By any name, Yusuf Islam is a legend. The man who came to fame as Cat Stevens will soon release a new album, a collection of songs he made famous half a century ago and has now re-recorded with the perspective that 50 years of living can bring. Correspondent Tracy Smith talks with Yusuf about recording “Tea for the Tillerman 2,” including his duet with his younger self for the song “Father and Son.”
Tag Archives: Video Profiles
Art Documentary: “Words And Pictures – Ian Beck”
Directed, Filmed and Edited by: Edmund Beck
Music composed by: Simon Whiteside
Interview and Graphics by: Laurence Beck
Sound mix by: David Mead
Short documentary film about Author, illustrator Ian Beck. A brief look at his life and where he works. Included are, his inspirations from childhood reading, the making of the artwork for Elton John’s 1973 album ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ and his current project in collaboration with Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials) creating a Myriorama.
Ian Archibald Beck is an English children’s illustrator and author. In addition to his numerous children’s books, he is also known for his cover illustration on Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album. More than a million copies of his books have been sold worldwide.
Video Profiles: 78-Year Old British-American Singer Graham Nash (CBS Sunday)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79KJcVV5Dew
Singer-songwriter Graham Nash had recently embarked on a sold-out tour, until it was cancelled due to coronavirus. Anthony Mason sits down with Nash in New York City to talk with the former member of The Hollies and Crosby, Stills & Nash about how he has maintained his productivity while remaining under lockdown.
New Photography Books: “Ciao” In Italy By Mario Testino (May 2020)
In Ciao, Testino handpicks his favorite images of Italy, a country that has featured heavily in his life, from his friendships and breathtaking vistas to quintessentially Italian iconic fashion shoots and Italians’ ever-evolving allure to their effervescent lifestyle. Featuring three sections, IN GIRO (out and about), ALLA MODA (in fashion), and AL MARE (at sea), the result is a highly personal journey across the country through Testino’s lens paying homage to Italy, and it’s culture as well as a chronicle of 40 years of genre-defining photography.
Widely regarded as one of the most influential fashion and portrait photographers, Mario Testino is responsible for the creation of emblematic images, transmitting emotion and energy in an open and intimate way. Throughout his four-decade career, Testino has been on a journey beyond the world of fashion capturing Earth’s traditions and cultures with unparalleled access and an extraordinarily unique point of view.
Peruvian by birth, Testino’s intimate connection to Italy found its roots in his Italian heritage, but blossomed when he experienced the country for himself. Discovering Italy was, for Testino, synonymous with discovering his passion for fashion. “Rome was all about the hottest, latest trends and fresh new styling, and I loved the way Italians could shed the latest look for an even newer thing without ever losing their own identity.”
Architecture Profiles: “Building Transformative Narratives – David Adjaye”
“Undoubtedly, the most significant project that’s really propelled and changed my career is the National Museum of African American History and Culture on the Mall. I was a young architect, but I was given the task to design and deliver this project. That was my role and my office’s role in the project. I didn’t do many things between that time, because it consumed so much but I learned so much. And when it opened with Barack Obama, before he left the White House, it kind of felt like something had been achieved. It was a kind of euphoric moment for me”
This is the Life Story of Sir David Adjaye OBE RA
Adjaye Associates was established in June 2000 by founder and principal architect, Sir David Adjaye OBE. Receiving ever-increasing worldwide attention, the practice has studios in London, New York and Accra and completed work in Europe, North America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Two of the practice’s largest commissions to date are the design of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington D.C. and the Moscow School of Management (SKOLKOVO). Further projects range in scale from private houses, exhibitions, and temporary pavilions to major arts centres, civic buildings, and masterplans. Renowned for an eclectic material and colour palette and a capacity to offer a rich civic experience, the buildings differ in form and style, yet are unified by their ability to generate new typologies and to reference a wide cultural discourse.
Video Profiles: 60-Year Old British Painter-Author Billy Childish Talks About “Th Future Of Art” (Artsy)
“The art world is the same as the rest of the world,” says British artist, writer, and punk-rocker Billy Childish. “What it requires is new, more, and now.” Childish has worked defiantly and prolifically outside of the mainstream since his expulsion from art school in the early 1980s. To the polymath—whose paintings, poems, novels, and music draw heavily from his autobiography—art is a deeply personal experience that should not rely on external validation, whether from critics or audiences. From his painting studio located on a historic dockyard in Kent, United Kingdom, Childish speaks passionately about the freedom that comes with self-validation. When asked about his perspective on the future of art, he demurs. “People think we’re continually ascending a mountain to success or to enlightenment,” he says. “It’s here and now and this is it.”
Furniture Design: Profile Of Japan’s Famed “Maruni Wood Industry” (Video)
In 1928 Maruni Wood Industry was born out of a fascination with the masterful carpentry in ancient shrines. Today its furniture is found in the Californian headquarters of Apple as well as airport lounges, galleries and restaurants around the world. We meet the company’s president to talk about the challenges of managing a family-run business.
Pioneering the industrial application of craft skills following establishment of the company in 1928
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From building structures such as Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines through to private dwellings and the tools that we use in our everyday lives, Japan is a nation that has for many centuries cultivated traditions based on wood that occupy an important position in our daily lives. Takeo Yamanaka, the founder of Maruni Wood Industry, spent his childhood at Miyajima in Hiroshima Prefecture, a place that has a rich heritage of traditional crafts based on the use of wood.
Artist Profiles: 69-Year Old American Painter Sigrid Burton (Video)
“I draw literally and figuratively from the natural world. My drawing and mark making refer to and derive from botanical and biological anatomies, including marine life, as well as, the structures of both macro and micro cosmologies and writing systems, such as logograms.”
Sigrid Burton is an American painter, long based in New York City, whose semi-abstract work is known for its use of expressive, atmospheric color fields and enigmatic allusions to natural and cultural realms. Burton has had solo exhibitions in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Osaka, including at Artists Space and the Michael C. Rockefeller Arts Center, and been included in shows at A.I.R. Gallery, the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, and the Carnegie Art Museum, Oxnard. Her work belongs to the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rockefeller Foundation, and Palm Springs Desert Museum, and has been reviewed in Arts Magazine, Arts & Antiques, Jung Journal, Chicago Tribune and LA Weekly.
Writers most frequently observe that Burton’s atmospheric works recall artists such as J.M.W. Turner, Odilon Redon, Pierre Bonnard and Mark Rothko, as well as the light of her native California. Art & Antiques described her approach as “chromatic expressionism” in which color is “her undisputed protagonist”. Peter Frank observed, “The dialectic between color and form has always inflected, even impelled” Burton’s painting, with color the more omnipresent element, and form the more persistent. Art historian William C. Agee wrote, “The domains she explores […] meet, intersect, fuse, and then disappear, like apparitions, in liquid pools of mist and color. Her pictorial odyssey refers simultaneously to both a higher order, a timeless cosmic vastness, as well as to a private, interior world, abounding in personal histories and memories.” Burton has lived and worked in Pasadena, California since 2013.
From Wikipedia
Video Profiles: 91-Year Old Bob Moore, Founder Of Bob’s Red Mill (CBS)
At 91, Bob Moore is an unexpected celebrity in the natural and organic foods industry, as the face of the company he founded, Bob’s Red Mill. He talks with correspondent Luke Burbank about his recipe for success.
Bob’s Red Mill is a brand of whole-grain foods marketed by employee-owned American[3] company Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods of Milwaukie, Oregon. The company was established in 1978 by Bob and Charlee Moore.
Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods is a producer of natural, certified organic, and gluten-free milled grain products, billing itself as the “nation’s leading miller of diverse whole-grain foods.” Its products are distributed throughout the United States, Canada, and a number of other locations such as the Caribbean. It produces over 400 products, primarily whole grains that are ground with quartz millstones which come from several 120-year-old mills, as well as baking mixes, beans, seeds, nuts, dried fruits, spices, and herbs. They are sold through seventy natural food and specialty grocery distributors in the United States and Canada, their online store, and the company’s factory store and restaurant.
From Wikipedia
Video Profiles: 60-Year Old Canadian Designer Bruce Mau – “Beauty Of Books”
Meet the influential Canadian “design guru”, Bruce Mau, in this short video. Mau, who is the author of quintessential publications on architecture and design, shares his thoughts on how we can bring the book into the technological environment without losing its beauty and richness.
“I think it’s such a brilliant technology that if it didn’t exist today – if somehow we got to the present through technology and computers before the book – we would have to invent the book,” Maus says of the discussion surrounding the alleged ‘death of the book’. The book, he continues, is such a brilliant technology, that no computer can match: “It never crashes, it sequences narrative, which is one of the most important things we need to do to understand the world.”
Mau shares how he is working on a technology platform for books because he realized that “when we moved the book from the physical book to the digital book, we left behind the beauty of the book. We left behind the culture of the book and the experience of the book. We just took the text.” The true experience of the book, he feels, should be better incorporated into the technological environment, while adding the capacity and reach that technology offers.
Bruce Mau (b. 1959) is a Canadian designer. Mau began as a graphic designer but has later extended his creative talent to the world of architecture, art, films, conceptual philosophy and eco-environmental design. From 1985-2010, Mau was the creative director of Bruce Mau Design (BMD), and in 2003 he founded the Institute Without Boundaries in collaboration with the School of Design. In 2010, he went on to co-found The Massive Change Network in Chicago. Mau is the recipient of prestigious awards including the Chrysler Award for Design Innovation in 1998, the American Institute of Graphic Arts Gold Medal in 2007, the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Collab Design Excellence Award in 2015, and the Cooper Hewitt 2016 National Design Award for Design Mind – for his impact on design theory, design practice and public awareness. In 1998, Mau designed a widely circulated 43 point manifest called ‘The Incomplete Manifesto for Growth’, which assists its users in forming and assessing their design process. Mau is also the author of iconic books such as ‘S, M, L, XL’ (1995) with Rem Koolhaas: an architecture compendium that quickly became a requisite addition to the shelves of creatives. In June 2020, he will publish ‘MC24’, which features essays, observations, project documentation, and design work by Mau and other high-profile architects, designers, artists, scientists, environmentalists, and thinkers of our time.
Bruce Mau was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner in connection with The World Around conference (https://theworldaround.com/) in New York City in January 2020.
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