One of my favorite painters

Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer (September 30, 1865 - September 24, 1953 was a French Symbolist/Art Nouveau painter and potter.

He was born Lucien Lévy to a Jewish family in Algiers. In 1879 he began studying drawing and sculpture in Paris. In 1887 Lévy began making his living in southern France, overseeing the decoration of ceramics. His own tastes in pottery decoration were influenced by Islamic Art. In 1895 he left for Paris to begin a career in painting; around this time he visited Italy and was further influenced by art of the Renaissance.

In 1896 he exhibited his first pastels and paintings under the name Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer; he'd added the last two syllables of his mother's maiden name (Goldhurmer), likely to differentiate himself from other people named Lévy. His paintings soon became popular with the public and among fellow artists as well. He earned high praise for the academic attention to detail with which he captured figures lost in a Pre-Raphaelite haze of melancholy, contrasted with bright Impressionist colouration. His portrait of writer Georges Rodenbach is perhaps the most striking example of this strange and extraordinary synergy.

After 1901 Lévy-Dhurmer moved away from expressly Symbolist content, incorporating more landscapes into his work. He continued to draw inspiration from music and attempted to capture works of great composers such as Beethoven in painted form. He died in Le Vésinet in 1953.

Art Renewal Center: Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer

ArtMagick Galleries: Dhurmer

The Piano

Such a great animation: beautiful, gentle and sad.

Bringing you the best of bygone eras

Amazing collection of retro links: Retrolounge

"A child said, What is the grass?"

Walter Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist, journalist, and humanist. He was a part of the transition between Transcendentalism and Realism, incorporating both views in his works. His works have been translated into more than twenty-five languages. Whitman is among the most influential and controversial poets in the American canon. His work has been described as a "rude shock" and "the most audacious and debatable contribution yet made to American literature."

The Walt Whitman Archive

Leaves of Grass (1900)

Halloween

Halloween is the one of the oldest holidays still celebrated today. It's one of the most popular holidays, second only to Christmas. While millions of people celebrate Halloween without knowing it's origins and myths, the history and facts of Halloween make the holiday more fascinating.

The History of Halloween

Halloween website

Halloween Poems

Tomas Baginski: The Cathedral

Botanical wonders

Scientific marvels; drop-dead beautiful works of art; a genus onto themselves: these are just a few of the explanations given to describe the allure of a legendary, century-old bevy of exquisite glass blossoms and fruits.

In “Botanical Wonders: The Story of the Harvard Glass Flowers,” The Corning Museum of Glass brings to bear its unique curatorial, conservation, and glassmaking capabilities to illuminate more fully than ever before the story of the delicate glass replicas of botanical specimens known as the Glass Flowers of Harvard.

The Corning Museum of Glass

Lisa Law - Hippie History

Lisa Law's story is one among thousands that emerged from American society in the turbulent 1960s. Americans in that era faced many controversial issues-from civil rights, the Vietnam War, nuclear arms, and the environment to drug use, sexual freedom, and nonconformity.

Many young people questioned America's materialism and cultural and political norms. Seeking a better world, some used music, politics, and alternative lifestyles to create what came to be known as the counterculture.

Lisa Law's photographs provide glimpses into the folk and rock music scenes, California's blossoming counterculture, and the family-centered and spiritual world of commune life in New Mexico. They are moments that she lived, witnessed, and recorded on the frontier of cultural change.

A Visual Journey: Photographs by Lisa Law 1965-1971

Always look on the bright side of life

Monty Python Official Website

Monty Python's Complete Useless Web Site

Leonardo Solaas software art

Beautiful, enchanting - I could play with these programs for hours. 'Dreamlines' is my favorite, watching the image appear, move and change is magical.

Dreamlines is a non-linear, interactive visual experience. The user enters one or more words that define the subject of a dream he would like to dream. The system looks in the Web for images related to those words, and takes them as input to generate an ambiguous painting, in perpetual change, where elements fuse into one another, in a process analogous to memory and free association.

Autopoemador takes a poem, or any text, and makes a random audiovisual experience out of it. It is an automatic poem reader, that literally processes words and makes something different out of them: a language, chaos or order, in which clear understanding and communication do not matter any more.

Autopintador is a paint program with a will of its own. The user has a strokes palette and several control tools. When drawing, though, the strokes move around the screen by themselves, and eventually disappear. The outcome is a painting in movement, that results from the interaction between user and machine. It is a game of forms and colors, that discloses it’s possibilities with playing and experimentation.

Poetry with paint - the art of Naoto Hattori

"Some people think my visions are very weird and hard to understand. To me they are natural and flow freely from my mind. I don’t know when it developed, as I’ve been creating and visualizing imaginary worlds ever since I was a child. Now as an adult I paint my feelings and emotions — it is like poetry with paint.
It is not difficult for me to create my images, they come to me automatically. If I imagine a flying vagina with wings smoking out of a penis shaped bong, I see the vision clearly in my mind.
At times I am dumbfounded by my own abilities. I’ve been painting for 10 years, yet there seems no end to the flow of imagery—it grows day by day.
At first the images seem confusing and meaningless, but as I create they become clarified. Then I learn from the paintings. As my inner self is revealed, I feel great satisfaction and relief.
Some people open their mind to a more visionary world with drugs. While my visions may have similarities to drug induced hallucinations, I achieve this without drugs.
Also there are similarities to my visions and those found in dreams. Like dreams they are varied and can be sweet, nightmarish, or just funny and weird.

I paint whatever I imagine and don’t compromise or lie to myself. In this way I maintain purity of thought and the originality of my work."

- Naoto Hattori -

Hide and Seek

Imogen Heap

The art of Michael Parkes

Michael Parkes is the world’s leading magical realist painter, sculptor, and stone lithographer. His decades of success as a fine artist stand out in the art world, where less than 1% of artists ever achieve the success in both the primary and secondary markets that Michael has achieved. His works are collected by celebrities, private collectors, and galleries around the world, and his body of work stands for the ages.

The World of Michael Parkes

Rage, Rage Against The Dying Of The Light

Dylan Thomas was born in Wales in 1914. He was a neurotic, sickly child who shied away from school and preferred reading on his own; he read all of D. H. Lawrence's poetry, impressed by Lawrence's descriptions of a vivid natural world. Fascinated by language, he excelled in English and reading, but neglected other subjects and dropped out of school at sixteen. His first book, Eighteen Poems, was published to great acclaim when he was twenty. Thomas did not sympathize with T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden's thematic concerns with social and intellectual issues, and his writing, with its intense lyricism and highly charged emotion, has more in common with the Romantic tradition. Thomas first visited America in January 1950, at the age of thirty-five. His reading tours of the United States, which did much to popularize the poetry reading as new medium for the art, are famous and notorious, for Thomas was the archetypal Romantic poet of the popular American imagination: he was flamboyantly theatrical, a heavy drinker, engaged in roaring disputes in public, and read his work aloud with tremendous depth of feeling. He became a legendary figure, both for his work and the boisterousness of his life. Tragically, he died from alcoholism at the age of 39 after a particularly long drinking bout in New York City in 1953.

Read poetry of Dylan Thomas here

Laurel and Hardy

Laurel and Hardy were an American-based comedy duo who became famous during the early half of the 20th century for their work in motion pictures. The members of the duo were the thin British-born-and-reared Stan Laurel and his heavier American partner from the state of Georgia, Oliver Hardy. The pair is considered among the most famous and finest double acts in cinema history. Each brought talents from his solo career to the team.

The two comedians worked together briefly in 1919 on The Lucky Dog, released in 1921. After a period appearing separately in several short films for the Hal Roach studio during the 1920s, they began appearing in movie shorts together in 1926, and Laurel and Hardy officially became a team in 1927. They became Hal Roach's most famous and lucrative stars. Among their most popular and successful films were the features Sons of the Desert (1933), Way Out West (1937), and Block-Heads (1938); and the shorts Big Business (1929), Helpmates (1932), and their Academy Award-winning short, The Music Box (1932).

The pair left the Roach studio in 1940; then appeared in eight low-budget comedies for 20th Century Fox and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. From 1945 to 1950, they did not appear on film and concentrated on their stage show. They made their last film, Atoll K, in France in 1950 and 1951 before retiring from the screen. In total, they appeared together in 106 films. They starred in 40 short sound films, 32 short silent films and 23 feature films, and in the remaining 11 films, had a guest or cameo appearance.


The Midnight Patrol (1933) 18 mins

René Magritte

René François Ghislain Magritte (November 21, 1898 – August 15, 1967) was a Belgian surrealist artist. He became well known for a number of witty and amusing images.

Magritte was born in Lessines, in the province of Hainaut, in 1898, the eldest son of Léopold Magritte, a tailor, and Adeline, a milliner. He began drawing lessons in 1910. In 1912, his mother committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Sambre. Magritte was present when her body was retrieved from the water. The image of his mother floating, her dress obscuring her face, may have influenced a 1927-1928 series of paintings of people with cloth obscuring their faces, including Les Amants, but Magritte disliked this explanation.[1] He studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels for two years until 1918. In 1922 he married Georgette Berger, whom he had met in 1913.

Magritte worked in a wallpaper factory, and was a poster and advertisement designer until 1926 when a contract with Galerie la Centaure in Brussels made it possible for him to paint full-time. In 1926, Magritte produced his first surreal painting, The Lost Jockey (Le jockey perdu), and held his first exhibition in Brussels in 1927. Critics heaped abuse on the exhibition. Depressed by the failure, he moved to Paris where he became friends with André Breton, and became involved in the surrealist group.

When Galerie la Centaure closed and the contract income ended, he returned to Brussels and worked in advertising. Then, with his brother, he formed an agency, which earned him a living wage.

During the German occupation of Belgium in World War II he remained in Brussels, which led to a break with Breton. At the time he renounced the violence and pessimism of his earlier work, though he returned to the themes later.

His work showed in the United States in New York in 1936 and again in that city in two retrospective exhibitions, one at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965, and the other at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1992.

Magritte died of pancreatic cancer on August 15, 1967 and was interred in Schaarbeek Cemetery, Brussels.

Winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature

Doris Lessing, who has won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature has been one of Britain's most prominent writers for more than 50 years.
Her novels, most notably The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook, weave political and sexual themes into a complex narrative thread.

Lessing's themes are big ones: racism, communism, terrorism and environmental destruction.

Her output ranges from romances through to science fiction and take in the most intimate internal dialogues and sweeping historical set-pieces.

Doris May Taylor is a child of the British Empire. Born in Persia - now Iran - in 1919, she was brought up in Southern Rhodesia - now Zimbabwe - where her father owned a farm.

Her African childhood, amid the vastness of the bush and her time at convent schools, brought her a wealth of inspiration.

In 1949 after two failed marriages, the second to a hard-line communist, Gottfried Lessing, she left Africa, and most of her family, and moved to London to try her hand at writing.

Multi-layered tales

Lessing's first novel, The Grass is Singing, published the following year, was an instant bestseller.

The story of the wife of a white farmer and her affair with an African servant, the book broke new ground, both in terms of its outlining of an interracial relationship and in the sheer detail Lessing gave to her characters' internal lives.

Perhaps Lessing's most controversial novel was The Golden Notebook, published in 1962.

A multi-layered story about the different areas of one woman's personality, her passions and hatreds, it is by far the most complex, and longest, work Lessing has ever produced.


Lessing has written more than 30 novels
She has also produced startling works, such as the semi-autobiographical Children of Violence series and Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), a frightening and surreal examination of mental illness.

By the late 1970s, Lessing left the African-themed novel behind and moved into science fiction.

In the Canopus in Argos series, she outlines a dystopic vision of the future, with natural catastrophes and tyranny becoming the norm.

The critic, Paul Schlueter, noted that Lessing's "high seriousness in describing Earth's own decline and ultimate demise is as profoundly apocalyptic as ever".

More recently, Lessing has produced novels like The Good Terrorist (1985), a satire on romantic politics, and The Fifth Child (1988), about the havoc wreaked on a family by an antisocial and violent child.

Her latest work, The Cleft, is a sci-fi novel which imagines what happens to a mythical all-female world when men are introduced.

Speaking at the Hay literary festival in June, Lessing said the book had been partly inspired by her own experience of giving birth at 19 and the woman in the next bed, already a mother of two girls, harshly rejecting the son she had just had.

The writer also addressed her critics - saying she had been surprised by the "horrible" early reviews of The Golden Notebook.

"There's something abrasive in me because I have often made people very cross," she mused.

But she said as a writer it was important not to care what other people think and that the profession must honour that.

"We are free... I can say what I think. We are lucky, privileged, so why not make use of it?"

- BBC News 11.10.2007

The original illustrated catalog of ACME Products

ACME is a worldwide leader of many manufactured goods. From its humble beginnings providing corks and flypaper to bug collectors ("Buddy's Bug Hunt/1935") to its heyday in the American Southwest supplying a certain coyote, from Ultimatum Dispatchers to Batman outfits, ACME has set the standard for excellence.
For the first time ever, information and pictures of all ACME products, specialty divisions, and services featured in Warner Bros. cartoons (made by the original studio from 1935 to 1964) are gathered here, in one convenient catalog.

Patrick Durand - photographer

"As far as I can remember, I’ve always had two passions: Planes and Photography. Trying to combine them seemed to be a natural move. In general, cities are off-limits to low altitude flying. In this “forbidden territory” the photographer faces a real challenge: seizing the breathtaking geometry of landscapes seen in a purely vertical perspective."

Vertical cities, panoramics, aviation

Ibrahim Ferrer and Omara Portuondo: Silencio

Ah.. dance to this music and be shamelessly romantic. Or dance for the memory of Che Guevara: Hasta la Victoria siempre!

Antoni Gaudi

The son of a coppersmith, Antoni Gaudi was born in Reus, Spain in 1852. He studied at the Escola Superior d'Arquitectura in Barcelona and designed his first major commission for the Casa Vincens in Barcelona using a Gothic Revival style that set a precedent for his future work.

Over the course of his career, Gaudi developed a sensuous, curving, almost surreal design style which established him as the innovative leader of the Spanish Art Nouveau movement. With little regard for formal order, he juxtaposed unrelated systems and altered established visual order. Gaudi's characteristically warped form of Gothic architecture drew admiration from other avant-garde artists.
Although categorized with the Art Nouveau, Gaudi created an entirely original style. He died in Barcelona in 1926.

Great buildings online:

Casa Batllo

Casa Mila

Colonia Guell

Park Guell

Sagrada Familia

The Sand Castle / Le Château de sable

A true classic in the art of film animation, directed by Jacobus Willem "Co" Hoedeman. Hoedeman has earned more than 80 international awards and honors throughout his career. "The Sand Castle" alone garnered 24 awards, including an Oscar in 1978 for best animated short.

A fable of great humor and appeal, The Sand Castle is the story of the Sandman and the creatures he sculpts out of sand. Under his direction, they build a castle and celebrate the completion of their new home, only to be interrupted by an uninvited guest. The wind blows, and the castle crumbles. The filmmaker leaves the door open to various interpretations. Sound film without words.

Anke M

I just love the photography of Anke Merzbach. Dark and strange, and so enchanting!


Anke M: Lea

Democratic Voice of Burma

Democratic Voice of Burma(or DVB) is a non-profit media organization based in Oslo, Norway. Run by Burmese expatriates, it makes radio and television broadcasts aimed at providing uncensored news and information about Burma (Myanmar), the country's military regime, and its political opposition.

Its mission is:

to provide accurate and unbiased news to the people of Burma,

to promote understanding and cooperation amongst the various ethnic and
religious groups of Burma,

to encourage and sustain independent public opinion and enable social and
political debate

to impart the ideals of democracy and human rights to the people of Burma.

This site is full of news and information you don't get anywhere else. And the photo section is worth looking at - though I must warn you, many of the pictures are graphic. But the situation in Burma isn't nice, so why should the images?

The Renaissance Connection

Welcome to The Renaissance Connection, the Allentown Art Museum's interactive educational web site. With the simple click of a mouse button, teachers, students, and art enthusiasts can travel 500 years into the past to discover many Renaissance innovations revealed through the Museum's Samuel H. Kress Collection of European art.
The site combines interactive time lines, historical maps, humorous activities, and interdisciplinary lesson plans, giving you the opportunity to become a Patron of the Arts, Design Your Own Innovation, and investigate Renaissance artworks in depth to discover how past innovations inform life today. Time travel has never been so easy, or so imaginative!

Stormy Monday

No one does it like T-Bone Walker.