Archive for May, 2015

Nature Means Everything – Ellsworth Kelly

Sunday, May 31st, 2015
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    Artnet LA

  • He is talking here.. (Youtube)

  • See Agnes Martin black and yellow..(scroll down) untitled one.

    Find Ellsworth Kelly’s black and yellow here.

  • Happy birthday Ellworth Kelly

    After being abroad for six years, Kelly decided to return to America in 1954. He was interested after reading a review of an Ad Reinhardt exhibit, to which he felt his work related. Upon his return to New York, he found the art world “very tough.”[1] Although Kelly is now considered an essential innovator and contributor to the American art movement, it was hard for many to find the connection between Kelly’s art and the dominant stylistic trends.[7] In May 1956 Kelly had his first New York exhibition at Betty Parsons’ Gallery. His art was considered more European than was popular in New York.

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    (Vertical)

    Kelly’s background in the military has been suggested as a source of the seriousness of his works. While serving time in the army, Kelly was exposed to and influenced by the camouflage with which his specific battalion worked. This close contact helped enlighten him on the use of form and shadow as well as the construction and deconstruction of the visible. It was a basic part of Kelly’s early education as an artist. Ralph Coburn, a friend of Kelly’s from Boston, introduced the technique of automatic drawing to him while he was visiting Kelly in Paris. Kelly embraced this technique of arriving at an image without looking at the sheet of paper upon which the image is drawn. These techniques helped Kelly in loosening his particular drawing style and broaden his acceptance of what he believed to be art. Kelly’s illness and coexistent depression may possibly be related to his use of black and white during his last year in Paris.

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    Via Gemini

    I just feel like I can live on. I hope I can reach 100. I think today if you just keep doing, keep working, that – maybe that’s possible. – Ellsworth Kelly

    I’m constantly investigating nature – nature, meaning everything.

    Read more at Brainy quote

    R.I.P Mary Ellen Mark – Photojournalist – March 20, 1940 – May 25, 2015

    Tuesday, May 26th, 2015
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    (Legendary street photojournalist and LAMPP participant Mary Ellen Mark, in her SoHo studio/library on Halloween 1991. Copyright © Paul Waldman 2015. All rights reserved.)
    Photo of Mary Ellen Mark by Paul Waldman

  • March 20, 1940 – May 25, 2015 (Time Obit here )

  • Mary Ellen Mark 801B-004-01XMARY ELLEN MARK After the Deluge

    The American photographer produced some of the most “delicately shaded studies of vulnerability ever set on film”

  • Mary Ellen Mark homepage

    Mary Ellen Mark: There is nothing more extraordinary than reality (hear her speak on youtube)

  • Legenday Philadelphia Photographer Mary Ellen Mark dies.

    Mary Ellen Mark, an artist known for her incredible humanist photography, passed away Monday in New York City. A rep confirmed the news Tuesday morning. She was 75.

  • Mark is survived by her husband, filmmaker Martin Bell, who directed the documentary “Streetwise” based on her images.

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    An example of Mary Ellen Mark’s passion for capturing the struggles of ordinary people is her 1983 photo Lillie with Her Rag Doll, which is part of the Streetwise photo essay. This photo shows the hopelessness that runaway children often feel and their fears as well as hopes of a better life. In this photo she is dressed in rags and has a cigarette in her mouth.

    Fotogpedia

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    via

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    by May Ellen Mark

    1969 East Village ‘

    Mary Ellen Mark on Diane Arbus

    I love her photographs, I do not try to make my photographs look like them. I don’t think my photographs look anything like hers. The only similarity is perhaps that both of us were fascinated by people who are marginal. I think her photographs are graphically very different; they are more direct, but that she is a distant observer. My photographs are more emotional and perhaps less graphically direct. But I repeat, I think she was a great photographer. When people compare us, they do it because we’re both women.

    See more photos and read the interview here.

    Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-hsien wins Cannes best director award for ‘The Assassin’

    Sunday, May 24th, 2015
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    Winners at Cannes

    The Assassin trailer here.

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    (Three Times)

  • “The main thing is for the actors to forget the camera. They have to act as if they are working in a documentary.”

  • Cinescope on Hou Hsieu Hsien – Master of Modern World

  • Hou Hsiao Hsien filmography here.

  • The director on long takes fast edits and a warrior in the shadows.

    It took about a year to make the movie, including three or so months of shooting. They spent a month in Japan, Mr. Hou said, and the gorgeous exterior shots were shot in central China and Inner Mongolia, the site of a silver birch forest in which Yinniang has one of her fiercest battles. Mr. Hou said that he didn’t rehearse the film, which is fairly astonishing given the precision of the camerawork and how bodies move through his space in it. Instead, Mr. Hou sets up the two (Arri) cameras and lets the performs work it out. If it succeeds, then that’s the shot that they use. “But if it doesn’t,” Mr. Hou explained, he “will shift the image based on what they’re working with.” He doesn’t pressure them to be “so technical” when they’re shooting, and that’s the “way he’s always worked.”

  • Cafe Lumiere Cafe Lumiere
    Homage to Yasujiro Ozu, Hou Hsiao Hsien project

    Cafe Lumiere (previous post)

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    Olivier Assayas and Hou Hsiao Hsien (via)

    May 24, 1980 – Brodsky’s Birthday Poem + Friendship with Baryshnikov

    Saturday, May 23rd, 2015
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  • Joseph Brodsky 1aBrodsky and Baryshnikov

  • Baryshnikov to Perform in a Show Based on Brodsky’s Poetry

    Mikhail Baryshnikov helpsachieve the dream of Russian poet Josef Brodsky

  • Two nobel prize winners from Russia were born on May 24..
    Mikhail Sholokhov – And Quiet Flows the Don..

    Joseph Brodsky – a Poet (Wiki )

    Paris Review

    May 24, 1980 – Poem by Joseph Brodsky

    I have braved, for want of wild beasts, steel cages,
    carved my term and nickname on bunks and rafters,
    lived by the sea, flashed aces in an oasis,
    dined with the-devil-knows-whom, in tails, on truffles.
    From the height of a glacier I beheld half a world, the earthly
    width. Twice have drowned, thrice let knives rake my nitty-gritty.
    Quit the country the bore and nursed me.
    Those who forgot me would make a city.
    I have waded the steppes that saw yelling Huns in saddles,
    worn the clothes nowadays back in fashion in every quarter,
    planted rye, tarred the roofs of pigsties and stables,
    guzzled everything save dry water.
    I’ve admitted the sentries’ third eye into my wet and foul
    dreams. Munched the bread of exile; it’s stale and warty.
    Granted my lungs all sounds except the howl;
    switched to a whisper. Now I am forty.
    What should I say about my life? That it’s long and abhors transparence.
    Broken eggs make me grieve; the omelet, though, makes me vomit.
    Yet until brown clay has been rammed down my larynx,
    only gratitude will be gushing from it.
    Joseph Brodsky

  • Always on Sunday, Rousseau’s Biopic by Ken Russell +Rabbit by Henri Rousseau & Durer

    Thursday, May 21st, 2015
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  • Ken Russell (previous post)

    A non-actor played Henri Rousseau.. both Rousseau and Alfred Jarry were so authentic a truly marvelous joyful portraiture rarely seen in films these days. (Alfred Jarry was played by Annette Robertson in the role of the surrealist playwright.)

    Full film Always on Sunday

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  • Henri Rousseau – May 21, 1844

    Albrecht Durer – May 21, 1471

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    John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, On Liberty & Women’s Rights

    Wednesday, May 20th, 2015
  • John Stuart Mill 20 May 1806 – the most influential philosopher of the 19th century.
    His wife Harriet Taylor reinforced Mill’s advocacy of women’s rights and the writing of On Liberty. He was a godfather to Bertrand Russell.

    John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor; paintings by George Frederic Watts, 1873, and an unknown artist, circa 1834
    John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor; paintings by George Frederic Watts, 1873, and an unknown artist, circa 1834

    In 1851, Mill married Harriet Taylor after 21 years of an intimate friendship. Taylor was married when they met, and their relationship was close but generally believed to be chaste during the years before her first husband died. Brilliant in her own right, Taylor was a significant influence on Mill’s work and ideas during both friendship and marriage. His relationship with Harriet Taylor reinforced Mill’s advocacy of women’s rights. He cites her influence in his final revision of On Liberty, which was published shortly after her death. Taylor died in 1858 after developing severe lung congestion, after only seven years of marriage to Mill.

    The Subjection of Women

    If society really wanted to discover what is truly natural in gender relations, Mill argued, it should establish a free market for all of the services women perform, ensuring a fair economic return for their contributions to the general welfare. Only then would their practical choices be likely to reflect their genuine interests and abilities.

    Mill felt that the emancipation and education of women would have positive benefits for men also. The stimulus of female competition and companionship of equally educated persons would result in the greater intellectual development of all.

    Phyllis Rose Parallel Lives Five Victorian Marriages.

    In her study of the married couple as the smallest political unit, Phyllis Rose uses as examples the marriages of five Victorian writers who wrote about their own lives with unusual candor.The couples are John Ruskin and Effie Gray; Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh; John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor; George Eliot and G. H. Lewes; Charles Dickens and Catherine Hogarth.

  • Soren Kierkegaard and Regina Olsen (previous post)

  • Nicholas Vreeland & A Film “Monk with a Camera” by Guido Santi and Tina Mascara

    Friday, May 15th, 2015
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    photo via

    He became a disciple of Khyongla Rinpoche, attracted by his teachings about the importance of diminishing “self-cherishing” and negativity, and developing compassion for others. Three years later, he became a full-fledged monk and the only Westerner in a settlement of 20,000. Faced with the rigors of a devout life, he gave up photography for a while, until Martine Franck, the widow of Cartier-Bresson, visited his monastery and persuaded him to embrace it anew.

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    Nicholas Vreeland with a tea merchant in New Delhi, India

    Vreeland insists that he is not an artist at all, just a busy monk who happens to find pleasure in taking pictures, and honor in photographing the Dalai Lama on several occasions. (It was the Dalai Lama who appointed him abbot.) Almost sheepishly, dutifully keeping pride at bay, he admits that it was only by selling his photographs to collectors that the planned expansion of the monastery (to house an enormous wave of refugee Tibetan monks) was made possible. Vreeland understands and employs the power of art without seeking any of its ego luster. When filmmakers Guido Santi and Tina Mascara asked to make him the subject of a documentary, he declined until his master told him it would benefit others.

    Nicholas Vreeland (LA review of books)

    Monk with a Camera Trailer (youtube)
    Directed by Guido Santi and Tina Mascara

  • More touching and moving story of Christopher Isharwood and Don Bacardy was also directed by Santi and Tina Mascara
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    Chris and Don by David Hockney

    “Chris & Don: A Love Story”

  • Conceptual Artist Chris Burden Dies at 69

    Sunday, May 10th, 2015
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  • Chris Burden dies at 69: artist’s light sculpture at LACMA is symbol of L.A.

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    Images via

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    For Oh Dracula, a 1974 performance at the Utah Museum of Art in Salt Lake City, Chris Burden replaced a painting on the wall with a large cloth chrysalis which he then climbed inside. Burden hung on the wall for one day during museum hours, cloistered in darkness like a light-sensitive vampire.

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    The Agony of Body Artist (Roger Ebert)

    Do you believe in Television – Chris Burden and TV

  • Christopher Burden (April 11, 1946 – May 10, 2015) was an American artist working in performance, sculpture, and installation art.

    One of Burden’s most reproduced and cited pieces, Trans-Fixed took place on April 23, 1974 at Speedway Avenue in Venice, California.[8] For this performance, Burden lay face up on a Volkswagen Beetle and had nails hammered into both of his hands, as if he were being crucified on the car. The car was pushed out of the garage and the engine revved for two minutes before being pushed back into the garage.

    Knight Rise Skyspace – James Turrell is 72 years old

    Wednesday, May 6th, 2015

    Internationally acclaimed artist James Turrell has been creating skyspaces since 1975. Knight Rise, located in the Nancy and Art Schwalm Sculpture Garden at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, is one of only 14 skyspaces open to the public in the United States.

    Happy birthday James Turrell – (May 6, 1943)artskyspace

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    (Maiden fallen)

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    (Maiden praying)

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    Above photos by Fung Lin Hall

    The World of Satyajit Ray – Mini Retrospective- May 2, 2015

    Saturday, May 2nd, 2015
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    Charulata (youtube)

  • 20 films directed by Satyajit Ray – see photos slideshow here.

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    Aparajito

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    Ray (on the right) with a cinematographer Soumendu Roy here.

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    Childhood days

  • Ray of hope – two documentaries Previous post

    Encounter with Jean Renoir

    Of all the films of Renoir, Ray admired La Regle du Jeu the most, a personal favorite of Renoir himself. Regarding filmmaking Renoir said that a filmmaker need not show a lot of things in a film but to show only the right things. Ray diligently followed the same advice that Renoir offered him in 1952: “You don’t have to have too many elements in a film, but whatever you use must be the right elements, the expressive elements.” From Renoir, Ray learnt that there was nothing more important to a film than the emotional integrity of human relationship in the film.

    Western Influences on Satyajit Ray


  • Satyajit Ray with Ravi Shankar