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Last login: 1 hour agoHapax: Hapax is a guy from Cork, Ireland.; Likes 18,571 pages, 177 videos, 1,318 photos • 892 fans • Received 315 reviews; Member since Jan 18, 2005

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Guggenheim Collection - Artist - Marc: 12:35am 1 review painting, arts, expressionism •http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/s...; franz marc
animal colour

Yellow Cow (Gelbe Kuh), 1911

During the early years of the 20th century, a back-to-nature movement swept Germany. Artists' collectives and nudist colonies sprung up in agricultural areas in the conviction that a return to the land would rejuvenate what was perceived to be an increasingly secularized, materialistic society. A seminarian and philosophy student turned artist, Franz Marc found this nature-oriented quest for spiritual redemption inspiring. His vision of nature was pantheistic; he believed that animals possessed a certain godliness that men had long since lost. "People with their lack of piety, especially men, never touched my true feelings," he wrote in 1915. "But animals with their virginal sense of life awakened all that was good in me." By 1907 he devoted himself almost exclusively to the representation of animals in nature. To complement this imagery, through which he expressed his spiritual ideals, Marc developed a theory of color Symbolism [more]. His efforts to evoke metaphysical realms through specific color combinations and contrasts were similar to those of Vasily Kandinsky, with whom, in 1911, he founded the Blue Rider, a loose confederation of artists devoted to the expression of inner states.

For Marc, different hues evoked gender stereotypes: yellow, a "gentle, cheerful and sensual" color, symbolized femininity, while blue, representing the "spiritual and intellectual," symbolized masculinity. Marc's color theories and biography have been used by art historian Mark Rosenthal to interpret Yellow Cow. The frolicking yellow cow, as a symbol of the female principle, may be a veiled depiction of Maria Franck, whom Marc married in 1911. Extending this reading, Rosenthal sees the triangular blue mountains in the background as Marc's abstract self-portrait, thereby making this painting into a private wedding picture. Not all of Marc's paintings of animals are so sanguine, however. He often depicted innocent creatures in ominous scenes. Painted in 1913, The Unfortunate Land of Tyrol reflects the desolation caused by the Balkan Wars and their anticipation of pan-European battle; an Austro-Hungarian border sign included in the lower-left portion of the canvas indicates the vulnerability of this province. The cemetery and emaciated horses portend doom, but Marc's faith in the ultimate goodness of nature and the regenerative potential of war prevails: the rainbow and bird with outstretched wings reflect a promise of redemption through struggle.

Stables (Stallungen), 1913

The Unfortunate Land of Tyrol, 1913

INTOURIST Soviet Union Russia Labels - a set on Flickr: May 12, 7:28am 1 review graphic-design, history, travel, soviet-union •http://www.flickr.com/photos/wavesjax...; travel in the soviet union
intramural

Intourist was renowned as the official state travel agency of the Soviet Union. It was founded in 1929 by Joseph Stalin and was responsible for managing the great majority of foreigners' access to, and travel within, the Soviet Union. It grew into one of the largest tourism organizations in the world, with a network embracing banks, hotels, and money exchanges.

Some of the best Intourist labels and brochures produced during the 1930's were designed by A. Selensky. Some of the labels in this set are signed by him.

Free Verse - An Anthology of New Poems From Spain and Latin America

May 12, 2:42am

1 review

poetry •http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/freever...

federico garcía lorca
horseman's song

Tr. Michael Smith

A towering figure in twentieth-century Spanish letters, Federico García Lorca (June 5, 1898 - August 19, 1936) was a Spanish poet and dramatist, also remembered as a painter, pianist, and composer. An emblematic member of the Generation of '27, he was killed by Nationalist partisans at the age of 38 at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.

And here, thanks to Uyulula, is a Turkish version of the poem set to music . . .

George Eastman House Ralph Eugene Meatyard Series: May 9, 5:18pm 3 reviews photography •http://www.geh.org/ne/str085/htmlsrc8...; ralph eugene meatyard
maskings

An encyclopedia entry on his life might read like this: "Born in Normal, Illinois, in 1925, the eldest of two sons, Meatyard attended Williams College as part of the Navy's V12 program in World War II. Following the war, he married, became a licensed optician, and moved to Lexington, Kentucky, where he eventually opened his own shop, Eyeglasses of Kentucky. When the first of his three children was born, Meatyard bought a camera to make pictures of the baby. Quickly, photography became a consuming interest. He joined the Lexington Camera Club, where he met Van Deren Coke, under whose encouragement he soon developed into a powerfully original photographer. Attending to professional obligations during the week, he photographed only on weekends. Through Minor White, whom he met at a workshop organized by Henry Holmes Smith at Indiana University in 1956, he became interested in Zen, which then became a major influence on his photography. An eclectic and voracious reader, Meatyard became close friends with poets and writers, including Guy Davenport, Wendell Berry, Jonathan Williams, and the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Meatyard's work became well known and was exhibited widely within the United States and abroad. In 1972, he died of cancer, a week before his forty seventh birthday."

For thirty years, something like this sketch has held Meatyard's place in photo histories, but, like the fixation on the mask from which Lucybelle has suffered, it also has confined appreciation of his achievement. A sketch, even a rather full one like this, inevitably leaves unanswered questions, shadings to be filled in, and, often unthinkingly, we complete the picture with short hand notions of our ownabout the South, about Zen, about dying young, about a tradesman who was also an important artist. As yet we don't have a full biographical critical study of Meatyard, but in a good one the details about Meatyard's life, his reading, his thinking about Zen, his leadership in the Lexington Camera Club, and the rest of the facts sketched here would reveal an artist of far greater depth and importance than the one the sketch portrays.

How do I know this? If a careful analysis of Lucybelle does nothing else, it helps us get past the Meatyard of myth and legend into a fuller understanding of an artist very much worth serious critical attention. Moreover, since Lucybelle draws directly on the artist's life as the material here transformed into what Meatyard saw as a photographic poem, to probe its meaning and how it operates necessarily involves investigating some aspects of Meatyard's biography in more detail. One doesn't learn much about his early days growing up in Normal, Illinois, about his playing the accordion in the high school band, about his acting in plays and forming a fraternity, though these would figure importantly in a full biography. The "life" Lucybelle elevates begins later. In its fiction, Lucybelle offers a picture of the mature artist the artist as he saw himself and as he sought to be seen. Lucybelle shows us something of his inner life, the springs of his sensibility, and his values expressed as he always expressed them, through what was in his hands photography's eloquent vernacular. Source

YURIKO MIYOSHI PRINT WORKS: May 5, 11:06am 1 review arts, prints •http://yuriko_mi.at.infoseek.co.jp/pr...; yuriko miyoshi
land

copy-etching & aquatint on Japanese Gampi paper
printed with two colors from two copper plates

THE INTAGLlO PRINTING PROCESS

Etching, Engraving, Drypoint, Aquatint, Mezzotint, Collagraph, Photogravure

The word intaglio is derived from the Italian term meaning 'I cut into'. In this process the areas incised or cut into a metal plate actually print the image while the upper, non-printing surfaces are wiped clean. In etching, a plate, typically copper, aluminum or zinc which can be 'eaten away' by acid, is coated with an acid-resistant substance. A sharp instrument draws the image exposing the surface of the metal. The plate is immersed in an acid bath and the exposed metal surfaces become 'acid etched' leaving lines or other areas recessed below the surface of the plate. In engraving, fine lines are incised directly into the plate and the burrs removed to produce clean, sharp lines on the print. Drypoint is similar to engraving but the burr is not removed, resulting in a soft, almost fuzzy line. In the aquatint process, areas covered by rosin powder become pitted when immersed in an acid bath. When inked and printed these pitted surfaces produce tonal or 'textural' areas. In a mezzotint, a serrated tool is used to roughen areas that will retain ink to be printed, while areas to remain white are burnished and scraped smooth so that ink can be wiped away. In a collagraph, the surfaces to be printed are built up with cardboard or other materials that have been glued onto the plate. (The collagraph may also be a relief printing method.) Artists use a press, apply heavy pressure to transfer ink to paper, as same as etching. In etching, a plate, more typically copper, is used in Japan. Copper is not cheap, so someone in other countries use aluminum or zinc. The relatively recent development of the collagraph technique has provided artists with another method for applying ink to paper. As seen above, it is often employed for the purpose of adding textural and dimensional efforts to the prints. Now some artists in many countries are using collagraph or using it with etching or other. In the photogravure process, the image is photochemically transferred to an etching plate which has been coated with a light-sensitve emulsion. The plate is then etched in acid using the standard intaglio process.

Basic Steps

Design > Transfer design to plate > Incise or etch design in plate > Ink plate and wipe off non-printing surfaces > Using a press, apply heavy pressure to transfer ink to paper

Poetry Foundation: The online home of the Poetry Foundation

May 5, 6:04am

1 review

buddhism, poetry •http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archi...

philip whalen
the slop barrel:
slices of the paideuma for all sentient beings

Voodoo by Les Stone - The Digital Journalist (November 2007): May 5, 3:08am 1 review caribbean, haiti, voodoo •http://digitaljournalist.org/issue071...; les stone
voodoo

Les Stone and I met in Haiti in November of 1987 while covering the ill-fated first "free" elections after the Duvaliers were removed from power.

Thirty-four Haitians were massacred, one journalist killed and several more wounded that day as Duvalier's former henchmen, the Ton-Ton Macoutes, made sure that the election would be nullified and be remembered by Haitians and the journalists alike.

For Les Stone it will always be memorable as it was his first trip out of the country and his first trip to Haiti. (He'll also remember to take the insurance when renting a car there as his car was riddled with bullet holes.) Since then he has been to Haiti over 50 times, most of these trips on his own dime to record the ongoing turmoil in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, forgotten by most despite being only 90 minutes from Miami.

On the surface Haiti is a photojournalist's paradise. It appears that all you need to do is hold the camera up, press the shutter and you'll have an image with more grit and depth than you could imagine. But to capture the real Haiti, one must endure the daily dangers of violence in a place where any foreigner stands out, and with a culture very foreign to the average American.

The violence is only one aspect; the culture and the unfaltering dignity of the Haitian people are another.

Les has endured much over the years to make these photographs and has gotten as deeply into the culture as a "blanc" could ever do. His trips continue to this day.

Fogonazos: Kolmanskop, a ghost town buried in the sand: May 3, 5:05pm 23 reviews photography •http://fogonazos.blogspot.com/2008/01...; richard ehrlich
kolmanskop

Kolmanskop is a ghost town in southern Namibia, a few kilometres inland from the port of Lüderitz. In 1908, Luederitz was plunged into diamond fever and people rushed into the Namib desert hoping to make an easy fortune. Within two years, a town, complete with a casino, school, hospital and exclusive residential buildings, was established in the barren sandy desert.

But shortly after the drop in diamond sales after the First World War, the beginning of the end started. During the 1950's the town was deserted and the dunes began to reclaim what was always theirs.

Saudi Aramco World : Keyboard Calligraphy: May 2, 12:11pm 1 review eastern-studies, arabic, script •http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue...; typesetting arabic script
keyboard calligraphy

In a recent exhibition on Ottoman culture held in Amsterdam's Nieuwe Kerk was an unimpressive-looking little 18th-century book, a printed version of a manuscript produced 150 years earlier. Usually a manuscript is more rare than a printed work, but in this case the cultural and historical importance of the printed book surpassed that of the manuscript from which it derived: This was one of the first books printed in the Middle East in an Arabic typeface. The language was Ottoman Turkish.

The book, titled The History of the West Indies, dates from 1730, comprises 91 pages and four maps and includes illustrations of plants and people. Its author is uncertain, but the name of the printer who produced it is known: He was the Hungarian Ibrahim Müteferrika, the man who started an information revolution in the Muslim world.

Johannes Gutenberg introduced printing with moveable type in Europe in about 1450. By 1500, Gutenberg's innovation had completely transformed the intellectual and economic landscape of Europe--but it had not been adopted in any Middle Eastern country. Why not?

Moveable type had been tried and rejected before, in China in the 11th century and in Korea in the 13th. In both places, the enormous size of the Chinese character set used by both languages meant that it was faster to cut whole-page woodblocks than to cast as many as 40,000 different characters and set them one by one. A similar problem, part technical and part esthetic, blocked the use of moveable type in the Arabic-speaking world--and in the Ottoman Empire, whose language was written in Arabic script.

The technical problem is this: Arabic letters are generally not written separately but joined to each other in groups or entire words, like a script typeface in English. And though the Arabic alphabet has only 28 letters, most letters have four forms, depending on whether they occur at the beginning of the word, in the middle of the word, at the end of the word, or stand alone. Furthermore, each combination of letters is unique, creating a typographic challenge greater than Chinese. Because all letters connect dynamically with the preceding one, and most also with the following one, the number of unique combinations is almost astronomical.

The esthetic problem comes from the dizzying mutability of written Arabic. For example, there are actually three ways the letter ha can be written in the middle of a word, and the calligrapher's choice is influenced not only by the letter immediately preceding the ha, but also by the letters earlier in the word, and even by letters that follow it--yet, in whatever form, it is still in essence the ha in the beginner's textbook. A sequence of letters can run along a baseline the way Roman letters do--though Arabic runs from right to left, of course--or they may start above the baseline and descend in a diagonal if the connections from one letter to the next make that an esthetically pleasing choice.

The result is that the individual letters in a well-written piece of text are in constant motion, like dancers in a polonaise: In the course of the dance, they bow to each other, embrace each other, push each other away, hug each other's necks and fall at each other's feet--and there are some real acrobats among them. . . .

International Year of the Potato 2008: May 2, 1:56am 10 reviews agriculture, cooking, food •http://www.potato2008.org/en/index.html; year of the potato
local staple

Food prices are soaring worldwide, driven by fierce competition for reduced international supplies of wheat, maize and rice, and other agricultural commodities. As concern grows over the risk of food shortages and instability in dozens of low-income countries, global attention is turning to an age-old crop that could help ease the strain of food price inflation.

The potato is already an integral part of the global food system. It is the world's number one non-grain food commodity, with production reaching a record 320 million tonnes in 2007. Potato consumption is expanding strongly in developing countries, which now account for more than half of the global harvest and where the potato's ease of cultivation and high energy content have made it a valuable cash crop for millions of farmers.

At the same time, the potato - unlike major cereals - is not a globally traded commodity. Only a fraction of total production enters foreign trade, and potato prices are determined usually by local production costs, not the vagaries of international markets. It is, therefore, a highly recommended food security crop that can help low-income farmers and vulnerable consumers ride out current turmoil in world food supply and demand.

In Peru, for example, the government has acted to reduce costly wheat imports by encouraging people to eat bread that includes potato flour. In China, the world's biggest potato producer, agriculture experts have proposed that potato become the major food crop on much of the country's arable land. India has plans to double its potato production.

Over the next two decades, the world's population is expected to grow on average by more than 100 million people a year. More than 95 percent of that increase will occur in the developing countries, where pressure on land and water is already intense. A key challenge facing the international community is, therefore, to ensure food security for present and future generations, while protecting the natural resource base on which we all depend. The potato will be an important part of efforts to meet those challenges...

The potato has been consumed in the Andes for about 8 000 years. Taken by the Spanish to Europe in the 16th century, it quickly spread across the globe: today potatoes are grown on an estimated 192 000 sq km, or 74 000 square miles, of farmland, from China's Yunnan plateau and the subtropical lowlands of India, to Java's equatorial highlands and the steppes of Ukraine.

The potato should be a major component in strategies aimed at providing nutritious food for the poor and hungry. It is ideally suited to places where land is limited and labour is abundant, conditions that characterize much of the developing world. The potato produces more nutritious food more quickly, on less land, and in harsher climates than any other major crop - up to 85 percent of the plant is edible human food,

Potatoes are rich in carbohydrates, making them a good source of energy. They have the highest protein content in the family of root and tuber crops, and protein of a fairly high quality, with an amino-acid pattern that is well matched to human requirements. They are also very rich in vitamin C - a single medium-sized potato contains about half the recommended daily intake - and contain a fifth of the recommended daily value of potassium.

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