Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.

Cecil Beaton

Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton (14 January 1904 – 18 January 1980) was an English fashion and portrait photographer and an Academy Award-winning stage and costume designer for films and the theatre.

Avoiding sports as a child, Cecil Beaton learned photography from his nanny on her Kodak 3A, and avoiding academics at Cambridge, which he left without a degree in 1925, he took his first published photo, printed in Vogue, of one of England’s leading Shakespearean scholars dressed in drag: To be exact, George “Dadie” Rylands, a Cambridge Fellow for 72 years, was costumed as Webster’s the Duchess of Malfi. From there Beaton had to go work for his father’s timber company, which he suffered for eight miserable days. After that he returned to his rightful place in the world in design, creating book jackets and studying photography until Vogue hired him fulltime in 1927. Although his style is flowery and theatrical, many of his most enduring images are serious people captured at critical times: a tense Churchill in 1940, Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation portrait, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s wedding portrait. During the war, he volunteered and was posted to the Ministry of Information, capturing images of the Blitz, its young injured on the cover of Life, and RAF pilots in their cockpit. Broadly talented, Beaton designed the lighting, sets, and costumes for many Broadway musicals, winning four Tony Awards, and for several Hollywood extravaganzas, winning the Oscar for best costumes twice, for Gigi and most famously for his high camp creations in My Fair Lady. Although he never consummated his longtime, unrequited love for Peter Watson, a gay art collector whose interests lay elsewhere, Beaton did enjoy possibly the greatest consolation prize of the twentieth century, an affair with Gary Cooper. For his entire life, he kept his childhood diary in which he first realized he was a “terrible, terrible homosexualist” and that shame never fully disappeared, driving him to a few misguided affairs with women later in his life, including one with Greta Garbo, who dumped him and went back to women. When he was seventy he suffered a major stroke that left him partially paralyzed, and though he adapted to drawing and photographing with his left hand, he never recovered his earlier ease. He died six years later, in 1980.
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/2326454/25115394

A painter paints the appearance of things, not their objective correctness, in fact he creates new appearances of things.

Happy Birthday Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Ernst Kirchner was born in Aschaffenburg in 1880. He studied architecture in the Technische Hochschule at Dresdon, and painting in Munich. In 1905, he and his colleagues founded the Die Brücke group. He was the leader among the German Expressionists at the time. His life took a new turn in 1911 when he moved to Berlin. Urban scenes attracted Kirchner’s attention and he devoted himself to capturing this imagery. During the Second World War, the Nazis confiscated 600 of Kircherner’s works.

 The Influences

In 1911, Kirchner moved to Berlin and the complexity of Berlin’s urban panorama prompted him to capture it on canvas. Berlin’s social life, the women, the glamour and all of Berlin’s artificiality were captured by Kirchner’s “bold lines and clashing colors.” The First World War was soon to follow and it would deeply effect Kirchner’s concentration on his art.

Kirchner participated in the field artillery of the First World War. He served in the 75th Artillery Regiment. However, in October 1915, he was discharged because of lung disease and because of several nervous breakdowns. His self-portrait as a soldier–“Selbstbildnis als Soldat,” which was painted upon his return to Berlin from the fields, is a good representation of the mental scars the war had left on him. He painted himself in the uniform he wore while in service; in the painting his hand has been mutilated and he can no longer hold a paintbrush to continue painting the model that appears in the foreground.

This painting reveals that “[Kirchner] feels as if he has been maimed, his right hand cut off, owing to the impossibility of pain. His face is screwed up in a tense grimace, with a cigarette dangling from his lips; this is an expression of the brutalization of the human relation of people and the loss of human relationships…”

Although this mutilation was just a symbolic one, the artist, in fact, would never recover from the persecutions of the Nazis. Later in the Second World War, the Nazis condemned him as a degenerate artist and confiscated 600 of his works. Kirchner was unable to handle so much hatred and he committed suicide on June 15, 1938.

http://library.thinkquest.org/C005707F/kirchner.htm

 

 

 

Art is the triumph over chaos.

John Cheever

John Cheever (May 27, 1912–June 18, 1982) was an American novelist and short story writer, sometimes called “the Chekhov of the suburbs” or “the Ovid of Ossining.” His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs, and old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born. Cheever is perhaps best remembered for his short stories (including “The Enormous Radio,” “Goodbye, My Brother,” “The Five-Forty-Eight,” “The Country Husband,” and “The Swimmer“), but also wrote a number of novels, such as The Wapshot Chronicle (National Book Award, 1958), The Wapshot Scandal (William Dean Howells Medal, 1965), Bullet Park, and Falconer. His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character’s decorous social persona and inner corruption, and sometimes as a conflict between two characters (often brothers) who embody the salient aspects of both–light and dark, flesh and spirit. Many of his works also express a nostalgia for a vanishing way of life (as evoked by the mythical St. Botolphs in the Wapshot novels), characterized by abiding cultural traditions and a profound sense of community, as opposed to the alienating nomadism of modern suburbia. A compilation of his short stories, The Stories of John Cheever, won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. On April 27, 1982, six weeks before his death, Cheever was awarded the National Medal for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cheever

Art should be something that liberates your soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further.”

Happy 50th Birthday Keith Haring

Keith Haring was born on May 4, 1958 in Reading, Pennsylvania, and was raised in nearby Kutztown, Pennsylvania. He developed a love for drawing at a very early age, learning basic cartooning skills from his father and from the popular culture around him, such as Dr. Seuss and Walt Disney.

Upon graduation from high school in 1976, Haring enrolled in the Ivy School of Professional Art in Pittsburgh, a commercial arts school. He soon realized that he had little interest in becoming a commercial graphic artist and, after two semesters, dropped out. While in Pittsburgh, Haring continued to study and work on his own and in 1978 had a solo exhibition of his work at the Pittsburgh Arts and Crafts Center.

Later that same year, Haring moved to New York City and enrolled in the School of Visual Arts (SVA). In New York, Haring found a thriving alternative art community that was developing outside the gallery and museum system, in the downtown streets, the subways and spaces in clubs and former dance halls. Here he became friends with fellow artists Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat, as well as the musicians, performance artists and graffiti writers that comprised the burgeoning art community. Haring was swept up in the energy and spirit of this scene and began to organize and participate in exhibitions and performances at Club 57 and other alternative venues.

In addition to being impressed by the innovation and energy of his contemporaries, Haring was also inspired by the work of Jean Dubuffet, Pierre Alechinsky, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Robert Henri’s manifesto The Art Spirit, which asserted the fundamental independence of the artist. With these influences Haring was able to push his own youthful impulses toward a singular kind of graphic expression based on the primacy of the line. Also drawn to the public and participatory nature of Christo’s work, in particular Running Fence, and by Andy Warhol’s unique fusion of art and life, Haring was determined to devote his career to creating a truly public art.

As a student at SVA, Haring experimented with performance, video, installation and collage, while always maintaining a strong commitment to drawing. In 1980, Haring found a highly effective medium that allowed him to communicate with the wider audience he desired, when he noticed the unused advertising panels covered with matte black paper in a subway station. He began to create drawings in white chalk upon these blank paper panels throughout the subway system. Between 1980 and 1985, Haring produced hundreds of these public drawings in rapid rhythmic lines, sometimes creating as many as forty “subway drawings” in one day. This seamless flow of images became familiar to New York commuters, who often would stop to engage the artist when they encountered him at work. The subway became, as Haring said, a “laboratory” for working out his ideas and experimenting with his simple lines.

Between 1980 and 1989, Haring achieved international recognition and participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions. His first solo exhibition in New York.was held at the Westbeth Painters Space in 1981.  In 1982, he made his Soho gallery debut with an immensely popular and highly acclaimed one-man exhibition at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery. During this period, he also participated in renowned international survey exhibitions such as Documenta 7 in Kassel; the São Paulo Biennial; and the Whitney Biennial. Haring completed numerous public projects in the first half of the 80’s as well, ranging from an animation for the Spectacolor billboard in Times Square, designing sets and backdrops for theaters and clubs, developing watch designs for Swatch and an advertising campaign for Absolut vodka; and creating murals worldwide.

In April 1986, Haring opened the Pop Shop, a retail store in Soho selling T-shirts, toys, posters, buttons and magnets bearing his images. Haring considered the shop to be an extension of his work and painted the entire interior of the store in an abstract black on white mural, creating a striking and unique retail environment. The shop was intended to allow people greater access to his work, which was now readily available on products at a low cost. The shop received criticism from many in the art world, however Haring remained committed to his desire to make his artwork available to as wide an audience as possible, and received strong support for his project from friends, fans and mentors including Andy Warhol.

Throughout his career, Haring devoted much of his time to public works, which often carried social messages. He produced more than 50 public artworks between 1982 and 1989, in dozens of cities around the world, many of which were created for charities, hospitals, children’s day care centers and orphanages. The now famous Crack is Wack mural of 1986 has become a landmark along New York’s FDR Drive. Other projects include; a mural created for the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty in 1986, on which Haring worked with 900 children; a mural on the exterior of Necker Children’s Hospital in Paris, France in 1987; and a mural painted on the western side of the Berlin Wall three years before its fall. Haring also held drawing workshops for children in schools and museums in New York, Amsterdam, London, Tokyo and Bordeaux, and produced imagery for many literacy programs and other public service campaigns.

Haring was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988. In 1989, he established the Keith Haring Foundation, its mandate being to provide funding and imagery to AIDS organizations and children’s programs, and to expand the audience for Haring’s work through exhibitions, publications and the licensing of his images. Haring enlisted his imagery during the last years of his life to speak about his own illness and generate activism and awareness about AIDS.

During a brief but intense career that spanned the 1980s, Haring’s work was featured in over 100 solo and group exhibitions. In 1986 alone, he was the subject of more than 40 newspaper and magazine articles. He was highly sought after to participate in collaborative projects ,and worked with artists and performers as diverse as Madonna, Grace Jones, Bill T. Jones, William Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Jenny Holzer, Yoko Ono and Andy Warhol. By expressing universal concepts of birth, death, love, sex and war, using a primacy of line and directness of message, Haring was able to attract a wide audience and assure the accessibility and staying power of his imagery, which has become a universally recognized visual language of the 20th century.

Keith Haring died of AIDS related complications at the age of 31 on February 16, 1990. A memorial service was held on May 4, 1990 at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, with over 1,000 people in attendance.

Since his death, Haring has been the subject of several international retrospectives. The work of Keith Haring can be seen today in the exhibitions and collections of major museums around the world.

http://www.haring.com/about_haring/bio/index.html

 

The first thing to do in life is to do with purpose what one purposes to do.

Pablo Casals

Pablo Casals was regarded as one of the greatest cello players and composers (writers of music) of the twentieth century. He was also an active protester against oppressive governments (those that misuse their power and mistreat citizens), including that of the Spanish tyrant Francisco Franco (1892–1975).

Casals was born on December 29, 1876, in Vendrell, in the Catalonian region of Spain. He was the second of eleven children of Carlos Casals and Pilar Defillo de Casals. Casals’s father, the local church organist, would play the piano while the infant Casals rested his head against it and sang along. By the age of four Casals was playing the piano, and at five he joined the church choir. At six he was composing songs with his father, and by the age of nine he could play the violin and organ. From the age of ten Casals began each day with a walk, taking inspiration from nature. He would then play two Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) pieces on the piano when he returned home.

Sometime in 1890, while Casals and his father were in a Barcelona bookstore, he found a volume of Bach’s six suites (arrangements of music) for solo cello. Previously the suites were considered merely musical exercises, but Casals saw in them something deeper. He studied and practiced the suites every day for a dozen years before performing them publicly; he continued to play at least one suite every day for the rest of his life.

 Casals became interested in the cello after seeing the instrument in a music recital at age eleven; soon, his father built him one. His parents argued about his future; his father wanted him to study carpentry, but his mother would not hear of it and enrolled him in the Municipal School of Music in Barcelona, Spain. Casals clashed with his strict instructors, preferring to play the cello in his own, more expressive, manner. His progress was extraordinary, and Casals’s new way of playing made the cello a more popular instrument.

Casals’s performance of the suites shocked listeners by correcting the previously held belief that Bach’s solo music for strings had no warmth or artistic value. Casals’s love of Bach’s music carried over into the rest of his life. As he told José Maria Corredor in Conversations With Casals, “I am everyday more convinced that the main-spring of any human enterprise must be moral strength and generosity.” Casals came to understand the suffering of the poor as he walked the streets of Barcelona. He vowed to use his music to help his fellow people.

Casals often wrote letters and organized concerts on behalf of the oppressed, and he refused to perform in countries, such as the Soviet Union, Germany, and Italy, whose governments mistreated their citizens. After the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), when General Francisco Franco took power, Casals announced he would never return to Spain while Franco was in charge. He settled in Prades, France, and gave occasional concerts until 1946, when, to take a stand against tyrants such as Franco, Casals vowed never to perform again.

However, encouraged by friends, Casals resumed playing in 1950, participating in the Prades Festival organized to honor Bach. At the end of the festival and every concert he gave after that, Casals played “Song of the Birds,” a Catalonian folk song, to protest the continued oppression in Spain. In 1956 he settled in Puerto Rico and started the Casals Festival, which led to the creation of a symphony orchestra and a music school on the island. Casals never returned to Spain.

Casals also continued to refuse to perform in countries that officially recognized the Franco government. Until his death in 1973, Casals made only one exception—in 1961 he performed at the White House for U.S. President John F. Kennedy (1917–1963), a man he greatly admired. In 1971, at the age of ninety-five, he performed his “Hymn of the United Nations” before the United Nations General Assembly. Casals sought to inspire harmony among people, with both his cello and his silence.

http://www.notablebiographies.com/Ca-Ch/Casals-Pablo.html

A sincere artist is not one who makes a faithful attempt to put on to canvas what is in front of him, but one who tries to create something which is, in itself, a living thing.

William Dobell
 
 Apprentice architect to Wallace J. Porter, Newcastle, 1916-24; Julian Ashton’s School, Sydney (evening classes), 1924-29; Slade School, London, 1929; Holland, The Hague, 1930; the continent and London, independent study, 1931-39.

When Dobell returned to Sydney in 1939, after ten years abroad, his portrait and genre paintings added a new dimension to the stature of Australian painting. The assimilation of varied influences – the chiaroscuro of Rembrandt, satire and simplicity of Daumier, wit of Hogart, Renoir’s feathery brushstroke, and other features – appealed to all schools. The fact of having exhibited at the RA gained Dobell a cirtain conservative following, which remained until increasing numbers of returning Australian expatriates, and a growing body of migrant artists, claimed him as the figurehead of the Sydney modernist wartime movement.

The circumstances and pressures of the time, the life and environment of Sydney, soon gave his work a new, added vitality. With two other painters, James Cook and Joshua Smith, he engaged in war service, first in a camouflage unit and then in the Civil Construction Corps as a labourer before receiving an appointment as an official war artist. The CCC experience particularly provided a succession of portrait subjects that gave full scope to talents expressed with an underlying quality of Cockney whimsicality already evident in his pictures of London costermongers. His best portraits, The Billy Boy, The Strapper, Scotty Allan, The Cypriot, all resulted from this wartime period of inspiration.

In 1944 he made a final sensational break with local academic tradition by winning the 1943 Archibald prize with a portrait of his colleague, Joshua Smith. The notoriety resulting from this award made his name known throughout Australia, but it had an inhibiting effect on his work because of the disproportionate publicity attached to everything he painted afterwards. He was offered tempting commissions, many of which represented subjects quite alien to his temperament; after a life of comparative poverty in London for ten years, the sudden accession to fame and wealth did his work more harm than good.

In 1948 he attained further celebrity by winning the Archibald and Wynne prizes simultaneously, the Archibald with a baroque-styled portrait, Margaret Olley, the Wynne with a landscape, Storm Approaching, Wangi. He visited and worked in New Guinea, 1950-51, and on his return was commissioned by the Commonwealth Government to paint a landscape in celebration of Commonwealth Jubilee year.

Towards 1956 his health deteriorated and seemed in danger of total collapse; he celebrated his recovery with a third successful Archibald painting in 1959, the subject being his surgeon, Dr Edward McMahon. Dobell won the £1500 Australian Women’s Weekly portrait prize with a portrait of Helena Rubinstein in 1957, and Time magazine commissioned a cover portrait of the Prime Minister, the Rt Hon. Robert G. Menzies, in 1960. These events were to be the precursors of great changes not only in Dobell’s own affairs but also in the local status of all artists; by 1962 the economic status of artists throughout Australia bore little relationship to the conditions of 1939. Dobell was affected rather more than his contemporaries.

In 1962 he had the experience of seeing pictures for which he would probably have accepted £50 at the time they were painted sold at auction for prices up to £7000. The crowning touch to Dobell’s career was a large retrospective exhibition held at the AGNSW in July 1965: it comprised 224 pictures from all periods.

The last years of his life were spent living alone in his house at Lake Macquarie, the only diversion from painting being the visits of his more intimate friends and drinks in the evening at the local pub. After his death the whole of his estate went to the creation of the Dobell Foundation.
http://www.cookshill.com/hmri/artists/william_dobell_bio.html

A work of art does not appeal to the intellect, it’s aim is not to instruct, but to awaken an emotion.

Happy Birthday Georges Inness

Georges Inness, born in the Hudson River town of Newburgh, New York, is one of the most important members of the “Hudson River School” of painting. When his family moved to Newark, New Jersey, Inness began work as a grocer’s clerk before finding a better position with a map-making firm. Self-taught at first, he began painting seriously in 1841 and had his first exhibition at the National Academy of Design four years later. Three trips abroad in the next twenty-five years brought him into contact with the work of John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, Jean-Baptiste Corot, Eugene Delacroix, and the Barbizon painters. From their paintings, he carried away those elements best suited to his personal vision of American landscapes; the use of color from Delacroix and the broad handling of nature from Corot and from the Barbizon School.

The emotional content of his landscapes, the poetic (almost mystical) feeling about them, is related to his attention to details and naturalistic coloring. A nervous man who had been epileptic as a child, he often found it difficult to begin a painting. Once he had put down a shape, however, his imagination leaped forward and he painted in a rush of energy, proceeding by association of ideas and often changing forms and details as he went along. Inness was elected to the National Academy in 1868 and remained convinced until the end of his life that he was a complete realist working with elements that relied on “the solidity of objects, and the transparency of shadows in a breathable atmosphere through which we are conscious of spaces and distances.” Although he disliked French Impressionism, he himself created a native American form of Impressionism that is firmly rooted in naturalism. His finest works have tremendous appeal to the imagination, a faint hint of escape from reality, and a fusion of reality and poetry which he himself called “the visible upon the invisible.”
http://www.3d-dali.com/Artist-Biographies/George_Inness.html

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you’re an artist.

David Hockney

David Hockney (1937-)

Born in Yorkshire, England, David Hockney attended local art schools then enrolled at the Royal College of Art in London. Hockney visited Los Angeles in 1963 after starting a series of paintings based on his fantasies of homoerotic life in California. These paintings of swimming pools associated him with the Pop Art movement which emerged in both Britain and the United States in the early Sixties. He also painted portraits of friends in the worlds of fashion and art many of whom became emblematic of the culture of the 1960’s. In the 1970’s, Hockney worked in Paris, but settled in Los Angeles in 1976.

After establishing himself with his clean, flat style of rendering people and landscape, Hockney is now an important realist painter of pleasing portraits and exotic landscapes that are, for the most part, simple compositions in bright clear colors. He has worked extensively with the performing arts designing sets for theatre and opera in London, New York, Paris and Los Angeles. In the 1980’s, Hockney began making collages that resemble Cubist compositions from Polaroid photographs, and portraits made of many photographic details of the sitter.

 http://www.acquavellagalleries.com/main/artist_bio.cfm?artist_id=140

My hand is the extension of the thinking process – the creative process.

Tadao Ando

Tadao Ando (安藤忠雄, Andō Tadao^?, born September 13, 1941 in Osaka, Japan) is a Japanese architect whose approach to architecture was once categorised as Critical Regionalism. Ando has led a storied life, working as a truck driver and boxer prior to settling on the profession of architecture, despite never having taken formal training in the field.

He works primarily in exposed cast-in-place concrete and is renowned for an exemplary craftsmanship which invokes a Japanese sense of materiality, junction and spatial narrative through the pared aesthetics of international modernism.

In 1969, he established the firm Tadao Ando Architects & Associates. In 1995, Ando won the Pritzker Architecture Prize, considered the highest distinction in the field of architecture. He donated the $100,000 prize money to the orphans of the 1995 Kobe earthquake.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadao_Ando
 

For me, each nuance of a color is in some way an individual, a being who is not only from the same race as the base color, but who definitely possesses a distinct character and personal soul.

Happy Birthday Yves Klein

Yves Klein was born April 28, 1928, in Nice. From 1942 to 1946, he studied at the Ecole Nationale de la Marine Marchande and the Ecole Nationale des Langues Orientales and began practicing judo. At this time, he became friends with Arman Fernandez and Claude Pascal and started to paint. Klein composed his first Symphonie monoton in 1947. During the years 1948 to 1952, he traveled to Italy, Great Britain, Spain, and Japan. In 1955, Klein settled permanently in Paris, where he was given a solo exhibition at the Club des Solitaires. His monochrome paintings were shown at the Galerie Colette Allendy, Paris, in 1956. The artist entered his blue period in 1957; this year a double exhibition of his work was held at the Galerie Iris Clert and the Galerie Colette Allendy, both in Paris. In 1958, he began using nude models as “living paintbrushes.” Also in that year, he undertook a project for the decoration of the entrance hall of the new opera house in Gelsenkirchen, Germany. The first manifesto of the group Nouveaux Réalistes was written in 1960 by Pierre Restany and signed by Arman, Klein, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, and others. In 1961, Klein was given a retrospective at the Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany, and his first solo exhibition in the United States at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York. He and architect Claude Parent collaborated that year on the design for fountains of water and fire, Les Fontaines de Varsovie, for the Palais de Chaillot, Paris. In 1962, Klein executed a plaster cast of Arman and took part in the exhibition Antagonismes 2: L’Objet at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. Shortly before his death he appeared in the film Mondo Cane (1962). Klein died suddenly on June 6, 1962, in Paris.

http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_bio_76.html