Happy Birthday William Blake !

William Blake

Today is the birthday of an English poet, painter, and printmaker William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827). Largely unrecognized during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. His prophetic poetry has been said to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language". His visual artistry has led one contemporary art critic to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced". Although he lived in London his entire life except for three years spent in Felpham he produced a diverse and symbolically rich corpus, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God", or "Human existence itself". Considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. His paintings and poetry have been characterised as part of both the Romantic movement and "Pre-Romantic", for its large appearance in the 18th century. Reverent of the Bible but hostile to the Church of England – indeed, to all forms of organised religion – Blake was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American revolutions, as well as by such thinkers as Jakob Böhme and Emanuel Swedenborg. Despite these known influences, the singularity of Blake's work makes him difficult to classify. The 19th-century scholar William Rossetti characterised Blake as a "glorious luminary," and as "a man not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors". Presenting some poems : Being Poet

Ah Sunflower

Ah Sunflower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun;
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller's journey is done;

Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale virgin shrouded in snow,
Arise from their graves, and aspire
Where my Sunflower wishes to go!

A Divine Image

Cruelty has a human heart,
And Jealousy a human face;
Terror the human form divine,
And Secresy the human dress.

The human dress is forged iron,
The human form a fiery forge,
The human face a furnace sealed,

The human heart its hungry gorge.

A Poison Tree

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I watered it in fears,
Night and morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine.
And he knew that it was mine,

And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

And Did Those Feet In Ancient Time

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

A Dream

Once a dream did weave a shade
O'er my angel-guarded bed,
That an emmet lost its way
Where on grass methought I lay.

Troubled, wildered, and forlorn,
Dark, benighted, travel-worn,
Over many a tangle spray,
All heart-broke, I heard her say:

'Oh my children! do they cry,
Do they hear their father sigh?
Now they look abroad to see,
Now return and weep for me.'

Pitying, I dropped a tear:
But I saw a glow-worm near,
Who replied, 'What wailing wight
Calls the watchman of the night?

'I am set to light the ground,
While the beetle goes his round:
Follow now the beetle's hum;
Little wanderer, hie thee home!'

Happy Birthday Pablo Picasso !

Pablo Picasso

Today is the birthday of a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer Pablo Ruiz y Picasso, known as Pablo Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973), who spent most of his adult life in France. He is widely known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and Guernica (1937), a portrayal of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso, Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp are commonly regarded as the three artists who most defined the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting, sculpture, printmaking and ceramics. Picasso demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his early years, painting in a realistic manner through his childhood and adolescence. During the first decade of the 20th century, his style changed as he experimented with different theories, techniques, and ideas. His revolutionary artistic accomplishments brought him universal renown and immense fortune, making him one of the best-known figures in 20th-century art. Presenting some Quotations : Being Poet

• I do not seek. I find.
• Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.
• Everything you can imagine is real.
• Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.
• Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.
• Action is the foundational key to all success.
• I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.
• Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.
• Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
• Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.
• All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
• I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.
• Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one's bath like a lump of sugar.
• He can who thinks he can, and he can't who thinks he can't. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.
• An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought.
• Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs. 

Happy Birthday e. e. cummings !

e. e. cummings

Today is the birthday of an American poet, painter, essayist and playwright Edward Estlin Cummings (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962), popularly known as e. e. cummings. His body of work encompasses approximately 2,900 poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays and several essays, as well as numerous drawings and paintings. He is remembered as a preeminent voice of 20th century poetry. Presenting some poems : Being Poet

love is more thicker than forget

love is more thicker than forget
more thinner than recall
more seldom than a wave is wet
more frequent than to fail

it is most mad and moonly
and less it shall unbe
than all the sea which only
is deeper than the sea

love is less always than to win
less never than alive
less bigger than the least begin
less littler than forgive

it is most sane and sunly
and more it cannot die
than all the sky which only
is higher than the sky

Buffalo Bill 's

Buffalo Bill 's
defunct
 who used to
 ride a watersmooth-silver
 stallion
and break one two three four five  pigeons just like that
 Jesus
he was a handsome man
 and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
                                                      i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls

the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds
(also, with the church's protestant blessings
daughters,unscented shapeless spirited)
they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead,
are invariably interested in so many things—
at the present writing one still finds
delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?
perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy
scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D
.... the Cambridge ladies do not care, above
Cambridge if sometimes in its box of
sky lavender and cornerless, the
moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy

Happy Birthday Juan Gris !

Juan Gris

Today is the 125th birthday of a Spanish painter and sculptor Juan Gris (March 23, 1887 – May 11, 1927), who lived and worked in France most of his life. His works, which are closely connected to the emergence of an innovative artistic genre—Cubism—are among the movement's most distinctive. Presenting a short note on his life and work : Being Poet

Juan Gris born in Madrid. Gris studied mechanical drawing at the Escuela de Artes y Manufacturas in Madrid from 1902 to 1904, during which time he contributed drawings to local periodicals. From 1904 to 1905 he studied painting with the academic artist José Maria Carbonero. In 1906 he moved to Paris and became friends with Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, and in 1915 was painted by his friend, Amedeo Modigliani. In Paris, Gris followed the lead of another friend and fellow countryman, Pablo Picasso. His portrait of Picasso in 1912 is a significant early Cubist painting done by a painter other than Picasso or Georges Braque. (Although he regarded Picasso as a teacher, Gertrude Stein acknowledged that Gris "was the one person that Picasso would have willingly wiped off the map.")

Although he submitted darkly humorous illustrations to journals such as Le Rire, L'assiette au beurre, Le Charivari, and Le Cri de Paris, Gris began to paint seriously in 1910. By 1912 he had developed a personal Cubist style. At first Gris painted in the analytic style of Cubism, but after 1913 he began his conversion to synthetic Cubism, of which he became a steadfast interpreter, with extensive use of papier collé. Unlike Picasso and Braque, whose Cubist works were monochromatic, Gris painted with bright harmonious colors in daring, novel combinations in the manner of his friend Matisse.

In 1924, he first designed ballet sets and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev and the famous Ballets Russes. Gris articulated most of his aesthetic theories during 1924 and 1925. He delivered his definitive lecture, Des possibilites de la peinture, at the Sorbonne in 1924. Major Gris exhibitions took place at the Galerie Simon in Paris and the Galerie Flechtheim in Berlin in 1923, and at the Galerie Flechtheim in Dusseldorf in 1925. He died in Boulogne-sur-Seine (Paris) in the spring of 1927 at the age of forty, leaving a wife, Josette, and a son, Georges. Before 2005, a Gris painting sold for more than USD69 million.

(Source : www.juangris.org) 

Happy birthday Henry Miller !

Henry Valentine Miller

Today is the birthday of an American novelist and painter Henry Valentine Miller (December 26, 1891 – June 7, 1980). He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is distinctly always about and expressive of the real-life Henry Miller and yet is also fictional. His most characteristic works of this kind are Tropic of Cancer (1934), Black Spring (1936), and Tropic of Capricorn (1939). He also wrote travel memoirs and essays of literary criticism and analysis. Presenting a note by his daughter Valentine : being poet

Dad lived in France, Greece, NYC, Beverly Glen, Big Sur & Pacific Palisades. He was a prolific writer, disciplined & driven to create. Painting watercolors was his way to relax, he didn’t consider himself an ‘artist’ but loved to paint. He made thousands of paintings, gave most of them away. He also learned how to etch & make silk screens. Nuns from The Immaculate Heart School came to the house in LA & taught him how to make the silk screens.

Dad balanced the cerebral with the physical. He loved riding bicycles, he would ride out to Coney Island and he raced in the Velodrome. He was still riding in his 70’s in the Palisades. He was a great walker, walking all over New York and the wonderful arrondisements of Paris. In Big Sur he would trek down the road to get the mail & groceries, hauling it back up the hill. My brother & I would run to his studio in the afternoons, Dad was always happy to take us up in the hills for long walks. Sometimes he told us stories, one I recall about a little rich girl who lived in the city, a fantasy which fascinated us, being country kids.

I only knew my Dad for 35 years, the last third of his life. But am so fortunate to have the legacy he created. In my home I am surrounded by his wonderful paintings, they are a pleasure to look at. His books are an endless source of knowledge and enjoyment in self discovery. One can open to any page & find some phrase or passage that rings true. Even his book titles are inspiring, he definitely had a way with words - “Stand Still Like The Hummingbird”, “The Devil in Paradise”, “Remember to Remember”, “The Wisdom of the Heart”, “The Air Conditioned Nightmare”, “The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder”.

Dinner conversations were always lively. There was a constant stream of friends and fans, also the women who would come to the Ocampo house & prepare special meals for Dad. I liked it when just the two of us could talk, Dad would recommend the latest authors he was reading, or writers he thought I might like. His taste in literature was eclectic, from obscure Marie Corelli to Knut Hamsun, Hermann Hesse to H Rider Haggard. He gave me the Modern Library collection of authors whom he admired, Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Carson McCuller… He loved Walt Whitman, Nostradamus, M Proust, Rimbaud, Balzac, Stendahl… He had a great memory & could pull favorite passages out of the air. His “Books in my Life” is a good read & source of novels & authors. My admiration, respect and love for my father grows as the years go by.

(sorce : henrymiller.info)

Happy Birthday Friedensreich Hundertwasser !

Friedensreich Hundertwasser

Today is the birthday of the eccentric and playfully self-advertising Viennese artist known as Friedensreich Hundertwasser was born as Friedrich Stowasser on 15 December 1928. He did not assume his nom d'artiste until 1949 ("sto" meaning "one hundred" in Slavic languages and "Wasser" meaning "water"). Even in adolescence Stowasser brought home reports from school attesting to his "exceptional feeling for colour and form". After taking the examinations qualifying for university entrance, Hundertwasser spent three months at the Viennese Art Academy studying under Professor Robin Christian Andersen. Hundertwasser was, however, more indebted to the work of Egon Schiele and Walter Kampmann, which he saw at their exhibitions, than to the brief period of academic instruction.  

Hundertwasser travelled extensively in Italy, where he met René Brô, whom he accompanied to Paris. Hundertwasser had thought of continuing formal training at the École des Beaux-Arts but spent only one day at that institution. Instead he found the numerous and adventurous trips he took to Morocco, Tunisia, Nepal, Tokyo and Siberia inspirational for the path he intended to follow. Taking Viennese Jugendstil as his point of departure, Hundertwasser developed an abstract, decorative, two-dimensional and vibrantly colourful, utterly distinctive style distinguished by ornamental spiral and labyrinth forms, circles, meanders and biomorphic shapes. 

During the 1960s Friedensreich Hundertwasser was extremely successful, with a 1962 retrospective in the Austrian pavilion at the Venice Biennale and a 1964 retrospective mounted by the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover. In addition, the first comprehensive catalogue of his œuvre was published. Active in the ecological movement, Hundertwasser was committed to making life liveable in a humane environment that was close to nature. He furthered his aims by issuing manifestos and making provocative public appearances, for instance giving a speech in the nude (1968) in Vienna. Between 1968 and 1972 Hundertwasser rehauled the old sailing vessel "San Giuseppe "' at docks in the Venice lagoon, rechristened it "Regentag" ["Rainy Day"], and going to see in it several times.

So versatile and prolific was Hundertwasser that he also designed coins and stamps for Austria, Senegal and the UN from the 1970s. Moreover, Hunderwasser was the first European artist to have work carved by Japanese master carvers. In 1981 Hundertwasser was appointed head of the master classes for painting at the Viennese Art Academy. The famous Hundertwasser House in Vienna, begun in 1983, attests to Hunderwasser's skill as an architect. The year before he died, Hundertwasser was working on a catalogue raisonné of his works and presented the Uelzen Station architectural project. Friedensreich Hundertwasser died on a cruise ship off New Zealand in 2000.

(source : hundertwasser-friedensreich.com)

Happy Birthday Diego Rivera !

Diego Rivera

Today is the birthday of Diego Rivera (December 8, 1886 – November 24, 1957), was a prominent Mexican painter born in Guanajuato, Guanajuato, an active communist. His large wall works in fresco helped establish the Mexican Mural Movement in Mexican art. Between 1922 and 1953, Rivera painted murals among others in Mexico City, Chapingo, Cuernavaca, San Francisco, Detroit, and New York City. In 1931, a retrospective exhibition of his works was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Presenting a short note on his life and work : Being Poet

Rivera began drawing when he was only three, just a year after his twin brother's death. He had been caught drawing on the walls. His parents, rather than punishing him, installed chalkboards and canvas on the walls for the young painter to make use.   

In Guanajuato, near his boyhood home As an adult, Rivera was a notorious womanizer who had fathered at least one illegitimate child. He married Angelina Beloff in 1911, and she gave birth to a son, Diego (1916–1918). Maria Vorobieff-Stebelska gave birth to a daughter named Marika in 1918 or 1919 when Rivera was married to Angelina (according to House on the Bridge: Ten Turbulent Years with Diego Rivera and Angelina's memoirs called Memorias). He married his second wife, Guadalupe Marín, in June 1922, with whom he had two daughters: Ruth and Guadalupe. He was still married when he met the art student Frida Kahlo. They married on August 21, 1929 when he was 42 and she was 22. Their mutual infidelities and his violent temper led to divorce in 1939, but they remarried December 8, 1940 in San Francisco. Rivera later married Emma Hurtado, his agent since 1946, on July 29, 1955, one year after Kahlo's death. He died on November 24, 1957. Rivera was an atheist. His mural Dreams of a Sunday in the Alameda depicted Ignacio Ramírez holding a sign which read, "God does not exist". This work caused a furor, but Rivera refused to remove the inscription. The painting was not shown for 9 years – until Rivera agreed to remove the inscription. He stated: "To affirm 'God does not exist', I do not have to hide behind Don Ignacio Ramírez; I am an atheist and I consider religions to be a form of collective neurosis."

Diego Rivera was portrayed by Rubén Blades in 1999's Cradle Will Rock, and by Alfred Molina in 2002's Frida. On the occasion of Diego Rivera's 125th Birthday Google designed a specialized logo to honor the legendary painter. 

(source : wikipedia)