Monthly Archive for May, 2011

ONE

He took his middle name from the ninth century Patriarch of Constantinople. He and his brother, Claude, invented the world’s first combustion engine, receiving a patent from Napoleon Bonaparte in July of 1807. A lunar crater is named after him. He was an independently wealthy farmer who raised a plebian crop of sugar beets. He coined the term velocipede for a wheeled cycle he engineered.  But, most significantly, he made the world’s first photograph—in September of 1826, more than a decade before L.J. Daguerre presented his monotype, silver iodide coated, copper plate process to the public, and also before Henry Fox-Talbot’s paper negative process, the Calotype. Both Daguerre and Fox-Talbot are generally credited as co-inventors of photography. But it was theFrench ex-Army officer and civil administrator from Saône-et-Loire who photographed the first non-fugitive image from nature. It was a view from the second floor studio window of his family estate at Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, Le Gras. The highly reflective pewter plate made for challenging viewing.

The original bitumen coated pewter plate of “View from the Window at Le Gras.”

The imaging process is described on an “overview” page on the Harry Ransom Center website at the University of Texas, Austin.

Niépce set up a camera obscura, placed within it a polished pewter plate coated with bitumen of Judea (an asphalt derivative of petroleum), and uncapped the lens. After at least a day-long exposure of eight hours [you can track the sun’s movement on two opposed walls], the plate was removed and the latent image of the view from the window was rendered visible by washing it with a mixture of oil of lavender and white petroleum [turpentine] which dissolved away the parts of the bitumen which had not been hardened by light. The result was the permanent direct positive picture—a one-of-a-kind photograph on pewter. It renders a view of the outbuildings, courtyard, trees and landscape as seen from that upstairs window.

Continue reading ‘Joseph Nicéphore Niépce: The World’s First Photograph’

“Defeater”

One admirer calls him “the bastard child of Philip Guston” (the maverick artist who see-sawed between figuration and abstraction, and whose late paintings featured R. Crumb style shoes and buffoon hooded KKK figures riding around in hot rods.) Martinez embraces a long tradition that uses pop images as cultural tropes; he is in an equally long tradition of artists who bathe their work in deep, richly textured paint: concisely put, “A Painter.”

There’s an art scene blogger who is moved by Martinez’ numerous portraits of paired siblings and other child innocents.

One critic “reads” Martinez’ work by digging into the very paint itself:

The artist uses the mutability of his medium to add and subtract layers of paint and to create constant movement across the canvas. His bold and sometimes aggressive approach to the imagery gives the work a fresh and raw quality. The longer the viewer studies the painting, the more recognizable the plethora of cultural references become.

And a friend of Martinez refers to his thick, wide-brush textures and riot of colors, calling him “an impasto painter extraordinaire.”

Martinez' studio floor.

Continue reading ‘Eddie Martinez: “A Painter”’

Bergman, photo by Irving Penn.

When Ingmar Bergman decided in 1967 to build a house on remote Fårö Island, he cast his fate with the nets of the local fishermen. Whether he was seeking a part-time refuge from the roiling world of cinema and the Royal Dramatic Theater, or whether he understood how much his own life soon would become intertwined with the local people, is still grist for speculation. What is clear in the two feature length documentaries that he made about the island’s residents is how deeply he admired their tenacious struggle to prosper in a challenging climate. In 1967, and again a decade later in 1979, he produced Fårö Documents, two closely observed feature length films about their work and lives. Much like Michael Apted’s ongoing Up series, Bergman planned to track the life journey of Fårö’s people every ten years—but a planned third film was never made.

Michael Koresky wrote of the stylistic simplicity and integrity of Bergman’s portraits by the filmmaker’s

surveying spaces with a lack of overt editorializing, letting the people speak for themselves or, more frequently, just go about their business, which Bergman captures with an intense focus—farmers slaughtering pigs in harrowing real time; neighbors working together to thatch a roof; and, in my favorite moment, a lonely fisherman cleaning, cooking, and eating his freshly caught dinner: simple, effortless, wordless.

Continue reading ‘Bergman on Fårö: A Testament—Part Two’