Ben Tour is a 28 years old Vancouver based artist. More of his illustrations along with a 2006 interview with him over at FecalFace.com
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)
Jean-Gabriel Domergue: “Modèle aux seins nus”, oil on canvas, 85 x 65,5 cm.
Jean-Gabriel Domergue was born in Bordeaux, France on March 4th, 1889.
An extremely talented and precocious painter, Domergue exhibited works at the Salon Des Artistes Français (the French Artists Exhibition) in 1906 at the young age of seventeen. In 1913, he was awarded the Second Prize of Rome and went on to win the gold medal award in the 1920 show. He then began showing outside the exhibition.
Having first been recognized for his landscapes which he painted with great ease, his career took a decisive turn during the 1920’s. At this time he became the painter of the “Parisian lady”.
Domergue invented a new type of woman : thin, airy, elegant, with a swanlike neck and wide seductive eyes which gaze upon the world with longing.
“I invented the pin-up” he later claimed. (more)
About Tatsuro Kiuchi:
Tatsuro Kiuchi was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1966. Originally a graduate in Biology at International Christian University in Tokyo, He made the change to an art career after graduating with distinction from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. He started illustrating mostly children’s books with several publishers in the US and Japan and eventually branched out into editorial work in magazines and the illustration of book jackets and advertising commissions. His first picture book “The Lotus Seed” (text by Sherry Garland / Harcourt Brace & Company) has sold more than 250,000 copies worldwide, and has been commissioned by such clients as Royal Mail to do Christmas Stamp Collection in 2006, and Starbucks for Worldwide Holiday Promotion “Pass the Cheer” in 2007. He now lives in Tokyo Japan. (Profile)
Visit his official English website, his blog and his Tumblr account. Some of his artwork can be bought online. I first came to know this artist via Coudal Partners.
The man on the photo is Popcorn Sutton. He was the object of the documentary The Last One (2008). Find out more about the film over at the Sucker Punch Pictures official website. If you don’t know what’s a moonshiner, try wikipedia.
I found about Popcorn Sutton over at the American Dream Tumblr blog. I recommend it. Cheers.
Ariel Levy wrote about McGinley:
“People fall in love with McGinley’s work because it tells a story about liberation and hedonism: Where Goldin and Larry Clark were saying something painful and anxiety-producing about Kids and what happens when they take drugs and have sex in an ungoverned urban underworld, McGinley started out announcing that “The Kids Are Alright,” fantastic, really, and suggested that a gleeful, unfettered subculture was just around the corner—still—if only you knew where to look.”
“That show, “The Kids Are Alright,” depicted a downtown neverland where people are thrilled and naked, leaping in front of graffiti on the street, sacked out in heaps of flannel shirts—everything very debauched and drug-addled and decadent, like Nan Goldin hit with a happy wand.” (New York Magazine)
I think it’s an inexact account of both McGinley and Clark works. Kids are happy from time to time in Larry Clark’s Kids. And young naked people seems to be a little fucked up in some on McGinley photographs. I would certainly not opposed those two artist that quickly.
“The Czech photographer Josef Koudelka belongs to the tradition of street photography that begins with Cartier-Bresson and Brassai. It is a genre of images snatched from chance encounters with passing strangers, seen against urban backdrops and preserved in memorable form. But for a few days in August 1968, Mr. Koudelka practiced a rarer, more precarious form of street photography, taking pictures inside history, where little is clear, and nothing is still.”
The black & white version of the printing instructions is from Avedon at Work. In The American West by Laura Wilson (2003 : 117 ; Amazon). Laura has a specific section on the printing process undertaken for the exhibition In The American West. She suggests that Avedon’s instructions were very general and that details for exposure were rather noted on test print (as seen above) by Ruedi Hofmann, Avedon’s studio manager :
The difficult and time-consuming process ok making these prints began in the basement darkroom of the Avedon studio in New York. Ruedi and David [Liittscwager] started with a set of 16-by-20 inch prints. Dick rejected them all. He felt that the tone was heavy; they were too black and had too much contrast. In reprinting, Dick’s directions were rarely technical. He would say simply, “Make the person more gentle,” or “Give the face more tension” This unconventional advice forced Ruedi and David to try to Understand the emotional content that Dick sought in each portrait. […] On test prints, Ruedi recorded the necessary manipulations with a red grease pencil. The exposure times, plus or minus, were in seconds to indicate where to darken or lighten an eyelid, or a nose, ot the wrinkle on a forehead.” (p. 114-117)
Laura Wilson was Richard Avedon’s assistant for six years (Wikipedia).
About this exhibition: “Using a handheld 35mm camera and available light, Robert Bergman spent 12 years making a series of large color portraits that address not only his subjects’ physical presence but also their psychic state. Drawing on his finely tuned sense of form and an ability to establish a rapport with his subjects, he never sensationalized or objectified them. Instead, he explored their penetrating gazes, downcast eyes, or distant stares to reveal their startling array of emotions—suspicion with curiosity; despair with resilience—thus making clear each individual’s “strength and delicacy,” as Schapiro noted.” (read more). See the press checklist in PDF. The NGA offers other interesting online ressources here.
The book is available for sale over at Amazon.
About Robert Bergman: “Born in New Orleans in 1944, Bergman’s father was a doctor and his mother was a Shakespearean actress. He first began to photograph as a child and seriously embraced the medium in his early twenties. In the mid 1960s, he was deeply influenced by Robert Frank’s book The Americans. Like so many other “street photographers” of that generation, he abandoned the large-format view camera he had previously employed and began to use a 35mm format to make black-and-white photographs in the American urban environment. Although he worked in the rapidly changing cityscape, he, unlike many of his contemporaries, increasingly sought out quiet, meditative moments.
In the 1980s, Bergman began to make color photographs that combine the saturated and muted hues of both the city and his subjects’ attire to achieve a rich, painterly idiom. He resides in Minneapolis and New York City.” (read more)
Other Bergman’s exhibitions are currently being held by the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York and the Yossi Milo Gallery. Open the Yossi Milo’s press booklet in PDF (it contains, among others, article by The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post : follow the links to enjoy these articles on their respective website).
“Paul Cardon, called Dornac (1858-1941, also known as Paul Marsan) was a photograph and publisher who took the portraits of the Paris society, between 1887 and 1917. His photographs were often published by the illustrated press. The famous serie “Nos Contemporains chez eux” shows the celebrities in their intimate spaces.” (source:Photo Central, where you can find another copy of the same photo).
“The goal of physiognomy is to judge character according to features of the face. LeBrun studied the lines linking different points of the head in a complex geometry which revealed the faculties of the spirit or character. Thus, the angle formed by the axis of the eyes and the eyesbrows could lead to various conclusions, depending upon whether or not this angle rose toward the forehead to join the soul or descented toward the nose and mouth, which were considered to be animal features.”
“Charles Le Brun (1619-1690) , First Painter to the King Louis XIV, was the founder of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, and the foremost proponent of French classicism. On 28 March 1671, addressing the Royal Academy, he formally presented his treatise: “all of the various demonstrations that he has drawn, whether heads of animals or heads of men, making note of the signs that mark their natural inclination.” (Procès-verbaux de l’Academie I : 358-359). While the set of drawings is still conserved in the Louvre, the original text has been lost: we have but a rough synthesis by Nivelon, posthumous digests by Henri Testelin and E. Picart, and the dissertation by Morel d’Arleux accompanying the 1806 edition of the engravings.” (Read more). Read wikipedia’s entry for Charles le Brun
