Daily Art Fixx

Today: the majestic photographs of Nick Brandt.  Born and raised in London, England, Brandt studied film and painting at St. Martins School of Art.  After college, he moved to California and became a well-known music video director for stars such as Michael Jackson (Earth Song) and Moby (Play).  It was while directing “Earth Song” in Tanzania that Brandt‘s love of East Africa and its animal inhabitants began.

Brandt’s style is unlike other wildlife photographers who tend to focus on “action shots”.  Instead, his black and white, fine art photos, are intimate, capturing not only beautiful landscapes, but also the personalities of his subjects.

Many of Brandt’s photographs look like paintings.  He achieves this effect by getting extremely close to the animals, (using no telephoto lenses) and includes as much of the sky and landscape as possible so that the animals are seen in the context of their environment.  He sometimes tracks his subjects for days to discover the perfect composition. Brandt admits his photos are unashamedly idyllic and romantic. “They’re my elegy to a world that is steadily, tragically vanishing.”

Brandt has had numerous solo exhibitions across North America and Europe and published the book “On This Earth” in 2005.  His new book entitled “A Shadow Falls” will be released in September 2009.

To enjoy more photographs visit NickBrandt.com or the Young Gallery for a detailed biography.

Related Books:
A Shadow Falls
On This Earth: Photographs from East Africa

Sources: NickBrandt.com, Young Gallery

Born Emmanuel Radnitzky on August 27, 1890 in Philidelphia, PA, Man Ray was an influential artist, best known for his avant-garde photography. He was a leading figure (and the only American) to play a  significant role in the Dada and Surrealist movements.

Ray grew up in Brooklyn, New York and showed artistic ability at an early age.  He studied drawing under Robert Henri and George Bellows at the Francisco Ferrer Social Center (Modern School). Upon his completion of his classes, Ray lived in the art colony of Ridgefield, New Jersey. There, he illustrated, designed and produced small pamphlets (Ridgefield Gazook – 1915) and A Book of Diverse Writings.

Ray had his first solo show at the Daniel Gallery in New York in 1915 and shortly after became interested in photography.  Around the same time, he became friends with Marcel Duchamp with whom he founded the Society of Independent Artists in 1916.  In 1920, along with Duchamp, Katherine Dreier, Henry Hudson, and Andrew McLaren, Ray founded the Société Anonyme, a group that sponsored lectures, concerts, publications, and exhibitions of modern art.

In 1921, May Ray moved to Paris where he settled for twenty years.  He became involved with Dada and Surrealist artists and writers such as Jean Cocteau, Max Ernst, Dali, Eluard, Picasso, and others.  While in Paris, Ray worked with different media and produced a variety of works.  In 1922, he began experimenting with his version of a photogram which he called a “rayograph” – the process of creating images from placing objects on photo-sensitive paper.  Ray likened his technique to painting saying that he was “painting with light”.

In the 1920′s and 30′s Ray earned a steady income as a portrait photographer and as one of the foremost fashion photographers for Harper’s Bazaar, Vu, and Vogue.   In the late 1920′s Ray won recognition for his experiments with Sabattier (solarization process) and many of the Surrealists followed his example of using photography in their works.

Man Ray also made his mark in the avant-garde film circles in the 1920′s. In “Le Retour à la Raison”, he created his first “cine-rayographs’ – sequences of cameraless photographs. Other films including “Emak Bakia” (1926), L’Etoile de Mer” (1928), and Les Mystères du Château de Dé” (1929) are now classics of the Surrealist film genre.

At the beginning of World War II, Man Ray left Paris and moved to Los Angeles in 1940 where he focused on painting and creating objects. While there, he also met and married Juliet Browner, a dancer and artists’ model. He remained in LA until 1951 when he returned to his home in Paris where he continued working in a variety of mediums – his photography having the greatest impact on 20th century art.  In 1963 he published his autobiography, “Self-Portrait”.

Man Ray died in Paris on November 18, 1976. His epitaph at the Cimetière du Montparnasse, reads: “unconcerned, but not indifferent”. Juliet Browner died in 1991 and she was interred in the Ray’s tomb. Her epitaph reads, “together again”. Browner set up a  charitable trust and donated much of Ray’s work to museums.

Sources: MOMA, Guggenheim Museum,  Wikipedia Images: USC, Ciudad de la Pintura

Born to a Zaoptecan Indian family on August 26, 1899, Rufino Tamayo is one of Mexico’s most renowned painters. An orphan by age 12, Tamayo moved to Mexico City to live with his aunt who enrolled him in commercial school.  He began taking drawing lessons in 1915 and from 1917 to 1921, he studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes.

Tamayo was appointed head of the Department of Ethnographic Drawing at the Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Mexico City in 1921 where he drew pre-Columbian objects in the Museum’s collection. The influence of the forms and tones of pre-Columbian ceramics are evident in Tamayo’s early works.

Unlike other well-known Mexican artists of the time such as Diego Rivera, Orozco, and Siquieros, Tamayo believed in the universality of painting.  His modern style that was influenced by pre-Columbian and European art, caused him some ridicule by the popular muralists who thought that their “only path” in art should serve revolutionary ideals. Tamayo’s response was “Can you believe that, to say that ours is the only path when the fundamental thing in art is freedom! In art, there are millions of paths—as many paths as there are artists.”

Tamayo’s differences with the Mexican muralists prompted him to move to New York from 1926 to 1928 where he was influenced by the work of European artists such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Henri Matisse. His painting became a fusion of the European styles of Cubism and Surrealism and his subject matter of Mexican culture.

By the 1930′s Tamayo’s paintings that featured intense colours and textured surfaces had become well known.  He returned to New York between 1936 and 1950 where he created a large body of work, taught at the Dalton School, and exhibited his work at the Valentine Gallery. Tamayo was also a prolific printmaker, and he experimented with bronze and iron sculpture.

Tamayo’s first retrospective was held at the Instituto de Bellas Artes, Mexico City in 1948. In 1950, his successful exhibition at the Venice Biennale led to international recognition.  As well, Tamayo was commissioned to design murals for the National Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City (1952-53) and for UNESCO in Paris (Prometheus Bringing Fire to Man, 1958).

Tamayo and his wife Olga lived in Paris between 1957 and 1964 before returning to Mexico City permanently in 1964.  The French government named him Chevalier and Officier de la Légion d’Honneur in 1956 and 1969.

Tamayo donated his collection of pre-Columbian art to the city of Oaxaca in 1974, founding the Rufino Tamayo Museum of Pre-Hispanic Art. As well, in 1981, he and his wife donated their collection of international art to the people of Mexico, forming the Rufino Tamayo Museum of Contemporary Art in Mexico City.

Tamayo’s work was exhibited in group and solo shows around the world including retrospectives at the São Paulo Bienal in 1977 and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1979. In 1988, he received the Belisario Domínguez Medal of Honor. Tamayo created his final painting  (a self portrait), in 1989 at the age of 90 – Hombre con flor (Man with flower). He died in Mexico City on June 24, 1991.

Sources: Guggenheim Collection, Albright-Knox Gallery, Wikipedia, Biography.com, Images: Ciudad de la Pintura

Born in 1947, Manhattan based sculptor, painter and inventor Tom Shannon attended the University of Wisconsin and the Art Institute of Chicago where he received a Master of Fine Art degree. His paintings are made by swinging a giant pendulum rigged with six remote control paint guns over a canvas. “It is a marriage of chaos and control.”

“My focus in recent years has kind of shifted more toward biology. Some of these paintings, when you look at them very close, there are odd things appear that really look like horses or fishes or birds or crocodiles, elephants. There are lots of things that appear when you look into it. It’s sort of like looking at cloud patterns. But sometimes they are very mottled, and highly rendered. And then there are all these forms that we don’t know what they are, But they are equally well resolved and complex. So, I think, conceivably those could be predictive, because since it has the ability to make forms that look like forms that we’re familiar with in biology, It’s also making other forms that we’re not familiar with. And maybe it’s the kind of forms that we’ll discover underneath the surface of Mars, where there are probably lakes with fish swimming under the surface.”

Shannon’s sculptures have been exhibited in galleries and institutions around the globe, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. “His clever orchestrations of hidden magnets and tiny suspension cables make otherwise inert materials such as steel and wood take on a truly otherworldly quality — bringing objects like planets, stars and atoms to a scale you can understand (and touch).”

Shannon was featured artist at the 2003 TED Conference where he presented Air Genie, a spherical helium airship whose entire surface is a LED video screen. He designed the TED Prize, the Buckminster Fuller prize and the Trophee Jules Verne installed at the Musee de la Marine in Paris. Recent outdoor work includes a hovering sculpture at the entrance of Kansai Electric in Osaka and a hovering work at Chateau La Coste. Shannon also holds the patents for the first tactile telephone, a color television projector and a synchronous world clock that is in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution.

To see more of Tom Shannon’s work, visit TomShannon.com. Visit TED for videos on his pendulum paintings and anti-gravity sculpture.

More great work from Atlanta, Georgia based artist Brian Dettmer. “Dettmer sifts through stacks of old books, boxes of dusty cassette tapes, and piles of obsolete maps to uncover the perfect source and subject for his conceptual explorations and sculptural dissections. Dettmer alters pre-existing materials by selectively removing and manipulating elements as a way to allow new interpretations and ideas to emerge. With the precision of a surgeon, Dettmer uses clamps, scalpels and tweezers to recontextualize his found objects and reveal hidden meanings.” (from Kinz & Tillou Fine Art)

To see more of Brian Dettmer’s altered books, visit his Photostream on Flickr or check out BrianDettmer.com for Gallery information.