STOLEN APPLES (Arts Blog)

Monday, 7 December 2009

Renato Guttuso (1911 – 1987): Paintings, Watercolors and Drawings (Acquavella Galleries; New York 1983)

Renato Guttuso (1911- 1987) was one of the major Italian painters of the twentieth century. His best-known paintings include Flight from Etna (1938–39), Crucifixion (1941) and La Vucciria (1974). Guttuso also designed for the theatre (including sets and costumes for Histoire du Soldat, Rome, 1940) and did illustrations for books. Those for Elizabeth David's Italian Food (1954) introduced him to many in the English-speaking world. http://www.giudecca795.com/en/artists/Renato-Guttuso/

Thursday, 3 December 2009

David Foster Wallace (1962 – 2008): On making a difference...

(...) And Schmidt had a quick vision of them all in the conference room as like icebergs and/or floes, only the shap caps showing, unknown and -knowable to one another, and he imagined that it was probably only on marriage (and a good, not the decorous dance of loneliness he'd watched his mother and father do for seventeen years but rather true conyugal intimacy) that partners allowed each other to see bellow the berg's cap's public mask and consented to be truly known, maybe even to the extent of not only letting the partner see the repulsive nest of moles under their leaft arm or the way after any sort of cold or viral infection the toenails on both feet turned a weird deep yellow for several weeks but even perhaps every once in a while sobbing in each other's arms late at night and pouring out most ghastly private fears and thoughts of failure and impotence and terrible and throughougoing smallness within a grinding professional machine you can't believe you once had the temerity to think you could help change or make a difference or even be more than a tiny faceless cog in, the shame of being so hungry to make some sort of real impact on an industry that you'd fantasized over and over about finally deciding that making a dark difference with a hypo and eight cc's of castor bean distillate was better, was somehow more true to your own inner centrality and importance, than being nothing but a faceless cog and doing a job that untold thousands of other bright youn men and women who could do at least as well as you, or rather now even better than you because at least the younger among them still believed deep inside that they were made for something larger and more central and relevant than shepherding preoccupied men...

(...) For it seemed very bit as miraculous and transrational and remote from the possibilities of actual lived life as the crucifixion and resurrection and transubstantiation did, which is to say it appeared not as a goal to expect ever to really reach or achieve but as a kind of navigational star, as in in the sky, something high and untouchable and miraculously beautiful in the sort of distant way that reminded you always of how ordinary and unbeautiful and incapable of miracles you your own self were, which was another reason why Schmidt had stopped looking at the sky or going out at night or even usually ever opening the lightproof curtains of his condominium's picture window when he got home at night and instead sat with his satellite TV's channel-changer in his left hand switching rapidly from channel to channel to channel out of fear that something better was going to come on suddenly on another of the cable provider's 220 regular and premium channels and that he was about to miss it, spending three nightly hours this way before it was time to stare with drumming heart at the telephone that wholly unbeknownst to her had Darlene Lilley's home number of Speed Dial so that it would take only one moment of the courage to risk looking prurient or creepy to use just one finger to push just one gray button to invite her for one cocktail or even just a soft drink over which he could take off his public mask and open his heart to her before quailing and deferring the call one more night...

-David Foster Wallace, Mister Squishy.

Monday, 30 November 2009

Milán Füst (1888 - 1967): "The Nameless One Drinks" - Short Biography

Traductor: http://www.microsofttranslator.com/Default.aspx

THE NAMELESS ONE DRINKS

Put a glass on the end of the table,
Fill it with wine for him and do not look away -
A poor old beggar will arrive through the air,
Who´s roamed above the seas and mounts and can´t be seen.

Now sink your head! - And you, oh second Elijah

Who´re prowling there behind the door, ready to take me unawares, stand forth!

And if you were, say, lame or were a learned hunchback ever freezingm ever shuddering...

Sit down beside the fireplace. It is silent here.

The fire falls into ashes soon, not even the flickers of the flames will trouble you,

And we shall sit and stir not in the silence: so that we can hear your gulps...

We close our eyelids too because we know what suffering is.

So drink for us, you unseen one, eternal wanderer that have no name!
And let this fancied vision span a spacious tent above to shelter us from pains - come, drink!

We do not want your penny, beggar of the earth, we know too well that you have none...

Milán Füst is a Hungarian poet, prose writer and aesthetician. He was born on 17 July 1888 into an impoverished Jewish lower-middle-class family in Budapest. Due to his lung problems he moved to Opatija (Abbázia) in 1904, where he started to write his diary. He continued this until 1944, but most of his diary was destroyed in 1944-45. His first writings were published in the periodical Nyugat in 1909. Among fellow writers for Nyugat, he had close friendships with Frigyes Karinthy, Dezső Kosztolányi, Árpád Tóth, Zoltán Somlyó, and Zoltán Nagy. In 1912 he finished his studies of law and economics and obtained a doctoral degree. He taught in several commercial colleges. During the time of the “Aster Revolution” of 1918 he was elected as an attorney of the Vörösmarty Academy, consisting of representatives of modern literature. He was persecuted in the period of White Terror. In 1921 he took an early retirement, and in 1923 married one of his former students, Erzsébet Helfer. They went to Italy for their honeymoon. In 1924 he wrote an introduction to the Hungarian translation of Andreas Haukland’s book entitled Ol Jörgen. In Naples he also met Haukland in person, and wrote a report on their encounter in the newspaper Pesti Naplóban. In 1928, Füst spent six months in Baden-Baden in the sanatorium of Dr. Grodeck, a psychologist-physician, whom he later declared his master in the field of psychology. In 1929, he participated in the conference of the PEN Club in Vienna. In 1931 he wrote the a tragedy with the title IV. Henrik király, the plans of which he had been nurturing since the age of seventeen. In 1932 he travelled to Berlin to the opening night of this play, but it was cancelled because Nazism came to the power. In 1933 he spent some weeks in Dubrovnik before travelling to Greece in the company of Tibor Déry. In 1935 he started to write his most important prose work, the novel called A feleségem története, which he finished after seven years of strenuous work. The book remained altogether unnoticed when initially published in 1942, but it was subsequently translated into many languages. From 1947, Füst taught at the College of Fine Arts. In 1948 he was qualified as a lecturer of aesthetics at the University of Budapest. In 1948 he re-wrote his lost aesthetics (Látomás és indulat a művészetben) from memory for his lectures at the free university. In response to an invitation he spent one month in Switzerland. A new edition of his selected poems and a collection of his short stories was published in 1948, then a volume containing five short novels in 1949. This was followed by an interval of forced silence, as he was only allowed to publish again in 1955. A feleségem története was published in French in 1958, in Polish in 1960, in German in 1962, and in Dutch in 1964. In 1965 he was considered to be the strongest candidate for the Nobel Prize, and therefore the Swedish radio interviewed him. Füst died on 29 July 1967. He had an odd, hiding type of personality. Many legends have been connected with his name. He liked to act roles and hide behind them. A sharp contrast as between his life and work is rare even in world literature. http://s2.ned.univie.ac.at/lic/autor.asp?paras=/lg;4/aut_id;25844/

Tuesday, 24 November 2009

Contemporary Poetry: Judith Wiker - "Photo of the Master of the Grandi Navi Veloci"

.
Photo of the Master of the Grandi Navi Veloci
.
You sit with arm extended
finger on the gun
you shoot yourself with vast walls
of maps wrapped about your head

Your pale blue shirt is crisp
brought tight to your neck
with soft blue waves that swirl
round your torso
like a stormy lonely sea

The tie you wear strikes a knot
where your voice should be

You are a perfectly wrapped package
for my breakfast meal
Pronto to my laptop
like a newspaper
tossed upon my lawn

I sip my hot sweet java
while I bite my wanting lip
and touch the moist jungle of passion
imagining the ships heaving steam
in the ocean outside your door

They could be summoned
to bring you closer to me
by walking the few short steps
to reach the slippery deck
so you can travel to my heart

I see the words printed across
the blue paper oceans
that whirl round your head
while Africa’s vast deserts
sit strong over your left shoulder
whispering in your ear

This is your world across the sea
as you sit behind a nippy steel desk
where you live in Italy

I find myself resisting to
dive deeper into the cool pools
of your azure eyes
holding back on touching
the fire red of your cinnamon hair

So I bow my head taking a slow
gentle journey up your smooth navy tie
counting the crisscross pinkish dots
hop-scotching towards your chin
capturing your lips in living color
like a tidal wave

bringing me in
bringing me in

I can no longer turn my head
looking away from who you really are
in this fragile moment

I have the vertigo of sea legs
no compass or bearings
to find my way
to you

.
Judith lives outside of Chicago in a remote enclave called the Secret Garden. Embraced by a majestic oak forest, sits a modest artistic shelter that provides an inspirational refuge from the surrounding urban sprawl.

Judith has been a teacher of creative development at the College of DuPage and remains an artist, writer, poet and singer/songwriter. She is currently in private practice and a consultant to physicians and psychologists in the field of alternative medicine.

Children of Fire is her debut compilation. Blushing Palm, her forthcoming recording album, to be released in the spring of 2009, with lyrics inspired by 10 poems in this collection.

http://www.judithwiker.com/judith_wiker.html

Friday, 20 November 2009

George ROMNEY (1734-1802): Thomas Alphonso Hayley as Puck (1792; Oil on canvas. Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, U.K.)

George ROMNEY (1734-1802)

THOMAS ALPHONSO HAYLEY AS 'PUCK', c.1790
Oil on canvas, 76.1 x 63.5 cm

Brighton Museum and Art Gallery (U.K.)

Photo by (c) Daniel Yanez 2009

.

George Romney (1734 – 1802) was a noted English portrait painter.

In 1755 he went to Kendal to learn painting from a Cumberland artist by the name of Christopher Steele, and within two years was becoming well-known as a portraitist.

In 1762, by which time he was married with two children, he went to London, and saw early success with a painting, The Death of General Wolfe which won a prize from the Royal Society of Arts. Romney soon had a thriving portrait business in Long Acre.

Romney was invited to join the newly-formed Royal Academy but refused to resign from another artistic society, violating the Academy's exclusive membership rules.

In 1773 he travelled to Italy with fellow artist Ozias Humphrey to study art in Rome and Parma, returning to London in 1775 to resume business, this time in Cavendish Square (in a house formerly owned by noted portraitist Francis Cotes). He was engaged to paint the portraits of many famous people, including Emma Hamilton and fellow artist Mary Moser. He did not return to his family in Kendal until 1798. http://www.reviewpainting.com/George-Romney.htm

Portrait study of Emma Hamilton as Miranda

Serena in Contemplation
.

Emma Hamilton as Circe

Thursday, 19 November 2009

Liliana Lucki: Oil and Pastel, Final Series - 2009

Liliana Lucki was born in San Miguel (Argentine) and studied at Buenos Aires´ National School of Art in 1975. She followed up her studies at the hands of professors Samos, Pagano and Noe and, in 1984, entered the art workshop of Juan Larrea. She´s been writing and illustrating children books for nearly three decades and at present teaches art and history of art. Her works have been displayed in many exhibitions all around her native land and abroad, including Italy, Spain and Mexico.