Creativity Explored - Fashion Friday

Creativity Explored‏ @creativityxplrd 

Kicking off #FashionFriday with a #sneakpeek of this incredible

repurposed kimono-style canvas coat, painted by CE artist #ThomasPringle. You won’t want to miss the upcoming #fashion exhibition, Fabulate! Save the date for the #fashionshow and opening reception on September 20!

Elisabetta Sirani. Supported her family through her art and opened a school for other female artists.

Anyone who thinks that all great classical artists were men is wrong. Here’s Elisabetta Sirani who, in the 1600s, depicted women throwing their rapists into wells, wielding the sword of justice, chopping off men’s heads. AND she opened a school for other female artists.

Self portrait as an allegory of painting

According to written records, when she died at 27, the Italian artist Elisabetta Sirani had already produced 200 paintings, drawings, and etchings. The cause of death was probably peritonitis, due to a ruptured ulcer, although there were rumors of poison, common for the era. 

An independent painter by 19, Sirani ran her family’s workshop. When her father became incapacitated by gout, she supported her parents, three siblings, and herself entirely through her art.

Sirani spent her life in Bologna, a city famous for its progressive attitude toward women’s rights and for producing successful female artists. She became known for her ability to paint beautifully finished canvases so quickly that many visited her studio to watch her work. Her paintings were acquired by wealthy, noble, and even royal patrons, including the Grand Duke Cosimo III de Medici.

Sirani’s funeral was an elaborate affair involving formal orations, special poetry and music, and an enormous catafalque decorated with a life-size sculpture of the deceased. In addition to her substantial oeuvre, Sirani left an important legacy through her teaching. Her pupils included her two sisters, Barbara and Anna Maria, and more than a dozen other young women who became professional painters.

at the Uffizi: https://www.uffizi.it/en/events/painting-and-drawing-like-a-true-master-the-talent-of-elisabetta-sirani

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabetta_Sirani

Dancing Goddess by Nina Paley

Dancing Goddesses by Nina Paley

https://www.awn.com/animationworld/dancing-goddesses-how-nina-paley-animated-stone-sculptures-seder-masochism

Lavinia Fontana. Born on August 24 , 1552. 466 years ago.

 Happy 466th birthday to Renaissance artist #LaviniaFontana! 

First professional woman artist

Internationally renowned 

Portraitist to nobility

Household breadwinner

In 1577 Fontana married the minor painter Gian Paolo Zappi. He was willing to subordinate his career to her own; he also became her agent. After her marriage, Fontana sometimes signed her work with her married name. She enjoyed the patronage of the family of Pope Gregory XIII and painted the likenesses of many eminent people. In addition to her career as an artist, she was the mother of 11 children.

 Art critics surmise that Zappi also painted some of the drapery and background in Fontana's paintings.

http://ow.ly/7La350ihhPU

Bianca degli Utili Maselli surrounded by her five sons, one daughter, slightly dazed dog, & bird. Fantastic study in family resemblance & textile complementarity by Lavinia Fontana of Bologna,

Lavinia Fontana, (born 1552, Bologna [Italy]—died August 11, 1614, Rome), Italian painter of the Mannerist school and one of the most important portraitists in Bologna during the late 16th century. She was one of the first women to execute large, publicly commissioned figure paintings.

Fontana studied with her father, Prospero Fontana (c. 1512–97), a minor painter of the school of Bologna, who taught his daughter to paint in the Mannerist style. By the late 1570s she was known in Bologna for painting fine portraits, including Self-portrait at the Harpischord and the very formal Gozzadini Family (1584). The attention to detail in her portraits is reminiscent of the work of another northern Italian Renaissance painter, Sofonisba Anguissola. Fontana’s works were admired for their vibrant colour and the detail of the clothes and jewelry that her subjects wore.

Woman with very cheerful little pooch, painted by Lavinia Fontana of Bologna.

 Stay away from my sweet doggie! Threatening look from Costanza Alidosi in 1594, as recorded by Lavinia Fontana

She made great strides in the field of portraiture, which garnered her fame within and beyond Italy. In fact, Fontana is regarded as the first woman artist, working within the same sphere as her male counterparts, outside a court or convent.

At age 25, Fontana married a fellow painter from a noble family, who acted as his wife’s assistant and managed their growing household,  For 20 years beginning in the 1580s, Fontana was the portraitist of choice among Bolognese noblewomen. She also painted likenesses of important individuals connected with the University of Bologna.

Fontana’s fame spread to Rome, where she moved in 1604. There she became a portraitist at the court of Pope Paul V and was the recipient of numerous honors, including a bronze portrait medallion cast in 1611 by sculptor and architect Felice Antonio Casoni.

NMWA EXHIBITIONS

Italian Women Artists from Renaissance to Baroque, 2007

An Imperial Collection: Women Artists from the State Hermitage Museum, 2003

Lavinia Fontana of Bologna (1552-1614), 1998

Four Centuries of Women's Art: The National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1990–91

Online

"Lavinia Fontana," http://www.nmwa.org/legacy/bios/bfontana.htm (January 15, 2002).

The Lives of Renaissance Women,http://www.bctf.bc.ca/lessonaids/online/LA9245.html (January 15, 2002). □

Aubrey Beardsley. Born on this day in 1872.

In her terrific 1968 treatise Black and White: A Portrait of Aubrey Beardsley (public library), British novelist, critic, music scholar, and social reformer Brigid Brophy calls Beardsley “the most intensely and electrically erotic artist in the world” and “perhaps the only artist of any kind practicing in [that period] who was never sentimental.” She writes:

Live (love) now: die sooner or later.

That, classically, is the purport of lyrical art. Aubrey Beardsley was above all a lyrical artist — but one who was pounded and buckled into an ironist by the pressure of knowing, which he did virtually from the outset, that for him death would be not later but sooner.

A scholar of Mozart and an astute cross-pollinator of the arts, Brophy — a lyrical genius herself — writes:

Beardsley is lyrical by virtue of his gift of line, which resembles the gift of melodic invention. Sheerly, Beardsley’s lines, like great tunes, go up and down in beautiful places… A Beardsley sequence is like a sonnet sequence. Yet it is never the literary content of an image that concerns him. His portraits, including those of himself, are less portraits than icons. He is drawing not persons but personages; he is dramatizing not the relationships between personalities but the pure, geometric essence of relationship. He is out to capture sheer tension: tension contained within, and summed up by, his always ambivalent images.

And yet Beardsley’s images are very much a sacrificial offering to tension, to the contradictory forces by which the human heart is pulled asunder — loneliness and longing, dread and desire, sadness and sensual delight. His stark black-and-white aesthetic — like his life, like all life — is one of violent and vitalizing contrasts, nowhere more so than in his drawings for Oscar Wilde’s play Salome. (Brain Pickings) 

Aesthetic artist and writer Aubrey Beardsley was born#onthisday in 1872. He rose to prominence in the 1890s alongside artists such as James McNeill Whistler and writers like Oscar Wilde. His bold artworks were inspired by Japanese prints, and his work influenced the opulent style of Art Nouveau in the early 20th century. 

Gustave Caillebotte. Born on this day in 1848

August 19, 1848. Gustave Caillebotte (19 August 1848 - 21 February 1894) was a French painter, member and patron of the artists known as Impressionists, although he painted in a more realistic manner than many others in the group. Caillebotte was noted for his early interest in photography as an art form.In this image: Gustave Caillebotte, Self-­-Portrait at the Easel, 1879?80. Oil on canvas, 35 7/16 × 45 1/4 in. (90 × 115 cm). Private collection.

Paris Street, Rainy Day

Gustave Caillebotte's best-known work, Paris Street: Rainy Day (above), painted in 1877, shows a vast cobblestone street, stretching out in front of looming, wedge-shaped buildings. The street is dotted with dark umbrellas that shelter top-hatted men, and women in long skirts — all looking vague and a little disoriented. That was a major subject of Caillebotte's: What the modernization of Paris was doing to its people.  NPR

Floor Scrapers

 Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) is the “unknown Impressionist.” If Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet and Pierre Auguste-Renoir are synonymous with the movement, Caillebotte remains unfamiliar. Yet Caillebotte’s masterpiece, “Paris Street, Rainy Day” (1877), with its chic Parisians under their arching umbrellas, carefully disposed against a vast expanse of shiny, wet cobblestones, narrow streets zooming into infinity behind them, is admired by countless art lovers, even by many who don’t know the artist’s name. And, it turns out, Caillebotte played a vital role in the early history of Impressionism, in many different ways.

Yet this obscurity isn’t surprising. For a remarkably long time, Caillebotte, a wealthy man who had no need to work (or sell his paintings), was discussed primarily as a patron of his adventurous friends, the Impressionists—someone who bought their pictures, paid their bills, lent them money, and was occasionally stimulated by their example to try his own hand, as an amateur. His controversial (at the time) donation of his collection to the French state, after his death, eclipsed his achievements as a painter. 

It was not until the 1950s and 1960s that the dealer Georges Wildenstein began presenting Caillebotte’s canvases as worth considation, and not until 1976 that a monographic museum show, organized by Kirk Varnedoe, claimed the painter for serious scrutiny. As a result, Caillebotte had an important place in a 1986 exhibition celebrating the centennial of the last Impressionist exhibition organized by the artists themselves. Other significant exhibits followed, most notably, in 1994, a full-scale retrospective, seen at the Grand Palais, Paris; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Royal Academy, London. (WSJ). 

Wikipedia here 

The Art Story here

NPR here

Saturday Music. Bob Wood plays a wicked guitar. "Besame Mucho"!

This is Bob Wood of Nashville, TN. He's been playing guitar forever, and he just turned 80! This cat can burn it down on the guitar! Share it!

Aretha Franklin. In Memorandum at the National Portrait Gallery

http://npg.si.edu/exhibition/memoriam-aretha-franklin

Friday Fish Wrap. Black Cat Appreciation Day, International Mermaid Day, celebrating Egbert van Heemakerck

It's #BlackCatAppreciationDay! This is a bronze statue of the cat-goddess Bastet, daughter of Re, made 715-343 BC in Egypt http://www.ashmoleanprints.com/image/453773/model-of-the-cat-goddess-bastet … #BlackCatDay

Canadian folk art artist Maud Lewis, Three black cats, 1955 #womensart 

A black cat for #BlackCatAppreciationDay @BLMedieval Harley 3244 f. 49v

Sloane MS 278, f. 47r

http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/record.asp?MSID=6512&CollID=9&NStart=278 …

Life is the bubbles under the sea! A mermaid swims in the margins with a mirror and comb in a C15th French copy of Les Fais et les Dis des Romains #InternationalMermaidDay

Today's artist w/out a known birthday: Egbert van Heemskerck of Haarlem & London. Painted peasants in taverns & doctors' offices. Here, tavern. Smoking. How to end up in doctor's office,

Aretha. RIP

Aretha by Milton Glasser
Her greatest songs

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/aug/16/aretha-franklin-her-greatest-songs-from-the-church-to-the-dancefloor

NASA + Clair de Lune + the real moon

https://youtu.be/zNpsy6lBPBw

From NASA's Ernie Wright comes "Moonlight (Clair de Lune)," a visualization that takes beautiful images of the lunar terrain and sets them to Claude Debussy's 1905 composition, Clair de Lune (1905). Here's how Wright describes the project:

This visualization attempts to capture the mood of Claude Debussy's best-known composition, Clair de Lune (moonlight in French). The piece was published in 1905 as the third of four movements in the composer's Suite Bergamasque, and unlike the other parts of this work, Clair is quiet, contemplative, and slightly melancholy, evoking the feeling of a solitary walk through a moonlit garden. The visuals were composed like a nature documentary, with clean cuts and a mostly stationary virtual camera. The viewer follows the Sun throughout a lunar day, seeing sunrises and then sunsets over prominent features on the Moon. The sprawling ray system surrounding Copernicus crater, for example, is revealed beneath receding shadows at sunrise and later slips back into darkness as night encroaches. The visualization was created to accompany a performance of Clair de Lune by the National Symphony Orchestra Pops, led by conductor Emil de Cou, at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, on June 1 and 2, 2018, as part of a celebration of NASA's 60th anniversary. The visualization uses a digital 3D model of the Moon built from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter global elevation maps and image mosaics. The lighting is derived from actual Sun angles during lunar days in 2018.

Gauguin comes to the de Young in November

It's difficult to see Gauguin through the shadow of his legend, the bad boy of late 19th century art, Van Gogh's nemesis, all arrogance and ego, fleeing industrial Europe for a South Sea paradise which never materialized. But he was always more than his public persona. Coming from a bourgeois banker background, he quickly grew beyond the limits of impressionism, evolving a style which has been highly influential (although seldom directly acknowledged). His notebooks and writings, as Richard Bretteil pointed out, are "The largest and most important body of texts, illustrated and otherwise, produced by any great artist in France since Delacroix...That he has always been treated as a businessman-turned-artist rather than as an artist-turned-writer shows the extent to which his literary achievement has been undervalued." 

"It seems that Eve did not speak negro, but good God! what language did she speak, she and the serpent?" he demanded in a letter to his fellow painter Emile Bernard in 1889. Adam and Eve, or Paradise Lost, 1890, was the visual counterpart to that question. Gauguin painted its writhing silhouettes of green foliage against an unnaturally dark cobalt sky in France long before he ever saw Tahiti. But there is no difference at all between it and the more elaborate reworkings of primal innocence and guilt that he would produce in the South Seas. All the imagery of Paradise was in his head already. He went there not to see it, but to live it. · Robert Hughes

Recognition of this barbarian, this brigand (words he used of himself), this wild, selfish and self-destructive genius, swiftly followed on his death; in 1906, within three years, the Salon d’Automne mounted a memorial exhibition of the full range of his work, trounced his detractors, vindicated his ideas and set him on the highest pinnacle of Mount Olympus (this he did not quite deserve). The list of those on whom he exerted influence is very long, Matisse and Picasso at its head...R. Sewell.

Gauguin: A Spiritual Journey

November 17, 2018–April 7, 2019  

de Young

World Elephant Day

Calling your help on conserving and protecting the elephants! Today marks the #WorldElephantDay of 2018. The inaugural World Elephant Day was initiated on August 12, 2012, to bring attention to the urgent plight of Asian and African elephants.

An elephant depicted on the 6th-century mosaic floor of the "Palatium Magnum" (Imperial Palace) of Constantinople.

Drawn by Matthew Paris in the 1250s. It was a gift from King Louis IX of France to Henry III of England in 1255, and it was kept (as you do) at the Tower of London.

 Today is #WorldElephantDay & I am proud to present an elephant with cloven hooves.  @AphraPell @julianpharrison @melibeus1 Those pointy ears are quite something as well!  No wonder Mr Hare is leaping in the air with shock.  Source:  http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpg84/

The Invisible Man and the Masque of Blackness at the Civic Center

British-Trinidadian artist Zak Ové’s Invisible Man and the Masque of Blackness installation of 40 identical resin and graphite figurative sculptures will be on display in Civic Center Plaza through the summer of 2018. First exhibited in London, this army of statuesque 6.5 feet tall black masked figurines is an exploration of identity, beauty and power in the African diaspora and serves as the work’s American debut.

As part of the Civic Center Commons Initiative, the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, and in partnership with the Recreation and Parks Department, is funding the San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) to bring this monumental temporary art piece to City Hall’s front steps.

Civic Center Plaza has served as a platform for grand sculptures including Zhang Huan’s Three Heads, Six Arms in 2010, Choi Jeong Hwa’s Breathing Flower in 2012 and Amanda Parer’s Intrude in 2016. Ové will be the first artist of African descent to mount a commissioned temporary art installation in Civic Center Plaza.

Invisible Man and the Masque of Blackness will be open to the public starting July 2018 and will be up for viewing for four months . Read more about this ambitious installation on SFAC’s website and learn more about the artist’s work on his website.

https://www.sfartscommission.org/calendar/dedication-zak-ov%C3%A9s-invisible-man-and-masque-blackness