Vitro Nasu

“I sat with Suzuki on the sofa and we talked of all kinds of things to do with Zen and with life … For once in a long time I felt as if I had spent a few moments with my own family.” (Dancing in the Water of Life, pp. 116-117)

“One had to meet this man in order to fully appreciate him. He seemed to me to embody all the indefinable qualities of the “Superior Man” of the ancient Asian, Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist traditions. Or, rather in meeting him one seemed to meet that “True Man of No Title”, that Chuang Tzu and Zen Masters speak of. And of course this is the man one really wants to meet. Who else is there? In meeting Dr. Suzuki and drinking a cup of tea with him I felt I had met this one man. It was like finally arriving at one’s own home.” (Zen and the Birds of Appetite, p. 61)

Thomas Merton met D.T. Suzuki in NYC in 1964

“Without contact with living examples, we soon get lost or give out …. He really understands what interior simplicity is all about and really lives it. This is the important thing.” (Letter to Anglican priest, Fr. Aelred, Dec. 8, 1964, The School of Charity, p. 254)

Seven Story Mountain
Happy birthday louie louie. He is a good photographer

Merton Dalai Lama

Jacques Rivette Enigmatic French New Wave Director, Dies at 87

“Cocteau is someone who has made such a profound impression on me that there’s no doubt he’s influenced every one of my films.”

“I reject the word ‘script’ entirely-at any rate in the usual sense. I prefer the old usage-usually scenario-which it had in the Commedia dell’Arte, meaning an outline or scheme: it implies a dynamism, a number of ideas and principles from which one can set out to find the best possible approach to filming.”

Jacques Rivette -Order of the Exile Concerning the Films of Jacques Rivette

Senses of Cinema – Jacques Rivette

(Claire Denis filming Jacques Rivette)

Interview on (Youtube)

Jean Luc Godard(Paris Nous Appartient – youtube)

1960 film Paris Nous Appartient (youtube)

Jacques Rivette Unconventional, Rigorous and Challenging (preivous post)

Jean Pierre Leaud and Eric Rohmer – OUT 1: NOLI ME TANGERE. Jacques RIVETTE, Suzanne SCHIFFMAN. 1971

via

(“La Religieuse” Anna Karina – based on Diderot )

Porfirio DiDonna

Porfirio DiDibba was born on 11 April 1942 in Brooklyn, New York. He died in Brooklyn on 26 August 1986 at the age of 44.

Biography

He would spend years trying to understand his commitment to art. He had studied piano since he was young and noted how painting could be like music in its phrasing and harmonics. Also, painting was much like his mother’s religious devotion, awakening feelings of awe and trust that he could not experience elsewhere.

See more here.

See more (via)

See Trout from Artnet

Painters Table (Brooklyn Rail)

Photo by Leila Alaoui

Leila’s homepage – see her works.

Leila Alaoui,photographer, born 10 July 1982; died 18 January 2016

Alaoui was in Ouagadougou to work on a photography project for a women’s rights campaign called My Body My Rights for Amnesty International.

The Artist who was killed by jihadists and what she was trying to tell the world.

Family and colleagues pay tribute to a talented young photographer, shot dead by four heavily-armed thugs in an al-Qaeda attack on a popular café in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

The Moroccans

See a photo from Lebanon November 2013

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Franco Citti

Franco Citti dies at 80 .

Citti, known internationally for his role as Calò in Francis Ford Coppola’s the Godfather I and III and as the face of films by director Pier Paolo Pasolini, came to fame at the age of 26 playing the title role in Pasolini’s 1961 Accattone. He continued to work with the legendary director throughout the 60s and 70s, appearing in films such as Mamma Roma, Edipo Re, Pigsty and The Decameron.

Ettore on the right
Ettore Scola dies at 84

the family in French

We all love each other so much

Parallax view

Ettore Scola, Italian Film Director of Satire and Farce, Dies at 84

The closest any of his films came to being autobiographical was “The Family” (1987), which instructs moviegoers in 80 years of European history from the vantage point of an apartment that housed five generations of a clan whose story is recounted by a retired professor, its last patriarch.

“It was like a big tribe composed of people who didn’t really know each other very well but respected the rules that bound them together,” Mr. Scola recalled of his own family. “The house was like a place filled with mirrors but no windows — you looked at each other but not at the world outside.”

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Patricia Highsmith – (Photo by Francis Goodman 1957)

Peter Wells on Patricia Highsmith

Koestler with writer Patricia Highsmith in Alpbach, Switzerland – on the day of the moon-landing, July 20, 1969. (The Swiss National Library)

She had a sort of romantic/intimate friendship with Arthur Koestler (who was married) but it was not presumed to be overtly physical.

Arthur Koestler (Kepler and Koestler)

Choose your highsmith

Todd Haynes on Cate Blanchett, Saul Leiter and Queer Cinema

Red Curtain by Saul Leiter

On the photographs of Saul Leiter…
“In Carol, we definitely keep returning to the predicament of looking as a visual strategy in how the film is put together. It was very conscious, as something that puts the subject on one side of the glass and the object on the other and filters their access to each. I think that visual language is a way of just revealing the act of looking as a predicament to begin with and one that is never completely easy to achieve. There’s always something in the way of what you want. [Saul Leiter] is a clear influence because he loved to do that and he did it so beautifully, disrupting his subject matter and finding planes of intersection and abstraction in his colour photography. While at times you think you’re looking at an abstract painting, it actually gives such a specific sense of time and place because of the kind of light and how it plays on glass and how it interferes with dust and dirt and grime. The real conditions of being in that city at that moment are revealed as palpable and beautiful and elemental in a way.”

See a video and photos Saul Leiter (1923-2013)

Todd Haynes Journey – Discovery

Alan Rickman (21 February 1946 – 14 January 2016)

Alan Rickman directed Winter Guest with Emma Thompson and her mother..

Something the Lord Made

Something the Lord Made is a 2004 film about the black cardiac pioneer Vivien Thomas and his complex and volatile partnership with white surgeon Alfred Blalock, the world famous “Blue Baby doctor” who pioneered modern heart surgery. Based on the National Magazine Award-winning Washingtonian magazine article “Like Something the Lord Made” by Katie McCabe

Play by Samuel Beckett – directed by Anthony Minghella.

Life in Pictures (youtube)
He was a graphic designer..

Eva Hesse Untitled 1966

Letter From Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse

While Hesse was living with her husband in Germany, Sol LeWitt nourished and encouraged Eva during her days of artistic isolation They corresponded daily. He was her friend and a mentor.

Sol Lewitt (previous post)

Eva Hesse (born on January 11, 1936, Hamburg, Germany)

Mel Bochner, Portrait of Eva Hesse, 1966.

Josef Albers and Eva Hesse

Tate:Albers and Hesse – Imperatives of Teaching

Eva Hesse had little praise for her Yale education and Albers seemed aware of this. Upon her death he sent a photograph of himself with Hesse (fig.8) to the Fischbach Gallery asking if her heirs might want to have a picture ‘showing her with me as her painting teacher … despite [my emphasis] my being in it.’16 Although she was among Albers’s favourite pupils, Hesse disliked him in so much as his views were not in keeping with her then expressionist painting technique and by extension, for what she perceived as the restrictiveness of his approach. Upon hearing a lecture by her teacher she wrote in her diary: ‘He is terribly limited but really maintains one point of view throughout. This is a paradoxically strong and weak attribute and shortcoming.’17 Many scholars and critics have addressed Hesse’s stated frustration with Yale University and Albers as part of diverse arguments about the artist, her work, and Modernism.18 Yet Linda Norden is one of few who has discussed Hesse’s formal education in depth and to my knowledge no one has written extensively about how (in a pedagogic sense) she was trained.19 Hesse’s work is intriguing because she studied with Albers, who along with Moholy-Nagy was largely responsible for the dissemination of Bauhaus-indebted teaching ideas in the United States – ideas to which Hesse likely had been exposed prior to her studies with the former Bauhaus master directly.

Lee Bontecou birthday Jan 15 (happy birthday – previous post)

Bowie at Berlin Wall – 1987

The Next Day – Marion Cortillard played a sexworker for priests – read more here.

Bowie with Nicolas Roeg and Duncan Jones here (photo via Duncan Jones)

Roeg directing David Bowie

Interview (Bowie’s in space: Nic Roeg on film)

David Bowie as Warhol in Basquiat (youtube)

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Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Bowie

David Bowie and Nagisa

See an excerpt from Merry Xmas Mr. Lawrence (Sakamoto receiving kiss -youtube)

Bowie’s responses to Proust Questionnaire – Vanity Fair

Q: Which living person do you most admire?
Bowie: Elvis.

David Bowie shared a birthday with Elvis, Anthony Newley was his early inspiration.

Previous post Bowie with birthday buddies Elvis and Stephen Hawking. (link to a documentary of David Bowie.)

David Bowie as an African

Wild is the Wind..his tribute to Nina Simone.. (How David Bowie helped Nina out of a slump)..

David with Klaus Nomi

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Barbara Hepworth

(10 January 1903 – 20 May 1975) was an English artist and sculptor. Her work exemplifies Modernism and in particular modern sculpture. She was one of the few women artists to achieve international prominence. Along with artists such as Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo, Hepworth was a leading figure in the colony of artists who resided in St Ives during the Second World War.

Curbed Form Sculptures

The Hepworth Wakefeild

Ben Nicholson

His second marriage was to fellow artist Barbara Hepworth on 17 November 1938 at Hampstead Register Office. Nicholson and Hepworth had triplets, two daughters, Sarah and Rachel, and a son, Simon, in 1934. They were divorced in 1951.

Ben Nicholsonat Tate (see more art)

See a photo of Henry Moore, Hepworth and Nicholson here.

Related links : British artists
Anthony Caro – Sculpture is My Life

Beverly Pepper

William Scott

and his son James Scott

Revolutionary by nature (Obit from Philly)

“I write what I think is for me necessary to write,” Pierre Boulez said in 2008. The conductor and composer died at his home in Germany on Tuesday at 90.

LA Times. (Obit)

Pierre Boulez, a radical titan of contemporary music, dies at 90

Pierre Boulez (wik)

In his early career, Boulez played a key role in the development of integral serialism, controlled chance and electronic music. This, coupled with his highly polemical views on the evolution of music, gained him the reputation as an enfant terrible

Previous post (see Boulez as Mona Lisa)
Last March Pierre Boulez celebrated his 90th birthday.

Francis Poulenc..Born on 7 January 1899, half monk half delinquent..
The composer is largely self-taught and eccentric. Francis Poulenc –“(Previous post)

Jean Pierre Rampal also was born on Jan 7. (Bach – youtube)

Alan Ebnother..

George Lawson

January 6 – February 20, 2016
Reception: January 9, 4 – 6pm
Hours: Tuesday – Saturday 11:30-5:30

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Alan Tired –
See Time Lapse

Sushi – Green Tea and Alan Ebnother

See Henry Chapman (Portfolio)

See more paintings from 2014