To read more: https://www.artic.edu/events/4684/conversation-bullets-and-steelthe-making-of-elizabethan-armor-2
From the Renzo Piano Building Workshop website:
“The Academy Museum gives us the opportunity to honor the past while creating a building for the future—in fact, for the possibility of many futures. The historic Saban Building is a wonderful example of Streamline Moderne style, which preserves the way people envisioned the future in 1939. The new structure, the Sphere Building, is a form that seems to lift off the ground into the perpetual, imaginary voyage through space and time that is moviegoing. By connecting these two experiences we create something that is itself like a movie. You go from sequence to sequence, from the exhibition galleries to the film theater and the terrace, with everything blending into one experience.”
Renzo Piano, Architect
When it opens in the heart of Los Angeles, at the intersection of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures will be the world’s premier movie museum.
Situated on the famed “Miracle Mile,” the museum will preserve and breathe new life into the former 1939 May Company department store, now re-named the Saban Building. Celebrating its history and imagining new possibilities, the additions to the building that date from 1946 have been removed and replaced with a spherical building that features the 1,000-seat David Geffen Theater and the Dolby Family Terrace with views towards Hollywood. The revitalized campus will feature more than 50,000 square feet of gallery space, two theaters, cutting-edge project spaces, an outdoor piazza, the rooftop terrace, an active education studio, a restaurant, and store.
https://www.academymuseum.org/en/
To read and see more: http://www.rpbw.com/project/academy-museum-of-motion-pictures
The Historic Photographer of the Year awards showcase the world’s very best historic places and cultural sites from across the globe, capturing everything from the most famous national treasures to the obscure and forgotten hidden gems.
The 2019 Awards attracted a swathe of astonishing entries from amateurs and professionals who have climbed, hiked and trekked their way to snap stunning historic places from every corner of the globe.
The Overall Winner was an outstanding image of the ruins of the Arromanches Mulberry Harbour in Normandy and was shot by Stéphane Hurel.
The Historic England category was won by JP Appleton with his haunting shot of the Victorian era Roker Pier, while HISTORY’s Short Filmmaker of the Year was awarded to Dibs McCallum for a fascinating short documentary exploring the remains of the RAF Barnham nuclear weapons storage facility.
To read more: https://www.historicphotographeroftheyear.com/2019-winners/
From a The New Yorker online article:
Though Peter de Sève is a regular contributor to the magazine, his most recognizable work comes from his career as a character designer. De Sève has helped create some of the most cherished animation characters of the past few decades, including those in “A Bug’s Life,” “Finding Nemo,” “Robots,” “The Little Prince,” and the “Ice Age” films. We recently talked to the artist about his work and about some of his favorite Christmas traditions.
Do you have any favorite depictions of Christmas? Artists who captured it especially well?
It’s funny, but only clichés come to mind: “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” But there is a song that transports me immediately to the season, that I can’t hear without feeling chills: “Charlie Freak,” by Steely Dan. It kills me every time.
To read more: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cover-story/cover-story-2019-12-16
In this episode of “The Way I See It,” actor and comedian Steve Martin looks at paintings by two early pioneers of American abstraction and takes us on a journey of seeing—shape and color transform into mountains, sky, and water. Find “The Way I See It” on BBC Sounds or wherever you get your podcasts. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000…
From a Christie’s online article:
Adams’ ‘visualisation’ strategy marked a shift away from Pictorialism, a much more manipulated photographic style, which had influenced his early work. His desire for sharper focus and deeper tone and contrast (he called it ‘an austere and blazing poetry of the real’) led to him becoming a leading figure in pure — or straight — photography.
Arguably no other photographer of his era knew more about photography than Adams. He wrote ten technical manuals on the discipline, and even advised major figures like Strand and Edward Weston, his friend and fellow West Coast photographer.
He also consulted for Polaroid and Hasselblad. Without such technical mastery he would not have been able to react with such immediacy to the quickly changing conditions of landscape.
One of his most famous works, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941, needed snap judgements of immense sophistication to capture the momentary effect of sunset light on the foreground, and establish a balanced tone and focus with the distant peaks, evanescent clouds and darkening sky.
An exhibit at South Carolina’s Columbia Museum of Art shows Vincent van Gogh in a new light. “Van Gogh and His Inspirations” presents the younger, wayward artist who learned from looking hard at the world — and the work of artists around him. A private collection of his inspirations is made public for the first time and presented alongside a dozen original van Gogh works. Jeffrey Brown reports.
A film by Eric Minh Swenson.
My paintings are inspired by an intensely personal introspective journey of life, from the ever-changing complexities of love, loss, birth, and death. The context of my work is what I call, “Absence and Presence” pertaining to how someone or something can be physically gone, but the essence still remains. Capturing the physical mixed with spirituality on canvas. My application of paint is an extension of that thought process. Continuously building up and tearing down, layer upon layer, adding and subtracting. A visceral dance between the conscious and the unconscious until the emotion is expressed. Painting the essence of something rather than a depiction. My message is about the human condition, that joy is sweetened by the memory of the pain endured to reach it.
From a VoyageLA online article: http://voyagela.com/interview/art-life-mark-acetelli/
With more than 80 works spanning paintings, etchings, and drawings, the Dutchman’s lifelong practice of self-portraiture functions as a means of concretizing that which is fleeting, be it individual moments of development set against the inexorable passage of time, or the facial contortions of emotion that are gone, without a trace, as swiftly as they arrive.
Across the four decades in which they were painted, one constant is particularly striking across media and styles―Rembrandt’s dedication to presenting himself from multiple perspectives, celebrating the multiplicity of the individual and championing the unfiltered portrayal of emotional expression.
To read more and order: https://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/art/all/04641/facts.rembrandt_the_self_portraits.htm?utm_campaign=2019_xmas4_davinci_rembrandt&utm_source=tas&utm_medium=nl
Over 200 of the world’s leading international Modern and contemporary art galleries display artworks by over 4,000 artists, including paintings, sculptures, installations, photography, film, video, and digital art. Visitors can find works ranging from editioned pieces by young artists to museum-caliber masterpieces.
Website: https://www.artbasel.com/miami-beach
Boomers Daily 