Great opening title sequence.

Bruce Kurland painted this still life while he was living in the town of Curriers in Wyoming County, New York. He felt that the city offered dismal prospects for a representational painter and moved to the countryside, where he painted images that focused on simple objects “being revealed by light.” Here, the dried bone, shriveled crab apple, and rusty cup emphasize the transformation of both natural and manmade materials over time. The dark, empty background highlights the delicacy and transitory nature of these strange objects. (more over at the Lucie Foundation Center for American Art)

About Bruce Kurland:

Bruce Kurland began painting in the late 1950s and studied at the Art Students League and the National Academy School of Fine Arts in New York. He spent almost twenty years living a “nineteenth-century life” in Wyoming County, New York, where he was inspired by the dramatic open vistas of the countryside. His small paintings show still lifes in miniature and often include unconventional items, from wilting flowers to old bones and dead mice. (more)

First spotted via On the Sunny Side of the Sunny Side up

Michael Peck’s artistic practice is concerned with the sensation of disorientation and dislocation that is often felt within the post modern world. Exploring issues regarding the loss of cultural identity, his work particularly focuses on the effects within minority groups and individuals existing on the fringe who are challenged to assimilate within the larger community. (more)

Michael Peck was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1977.

Previously on Skandalon

Previously on Skandalon: Andy Rementer

This illustration was created by Felix Petruska for the cover of the Spanish translation (Blackie Books, 2009) of The Simpsons and Philosophy (Open Court Publishers, 2001).

Felix Petruska is a Barcelona based illustrator and designer. Check his blog and browse his Flickr’s albums.

Freud, Lucian (1922- ). German-born British painter. He was born in Berlin, a grandson of Sigmund Freud, came to England with his parents in 1931, and acquired British nationality in 1939. His earliest love was drawing, and he began to work full time as an artist after being invalided out of the Merchant Navy in 1942. In 1951 his Interior at Paddington (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) won a prize at the Festival of Britain, and since then he has built up a formidable reputation as one of the most powerful contemporary figurative painters. Portraits and nudes are his specialities, often observed in arresting close-up. His early work was meticulously painted, so he has sometimes been described as a `Realist’ (or rather absurdly as a Superrealist), but the subjectivity and intensity of his work has always set him apart from the sober tradition characteristic of most British figurative art since the Second World War. In his later work (from the late 1950s) his handling became much broader. (WebMuseum)

• MoMA’s exhibition: “Lucian Freud: The Painter’s Etchings” (December 16, 2007–March 10, 2008)
• TATE’s exhibition: “Lucian Freud” (June 20th-September 22 2002)
• Centre Pompidou’s exhibition: “Lucian Freud. L’Atelier” (March 10 - July 19 2010)
• The Independent: “Lucian Freud: Portrait of the artist as a happy man” a profile by John Spurling, December 13th, 2008
• The Guardian: “Lucian Freud: Art without the feel-good factor” by Jonathan Jones, August 28, 2008

Previously on Skandalon : Paul Roberts, photorealistic paintings of bodies in or on water.

About The Burt Britton Collection of artists’ self-portraits:

Picking up a bartending shift at the Village Vanguard, the famous New York jazz joint where he usually worked the door, Burt Britton found himself alone at last-call with just one final patron, Norman Mailer. After pouring the esteemed author a final drink, the question was put to Burt, “What do you want from me, Kid?” Exasperated at the end of the long shift, Burt inexplicably responded, “draw me your self-portrait,” handed him a piece of folded paper, and that, simply put, is how it all began.

That night in the mid-Sixties Mailer produced and gave to Britton an amazing object of self-expression, the first of hundreds to come, a self-portrait of the author more revealing than 1000 words. Inspired by Mailer’s product, Britton started to collect. Still at the Vanguard, he gathered self-portraits by Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock after landmark 1966 concerts, he even got a portrait from a New York high-school basketball phenomenon, Lew Alcindor, later the champion Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Moving to the legendary Strand bookstore in about 1968, Britton encountered novelists, poets, journalists, and critics, both the highly regarded and those just starting out. He would respectfully ask local and visiting literary luminaries such as Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Jorge Luis Borges to add their self-portrait to his album with the same democratic spirit that he offered the young John Irving, just months away from the fame that came with The World According to Garp. (Bloomsbury’s auction catalogue : PDF)

Bloomsbury’s catalogue contains every items in the Burt Britton Collection along with details and explanations about the Collection in general and some specific explanations about each self-portrait as well. Alternatively, one can browse the collection over at the Bloomsbury Auctions official website. Back in 2009, there was a story about this collection in The New York Times: “Self-Portraits Speak More Than Words” by James Barron, September 23th, 2009.

Previously on Skandalon : Don DeLillo

Andrew B. Myers: Solar Eclipse 2 (crowd watch), 2009 from the Solar Maximum series

Andrew B. Myers is a photographer and digital image maker that resides in Toronto. His colourful and detailed pictures are very carefully crafted, with an approach that always plays both analog as well as digital techniques to achieve a certain look and sensibility. He is currently completing his studies at Ryerson University and has been exhibited in the Toronto area. (About)

Roger Ebert’s Journal: “Roger Ebert presents At the Movies” September 10th, 2010

“Roger Ebert Presents At the Movies,” a weekly half-hour film review program, was announced today by its producers, Chaz and Roger Ebert. The program continues the 35-year-old run of a reviewing format first introduced by Gene Siskel and Ebert and later by Ebert and Richard Roeper.

It will return to its birthplace, launching nationally on public television with presenting station WTTW Chicago, where it began in 1975 as “Opening Soon at a Theater Near You” and then in 1976 as “Sneak Previews,” became the highest rated entertainment show in PBS history. The original format moved into syndication as “At the Movies” in 1982 with Tribune Entertainment and a quarter-century with Buena Vista Television.

The Eberts said the new program will air in January 2011, and in addition to reviewing new movies will expand into coverage of New Media, special segments on classics, on-demand viewing and genres, and an extended website. It will use the copyrighted “Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down”® format made famous by Siskel & Ebert. (read on)

Takashi Murakami was born in Tokyo in 1962. He’s a contemporary Japanese artist. About the Mushrooms:

For me they seem both erotic and cute while evoking – especially for the Western imagination – the fantastic world of fairy tale. I thought that, by uniting the eroticism and the magic side of mushrooms, I could use them as motifs in my work. (read more)

Some of Murakami’s work is being exhibited in the palace of Versailles and it’s creating something of a controversy: see “Takashi Murakami takes on critics with provocative Versailles exhibition” (by Lizzy Davies, The Guardian, September 10th, 2010) and “Murakami’s Creations Invade Versailles” (by Rooksana Hossenally, The New York Times, September 13th, 2010. Visit the Chateau de Versailles official website for more info on the exhibition.

Here’s the statement related to this piece of art:

At a distance of 18,000 km from the earth the elephant Würsa would be able to balance on her trunk. It is on the basis of learned scientific calculations that Daniel Firman reached this conclusion and came to produce this extraordinary work which confounds all our certainties regarding the gravitation of bodies.

This hyper-realist sculpture calling on the skills of a taxidermist conjures up ideas of both lightness and of heaviness, so enabling the artist to offer a novel and spectacular physical and psychological experience.

Exploring the huge territory of sculpture, Daniel Firman presents anonymous characters and elements from everyday life in situation that seem to be in precarious equilibrium. For more than a decade he has been developing a unique formal language and is particularly interested in the question of bodies: Würsa à 18,000 km de la Terre, a novel creation made specially for the Palais de Tokyo is the new expression. (Source).

Same sculpture, but on the artist’s official website. Daniel Firman is a French artist born inn Bron (France) in 1966. He currently works and lives in Paris.