Surreal . Fine Art . Conceptual Photography/ Arts

Pablo Picasso's paintings

2012-09-24T09:44:00.000-07:00

Pablo Picasso's paintings & artworks

about picasso, artist, by pablo picasso, conceptual arts, Pablo Picasso, paintings, paintings by picasso, picasso and, picasso the, pictures, Spanish painter, who was picasso, works of picasso

Fotoup the new photography social network

2012-09-21T17:10:00.003-07:00

Fotoup photography social network

edgar degas paintings, the dancers

2012-09-19T10:42:00.003-07:00

edgar degas paintings, the dancers

Edgar Degas, was a French artist famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. He is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist.........degas

degas

2012-09-14T10:45:00.001-07:00

Edgar Degas

en.wikipedia.org

Born: July 19, 1834, Paris

Died: September 27, 1917, Paris

Education: Lycée Louis-le-Grand

Buried: Montmartre Cemetery

Periods: Impressionism, Realism

Artwork

La Petite Danseuse de Quat...

1881

L'Absinthe

1876

Interior

1869

Place de la Concorde

1875

Young Spartans Exercising

1860

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Degas was born in Paris, France, the oldest of five children of Célestine Musson De Gas, a Creole from New Orleans, and Augustin De Gas, a banker. The family was moderately wealthy. Degas' mother died when he was thirteen, after which his father and grandfather were the main influences on his early life. At age eleven, Degas (in adulthood he abandoned the more pretentious spelling of the family name)[4] began his schooling with enrollment in the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, graduating in 1853 with a baccalauréat in literature.

Degas began to paint early in life. By the age of eighteen, he had turned a room in his home into an artist's studio, and in 1853 he registered as a copyist in the Louvre. His father, however, expected him to go to law school. Degas duly enrolled at the Faculty of Law of the University of Paris in November 1853, but made little effort at his studies. In 1855, Degas met Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, whom he revered, and whose advice he never forgot: "Draw lines, young man, and still more lines, both from life and from memory, and you will become a good artist."[5] In April of that same year, Degas received admission to the École des Beaux-Arts, where he studied drawing with Louis Lamothe, under whose guidance he flourished, following the style of Ingres.[6] In July 1856, Degas traveled to Italy, where he would remain for the next three years. In 1858, while staying with his aunt's family in Naples, he made the first studies for his early masterpiece, The Bellelli Family. He also drew and painted numerous copies afterMichelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and other artists of the Renaissance but, contrary to conventional practice, he usually selected from an altarpiece a detail that had caught his attention—a secondary figure, or a head which he treated as a portrait.[7]

[edit]Artistic career

Upon his return to France in 1859, Degas moved into a Paris studio large enough to permit him to begin painting The Bellelli Family—an imposing canvas he intended for exhibition in the Salon, although it remained unfinished until 1867. He also began work on several history paintings: Alexander and Bucephalus and The Daughter of Jephthah in 1859–60; Sémiramis Building Babylon in 1860; and Young Spartans around 1860.[8] In 1861, Degas visited his childhood friend Paul Valpinçon inNormandy, and made the earliest of his many studies of horses. He exhibited at the Salon for the first time in 1865, when the jury accepted his painting Scene of War in the Middle Ages, which attracted little attention.[9] Although he exhibited annually in the Salon during the next five years, he submitted no more history paintings, and his Steeplechase—The Fallen Jockey (Salon of 1866) signaled his growing commitment to contemporary subject matter. The change in his art was influenced primarily by the example of Édouard Manet, whom Degas had met in 1864 (while both were copying the same Velázquez portrait in the Louvre, according to a story that may be apocryphal).[10]

At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Degas enlisted in the National Guard, where his defense of Paris left him little time for painting. During rifle training his eyesight was found to be defective, and for the rest of his life his eye problems were a constant worry to him.[11]

A Cotton Office in New Orleans, 1873

After the war, in 1872, Degas began an extended stay in New Orleans, Louisiana, where his brother René and a number of other relatives lived. Staying at the home of his Creole uncle, Michel Musson, on Esplanade Avenue,[12]Degas produced a number of works, many depicting family members. One of Degas's New Orleans works, A Cotton Office in New Orleans, garnered favorable attention back in France, and was his only work purchased by a museum (that of Pau) during his lifetime.

Degas returned to Paris in 1873. The following year his father died, and in the subsequent settling of the estate it was discovered that Degas's brother René had amassed enormous business debts. To preserve the family name, Degas was forced to sell his house and a collection of art he had inherited. Dependent for the first time in his life on sales of his artwork for income, he produced much of his greatest work during the decade beginning in 1874.[13] By now thoroughly disenchanted with the Salon, Degas joined forces with a group of young artists who were intent upon organizing an independent exhibiting society. The first of their exhibitions, which were quickly dubbed Impressionist Exhibitions, was in 1874. The Impressionists subsequently held seven additional shows, the last in 1886. Degas took a leading role in organizing the exhibitions, and showed his work in all but one of them, despite his persistent conflicts with others in the group. He had little in common with Monet and the other landscape painters, whom he mocked for painting outdoors. Conservative in his social attitudes, he abhorred the scandal created by the exhibitions, as well as the publicity and advertising that his colleagues sought.[1] He bitterly rejected the label Impressionist that the press had created and popularized, and his insistence on including non-Impressionist artists such as Jean-Louis Forain and Jean-François Raffaëlli in their exhibitions created rancor within the group, contributing to their eventual disbanding in 1886.[14]

As his financial situation improved through sales of his own work, he was able to indulge his passion for collecting works by artists he admired: old masters such as El Greco and such contemporaries as Manet, Pissarro, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh. Three artists he idolized, Ingres, Delacroix, and Daumier, were especially well represented in his collection.[15]

In the late 1880s, Degas also developed a passion for photography.[16] He photographed many of his friends, often by lamplight, as in his double portrait of Renoir andMallarmê. Other photographs, depicting dancers and nudes, were used for reference in some of Degas's drawings and paintings.[17]

As the years passed, Degas became isolated, due in part to his belief that a painter could have no personal life.[18] The Dreyfus Affair controversy brought his anti-Semitic leanings to the fore and he broke with all his Jewish friends.[19] His argumentative nature was deplored by Renoir, who said of him: "What a creature he was, that Degas! All his friends had to leave him; I was one of the last to go, but even I couldn't stay till the end."[20]

Although he is known to have been working in pastel as late as the end of 1907, and is believed to have continued making sculpture as late as 1910, he apparently ceased working in 1912, when the impending demolition of his longtime residence on the rue Victor Massé forced him to move to quarters on the boulevard de Clichy.[21] He never married and spent the last years of his life, nearly blind, restlessly wandering the streets of Paris before dying in September 1917.[22]

Sculpture

Degas's only showing of sculpture during his life took place in 1881 when he exhibited The Little Fourteen Year Old Dancer, only shown again in 1920; the rest of the sculptural works remained private until a posthumous exhibition in 1918. Degas scholars have agreed that the sculptures were not created as aids to painting, although the artist habitually explored ways of linking graphic art and oil painting, drawing and pastel, sculpture and photography. Degas assigned the same significance to sculpture as to drawing: "Drawing is a way of thinking, modelling another".[29]

After Degas's death, his heirs found in his studio 150 wax sculptures, many in disrepair. They consulted foundry owner Adrien Hébrard, who concluded that 74 of the waxes could be cast in bronze. It is assumed that, except for the Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, all Degas bronzes worldwide are cast from surmoulages (i.e., cast from bronze masters). A surmoulage bronze is a bit smaller, and shows less surface detail, than its original bronze mold. The Hébrard Foundry cast the bronzes from 1919–1936, and closed down in 1937, shortly before Hébrard's death.

In 2004, a previously unknown cache of 73 plaster casts created from wax originals sculpted by Degas was discovered. Although not previously catalogued, the casts were consistent with the 73 originals that Degas’s heirs gave to Hébrard Foundry in 1918. Art scholars are not in agreement as to what these casts actually are.[41] It appears, from their condition and provenance, that no bronzes were ever cast from these 73 plasters.

[edit]Personality and politics

Self-portrait (photograph), c. 1895

Degas, who believed that "the artist must live alone, and his private life must remain unknown",[42] lived an outwardly uneventful life. In company he was known for his wit, which could often be cruel. He was characterized as an "old curmudgeon" by the novelist George Moore,[42] and he deliberately cultivated his reputation as a misanthropic bachelor.[20] Profoundly conservative in his political opinions, he opposed all social reforms and found little to admire in such technological advances as the telephone.[42] He fired a model upon learning she was Protestant.[42] Although Degas painted a number of Jewish subjects from 1865 to 1870, his anti-Semitism became apparent by the mid-1870s. His 1879 painting At The Bourse is widely regarded as strongly anti-Semitic, with the facial features of the banker taken directly from the anti-Semitic cartoons rampant in Paris at the time.[43]

The Dreyfus Affair, which divided Paris from the 1890s to the early 1900s, further intensified his anti-Semitism. By the mid-1890s, he had broken off relations with all of his Jewish friends,[19] publicly disavowed his previous friendships with Jewish artists, and refused to use models who he believed might be Jewish. He remained an outspoken anti-Semite and member of the anti-Semitic "Anti-Dreyfusards" until his death.[44]

[edit]Reputation

During his life, public reception of Degas's work ranged from admiration to contempt. As a promising artist in the conventional mode, Degas had a number of paintings accepted in the Salon between 1865 and 1870. These works received praise from Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and the critic, Jules-Antoine Castagnary.[45] He soon joined forces with the Impressionists, however, and rejected the rigid rules, judgements, and elitism of the Salon—just as the Salon and general public initially rejected the experimentalism of the Impressionists.

Degas's work was controversial, but was generally admired for its draftsmanship. His La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans, or Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, which he displayed at the sixth Impressionist exhibition in 1881, was probably his most controversial piece; some critics decried what they thought its "appalling ugliness" while others saw in it a "blossoming".[46]

In part Degas' originality consisted in disregarding the smooth, full surfaces and contours of classical sculpture ... [and] in garnishing his little statue with real hair and clothing made to scale like the accoutrements for a doll. These relatively "real" additions heightened the illusion, but they also posed searching questions, such as what can be referred to as "real" when art is concerned.[47]

The suite of pastels depicting nudes that Degas exhibited in the eighth Impressionist Exhibition in 1886 produced "the most concentrated body of critical writing on the artist during his lifetime ... The overall reaction was positive and laudatory".[48]

Recognized as an important artist in his lifetime, Degas is now considered "one of the founders of Impressionism".[49] Though his work crossed many stylistic boundaries, his involvement with the other major figures of Impressionism and their exhibitions, his dynamic paintings and sketches of everyday life and activities, and his bold color experiments, served to finally tie him to the Impressionist movement as one of its greatest artists.

His paintings, pastels, drawings, and sculptures are on prominent display in many museums.

Although Degas had no formal pupils, he greatly influenced several important painters, most notably Jean-Louis Forain, Mary Cassatt, and Walter Sickert;[50] his greatest admirer may have been Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.[51]

Surreal 3d composite photography by mohsen daemi

2012-09-12T19:28:00.000-07:00

Surreal 3D Composite Photography by Mohsen Daemi

my steps photo series

No one can find me

The nobody

Death

mohsendaemi.com

Afghan Girl , 1984 (left) and 2002 (right) By Steve McCurry

2012-09-05T19:52:00.000-07:00

Afghan Girl , 1984 (left) and 2002 (right) By Steve McCurry

How we gave colors names

2012-09-04T17:16:00.001-07:00

The crayola-fication of the world: How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains

This is not basically relate to art but its about colors ... and wow

In Japan, people often refer to traffic lights as being blue in color. And this is a bit odd, because the traffic signal indicating ‘go’ in Japan is just as green as it is anywhere else in the world. So why is the color getting lost in translation? This visual conundrum has its roots in the history of language.

Blue and green are similar in hue. They sit next to each other in a rainbow, which means that, to our eyes, light can blend smoothly from blue to green or vice-versa, without going past any other color in between. Before the modern period, Japanese had just one word, Ao, for both blue and green. The wall that divides these colors hadn’t been erected as yet. As the language evolved, in the Heian period around the year 1000, something interesting happened. A new word popped into being – midori – and it described a sort of greenish end of blue. Midori was a shade of ao, it wasn’t really a new color in its own right..........

>>>read the it here

Splendid Examples Of Matte Painting

2012-09-03T16:37:00.001-07:00

Splendid Examples Of Matte Painting

A matte painting is a painted representation of a landscape, set, or distant location that allows filmmakers to create the illusion of an environment that would otherwise be too expensive or impossible to build or visit. Historically, matte painters and film technicians have used various techniques to combine a matte-painted image with live-action footage. We will now be hopping into a theoretical Delorean and traveling to the past, as well as the future of this prominent genre ofdesign.Today we have collected “30+ Splendid Examples Of Matte Painting” .www.ozoneeleven.com

David Lynch

2012-08-19T14:32:00.000-07:00

David Lynch

art works contributed to David lynch and his works

David Lynch arts and bio

2012-08-19T12:26:00.000-07:00

David Lynch

david-lynch

Date of Birth20 January 1946, Missoula, Montana, USA

Birth NameDavid Keith Lynch

Height5' 11" (1.80 m)

Mini Biography

Born in precisely the kind of small-town American setting so familiar from his films, David Lynch spent his childhood being shunted from one state to another as his research scientist father kept getting relocated. He attended various art schools, married Peggy Lynch and then fathered future director Jennifer Chambers Lynch shortly after he turned 21. That experience, plus attending art school in a particularly violent and run-down area of Philadelphia, inspired Eraserhead (1977), a film that he began in the early 1970s (after a couple of shorts) and which he would work on obsessively for five years. The final film was initially judged to be almost unreleasable weird, but thanks to the efforts of distributor Ben Barenholtz, it secured a cult following and enabled Lynch to make his first mainstream film (in an unlikely alliance with Mel Brooks), though The Elephant Man (1980) was shot through with his unique sensibility. Its enormous critical and commercial success led to Dune (1984), a hugely expensive commercial disaster, but Lynch redeemed himself with the now classic Blue Velvet (1986), his most personal and original work since his debut. He subsequently won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival with the dark, violent road movie Wild at Heart (1990), and achieved a huge cult following with his surreal TV series "Twin Peaks" (1990), which he adapted for the big screen, though his comedy series "On the Air"(1992) was less successful. He also draws comic strips and has devised multimedia stage events with regular composer Angelo Badalamenti. He had a much-publicized affair with Isabella Rossellini in the late 1980s.IMDb Mini Biography By: Michael Brooke <michael@everyman.demon.co.uk>

Mini Biography
Born in 1946 in Missoula, Montana, David Lynch was raised early in small town America. After high school, he went to Boston to attend the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Shortly after that, he planned a 3 year trip to Europe to work on his art, but didn't take to it and left after 15 days. In 1977, he released his first film Eraserhead (1977), which, although not critically acclaimed, was noticed by many people, includingFrancis Ford Coppola, who was rumored to have screenings of it for his cast and crew on the Apocalypse Now (1979) set. After a stream of visually stunning films such as Blue Velvet (1986), Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Dr. (2001). All these films, and a few more, beginning with Blue Velvet (1986), and including his "Twin Peaks" (1990) TV series, feature what has now been added to signature Lynch features, such as vibrant colors, the use of dreams and amazing montage to connect character thought and multiple emotions into one sequence. In addition to that, since Blue Velvet (1986), Lynch has gained the reputation of one of the foremost auteurs in the filmmaking industry, and one of the few living auteur's who continually defies both cinematic convention and the Hollywood curse. His films continually represent his ideal that films; representing life, should be complicated, and, in some cases and sequences, be inexplainable. I'm sure he knows why he puts the scenes and shots and props and cuts and effects and filters and lights and colors and actors and costumes and music in the scenes, but he'll never tell anyone else. For this reason, and due to the beautiful confusion of his films, he will always be recognized as if not one of the greatest filmmakers, one of the most original. Lynch is a creative master, and even if his films aren't necessarily realistic, they are real in their representation of what life is: a confusing, irrational series of random events that truly have little purpose, and one makes their own interpretation of every event, giving their life purpose personally. Lynch wants his films to resonate emotionally and instinctively, and for every person to relate and make their own understanding. As he said "Life is very, very confusing, and so films should be allowed to be, too". David Lynch is original. He has done things in filmmaking that D.W. Griffith did in his day. David Lynch will never stop making beauty on the screen.IMDb Mini Biography By: TADAMS

Spouse
Emily Stofle (26 February 2009 - present)
Mary Sweeney (10 May 2006 - 12 February 2007) (divorced) 1 child
Mary Fisk (21 June 1977 - 29 August 1987) (divorced) 1 child
Peggy Lynch (1967 - 1974) (divorced) (1 child)

Trade Mark

Has frequently cast Jack Nance, Kyle MacLachlan, Sheryl Lee, Laura Dern, Isabella Rossellini, Sherilyn Fenn, Harry Dean Stanton, Michael J. Anderson, Everett McGill, Frances Bay, Dean Stockwell, David Patrick Kelly, Brad Dourif, Catherine E. Coulson, Grace Zabriskie, Ian Buchanan, Alicia Witt, Justin Theroux, Bellina Logan, Laura Harring, and Naomi Watts.

Finds small-town USA fascinating

Has a taste for low/middle frequency noise, dark and rotting environments, distorted characters, a polarized world (angels vs demons, Madonnas vs whores), and debilitating damage to the skull or brain.

Use of slow-motion during key scenes of violence

Red curtains

Strobe lights

Almost always casts a musician for a supporting role: Sting in Dune (1984); Chris Isaak, David Bowie, Julee Cruise, and 'Miguel Ferrer' (son and former drummer of Rosemary Clooney in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992); Marilyn Manson and Henry Rollins in Lost Highway (1997);Billy Ray Cyrus, Rebekah Del Rio and Angelo Badalamenti in Mulholland Dr. (2001). Regular collaborator Kyle MacLachlan is also descended from composer Johann Sebastian Bach.

Uses many references to France, the French language, culture, people, and names.

Constant references to dreams as a way of connecting the plot and twists in his films.

Uses Roy Orbison songs in his films

Close up shots of eyes

His regular casting director is Johanna Ray

Quirky, nasally voice

His hair

Films are often sexually charged & graphically violent

Extreme surrealism

Many of his films examine the dark side of American suburbia.

Trivia

Ate lunch at Bob's Big Boy in Los Angeles, California, nearly every day for almost eight years in a row.

Is an Eagle Scout.

His grandfather was Finnish.

Currently (2002) runs his own personally authorized Web site, www.davidlynch.com and has been rumored to appear in the chat area of the site under a more than obvious name.

Personally approved DVD releases of his movies do not have any chapter stops. This is done because he believes that films are meant to be viewed from beginning to end.

He is also an artist working in paint and such dynamic elements as live ants and rotting flesh. He also frequently designs and builds the furniture in his films. These can be seen in the documentary about him, Pretty as a Picture: The Art of David Lynch (1997) (TV).

Projects he has written but to date has not produced include "Ronnie Rocket," "Up at the Lake," and "One Saliva Bubble."

Producer Dino De Laurentiis offered him the chance to direct "Hand-Carved Coffins" based on a Truman Capote work, but Lynch turned it down; to date the project has not been produced.

His favorite band is Rammstein.

Wrote the Gordon Cole character (from "Twin Peaks" (1990)) with himself in mind.

After the financial disaster that was Dune (1984), Lynch and Dino De Laurentiis were almost ready to part company but Lynch showed Dino the script for Blue Velvet (1986), which he had been working on for some time, and the two combined talents to make the seminal 1986 classic.

After George Lucas saw Eraserhead (1977), he offered Lynch the chance to direct Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983) but Lynch turned him down. Lynch felt the film would be more Lucas's vision than his own.

Daughter, Director Jennifer Chambers Lynch (b. 1968), with first wife actress Peggy Lynch. Son, Austin Jack Lynch (b. 1982), with second wifeMary Fisk. Son, Riley Lynch (b. 1992), with film editor Mary Sweeney (she later became his third wife).

While in college, roomed with Peter Wolf, former lead singer with the J. Geils Band. Lynch kicked him out, however, because he thought Wolf was "too weird."

His son, Austin Jack Lynch, appeared in an episode of "Twin Peaks" (1990) as Pierre Tremond, or the Creamed-Corn Kid. His nephew,Jonathan J. Leppell, played Pierre Tremond/Chalfont in the movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992). Julee Cruise, who appears in "Twin Peaks" (1990), is his musical protégée. Lynch wrote the lyrics on her first album, some of the lyrics of her second album, and occasionally plays an instrument on her recordings.

He attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia

Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume Two, 1945-1985," pp. 621-626 (as David K. Lynch). New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1988.

Insisted his name be struck from the 190-minute Extended Cut of Dune (1984), which was prepared specially for television. That version credits the pseudonymous "Judas Booth" as writer/director. Yet in 2009 - the movie's 25th anniversary - Lynch (by a fan's request) actually signed Booth's name to a vintage "Making of Dune (1984) paperback at West Hollywood's famous Book Soup.

Has cited Luis Buñuel, Werner Herzog, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Stanley Kubrick, and Roman Polanski as some of his influences.

In addition to excluding chapter breaks in his approved DVD releases of his movies, he hasn't recorded an audio commentary in any of his films. This is because he believes that films speak for themselves.

Announced at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival that he has been shooting a feature length project on digital video called "Inland Empire" for over a year. He also announced that he was so impressed with digital that he was giving up directing on projects on film.

He drew and wrote the comic strip, "The Angriest Dog in the World" that ran in the Los Angeles Reader newspaper throughout the 1980s.

President of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 2002.

Is famous (or infamous) for not saying anything on Eraserhead (1977). He lets the viewers decide what it means.

He was offered the chance to direct Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), but he turned it down, saying that the script was funny, but it wasn't his thing.

Was very good friends with Jack Nance.

Is friends with Kyle MacLachlan.

He was introduced to Isabella Rossellini at a restaurant by a mutual friend when he was in the process of casting Blue Velvet (1986). Struck by her serene European beauty, he told her, "You could be Ingrid Bergman's daughter." 'You idiot,' my friend said to me," Lynch recalled, "'she is Ingrid Bergman's daughter!'"

His grandmother was German.

Though on the surface his alliance with Mel Brooks on The Elephant Man (1980) would seem unlikely to many, a number of Lynch's films are interpreted as being satirical of traditional Hollywood clichés (Mulholland Dr. (2001), Wild at Heart (1990), _Blue Velvet (1986)_ albeit in a much darker and artistic way than in the films that made Brooks a success (Young Frankenstein (1974), Blazing Saddles (1974), etc.).

Was engaged to Italian actress Isabella Rossellini from 1986 to 1990.

Claims one of his favorite films to be The Wizard of Oz (1939), and has many references to the classic in his films, the most obvious are in Wild at Heart (1990). He has also cited Vertigo (1958) and Glen or Glenda (1953) as his other favorites.

Is friends with Mädchen Amick.

Fan of Elvis Presley.

Is mentioned in German author Patrick Roth's short story "Lynch for Lunch" (2008).

Being an avid coffee drinker, he has own line of special organic blends.

Has practiced Transcendental Meditation for twenty minutes each day since 1973.

Although having planned to study three years with painter Oskar Kokoschka in Austria for three years, he returned to the US after only 15 days.

Served as an usher at the Presidential Inaugaration of John F. Kennedy (20 January 1961).

Is a Presbyterian.

Born to Donald Lynch, a research scientist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and his wife Sunny, an English language tutor.

Frequently works with Crispin Glover.

Some of his favorite films of all time are: 8 1/2 (1963), La Strada (1954), Sunset Boulevard (1950), The Apartment (1960), Lolita (1962), Persona (1966), Hour of the Wolf (1968), Mr. Hulot's Holiday (1953), My Uncle (1958), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), Stroszek (1977) and The Wizard of Oz (1939).

Sherilyn Fenn, who worked with him in "Twin Peaks" (1990) and Wild at Heart (1990), later starred in his daughter Jennifer Chambers Lynch's directorial debut Boxing Helena (1993).

He was so impressed by Sheryl Lee's performance as the dead Laura Palmer in "Twin Peaks" (1990)' pilot episode that he wrote the role of Maddy Ferguson for her, in order to bring her back in the series.

The car accident scene in Wild at Heart (1990) came from his impression of actress Sherilyn Fenn as a china doll, and from the idea of seeing a porcelain doll breaking. He told her, "I envisioned this broken China doll, all bloody, and ranting and raving, and it was you".

Has worked with real-life father-son pair José Ferrer and Miguel Ferrer in Dune (1984) and 'Twin Peaks (1990)(TV)'; and real-life mother-daughter pair Diane Ladd and Laura Dern in Wild at Heart (1990) and Blue Velvet (1986).

His ancestry is Finnish.

Directed 3 actors in Oscar nominated performances: John Hurt, Diane Ladd, and Richard Farnsworth.

Personal Quotes

It's better not to know so much about what things mean or how they might be interpreted or you'll be too afraid to let things keep happening. Psychology destroys the mystery, this kind of magic quality. It can be reduced to certain neuroses or certain things, and since it is now named and defined, it's lost its mystery and the potential for a vast, infinite experience.

I sort of go by a duck when I work on a film because if you study a duck, you'll see certain things. You'll see a bill, and the bill is a certain texture and a certain length. Then you'll see a head, and the features on the head are a certain texture and it's a certain shape and it goes into the neck. The texture of the bill for instance is very smooth and it has quite precise detail in it and it reminds you somewhat of the legs. The legs are a little bit bigger and a little more rubbery but it's enough so that your eye goes back and forth. Now, the body being so big, it can be softer and the texture is not so detailed, it's just kind of a cloud. And the key to the whole duck is the eye and where the eye is placed. And it has to be placed in the head and it's the most detailed, and it's like a little jewel. And if it was fixed, sitting on the bill, it would be two things that were too busy, battling, they would not do so well. And if it was sitting in the middle of the body, it would get lost. But it's so perfectly placed to show off a jewel right in the middle of the head like that, next to this S-curve with the bill sitting out in front, but with enough distance so that the eye is very very very well secluded and set out. So when you're working on a film, a lot of times you can get the bill and the legs and the body and everything, but this eye of the duck is a certain scene, this jewel, that if it's there, it's absolutely beautiful. It's just fantastic." "Film exists because we can go and have experiences that would be pretty dangerous or strange for us in real life. We can go into a room and walk into a dream. If we didn't want to upset anyone, we would make films about sewing, but even that could be dangerous. But I think finally, in a film, it is how the balance is and the feelings are. But I think there has to be those contrasts and strong things withing a film for the total experience.

I'm not a real film buff. Unfortunately, I don't have time. I just don't go. And I become very nervous when I go to a film because I worry so much about the director and it is hard for me to digest my popcorn.

It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It's better not to know so much about what things mean. Because the meaning, it's a very personal thing, and the meaning for me is different than the meaning for somebody else.

To give a sense of place, to me, is a thrilling thing. And a sense of place is made up of details. And so the details are incredibly important. If they're wrong, then it throws you out of the mood. And so the sound and music and color and shape and texture, if all those things are correct and a woman looks a certain way with a certain kind of light and says the right word, you're gone, you're in heaven. But it's all the little details.

In Hollywood, more often than not, they're making more kind of traditional films, stories that are understood by people. And the entire story is understood. And they become worried if even for one small moment something happens that is not understood by everyone. But what's so fantastic is to get down into areas where things are abstract and where things are felt, or understood in an intuitive way that, you can't, you know, put a microphone to somebody at the theatre and say 'Did you understand that?' but they come out with a strange, fantastic feeling and they can carry that, and it opens some little door or something that's magical and that's the power that film has.

I think that ideas exist outside of ourselves. I think somewhere, we're all connected off in some very abstract land. But somewhere between there and here ideas exist. And I think the mind isn't conscious enough to go all the way to where we're connected, but it's conscious of a certain amount of that territory. And when these ideas fly into the conscious part, then you can capture them. But if they're outside of the conscious part, you don't even know about them. So you just hope that you can make the conscious part of your mind bigger or that these ideas will fly into your airspace, so you can shoot them down and grab them and take them home. So that's all you try to do. Sometimes an idea will strike you when you're sitting in a quiet chair. But sometimes an idea will strike you when you're standing. Sometimes music will also help you. If I thought I could just sit still in a quiet place and get ideas, I would do that all the time, but sometimes nothing happens. There's no rhyme or reason to it. But you've got to write them down right away. I forget so many things. Then if I forget it and try to remember it, my whole day is ruined because I can't remember and I feel horrible. And I imagine that it was one of the all time great ideas. And it probably isn't.

I've said many, many, many unkind things about Philadelphia, and I meant every one.

[His films] mean different things to different people. Some mean more or less the same things to a large number of people. It's okay. Just as long as there's not one message, spoon-fed. That's what films by committee end up being, and it's a real bummer to me . . . Life is very, very complicated, and so films should be allowed to be, too.

I don't think that people accept the fact that life doesn't make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable. It seems like religion and myth were invented against that, trying to make sense out of it.

[on plans to build 100 transcendental meditation centers to bring an end to crime and war]: "Peace could be on this Earth this year. It would be a whole new world."

I like to make films because I like to go into another world. I like to get lost in another world. And film to me is a magical medium that makes you dream...allows you to dream in the dark. It's just a fantastic thing, to get lost inside the world of film.

I would rather not make a film than make one where I don't have final cut.

All my movies are about strange worlds that you can't go into unless you build them and film them. That's what's so important about film to me. I just like going into strange worlds.

I'm not sure what these people are saying. Is it that if you depicted no graphic violence, the world would calm down and there would be less violence? Or is it that if you sense certain things about violence and then portray those things in a film, does that make the violence go to another level? Or is the violence in films a way to experience something without having to do it in real life?

Sex is a doorway to something so powerful and mystical, but movies usually depict it in a completely flat way. Being explicit doesn't tap into the mystical aspect of it either in fact, that usually kills it because people don't want to see sex so much as they want to experience the emotions that go along with it. These things are hard to convey in film because sex is such a mystery.

I'm convinced we all are voyeurs. It's part of the detective thing. We want to know secrets and we want to know what goes on behind those windows. And not in a way that we would use to hurt anyone. There's an entertainment value to it, but at the same time we want to know: What do humans do? Do they do the same things as I do? It's a gaining of some sort of knowledge, I think.

My mother refused to give me coloring books as a child. She probably saved me, Because when you think about it, what a coloring book does is completely kill creativity.

There's something deeply satisfying about directing the flow of water.

Cigarettes are pretty much my worst vice, and I even stopped smoking for 20 years. I spend most of my free time with my family and working on art.

Sex was like a world so mysterious to me, I really couldn't believe there was this fantastic texture to life that I was getting to do...it has all these different levels, from lust and fearful, violent sex to the real spiritual thing at the other end. It's the key to some fantastic mystery of life.

I like things to be orderly. For seven years I ate at Bob's Big Boy. I would go at 2:30, after the lunch rush. I ate a chocolate shake and four, five, six, seven cups of coffee--with lots of sugar. And there's lots of sugar in that chocolate shake. It's a thick shake. In a silver goblet. I would get a rush from all this sugar, and I would get so many ideas! I would write them on these napkins. It was like I had a desk with paper. All I had to do was remember to bring my pen, but a waitress would give me one if I remembered to return it at the end of my stay. I got a lot of ideas at Bob's.

[on actor Kyle MacLachlan]: "What do we do together? I have a pretty good cappuccino machine, and anytime he gets the urge, he comes on over. We talk about the problems associated with getting a good cup of coffee."

In a large city I realized there was a large amount of fear. Coming from the Northwest, it kind of hits you like a train.

There was nothing much going on upstairs until the age of nineteen.

As a teenager, I was really trying to have fun 24 hours a day. I didn't start thinking until I was 20 or 21. I was doing regular goof-ball stuff.

My father was a scientist for the Forest Service. He would drive me through the woods in his green Forest Service truck, over dirt roads, through the most beautiful forests where the trees are very tall and shafts of sunlight come down and in the mountain streams the rainbow trout leap out and their little trout sides catch glimpses of light. Then my father would drop me in the woods and go off. It was a weird, comforting feeling being in the woods. There were odd, mysterious things. That's the kind of world I grew up in.

[on his 1965 sojourn to Europe to study art] I didn't take to Europe. I was all the time thinking, "This is where I'm going to be painting". And there was no inspiration there at all for the kind of work I wanted to do.

[on his 1965 sojourn to Europe to study art] I intended to stay three years. Instead, I stayed 15 days! I remember lying in an Athens basement with lizards crawling along the walls and contemplating that I was 7,000 miles from McDonalds!

[on why his officially sanctioned DVDs contain no chapter stops] It is my opinion that a film is not like a book--it should not be broken up. It is a continuum and should be seen as such.

Absurdity is what I like most in life, and there's humor in struggling in ignorance. If you saw a man repeatedly running into a wall until he was a bloody pulp, after a while it would make you laugh because it becomes absurd.

I let the actors work out their ideas before shooting, then tell them what attitudes I want. If a scene isn't honest, it stands out like a sore thumb.

[on Sheryl Lee and her performance in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992)] It turns out, at least in my opinion, she's an unbelievable actress and there are things that she's done in this movie that are truly incredible. I haven't seen too many people get into a role and give it as much. So, the big news for me was this person was hired to be a dead girl and turns out to be a great actress and a perfect Laura Palmer.

[on Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992)] I love that film. I say now that The Straight Story (1999) is my most experimental movie, but up until then, "Fire Walk With Me" was my most experimental film, and some of the things, the combos, you know, like, sequences . . . It was a dark film, but like Peggy Lipton said in an interview, it was just too much in people's faces, and it didn't have the humor of "Twin Peaks" (1990). So it was what it was supposed to be, but it wasn't what people wanted. It was supposed to be stand-alone, but it was also supposed to be the last week of Laura Palmer's life. And all those things that had been established, they could be pleasant on one level to experience, but unpleasant on another level.

[remarking about Elvis Presley's reported comment to one of his backup singers that he thought no one would remember him] That's incredible. Elvis swims in our minds, and in the emotions all through time.

[on Eyes Wide Shut (1999)] I really love Eyes Wide Shut. I just wonder if Stanley Kubrick really did finish it the way he wanted to before he died.

[on actress Joan Chen] She's the best thing from China since pasta - and much more beautiful. (People, May 04, 1992)

[on actress Sherilyn Fenn] She's a mysterious girl and I think that actresses like her who have a mystery - where there's something hiding beneath the surface - are the really interesting ones. (Premiere UK, July 1993)

I was driving through Central Park with Kyle MacLachlan and on the radio came Crying by Roy Orbison. I started listening to this song and I'm thinking only of Blue Velvet (1986) and I'm thinking this song could appear in the film. Once we were filming in Virginia, I ask for Roy Orbison's Greatest Hits and I hear In Dreams and boom! An explosion goes off in my head. And I think, "This is it." Dennis [Hopper] was supposed to sing that and Dean Stockwell was supposed to listen but Dennis couldn't remember the lines. And I thought, "Wait a minute, Dean will sing and Dennis will listen." It was a magical thing.

People say my films are dark. But like lightness, darkness stems from a reflection of the world. The thing is, I get these ideas that I truly fall in love with. And a good movie idea is often like a girl you're in love with, but you know she's not the kind of girl you bring home to your parents, because they sometimes hold some dark and troubling things.

Salary
The Alphabet (1968) $1,000

Where Are They Now

(May 2004) Lodz, Poland. Discussing his plans for building post production film studio in an old factory on Targowa street.

Surreal Artworks to Express Emotions

2012-08-19T09:59:00.000-07:00

Surreal Artworks to Express Emotions

Growing up can be a challenge, especially in the teenage years. Some people use writing or art as a creative outlet for all the emotions they keep inside.

Sebastian Eriksson is an 18-year-old up-and-coming surrealist artist living in Sweden. Not only is his artwork amazing, it's extremely thought-provoking as he adds descriptions of how his pieces relate to his life.

For instance, in the piece above, he states: "This is another paradox that I've been working on for a couple of days. It describes a person with psychological problems such as schizophrenia, insanity, depression or other mental problems. His endless screaming makes his own mind eat him up. I have periods in my life where I feel like this. I wanted to make an illustration of my thoughts and my pain within."

And for the piece immediately below: "One day I felt like I was lost and I had too much things to think about. Like I was stuck in a maze and couldn't get out."

We've all felt like Sebastian, but most of us do not have the talent to draw how we feel. It's fascinating to look into the mind of a teenager through his or her artwork. It's also an honor.

Self-portrait of the artist

Sebastian Eriksson's website

STEVE PAYNE

2012-08-18T06:54:00.001-07:00

STEVE PAYNE

In Artists Inspire Artists’s “Artists Series” we single out one amazing artist who’s work could stand alone. Today we have Steve Payne, who created the Replaceface series, where Steve took digital copies of George Dawe’s paintings of russian generals and added celebrities faces to the portrait using photoshop. So as always, enjoy & live inspired!

Alexandra Pacula paintings

2012-08-14T05:48:00.002-07:00

Alexandra Pacula paintings

It's almost as if Alexandra Pacula paints what she sees while driving drunk at 100 mph. "My work investigates a world of visual intoxication; it captures moments of enchantment, which are associated with urban nightlife," says the New York-based artist born in Poland.

"I am fascinated by the ambiance of the city at night and its seductive qualities. The breathtaking turbulence of speeding vehicles and hasty pedestrians evoke feelings of wonder and disorientation. The vibrant lights become a magical landscape with enticing opportunities and promises of fulfillment."

Pacula paints with oil to recreate the feeling of dizziness and confusion. She then lets the paint blur, allowing shapes to dissolve.

"I suggest motion in order to slow down the scene and capture the fleeting moments, which tend to be forgotten," she says. "By interpreting lights in graphic or painterly ways, I create a sense of space, alluding to a hallucinogenic experience. I want the viewer’s eye to travel within my composition and experience a familiar exhilarating event of an actual nightly excursion."

pencil vs. camera

2012-08-12T06:56:00.001-07:00

pencil vs. camera

'pencil vs. camera' by ben heine

image © ben heine

'pencil vs. camera' by ivory coast-born brussels-based photographer ben heine is a series of images

that inject hand-drawn pictures within real-life settings to create a composite effect that is often surreal

and highly narrative. manipulating the backdrop to host added elements such as real-life tetris blocks,

floating speech bubbles, and an alcoholic panda, the photographs are an exercise in manual photoshop,

always including heine's hand which holds up the sketched piece of paper in the foreground.

alarmingly accurate and crisply focused, the series puts great care in the alignment and perspective

required to successfully pull off the optical illusion. heine creates seemingly effortless snapshots that

are highly imaginative and contextual.

image © ben heine

Ballpoint pen

2012-08-12T06:53:00.002-07:00

Ballpoint pen

Surprisingly, all these detailed, realistic pictures are made by ordinary ballpoint pen. The author – a young artist and photographer Sarah Esteje. It is difficult to imagine how you can draw so cleanly and professionally the first time – because, unlike the pencil drawings, there is nothing to fix fails.

Pablo Picasso

2012-08-07T18:03:00.001-07:00

Pablo Picasso

Text from Thomas Hoving, "Art For Dummies®"
"Yet Cubism and Modern art weren't either scientific or intellectual; they were visual and came from the eye and mind of one of the greatest geniuses in art history. Pablo Picasso, born in Spain, was a child prodigy who was recognized as such by his art-teacher father, who ably led him along. The small Museo de Picasso in Barcelona is devoted primarily to his early works, which include strikingly realistic renderings of casts of ancient sculpture.

"He was a rebel from the start and, as a teenager, began to frequent the Barcelona cafes where intellectuals gathered. He soon went to Paris, the capital of art, and soaked up the works of Manet, Gustave Courbet, and Toulouse-Lautrec, whose sketchy style impressed him greatly. Then it was back to Spain, a return to France, and again back to Spain - all in the years 1899 to 1904.

"Before he struck upon Cubism, Picasso went through a prodigious number of styles - realism, caricature, the Blue Period, and the Rose Period. The Blue Period dates from 1901 to 1904 and is characterized by a predominantly blue palette and subjects focusing on outcasts, beggars, and prostitutes. This was when he also produced his first sculptures. The most poignant work of the style is in Cleveland's Museum of Art, La Vie (1903), which was created in memory of a great childhood friend, the Spanish poet Casagemas, who had committed suicide. The painting started as a self-portrait, but Picasso's features became those of his lost friend. The composition is stilted, the space compressed, the gestures stiff, and the tones predominantly blue. Another outstanding Blue Period work, of 1903, is in the Metropolitan, The Blind Man's Meal. Yet another example, perhaps the most lyrical and mysterious ever, is in the Toledo Museum of Art, the haunting Woman with a Crow (1903).

"The Rose Period began around 1904 when Picasso's palette brightened, the paintings dominated by pinks and beiges, light blues, and roses. His subjects are saltimbanques (circus people), harlequins, and clowns, all of whom seem to be mute and strangely inactive. One of the premier works of this period is in Washington, D.C., the National Gallery's large and extremely beautiful Family of Saltimbanques dating to 1905, which portrays a group of circus workers who appear alienated and incapable of communicating with each other, set in a one-dimensional space.

"In 1905, Picasso went briefly to Holland, and on his return to Paris, his works took on a classical aura with large male and fernale figures seen frontally or in distinct profile, almost like early Greek art. One of the best of these of 1906 is in the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, NY, La Toilette. Several pieces in this new style were purchased by Gertrude (the art patron and writer) and her brother, Leo Stein. The other major artist promoted by the Steins during this period was Henri Matisse, who had made a sensation in an exhibition of 1905 for works of a most shocking new style, employing garish and dissonant colors. These pieces would be derided by the critics as "Fauvism," a French word for "wild beasts." Picasso was profoundly influenced by Matisse. He was also captivated by the almost cartoon-like works of the self-taught "primitive" French painter Henri "Le Douanier" Rousseau, whom he affectionately called "the last ancient Egyptian painter" because his works have a passing similarity to the flat ancient Egyptian paintings.

"A masterpiece by Rousseau is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, his world-famous Sleeping Gypsy, with an incredible tiger gazing at the dormant figure with laser-like eyes.

"Picasso discovered ancient Iberian sculpture from Spain, African art (for he haunted the African collections in the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris), and Gauguin's sculptures. Slowly, he incorporated the simplified forms he found in these sources into a striking portrait of Gertrude Stein, finished in 1906 and given by her in her will to the Metropolitan Museum. She has a severe masklike face made up of emphatically hewn forms compressed inside a restricted space. (Stein is supposed to have complained, "I don't look at all like that," with Picasso replying, "You will, Gertrude, you will.") This unique portrait comes as a crucial shift from what Picasso saw to what he was thinking and paves the way to Cubism.

"Then came the awesome Les Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907, the shaker of the art world (Museum of Modern Art, New York). Picasso was a little afraid of the painting and didn't show it except to a small circle of friends until 1916, long after he had completed his early Cubist pictures. Cubism is essentially the fragmenting of three-dimensional forms into flat areas of pattern and color, overlapping and intertwining so that shapes and parts of the human anatomy are seen from the front and back at the same time. The style was created by Picasso in tandem with his great friend Georges Braque, and at times, the works were so alike it was hard for each artist quickly to identify their own. The two were so close for several years that Picasso took to calling Braque, "ma femme" or "my wife," described the relationship as one of two mountaineers roped together, and in some correspondence they refer to each other as "Orville and Wilbur" for they knew how profound their invention of Cubism was.

"Every progressive painter, whether French, German, Belgian, or American, soon took up Cubism, and the style became the dominant one of at least the first half of the 20th century. In 1913, in New York, the new style was introduced at an exhibition at the midtown armory - the famous Armory Show - which caused a sensation. Picasso would create a host of Cubist styles throughout his long career. After painting still-lifes that employed lettering, trompe l'oeil effects, color, and textured paint surfaces, in 1912 Picasso produced Still-Life with Chair-Caning, in the Picasso Museum in Paris, which is an oval picture that is, in effect, a cafe table in perspective surrounded by a rope frame - the first collage, or a work of art that incorporates preexisting materials or objects as part of the ensemble. Elements glued to the surface contrasting with painted versions of the same material provided a sort of sophisticated double take on the part of the observer. A good example of this, dubbed Synthetic Cubism, is in the Picasso Museum, Paris, the witty Geometric Composition: The Guitar (1913). The most accomplished pictures of the fully developed Synthetic Cubist style are two complex and highly colorful works representing musicians (in Philadelphia and the Museum of Modern Art, New York). He produced fascinating theatrical sets and costumes for the Ballet Russe from 1914 on, turned, in the 1920s, to a rich classical style, creating some breathtaking line drawings, dabbled with Surrealism between 1925 and 1935, and returned to Classicism.

"At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Picasso was appointed the director of the Prado. In January, 1937, the Republican government asked him to paint a mural for the Spanish pavilion at the world exposition in Paris. Spurred on by a war atrocity, the total destruction by bombs of the town of Guernica in the Basque country, he painted the renowned oil Guernica in monochrome (now in Madrid's Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia.) Something of an enigma in details, there's no doubt that the giant picture (which until the death of Franco was in New York's Museum of Modern Art) expresses a Goyaesque revulsion over the horrors man can wreak upon fellow man. The center is dominated by a grieving woman and a wounded, screaming horse illuminated, like Goya's Third of May, 1808 by a harsh light.

"Picasso lived in Paris through the war, producing gloomy paintings in semi-abstract styles, many depicting skulls or flayed animals or a horrifying charnel house. He joined the Communist party after the war and painted two large paintings condemning the United States for its involvement in the Korean War (two frightfully bad paintings about events that never happened - like American participation in germ warfare). [In fact, research has determined that the event depicted by Picasso in "Massacre in Korea" did occur. See this newspaper article written in 1999, after Hoving wrote this piece...although the claim of germ warfare is still unsubstantiated. - ed.]. He turned enthusiastically to sculpture, pottery, and print-making, and, in his later years, preoccupied himself with a series of mistresses and girlfriends, changing his style to express his love for each one, and, finally, making superb evocations of the works of old masters like Diego Velazquez. Whatever Picasso had a hand in turned out to have an unquenchable spark of utter genius."

BOOKS ON PICASSO

Les Demoiselles D'Avignon (Studies in Modern Art, No 3)
William Rubin, et al
Everything you EVER wanted to know about Picasso's proto-Cubist masterwork. The graphics are of high quality and include every preparatory drawing or sketch as well as related works by other artists that influenced or were influenced by the "Demoiselles". Rubin is one of the clearest writers on art, and offers an accessible, yet thorough work.

A Life of Picasso: Volume I, 1881-1906
John Richardson, Marilyn McCully
The definitive multi-volume biography of the 20th century's most fascinating artist. Volume I covers the early years, through the Blue and Rose Periods. This paperback version is the smarter buy. Also available: A Life of Picasso: Volume II, 1907-1917, which covers the critical Cubist Period.

Picasso : The Early Years 1892-1906
This is the catalog to the blockbuster show of 1997, featuring the Blue and Rose Periods. The graphics are of exceptional quality, and the accompanying essays are enlightening, focusing on less well-known aspects of this period of Picasso's career.

Picasso and Portraiture : Representation and Transformation
William Rubin (Editor), Anne Baldassari, Pierre Daix
This is the catalog to the blockbuster show of 1996, featuring portraits from the beginning to end of Picasso's long career. The graphics are again of exceptional quality. Rubin's essay in particular is critical in art historical writing on the Spanish master.

Picasso's Variations on the Masters : Confrontations With the Past
Susan Grace Galassi
This is an extremely interesting look at Picasso's series paintings based on masterworks from the past, from Velazquez to Delacroix to Manet. It was as if he could not find sufficient competition among contemporary artists, and looked to outdo the masters of the past in their own works.

Pablo Picasso's Confessions

2012-08-07T17:57:00.001-07:00

Pablo Picasso's Confessions

In many of my discussions with people who defend "modern art", people express the idea that the artist is by definition right about his evaluation of his own "art" and that nobody else can really decide whether or not it is good or valuable since "It could be that there's really something deeply important hidden beyond your ability to interpret it." Though I don't subscribe to that position myself, it might be instructive for such people to listen to what Pablo Picasso, one of the early proponents of the ugly and meaningless in 20th century painting had to say about his work.

This page previously included quotes reportedly taken from an interview with Picasso by Giovanni Papini called "Picasso Confesses". As it turns out this was a fantasy interview which never took place. As it turns out, Picasso said numerous things at least as bad as what was reported earlier.

On Sayings..."If you take my sayings and explode them in the air, they remain only sayings. But if you fit them together in their correct places, you will have the whole story." (Dor del la Souchere, 1960, p. 13)

On The Parthenon..."The Parthenon is really only a farmyard over which someone put a roof; colonades and sculptures were added because there were people in Athens who happened to be working and wanted to express themselves. It is not what the artist does that counts, but what he is. Cezanne would never have interested me a bit if he had lived and thought like Jacques Emile Blanche, even if the apple he painted had been ten times as beautiful. What forces our interest is Cezanne's anxiety - that's Cezanne's lesson; the torments of Van Gogh - that is the actual drama of the man. The rest is a sham." (Cashiers de Art, Conversation Avec Picasso, 1949)

On The Dictatorship of the Painter(s)..."There ought to be an absolute dictatorship...a dictatorship of painters...a dictatorship of one painter...to suppress all those who have betrayed us, to suppress the cheaters, to suppress the tricks, to suppress the mannerisms, to suppress charms, to suppress history, to suppress a heap of other things. But common sense always gets away with it. Above all, let's have a revolution against that! The true dictator will always be conquered by the dictatorship of common sense...and maybe not!" (Cashiers de Art, Conversation Avec Picasso, 1949)

On Guernica and Communism..."I am a communist and my painting is a communist painting. But if I were a shoemaker, Royalist or Communist or anything else, I would not necessarily hammer my shoes in any special way to show my politics." (Interview with Jerome Seckler, 1945, Picasso Explains)

On Truth..."What is truth? Truth cannot exist. ... Truth does not exist. ... Truth is a lie." (Parmelin, Picasso: The Artist, His Model, and Other Related Works, 1965, p. 110)

On How Awful Art Is..."Enough of Art. It's Art that kills us. People no longer want to do painting: they make art. People want Art. And they are given it. But the less Art there is in painting the more painting there is." (Parmelin, Picasso Plain, 1964, p. 30)

On Truth and Lies..."We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies." (The Arts, Picasso Speaks, 1923)

On The Threat of Artists..."[T]oday we haven't the heart to expel the painters and poets from society because we refuse to admit to ourselves that there is any danger in keeping them in our midst." (Cashiers de Art, Conversation Avec Picasso, 1949)

On Academic Training..."Academic training in beauty is a sham. We have been so deceived, but so well deceived that we can scarcely get back even a shadow of the truth." (Cashiers de Art, Conversation Avec Picasso, 1949)

On Planning..."I see, for others, that is to say, in order to put on canvas the sudden apparitions which come to me. I don't know in advance what I am going to put on canvas any more than I decide beforehand what colors I am going to use. While I am working I am not conscious of what I am putting on the canvas. Each time I undertake to paint a picture I have a sensation of leaping into space. I never know whether I shall fall on my feet. It is only later that I begin to estimate more exactly the effect of my work." (Zervos, Pablo Picasso, 1932, p. xv)

On The Virtue of Vagueness..."You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea." (Kahnweiler, Juan Gris: sa vie, son oeuvre, ses ecrits, 1946, p. 83)

On Planning..."One never knows what one is going to do. One starts a painting and then it becomes something quite else. It is remarkable how little the 'willing' of the artist intervenes." (Kahnweiler, Gesprache mit Picasso, 1959, p. 85-98)

On Subjects..."...even if the painting is green, well then! the 'subject' is the green. There is always a subjet; it's a joke to suppress the subject, it's impossible." (Parmelin, Picasso: The Artist and His Model, and other Recent Works, 1965, p. 43)

On Bad Habits..."I paint the way someone bite his fingernails; for me, painting is a bad habit because I don't know nor can I do anything else." (Gallego Morell, de Renoir a Picasso, 1958, p. 3)

On Imitation..."Imitators? All right! Disciples if your like. But disciples be damned. It's not interesting. It's only the masters that matter. Those who create. And they don't even turn around when you piss on their heels..." (Georges-Michel, de Renoir a Picasso, 1954, p. 94-95)

On Imitation..."What does it mean for a painter to paint in the manner of So-and-So or to actually imitate someone else? What's wrong with that? On the contrary, it's a good idea. You should constantly try to paint like someone else. But the thing is, you can't! You would like to. You try. But it turns out to be a botch...And at the very moment you make a botch of it that you're yourself." (Parmelin, Picasso: The Artist and His Model, and other Recent Works, 1965, p. 43)

On Beauty..."'I have never in any museum seen a picture as beautiful as this one.' [Picasso] said to me, pointing to a sheet of tin hanging on the door. 'the man who painted this picture was not thinking of his glory.'" (Sabartes, Picasso: portraits et souvenirs, 1946, p. 210-212)

On Bad Paintings..."I like all painting. I always look at the paintings - good or bad - in barbershops, furniture stores, provincial hotels...I'm like a drinker who needs wine. As long as it is wine, it doesn't matter which wine." (Guttuso, Journals, Quoted in Mario De Micheli, 1964)

On Objective Reality..."The goal I proposed myself in making cubism? To paint and nothing more. And to paint seeking a new expression, divested of useless realism, with a method linked only to my thought - without enslaving myself with objective reality. Neither the good nor the true; neither the useful or the useless." (Del Pomar, Con las Buscadores del Camino, 1932, p. 126)

On Beauty, Art, and Research..."I have a horror of people who speak about the beautiful. What is the beautiful? One must speak of problems in painting! Paintings are but research and experiment. I never do a painting as a work of art. All of them are researches." (Liberman, Picasso, Vogue, November 1, 1956)

On Blindness as a Virtue..."[T]hey ought to put out the eyes of painters as they do goldfinches in order that they can sing better." (Teriade, En causant avec Picasso, Intransigeant, June 15, 1932)

On Kiddie Art...When visiting an exhibition of children's drawings, Piscasso remarked: "When I was their age I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them." (Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, 1958, p. 275)

On Imposters..."Museums are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their business are mostly imposters." (Zervos, Conversation avec Picasso, 1935)

On Symbolism and Communism..."If I paint a hammer and sickle people may think it is a representation of Communism, but for me it is only a hammer and sickle. I just want to reproduce the objects for what they are, not for what they mean." (Interview with Jerome Seckler, Picasso Explains, 1945)

On Re-Education Camps and Art..."If everyone would paint, political re-education would be unnecessary." (Spender, Keeping a Great City Alive, Vogue, December 1946, p. 194, 224, 226)

On Art as a Weapon..."No, painting is not made to decorate apartments, it's an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy." (Tery, Picasso, n'est pas officer dans l'Armee francaise, Les Lettres Francaises, March 24, 1945)

Epic Mickey Concept Art by A.J. Trahan

2012-08-07T17:37:00.000-07:00

Epic Mickey Concept Art by A.J. Trahan

Concept artist and illustrator A.J. Trahan has released concept artwork he created for Disney’s Epic Mickey. After working for two and a half years on Epic Mickey, A.J. has now been able to show his work which contains a few concepts he did for the opening cinematic.

Link: ajtronart.blogspot.com

2012 The Zebra Awards

2012-08-05T22:50:00.000-07:00

2012 The Zebra Awards

Black and white photography is as simple as it is complex, carefully weaving streaks of light into the black-unknown, giving rise to lines, shapes, textures, emotions and stories. TZIPAC is proud to celebrate this magic of black and white photography with The Zebra Award 2012 . With US$5000 worth of grand prizes and our custom-made TZIPAC medals up for grabs, we hope The Zebra Award 2012 will bring to light the marvelously diverse and vibrant visions of black and white photography from many amazing artists worldwide.

“Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships.” Ansel Adams

Eligibility: Open to all photographers over 18 years old from around the world, professionals and non professionals.

Entry Fee: $20 for one, $75 for five, and $100 for ten.

Prizes: $5000 in cash prizes as well as the prestigious TZIPAC medals to all categories 1st Place Winners.

Image Specifications: Images must be in JPG/JPEG format, 8 bit, 1500pixels on the longest side, 72 dpi, and have maximum file size of 300KB. Colour space should be RGB or sRGB. Images must have no border, nor marks or logos identifying the artists.

All images must be gray scale or RGB mode without any colouring or toning. All images which are not strictly black and white will be disqualified on judging.

Copyright:
You warrant that submitted artworks have been created by you, and that you own all necessary rights to use the artworks for participating in TZIPAC’s competitions. In particular, the artworks must not violate or infringe on any copyrights, trademarks, moral rights, rights of privacy/publicity or intellectual property rights of any person or entity, and no other party must have any rights, claim or interest in the artwork.
Artworks that fail to comply with these copyrights conditions will be disqualified.
The copyrights of submitted artworks will remain with the artists at all times. However, the competition participants agree to grant TZIPAC permission to use the artworks for promotional purposes, without further permissions or remunerations, in its publications, including electronic media or printed materials, including website, online galleries, online magazines, as well as other forms (potentially with third-party publications) for the expressed purpose of promoting the artworks, the artists and TZIPAC.
Any artwork used by TZIPAC will credit the artist.
Third-party Releases/Licences
Upon TZIPAC’s request, each entrant must be prepared to provide a signed written personal release (i.e., model release forms) from all recognizable individuals featured in submitted artworks, authorizing TZIPAC to reproduce, distribute, display and create derivative works of the competition entry in connection with and promotion of the TZIPAC competition, in any media now or hereafter. Please do not submit model release forms unless requested.
In addition, upon TZIPAC’s request, each entrant must be prepared to provide a signed written license from the copyright owner of any sculpture, artwork or other copyrighted material that appears in the submitted competition entry, authorizing us to reproduce, distribute, display and create derivative works of the artwork in connection with and promotions of the TZIPAC competition.
Failure to provide such releases upon request may result in disqualification and forfeiture of all prize winnings.

Deadline: 31st October (we will also have an extended deadline until the 30th November but wish not to advertise this date as yet)

Website: http://www.tzipac.com/

International Fine Art Photography Competition 2012

2012-08-05T22:49:00.000-07:00

International Fine Art Photography Competition 2012

International Fine Art Photography Competition (Grand Prix de la Découverte)

Open to emerging and mid-career photographers worldwide (18+ years)

Entry Fee: $20 per image (up to 10 images)

Prizes: $10,000 in cash awards

All finalists’ photographs will be:
-featured at the NoFound Photo Fair in November in Paris (more than 20,000 visitors)
-published in an exhibition book and in an article in aCurator Magazine (seen by curators all over the world)
-accepted into the prestigious collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale
-featured in the Grand Prix online gallery

The Grand Prix winner also receives travel to Paris and accommodations for the week of the awards ceremonies, exhibition, and press events.

Copyright: The photographer retains all rights to submitted images. Finalists’ images may be used in the November 2012 exhibition, exhibition book, and for promotion, with the photographers’ permission. This competition is proud to be in compliance with the Artists Bill of Rights.

Deadline: August 15 (11:59 pm Pacific Daylight Time)

Website: https://www.internationalfineartphoto.org/

Professional Photographer of the Year 2012

2012-08-05T22:47:00.000-07:00

Professional Photographer of the Year 2012

The Professional Photographer of the Year awards are only open to digital submissions but to all photographers, worldwide.

There are 13 categories, 12 of which require a single image to enter and ONLY the Portfolio category allows three images to be entered. We will shortlist ready for the March 2013 issue, and inform winners accordingly. We will celebrate with the winners at an awards ceremony in March 2013, at a location yet to be finalised. The closing date for the competition is: 16 January 2013.

Eligibility: worldwide

Free to Enter

Prizes: We’d like to think that becoming Professional Photographer of the Year 2012, or a category or Portfolio winner, are strong enough reasons for entering, but in addition to that each winner will receive a professionally produced print of their winning image and a specially designed and created logo they can use for marketing purposes. They will also be invited to the exclusive awards night with magazine staff, judges, the other category winners, the competition sponsors and specially selected VIP guests and their work will be featured in a PPOTY 2012 special supplement in the June 2013 issue celebrating the winner’s images, including an interactive multimedia version which will be emailed to magazine purchasers, subscribers and winners.

Categories: There are 13 categories, 12 of which require a single image to enter and ONLY the Portfolio category allows three images to be entered. We will shortlist ready for the March 2013 issue, and inform winners accordingly. We will celebrate with the winners at an awards ceremony in March 2013, at a location yet to be finalised.

Copyright and usage of your entry: All necessary model and property releases have been obtained from any clearly identifiable person appearing in any image, By entering the competition, Participants grant Professional Photographer and its Competition Partners an irrevocable, non-exclusive, worldwide royalty-free licence to reproduce, publicly display, distribute, publicly perform and create derivative works from their Submitted Materials, in all media, solely in connection with the administration, judging and promotion of the Professional Photographer of the Year Awards 2012.

Deadline: January 16, 2013

Website: http://www.professionalphotographer.co.uk/PPOTY2012

BBC August 2012 photo contest: really wild cats

2012-08-05T04:51:00.000-07:00

BBC August 2012 photo contest: really wild cats

Felines are fascinating whether they are roaming the African savanna or spying on birds at your garden feeder. We want to see your best images of these agile animals demonstrating really wild behaviour.

Capture their whiskers twitching as they creep through the undergrowth stalking their prey or watch them defend their territory, play with their siblings and nurture their young.

From tropical rainforests to urban jungles, share your favourite photographs of mischievous moggies as they show instinctive behaviour.

Eligibility: Worldwide

Free to Enter

Copyright: You remain the owner of the copyright in any original User Contribution that you submit.

Timeline
The final date for submissions is 1 September 2012.
The final date for voting is 1 October 2012.

Website: http://www.discoverwildlife.com

2013 Calendar Photo Contest at Photoscramble

2012-08-05T04:49:00.000-07:00

2013 Calendar Photo Contest at Photoscramble

The photo with the most votes will be the cover of MVGSDR’s 2013 Calendar. The 12 photos with the next highest votes will be the monthly pages.

Eligibility: Worldwide

Fees: This contest is free to enter. This contest is free to vote for your favorite photos.

Prizes
Winners will be announced on Aug 31, 2012 at
1st: Calendar Cover and Free Calendar
2nd: Monthly Calendar Page and Free Calendar

Voting Method: Thumbs Up
Allow 1 Vote per day

Copyright We DO NOT OWN any of the Content submitted by our users and you are NOT TRANSFERRING TO US any copyright ownership in your content.
Usage of entry you grant us the following world-wide, royalty free, irrevocable, perpetual and non-exclusive license(s) only for use in DISPLAY, PROMOTION AND MARKETING our property(s): With respect to Content you submit or make available to us, you grant us the license to use, distribute, reproduce, edit, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such Content and the right to sublicense the Content with the sublicense having the right to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other works in any format or medium now known or later developed. This license grant is from you to Company and does not pertain to any license between Contest Host and Contestant, Voter, or any other third party, which remains the sole responsibility of the Contest Host consistent with Paragraph 4 above. (visit website for more details)

Dates
Contest: Aug 01,2012 – Aug 31,2012
Entry: Aug 01,2012 – Aug 31,2012
Voting: Aug 01,2012 – Aug 31,2012

Website: http://www.photoscramble.com/contests/2013-calendar-photo-contest/

Green Dot Expeditions Photo Contest 2012

2012-08-03T02:48:00.000-07:00

Green Dot Expeditions Photo Contest 2012

GREEN DOT EXPEDITIONS is introducing a series of Photo Contests, to instill the spirit to explore life and its wonders through photography.

Eligibility– The contest is open to all photographers who are above the age of 18 * and not a professional photographer.

Free to Enter

This contest will be conducted in two phases.
PHASE 1: In this Phase, there will be a contest every 15 days for 6 months (12 contests in total).Every contest will have a theme which will be notified on the Blog or website .Two winners (1st and 2nd) will be chosen from each contest.
PRIZES: 1st prize – A special Wildlife T-shirt , manually printed by Capt Suresh Sharma and Dr Rajbir Kaur Sharma and an opportunity to display and place your image for sale with THE GREEN FRAMES. Plus a opportunity to have tea with Captain Suresh Sharma in the famous KINGCOBRA at Delhi.
2nd Prize – A special Wildlife T-shirt, manually printed by Capt Suresh Sharma and Dr Rajbir Kaur Sharma.
PHASE 2: In the Phase 2 of the contest, the 12 of the first prize winners of Phase 1 will have another contest on a special theme about which the winners will be notified by e-mail.
PRIZES : Phase 2 Contest
1st prize – An opportunity to travel on a tour worth Rs 35,000 with Green Dot Expeditions in India.
2nd Prize- An opportunity to attend a workshop with Capt Suresh Sharma worth Rs 5000 and a 50% discount for one trip with Green Dot Expeditions.

Also the winning images and special mentions for both the phases will be displayed on the website of Green Dot Expeditions for a limited period with due credit.

THEME FOR THE FIRST CONTEST OF THE FIRST PHASE – “The Spirit of Freedom” – We are looking for images that show what freedom means to you. How would children, youngsters and adults interpret freedom … Let your creative juices flow……and start clicking!

Copyright and usage of your entry: The photograph, in its entirety, must be an original work created by the contestant. By entering this competition you agree to allow us to use your image for promotion of the photo contest only. All rights remain with the photographer of the image submitted for the contest.

TIME- Dates for the 1st contest : 1st August to 15th August.

Website: http://greendotexpeditions.wordpress.com/our-team/

Best Vacation Ever 2012 – Photo Contest

2012-08-02T14:55:00.000-07:00

Best Vacation Ever 2012 – Photo Contest

With the kids out of school, summer is prime time for vacations! Did you go on anywhere special this season? Or did you have an epic Staycation or Daycation? Share your best vacatin photo with us and you could win a $25 Viovio gift certificate to use towards printing your summer photo book!

Eligibility: Anyone can enter. All you need to do is create an account with Viovio.

Free to Enter

Prizes: The photo with the most votes will win a $25 Viovio gift card along with a few other prizes.

Limit of Entry per person: No limit on number of entries.

Copyright : Photographer retains all copyrights.

Deadline : August 20th, 2012

Contest page http://www.viovio.com/contests/321

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