Posts Tagged ‘painting’
Hours of fun!…
Your correspondent is headed out of reliable radio contact for a couple of weeks. Thus today’s post is a pair of tools– perhaps more accurately, mesmerizing toys– to which readers can turn for diversion until June 14 or so, when regular service will resume…
From Anselm Levskaya, a nifty polyhedron construction kit… and for more fun: Levskaya’s “Eschersketch,” a wonderfully-simple tool for creating repetitive geometric designs like this (or a nearly-infinite number of variations thereon):
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As we just doodle it, we might spare a thought for Peter Paul Rubens; he died on this date in 1640. A master of the Flemish Baroque, Rubens was renown for his portraits, landscapes, and history paintings (largely of mythological and allegorical subjects), for his Counter-Reformation altarpieces… and for his fondness for painting full-figured women (to wit, “Rubenesque”). Rubens was born into a Calvinist family, but educated as a Humanist. And while he was a remarkably prolific painter, both personally and via the studio he oversaw in Antwerp, he remained an active scholar and diplomat– for which services he was knighted by both Spain’s Philip IV and England’s Charles I.
Self-portrait, 1623
Is it real or is it…?
Australian artist Jeremy Geddes creates oil paintings that are astonishingly– dangerously– counterintuitive, at the same time that they’re astoundingly photo-realistic. Geddes’ describes his process in this 2011 interview with Empty Kingdom.
[TotH to Laughing Squid]
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As we look away then back again, we might spare a thought for Jean-François Lyotard; he died on this date in 1998. A co-founder (with Derrida, Châtelet, and Deleuze) of the Collège International de Philosophie– the bastion of Postmodernism– Lyotard was a philosopher, sociologist, and literary theorist. As a champion of “the sublime”– in Lyotard’s rehabilitation of an ancient aesthetic concept, the pleasurable anxiety that one experiences when confronting wild and threatening sights– he would surely have approved of Geddes’ work.
The benefits of rarefied air…
From inner-city food deserts to car-centric suburbs, aspects of the physical environment are frequently cited as a contributing factor to the rise of obesity in the developed world. However, new research, published earlier this year in the International Journal of Obesity and summarised online at the Public Library of Science (PLOS) blog, Obesity Panacea, found a surprising correlation between elevation and obesity in the United States.
As the paper’s lead author, Dr. Jameson Voss of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, points out, mapping obesity prevalence in America reveals distinct, and hitherto unexplained, geographic variations:
Obesity appears most prevalent in the Southeast and Midwest states and less prevalent in the Mountain West. Despite significant research into the environmental determinants of obesity, including the built environment, the explanation for these macrogeographic differences is unclear.
Intriguingly, those areas in which less than a quarter of the population is obese map almost exactly onto the more mountainous regions of the country—the Appalachians, the Rockies, and the Sierra Nevada. And, indeed, after controlling for diet, activity level, smoking, demographics, temperature, and urbanisation, Voss and his colleagues found “a four- to five-fold increase in obesity prevalence at low altitude as compared with the highest altitude category”…
Read the full (and filling) story at Edible Geography.
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As we head for higher ground, we might send playful birthday greetings to Joan Miró i Ferrà; he was born on this date in 1893. A painter, sculptor, and ceramicist, who worked over time as a Fauve, Magic Realist, Surrealist, and Expressionist (and pioneered Color Field painting), Miró had a huge influence on artists in the later Twentieth Century (Frankenthaler, Rothko, Motherwell, and Calder among many others), and on design pioneers like Paul Rand.
“Women and Birds at Sunrise” 1946
Carl Van Vechten’s portrait of Miró
What’s old is new again…
German photographer and artist Dorothee Golz has turned her hand to “updating” a classic or two… readers will find her digital mash-ups of figures from famous Renaissance (and some slightly later) paintings among her Digital Paintings.
[TotH to Laughing Squid]
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As we contemplate time travel, we might send crisp, black-and-white birthday greetings to Margaret Bourke-White; she was born on this date in 1904. A powerful documentary photographer, Bourke-White was the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet Industry, the first female war correspondent permitted to work in combat zones, and the first female photographer for Henry Luce’s Life magazine, where her work appeared on the first cover.
Bourke-White’s famous 1946 photo of Mohandas K. Gandhi
Bourke-White
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