Born On This Day- July 25th... American Artist Thomas Eakins

self portrait by the artist 1902

I am quite enamored of late the 19th & 20th century American painters & Thomas Cowperthwaite Eakins epitomizes everything I love about the American Realist Movement. Eakins was unsuccessful as an artist in his lifetime, but he is thought to be one of the most influential & important figures in American painting. His work is significant for its homoeroticism, & he is noted for his teaching methods, & for his insistence on teaching men & women together, which was ground breaking & controversial at the time.

 Eakins was raised & educated in Philadelphia. He studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, & he spent several years studying in Paris & Spain. He returned to the Pennsylvania Academy to teach in 1876, & became the director in 1882. His teaching methods were controversial at the time, especially his interest in instructing his students in all aspects of the human figure, including the nude. There were tensions between him & the Academy's board of directors throughout his teaching career, he was ultimately fired in 1886 for removing the loincloth of a male model in a class where female students were present.

Deeply influenced by his dismissal, his later painting concentrated on portraiture, usually of friends & family. This work was realistic but with approach that went beyond just pure representation. He was influenced by early photographers & did many photographs as studies, including many nudes. I find this photographic work to exceptional also.

 

I have a large "coffee table" book of his work that has given me much pleasure. Along with John Singer Sargent & James Whistler his work has been very influential in defining my taste in painting & my passion for art.

photographic study for The Wrestlers

the painting

Born On This Day- July 17th... Photography Great Berenice Abbott

If you were to click on the label at the bottom of my posts you would discover that I have a very real passion for Photography, whether it is formal portraiture, commercial work, art photography, or found snapshots. I have a sizable & thought provoking collection of vintage photographs of men being affectionate, which I like to share with readers.

Abbott by Man Ray 1925

Abbott by Hank O'Neal 1979

My passion for photography + my keen interest in architecture brings me to today’s birthday- Berenice Abbott. Abbott was a celebrated photographer of NYC architecture. She shot using a Century Universal Camera which produced 8 x 10 inch negatives; this large format camera was the instrument that Abbott used to photographed NYC with diligence & attention to detail. Her work has provided an historical chronicle of many now destroyed buildings & neighborhoods of Manhattan.

During the Great Depression, Abbott was hired by the Federal Art Project (FAP) as a project supervisor for the Changing New York project. She would take the photographs of the city, but had assistants to help her both in the field & in the office. This arrangement allowed Abbott to devote all her time to producing, printing, & exhibiting her photographs. By the time she resigned from the FAP in 1939, she had produced 305 photographs that were added to the collection at the Museum of the City of New York.


When she 1st arrived in NYC, Abbott shared an apartment in Greenwich Village with writer Djuna Barnes, philosopher Kenneth Burke, & literary critic Malcolm Cowley. She pursued journalism, but soon became interested in theater & art, inspired by her friends Eugene O'Neill & Man Ray. Abbott first became involved with photography in 1923, when Man Ray, looking for somebody who knew nothing about photography & would do as he said, hired her as a darkroom assistant at his portrait studio in Montparnasse. Abbott: "I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else." Ray was impressed by her darkroom work & allowed her to use his studio to take her own photographs.

Self Portrait 1937

In 1935, Abbott fell in love & moved into a Greenwich Village apartment with the art critic- Elizabeth McCausland. They were a couple for 30+ years until McCausland's death in 1965. In the early 1960s Abbott & McCausland traveled US Highway # 1 from Florida to Maine, with Abbott shooting the small town & automobile-related architecture. The project resulted in more than 2,500 photographs. Not only was Abbott a photographer, but also an inventor & innovator. She developed the distortion easel, which created unusual effects on images developed in a darkroom, & the telescopic lighting pole, known today by photographers as an "autopole," to which lights can be attached at any level.

 

Shortly after McCausland’s death, Abbott underwent a lung operation. She was told she should move from NYC because of the air pollution. She bought a rundown house in Maine, remaining there until her death in 1991. Abbott continued to work after her move to Maine. Her last book was A Portrait of Maine in 1968.

A Few Of My Favorite Things At Post Apocalyptic Bohemia

This small cabinet was purchased in 1990, in Portland, when we were still living in our Seattle cottage. We preferred junking & hunting for architectural salvage in Portland & would visit several times a year. The cabinet was spotted at a flea market on Hayden Island, not far from where we live now. It was marked- "Red Cross Supply Cabinet". It was painted enamel white & the Husband stripped it this far & I decided I that I liked the way it looked in process & asked him to not take it further. It has glass on all 4 sides. The cabinet is filled with small items from boyhood: arrowheads, agates, fossils, Indian head nickles, campaign buttons... stretching into adulthood: dog tags, glass candies from our trip to Venice, police whistles from a London junk shop, late 19th century shards found while helping dig a community garden in Seattle's International District, & the bullet from when I was shot. The cabinet of my life's flotsam & jetsam sits at the end of my worktable. Like so many things in life, if you click on it, it will get bigger.

We collect dog pictures.

 The Husband believes in filling a small space with a lot of objects & art & leaving the larger spaces with more blank areas. Our one very small bathroom, the only room in the house that has yet to have an extensive makeover, is filled with collections. The top painting was found at the 12th Street Flea Market in NYC on our 20th anniversary. I love it beyond all reason. The bottom is from a Seattle junk shop in the Pike Place Market. We actually lived in the Market in the mid-1980s.

More from the Dog Pictures collection. On the left is a plate from a book that says- "Dog Of The Monastery" & on the right is a wood cut of a dog, a plate from a book of fables dated 1777. Above them hangs a Tramp Art terrier.

In the bathroom is a wall with some choice pieces from my vintage photographs of men.

19th Century ceramics surround the very first photograph of my collection, an opening night gift from a very cute young actor in his very early 20s (heck, I was only in my late 30s), I played his father... the pair of soldiers from WW1 are remarkable to me still, & a lovely memory of a time when I was working a lot as an actor & had young men buying me gifts. This piece started 25 years of collecting old photographs of men being affectionate.

Thank you for taking a look around. I have more if you are curious.

John & CC Have New Hats

As one of my pals professed: "I really like your blog, but I like the stuff about you... not the birthdays of dead gay people". I started to collect vintage (1860-1980) photographs of men together a decade ago. I have more than 100. I was sharing them with readers of Post Apocalyptic Bohemia, but I began to wander away to other subjects along the way.

I borrowed against my IRA to catch up on the bills & repairs. It has been an interesting experience to usually not have any cash for some fun. I long ago decided that a perfect day included going to a part town with which I am not familiar, some bucks in my jeans & no agenda. I earmarked a tiny portion of the cash flow to just such a plan. I took the Husband with me because... well, I sort of had to.

The Husband found some swell stuff to use in projects for his BOYS' FORT, & I found this photo, at the best salvage store that I have encountered: Old Portland Hardware & Architectural.

I find this photo to be one of the very finest I have added to the collection. It is certainly the sweetest of a sweet selection of snapshots & formal portraits of men in couples or groups from the past 150 years.

The names are written in pencil: John Fuller & CC Brown. The rest of the piece is a perfect embossed paper in a Victorian pattern. I love these 2 gentlemen. What is their story that led to this portrait?

Would you like to see more of the collection?

55 Beautiful Bird's-Eye Photos by Yann Arthus-Bertrand

One interesting trend we have noticed recently is the use of a bird’s-eye view to take photographs. Modern photographers love to experiment with things and observe how people interact with their work. Although not yet the most common trend, still, as new design styles come up and more and more photographers notice and make use of them, it promises to be an interesting area.

Yann Arthus-Bertrand is a French photographer and environmentalist who has a tendency toward stunning bird’s eye view photography. Revealing Earth from above, Yann Arthus-Bertrand reveals wonderful symmetry and color. The scenes captured by his camera are fresh because of their unusual angles.














































































































Source: yannarthusbertrand2