Yesterday I spend all day at the Los Angeles Zoo out in the Griffith Park area. I hadn’t been there in a while and I wanted to take pictures of the animals. Now I am not a big supporter of keeping animals in cages and some of the animal behavior I saw there seemed like depression or obsessive neurotic behavior but I’m no expert. I also have no idea how well the animals are treated so I am not pointing a finger at the zoo. In fact I thought it was laid out quite well. It seemed to me that the apes and chimps could get out if they wanted but they seem to lack the desire. But again I may be overestimating their abilities. Despite my upset at seeing these incredible creatures behind bars I appreciate that you could not see them any other way in Los Angeles.
Putting aside my feelings I really enjoyed seeing what the zoo had to offer and I took pictures, plenty of pictures. The animals that stuck out to me were the tiger (who was a rock star with many fans watching him) and the chimps and gorillas whose expression are so human it’s scary. I was also struck by the majesty of the giraffes who seem to glide around their enclosure and the flamingos whose beauty is stunning. The least impressive was the alligator who didn’t move a muscle for 4 hours. Here is my first gallery of photos to see from my outing.
The incredible and successful Vince Lombardi talks to us about what it takes to be a success.
Be thankful today that we can still be motivated by a man who is no longer with us but whose words resonate across time.
Last Sunday I shot a couple models downtown Los Angeles at 2nd street right across from Megatoys where there was some amazing graffiti. The two models were great and provided me with many good poses. Here are just four. Later on I’ll set up a full gallery.
My good friend and social media guru Gregg Masters talks about Social Media for artists in the article below. Gregg is the CEO of Xanate Media,
a full service social media marketing company.
Charles Blackman (born 12 August 1928) is one of the best known Australian artists still living today, especially for the famous Schoolgirl and Alice in Wonderland series of the 1950s. He was a member of the Antipodeans, a group of Melbourne painters that also included Arthur Boyd, David Boyd, John Brack, Robert Dickerson, John Perceval and Clifton Pugh.
Early life and initial success
Blackman, born 12 August 1928 in Sydney, left school at 13 and worked as an illustrator with the Sydney Sun newspaper while attending night classes at East Sydney Technical College (1943–46). He was later awarded an honorary doctorate. He came to notice following his move to Melbourne in the mid-1940s, where he became friends with Joy Hester, John Perceval and Laurence Hope as well as gaining the support of critic and art patron John Reed. His work met critical acclaim through his early Schoolgirl and Alice series, the latter Blackman’s conception of Lewis Carroll’s most famous character. For some time while painting the Alice series, Blackman worked as a cook at a cafe run by art dealer, George Mora and his wife, fellow artist Mirka Mor.
In 1959 he was a signatory to the Antipodean Manifesto, a statement protesting the dominance of abstract expressionism. The manifesto’s adherents have been dubbed the Antipodeans Group. His work is associated with dreamlike images tinged with mystery and foreboding. In 1960 he lived in London after winning the Helena Rubenstein Scholarship, settling in Sydney upon his return six years later. In 1970 he moved to Paris, when awarded the atelier studio in the Cité des Artes. He lived there for a year at the same time as John Coburn, and subsequently returned often, as Paris was an eternal source of inspiration.
His strong friendships with fellow artists led to field trips, sessions with models, cultural interchanges with poets, writers, musicians and worked with the ballet, doing set designs, i.e. Daisy Bates. After 27 years of marriage, Patterson divorced Blackman in 1978 and he married the young artist Genevieve de Courvreur. He married a third wife, Victoria Bower in 1989, who he also later divorced. He has six children, Auguste, Christabel, Barnaby,Beatrice, Felix and Axiom. He has won many prizes and distinctions, culminating in a major retrospective in 1993 and an OBE for services to Australian art in 1977.
A portrait of Charles Blackman by Jon Molvig won the Archibald Prize in 1966.
Later life
After years of alcohol abuse, Blackman now suffers from Korsakoff’s syndrome, a brain disorder affecting memory. After suffering a stroke and heart attack in 1994, Blackman has subsequently been under full-time care. The subject of ownership of Blackman’s paintings has been a controversial issue, though his former wife Barbara maintained that her possession of some of them had been for the sake of preservation and that she intended to donate them to galleries This commitment may have been met by the donation of five works to the National Gallery of Australia in August 2010. In a statement published by the Canberra Times newspaper, Ms Blackman said that, “At Easter my house was flooded. No paintings were damaged but since then I have been giving paintings to public collections. I have no valuable Blackmans left in my collection…”.
Blackman has repeatedly expressed disdain for the concept of making money from or maintaining exclusive ownership of his paintings. His accountant and close friend, Tom Lowenstein, set up the Charles Blackman Trust to manage the painter’s affairs. Lowenstein periodically sells off the works that Blackman still owns to ensure Blackman’s expenses are taken care of.[4] Blackman lives a simple but happy life in his rented home in Sydney. He meets with friends and fellow artists Judy Cassab and Marina Finlay twice a month to draw and have “passionate discussions” about art.[4]
In August 2010, The Blackman hotel opened in St Kilda Road, Melbourne. It features 670 digitally reproduced fine art prints by Charles Blackman.[5]
Ursula Dubosarsky’s novel The Golden Day was directly inspired by Blackman’s 1954 painting Floating Schoolgirl,[6] which is in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.[7]
Kneller was the Leroy Neiman of his day. A rockstar painter of the English court who painted portraits of a who’s who gallery of 17th century celebrities and nobility.
Sir Godfrey Kneller, 1st Baronet (8 August 1646 – 19 October 1723) was the leading portrait painter in England during the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and was court painter to English and British monarchs from Charles II to George I. His major works include The Chinese Convert (1687); a series of four portraits of Isaac Newton painted at various junctures of the latter’s life; a series of ten reigning European monarchs, including King Louis XIV of France; over 40 “Kit-cat portraits” of members of the Kit-Cat Club; and ten “beauties” of the court of William III, to match a similar series of ten beauties of the court of Charles II painted by his predecessor as court painter, Sir Peter Lely.
Kneller was born Gottfried Kniller in the Free City of Lübeck, the son of Zacharias Kniller. Kneller studied in Leiden, but became a pupil of Ferdinand Bol and Rembrandt inAmsterdam. He then traveled with his brother John Zacharias Kneller, who was an ornamental painter, to Rome and Venice in the early 1670s, painting historical subjects and portraits in the studio of Carlo Maratti, and later moved to Hamburg. They came to England in 1676, and won the patronage of the Duke of Monmouth. He was introduced to, and painted a portrait of, Charles II. In England, Kneller concentrated almost entirely on portraiture. He founded a studio which churned out portraits on an almost industrial scale, relying on a brief sketch of the face with details added to a formulaic model, aided by the fashion for gentlemen to wear full wigs. His portraits set a pattern that was followed until William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds.
Isaac Newton
Nevertheless, he established himself as a leading portrait artist in England. When Sir Peter Lely died in 1680, Kneller was appointed Principal Painter to the Crown by Charles II. In the 1690s, Kneller painted the Hampton Court Beauties depicting the most glamorous ladies-in-waiting of the Royal Court for which he received his knighthood from William III. He produced a series of “Kit-cat” portraits of 48 leading politicians and men of letters, members of the Kit-Cat Club. Created a baronet by King George I, he was also head of the Kneller Academy of Painting and Drawing 1711-1716 in Great Queen Street, London, which counted such artists as Thomas Gibson amongst its founding directors. His paintings were praised by Whig luminaries such as John Dryden, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Alexander Pope.
On the landing in Horsham Museum hang works of art from the Museum’s extensive painting collection, featuring a large eighteenth century portrait of Charles Eversfield and his wife of Denne Park House. In the painting Eversfield is giving his wife some violets which signifies fidelity, love and honesty. It is likely that the picture was cut down at some time as it was unusual to stop just below the knee. It may have been painted by more than one person: someone who specialised in clothing, another in drapes, and so on, with perhaps the great court painter Sir Godfrey Kneller painting the heads, for it was the portraits that gave the sitters their identity, everything else is rather formulaic.
Kneller died of fever in 1723 and his remains were interred in the church of St. Mary’s (Twickenham) (he was a churchwarden there when the 14th century nave collapsed in 1713 and was involved in the plans for its reconstruction by John James (architect)).The site of the house he built in 1709 in Whitton near Twickenham is now occupied by the mid-19th century Kneller Hall, home of the Royal Military School of Music.
Margaret Timmers’s new book “A Century of Olympics Posters,” published by the Victoria & Albert Museum in conjunction with their exhibition “A Call to the Games: Olympic Posters” (currently on view at the National Sports Museum in Melbourne) brings together some of the best artwork and poster design of the twentieth century.
The flavor and feel of the Olympics is somewhat defined by the graphics and the artwork that promotes it. Now more than ever the “branding” of the Olympics is just as important as the performances. In a way for an entity like NBC it’s more important. Especially since here in America we are seeing tape delays. The graphics become more important in their package. It needs to stimulate and give the viewer added value.
The posters above harken back to a day when the define of the Olympics was centered on the posters and the graphics that were local to the venue as TV was not a factor. So take a look at a slice of Olympic art from yesteryear.
Awesome painter of landscapes back in the day. His work gives you a real feel about life in Holland during the 18th century.
Isaak Ouwater (1750-1793)
Most of the paintings produced by the eighteenth-century painter Ouwater were townscapes. This topographical genre originated in Dutch art of the seventeenth century. An important influence on Ouwater was the late seventeenth-century painter Jan van der Heyden. The painter lived and worked his entire life in Amsterdam, although he toured Holland on several occasions. The sketches that he made on his travels formed the basis for his views of Haarlem, The Hague, Hoorn and other towns. Ouwater added small figures to enliven work.
