Diego Rivera (December 8, 1886 – November 24, 1957) was a world-famous Mexican painter, an active Communist and husband of Frida Kahlo. Rivera’s large wall works in fresco helped establish the Mexican Mural Renaissance. Between 1922 and 1953, Rivera painted murals in Mexico City, Chapingo, Cuernavaca, San Francisco, Detroit, and New York City.
*Below: Rivera’s Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central (A Sunday Afternoon Dream in the Alameda Park) depicts the history of Mexico.
As I just saw Coraline I thought I might do my part to promote a fellow peer – introducing upcoming claymation guru and beatbox wiz kid, Luke ‘LC BEATS’ Cavalan.
These are some stills from his short film ‘Mayhem in May Lane’ – he’s currently in the throws of filming his major work Kaos in King St (see his blog here: http://kaosinkingst.blogspot.com
Lucian Freud’s paintings are often associated with surrealism and depict people, plants and animals in unusual juxtapositions. These works are usually painted with relatively thin paint, but from the 1950s he began to paint portraits, often nudes, to the almost complete exclusion of everything else, employing a thicker impasto. With this technique he would often clean his brush after each stroke. The colours in these paintings are typically muted.
Freud’s subjects are often the people in his life; friends, family, fellow painters, lovers, children. To quote the artist: “The subject matter is autobiographical, it’s all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement, really.”
I was fortunate enough last year to see some of his early works displayed at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art – please enjoy!
Some work by Brisbane-based artist Brett Lethbridge. A friend of mine took me to visit his Paddington gallery once and it’s been love ever since…
For more information: http://www.brettlethbridge.com
Into the second week of Designing Worlds, we were asked to create the production design for a set piece of text and present it to our class as well as the folks doing the Creating Experiences workshop (they will take our ideas and work it into a multi-platform media experience)
Not wanting to merely limit ourselves to a powerpoint presentation and a whole lot of talk, we opted to create a physical diorama outlining the final point of action in the story The Last Days of a Famous Mime. Our hope was to pitch this story as a possible 2 1/2 D animated short, drawing influences from Maurice Sendak, Brett Helquist and Triplets of Belleville director Sylvain Chomet.
I thoroughly recommend seeing this film if you’re a cycling fan or simply a lover of beautiful and poignant animation.
It was only a matter of time before I acknowledged the amazing production design that is associated with all of Wes Anderson’s films. For Darjeeling Limited, Mark Friedberg was the production designer and below is an article on his experiences whilst working on the film.
The Darjeeling Limited is the second film I have designed for Wes and it is the second film that I have designed in India . 11 years ago my wife, the producer Lydia Dean Pilcher and my son, the 4-month-old infant, Oakley Dean and I set out for Khajarjo and Jaiphur in order to work on Mira Nair’s Kama Sutra. The combination of worrying about a small baby, the lack of infrastructure in India and my own cultural deafness made it a very tough experience. I suppose contracting Malaria did not help either. Kama Sutra was the last film my wife and I collaborated on together. The idea of returning had become forbidden territory. Which explains why when Wes invited us to come along on his latest adventure set In India, I was less than enthusiastic. I have rarely been as happy to have been wrong.
Working on a Wes Anderson film is a wild ride. He comes with pretty clear and sometimes intractable ideas of how the film needs to be made and what will be the process of making it. Life Aquatic was a Roman holiday. We were set in an anonymous old world European Capitol and the Mediterranean . We worked ourselves to death but then we went out and ate quite well. We became close. The crew began to resemble Zissou’s team. Everyone with a role that was both professional and social. Each with our expertise as well as our emotional quirks. I was a newcomer to the team then but have achieved full membership at this point. Many members are still my closest friends off the set.
Wes’s master plan for the Darjeeling experience was a streamlined team living together in Rajasthan, working with an Indian crew and shooting on a moving train on the Indian Railways tracks. We set up shop in Jodhpur and found a Palace cum hotel where the cast and creative team lived together for half a year. Lydia and I had also brought our children now 12 and 7. They quickly became the film’s mascots and provided a refreshing release from the self-seriousness of working under strict deadlines in a country and especially a bureaucracy that had little interest in western film or in deadlines in general. After a grueling poker game of a negotiation we were able to secure our train and rail time.
Our workshop was in a primitive warehouse complex in an old train yard in the bustling but simple market city of Jodhpur . We were a mixture of Bombay film construction crew and local Rajasthani artisans with little or no film experience. We hired a band of local laborers who showed up with a few truckloads of bamboo, some rope and plastic tarps. These materials were thrown together and the resulting Gilliganesque structure became the shop. It was built along the tracks in the yard. Wes and I had designed the train to be both a fully functional filming facility as well as highly designed India Touring train. My team and I had who had been working every single day for a few months preparing in Bombay now kicked into 24-hour mode as we waited for the train, we were to renovate to arrive.
I will never forget the evening that the train finally arrived. We had been struggling to come to terms with the Indian Railways. They are one of the world’s largest bureaucracies with over 10 million full time employees, and had never had a film ask for the kind of access we needed. Similarly in a typically post colonial and more typically bureaucratic manner, they were loath to establish precedent of any kind. No manager or minister wanted to call any attention to themselves. Wes had refused the traditional approach of building an interior set on a stage and the fate of the film was in the balance. Having intimate insight into the process I can safely say that the film almost didn’t happen. Many sleepless nights in the bed of the designer and the producer were had leading up to the beginning of our shooting schedule. On the night the train arrived the entire crew showed up at the shop and cheered. Lydia and I shared a hug that was second only to the ones after my children were born. I can still feel the loving squeezing arms around mine.
Wes’s confidence in his own vision is one of his finest qualities. The fact of actually being on the train and actually being in India gives the film its lifeblood. In the heat of the mortal combat some call film making I often find myself wishing he was more flexible but once we arrived and were shooting on the moving train I was sure he was right. To this day I am not sure whether the greater achievement was the train’s design or securing the use of the train itself.
Ironically I may have had the best time in India of anyone on the crew. The only exception was my son who mastered rickshaw navigation and became a fixture in the local market. The re-experience of working with Lydia was rejuvenating and added a renewed sense of cooperation to our relationship. I had a great crew, there is now electricity, airlines, cell service and Internet and I left in relative health. In fact the 20 lbs I lost by virtue of the local fare is still there and off of me.
The first time I went to India expecting spiritual enlightenment only to be disillusioned by India ’s harsher side and my own inability to embrace its differences. This trip I was much more open and I found the time spend there empowering. The mix of a new world youthful exuberance of a country on the move mixed with the personal un-corporate un-mass produced beauty of traditional handmade craft made me recoil upon reentry to our cooperate mass produced culture. I return to the west with a clear sense that we are need to fight to preserve individual vision and have much to learn from our eastern friends.
Courtesy of http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karin-badt/personal-experience-set-d_b_67799.html
Being a big James Dean fan despite the fact that his film career (and life) was cut short, I have also come to be a fan of photographer Roy Schatt. In 1954 he took many striking portraits of the artist as a young man including the well known stroll down the street in New York.
To be honest I’ve always preferred black and white photography (and films in some cases), Roger Deakins, cinematographer of The Man Who Wasn’t There actually once said that he found colour in films distracting.
Stumbled across this artist whilst looking for idea for my creature exercise. Alot of SWAMPY’S illustrations are drawn on old pages ripped from encyclopedia…pretty cool stuff.
For more: http://www.flickr.com/photos/toothpaw/
Santuario do Bom Jesus do Monte – Braga Portugal
East of Braga are three well known places of pilgrimage. The one most worth seeing is the church of Bom Jesús do Monte (alt. 401m/1,316ft), 6km/4mi east of Braga in a park on the western slopes of Monte Espinho (564m/1,850ft). The beautiful gardens, little boating lake and pretty walks make it a favorite spot for picnics and excursions. There is a road up to Bom Jesús do Monte but the actual church is reached by a funicular or on foot up a Way of the Cross leading to a terrace from which a monumental Baroque staircase ascends to the church (originally 15th century; rebuilt in 18th and 19th centuries).
How'd you like to do these stairs on your knees?
