Created, Animated and Directed by: Tyler Pacana
An overview of how animation is made with traditional, 2D-rigged, stop-motion, and CG techniques.
Music: Hub World – Yotam Perel
Produced at Sheridan College [2020].
Category Archives: Arts & Literature
Today: 250th Anniversary Of William Wordsworth’s Birth – “That Inward Eye”
From an Apollo Magazine article (April 7. 2020):
‘They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude’
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‘We are fond of tracing the resemblance between Poetry and Painting,’ wrote William Wordsworth (1770–1850) in the famous ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads (1800), ‘and, accordingly, we call them Sisters.’ To speak of the ‘sister arts’ was indeed a critical platitude of the age, though as it happens Wordsworth’s attitude towards painting wasn’t normally very sisterly.
When, in 1840 or so, a well-meaning houseguest called Margaret Gillies made a drawing of the 70-year old Mrs Wordsworth, everyone agreed that it was an excellent likeness; but her kind act was rewarded with a testy and somewhat ungracious sonnet from the sitter’s husband. He preferred to visualise Mary in her salad days: ‘’tis a fruitless task to paint for me, / Who, yielding not to changes Time has made, / By the habitual light of memory see / Eyes unbedimmed, see bloom that cannot fade, / And smiles that from their birth-place ne’er shall flee / Into the land where ghosts and phantoms be’..
All she possesses, as a painter, is the outward eye: ‘that inward eye’ is the poet’s hallmark, as of course Miss Gillies would have known from Wordsworth’s most famous poem, the one about the daffodils – ‘They flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude’. By chance we know (because Wordsworth left it on record, saying they were the best thing in the poem) that those two lines were actually contributed by Mary, so the uxoriousness of the thing is double: not only does she evade the merely visual but she also possesses the innate genius to be able to name the imaginative power that so transcends it.
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Documentaries: “Natalie Wood – What Remains Behind” On HBO (May 5)
The greatest roles of her life were behind the scenes. Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind is an intimate portrait of actor Natalie Wood’s life and career, told through the eyes of her daughter Natasha Gregson Wagner and others who knew her best. The film celebrates the woman behind the iconic imagery and explores the compelling details of Wood’s personal life and illustrious career that are often overshadowed by her tragic death.
The documentary premieres May 5th at 9pm on HBO.
FINE ARTS: 4K VIDEO TOUR – THE VAN GOGH MUSEUM “ARTISTIC EXCHANGE”
Van Gogh Museum Tour in 4K. Have you always wanted to be alone in the Van Gogh Museum? Step into Vincent’s world and enjoy the private video tour.
Episode 5: Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam
Photography: The “2019 Great Outdoors Photo Contest” Winner – “Napali Storm” By Richard Langer
The grand prize in the 2019 Great Outdoors Photo Contest goes to Richard Langer for the image, “Napali Storm.”
“This photograph was taken from a small helicopter over the Napali cliffs on the island of Kauai, Hawaii,” explains Langer. “To avoid the distortions that would result from photographing through the helicopter’s dome, I selected one that had no doors. This was fine for photography, but it let the rain and wind in on my wife and me. Though the weather had been stormy and rainy throughout the flight, it lifted a little as we flew over the ocean. By the end of the trip, we were drenched and shaken, but knew that we had witnessed an amazing sight.”
From Outdoor Photographer
New Art & Nature Books: “What It’s Like To Be A Bird” – David Allen Sibley (2020)
While its focus is on familiar backyard birds–blue jays, nuthatches, chickadees–it also examines certain species that can be fairly easily observed, such as the 
seashore-dwelling Atlantic puffin. David Sibley’s exacting artwork and wide-ranging expertise bring observed behaviors vividly to life.
The bird book for birders and nonbirders alike that will excite and inspire by providing a new and deeper understanding of what common, mostly backyard, birds are doing–and why.
“Can birds smell?” “Is this the same cardinal that was at my feeder last year?” “Do robins ‘hear’ worms?” In What It’s Like to Be a Bird, David Sibley answers the most frequently asked questions about the birds we see most often. This special, large-format volume is geared as much to nonbirders as it is to the out-and-out obsessed, covering more than two hundred species and including more than 330 new illustrations by the author.
And while the text is aimed at adults–including fascinating new scientific research on the myriad ways birds have adapted to environmental changes–it is nontechnical, making it the perfect occasion for parents and grandparents to share their love of birds with young children, who will delight in the big, full-color illustrations of birds in action. Unlike any other book he has written, What It’s Like to Be a Bird is poised to bring a whole new audience to David Sibley’s world of birds.
DAVID ALLEN SIBLEY is the author and illustrator of the series of successful guides to nature that bear his name, including The Sibley Guide to Birds. He has contributed to Smithsonian, Science, The Wilson Journal of Ornithology, Birding, BirdWatching, North American Birds, and The New York Times. He is a recipient of the Roger Tory Peterson Award for Promoting the Cause of Birding from the American Birding Association and the Linnaean Society of New York’s Eisenmann Medal. He lives and birds in Massachusetts.
New Museum Exhibitions: “Andy Warhol” At The Tate Modern, London (Video)
Although our galleries are temporarily closed we wanted to share the Andy Warhol exhibition at Tate Modern with you. Join Tate curators Gregor Muir and Fiontán Moran as they discuss Warhol through the lens of the immigrant story, his LGBTQI identity and concerns with death and religion.
Meet the man behind the brand. It’s a Warhol you might not know, with some artworks you may not have seen before.
Find out more about the exhibition here
Top Artist Documentary: ‘PHYLLIDA’ – A Portrait Of The 76-Year Old British Sculptor Phyllida Barlow
This documentary is an intimate portrait of British sculptor Phyllida Barlow during her preparation for the major survey ‘cul-de-sac’ at the Royal Academy last 
year. Directed by Cosima Spender, this film maps the roots of Barlow’s oeuvre, as she revisits childhood memories, domestic and urban spaces, and their subsequent role in her creative process.
Phyllida Barlow began studying at Chelsea College of Art in 1960, and went on to study and teach at Slade School of Art for more than twenty years, becoming Emerita Professor in 2009. She was elected a Royal Academician in 2011, and represented Great Britain in the 2017 Venice Biennale, where she created the ambitious installation, ‘folly’.
Watch this evolution and the artist’s influences in ‘PHYLLIDA’. ‘I want the work to be traversed in a way that your memory of it is tested, so that you keep forgetting what you’ve seen’, Barlow explains, ‘I think that is the nature of sculpture – not something that can be held as a whole image in your head, only as fragments… The spaces, the silences in between, are as much a component of the work as the thing itself.”
‘PHYLLIDA’ is produced by Hauser & Wirth, in association with Third Channel and Peacock Pictures.
Tribute: Architect-Author Michael Sorkin – “City Air Makes You Free” (1948-2020)
From an Apollo Magazine online article (March 31, 2020):
Ultimately he was a humane critic of the contemporary city, a serious, funny and poetic voice defending the powerless against big capital and an articulator of how architecture should be used as a tool of resistance. He is indelibly associated with New York, a city he loved with a fervour despite its faults, and of which he defended every inch as a public good. Number 210 in his list was the medieval German phrase ‘Stadtluft macht frei’ – ‘city air makes you free’. He will survive through his magical writing, which makes us all a little freer.
Michael Sorkin, who died last week of complications due to Covid-19, gained his reputation as the architecture critic of The Village Voice in New York, which, in the 1980s, was a publication with a formidable reach and impact on a city just beginning to boom again. He launched fierce attacks against the banality of the contemporary city, the rapacity and greed of developers (notably the current president, including in a 1985 piece entitled ‘Dump the Trump’) and the loss of great landmarks. But he was no nostalgist; he revelled in the potential of architecture to catalyse change and excoriated his contemporaries for caving in to big business, for building prisons and being complicit in a denuded public realm.
Interviews: 66-Year Old American Author Erik Larson On Writing “The Splendid And The Vile”
Erik Larson, #1 New York Times bestselling author, shares his writing process.
In The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson shows, in cinematic detail, how Churchill taught the British people “the art of being fearless.” It is a story of political brinkmanship, but it’s also an intimate domestic drama, set against the backdrop of Churchill’s prime-ministerial country home, Chequers; his wartime retreat, Ditchley, where he and his entourage go when the moon is brightest and the bombing threat is highest; and of course 10 Downing Street in London.
Drawing on diaries, original archival documents, and once-secret intelligence reports—some released only recently—Larson provides a new lens on London’s darkest year through the day-to-day experience of Churchill and his family: his wife, Clementine; their youngest daughter, Mary, who chafes against her parents’ wartime protectiveness; their son, Randolph, and his beautiful, unhappy wife, Pamela; Pamela’s illicit lover, a dashing American emissary; and the advisers in Churchill’s “Secret Circle,” to whom he turns in the hardest moments.
Erik Larson is the author of eight books, six of which became New York Times bestsellers. His latest books, The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz and Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, both hit no. 1 on the list soon after launch. His saga of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, The Devil in the White City, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and won an Edgar Award for fact-crime writing; it lingered on various Times bestseller lists for the better part of a decade.
Boomers Daily 