Vitro Nasu

(David Ireland’s Mission District Home Opens as a Museum)

via (Marioni, Beuys influenced David Ireland)

“I think art making is a matter of finding things out and not considering practical issues, but thinking about things that are internal and of an investigatory nature for ourselves.” – David Ireland

“When I feel like I’m being understood too easily by people, then I pump it up a little bit … make it a little bit tougher.” – David Ireland

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Three Attempts to Understand Van Gogh’s Ear in Terms of the Map of Africa, 1987

RIP David Ireland (more images here)

Hugh
Via

As a warrior artist I like to feature art by other warrior artist or pieces of art that inspire warrior artists, and these two tracks by South African horn player Hugh Masekela are just that. Born April 4, 1939 music found Masekela at a young age. He took up trumpet at 14, and after quickly mastering it went on to lead several jazz ensembles. Growing up in apartheid South Africa, his music has always been a reflection and form of protest against the system that enslaved his people.

What Hugh Masekela meant to South Africa’s Freedom Fighter.

Many people have paid tribute to the musical genius of Hugh Masekela, known as the father of South African jazz. But he was not just known for his musicianship. The artist, who died on Tuesday at age 78, used his public platform to speak out against apartheid and substance abuse.

Time obit

Acclaimed Feminist Science Fiction Writer Ursula K. Le Guin Dies at 88

Ursula K. Le Guin(wiki)

Le Guin was influenced by fantasy writers including J. R. R. Tolkien, by science fiction writers including Philip K. Dick (who was in her high school class, though they did not know each other),by central figures of Western literature such as Leo Tolstoy, Virgil and the Brontë sisters, by feminist writers such as Virginia Woolf, by children’s literature such as Alice in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows, The Jungle Book, by Norse mythology, and by books from the Eastern tradition such as the Tao Te Ching.

Ursula K Le Guin (homepage)

What inspired you to be a writer?

Learning to write, at five.

What were your childhood & youth like — was it happy — were there any significant influences on you?

My childhood was what is called “happy.” My parents were loving, kind, and intelligent; I had an extra mother in my great-aunt; I had three big brothers to tag around after (and to have fights with the youngest of them); and everybody in the family was glad I was a girl, which made me able to be glad to be a woman, eventually.

My father was a university professor and we were well off, even during the Depression of the 1930’s. We lived in a beautiful redwood house in Berkeley, and summers on an old ranch in the hills of the Napa Valley. I went to public schools, where I got a good education (although I was shy and malingered a good deal in grade school, and high school was three years of social torture.)

There were lots of visitors, lots of talk and argument and discussion about everything, lots of books around, lots of music and story-telling. The life of the mind can be a very lively one. I was brought up to think and to question and to enjoy.

During the second World War my brothers all went into service and the summers in the Valley became lonely ones, just me and my parents in the old house. There was no TV then; we turned on the radio once a day to get the war news. Those summers of solitude and silence, a teenager wandering the hills on my own, no company, “nothing to do,” were very important to me. I think I started making my soul then.

Jack Whitten (wiki)

When the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center occurred, Whitten was at his studio on Lispenard Street in Tribeca watching the first plane hit. He spent two years constructing a monumental elegiac and emotion-filled panel, with ashes embedded into it, as a memorial of the day.

Obit from Artforum

Jack Whitten, a conceptual painter who tested the medium’s limits for more than five decades, has died at seventy-eight. The artist, awarded the National Medal of the Arts in 2016 for “remaking the American canvas,” was dubbed the father of new abstraction by the New York Times. Throughout his career, Whitten eschewed the popular or marketable for what interested him philosophically, and was largely unrecognized by the mainstream until recent years, following a major 2014 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, California.

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Kenneth Goldsmith interviewed Jack Whitten on BOMB

Ed Moses, Bronco (2002)
Photo: Courtesy of William Turner Gallery.

Ed Moses (LA times Obit)

Wiki

Nambo Panel (See his art)

Artnet News

1. On freedom:
“The rational mind constantly wants to be in charge. The other parts want to fly. My painting is the encounter between the mind’s necessity for control and its yearning to fly, to be free from our ever-confining skull.”

2. On Buddhism:
“I’ve been student of Buddhism since 1960. And of course it interfaces how I behave, how I think, how I perceive.”

3. On inspiration:
“I’m never inspired. I’m obsessed. And I look forward every day to paint.”

4. On the Ferus Gallery:
“This group of artists that hung out at Ferus Gallery, we all had an arrogance that we were the best, and all of the other artists in this town were on an old boat, and they had better get on a fast plane with us. We outshone them all; we out grew them all.”

Widewalls

Ed Moses belonged to the generation of artists called the cool school, whose philosophy was to perceive painting and drawing as a long-lasting process of personal development. Moses’ pieces are somewhere in between semi-representational and abstract, they contain a lot of patterns and geometric shapes, which are partially inspired by the Native Indian tradition.

Andy Kaufman and Jim Carry shared a birthday, Muhammed Ali too.
Previous post The Fighter and the Funny Guys..

Andrew Kaufman January 17, 1949
Jim Carry born January 17, 1962

Via

Jim Carrey on losing himself inside Andy Kaufman and why he relived it for the documentary ‘Jim & Andy’

But perhaps the most pivotal moment in Carrey’s spiritual journey came when he played his comedic idol, Andy Kaufman, in the 1999 film “Man on the Moon,” plunging himself so deeply into the role that he was never the same again.

That experience has now been chronicled in the new Netflix documentary “Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond — Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton.” Directed by Chris Smith (“American Movie”) and produced by Spike Jonze, the film — now playing via streaming and in a handful of theaters — draws from roughly 100 hours of behind-the-scenes footage that was shot during the making of “Man on the Moon.”

Lee Bontecou

Lee was born on January 15, 1931 in Providence, Rhode Island

Happy birthday Lee Bontecou, she is 87 years old.

Bontecou does not care what you think

She doesn’t want to impose. She’s probably most closely allied to the abstract expressionists because she acknowledges when she was a young artist [during] the heyday of the abstract expressionists, she admired not only their work but the idea of freedom and experimentation that their work embodied and the way they lived their lives. They weren’t theorists. They didn’t talk about their work. It was intuitive. She still doesn’t want to really talk about her work. She doesn’t want to fix meaning. She wants to keep it open for people.

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Inspiration – Alabama

(January 12, 1856 – April 14, 1925)
Complete works by John Singer Sargent

Henry James

Painting of Robert Louis Stevens and his wife by John Singer Sargent – 1885.

Curious Painting of Robert Louis Stevens and his wife by Sargent

Alice Runnel James (Mrs William James) watercolor by John Singer Sargent – 1921

Atwood

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ALIAS GRACE created by Sarah Polley, based on the novel by Margaret Atwood, directed by Mary Harron, with Sarah Gadon, Edward Holcroft, Anna Paquin and Paul Gross.

Happy birthday Sarah Polley!

Sarah Polley directed Julie Christie in Away from her.

A documentary by Sarah Polley (Youtube)

Activist Sarah Polley says Toronto’s Homeless are in crisis.

Egyptienne

Fouad Elkoury is a Lebanese photographer and filmmaker. Son of Lebanese architect Pierre el-Khoury, he studied architecture in London before switching to photography. His photographic images of war in Lebanon gained Elkoury international recognition for his work.

Artnet – Layered Histories

Suite Egyptienne is an account of Elkoury’s own, photographic travels through Egypt in the late 1980s. Following in the footsteps of Flaubert and Du Camp, the artist journeyed across the Nile valley nearly 150 years later. Whilst in pursuit of their 19th century voyage, Elkoury, accompanied by his then wife Nada, observed and documented an subconscious overlap of narratives. In his photography, Nada becomes the protagonist in Elkoury’s depiction of Egypt, transforming the 150-year-old Orientalist narrative into a personal fiction. The series evokes a sense of nostalgia for the era of Flaubert’s romanticism, whilst also making us reminisce the Egypt of 1989.

Kaak Seller, 1991, from “Beirut City Center

Place des canons

Blue sky gallery

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Jan Palach – a Poem by David Shapiro, his collaboration with architect John Hejduk

Happy birthday David Shaprio

Read Poem For You here.