband Hans-Peter Szameit, she founded Pantura Studios in the United States where together they taught a growing group of students who came from across the country and abroad. In early 2006 they moved to Stockholm, Sweden and founded The Swedish Academy of Realist Art/Atelier Stockholm (www.atelierstockholm.se), the first school of its kind in Northern Europe. Her paintings and drawings can be found in public and private collections throughout the world.