Month: July 2020

David Bruce: The Funniest People in Art — Gays and Lesbians,Gifts, Inspiration, Landscapes

Gays and Lesbians

• Alison Bechdel is a lesbian who draws the comic strip Dykes to Look Out For. Her comic strip started out as little drawings of lesbians she created in the margins of letters to friends. She began numbering the drawings — for example, “Dykes to Watch Out For, No. 75” — even though at that point she had drawn only three or four. Because her friends liked the drawings, she submitted them to a feminist newspaper titled Womanews. The drawings were accepted, and her comic strip developed from those early drawings.

• Despite being gay, author Michael Thomas Ford is far from fashion conscious and has a difficult time being presentable at fashionable events. For a photo shoot, Mr. Ford was asked to bring along some clothes to be photographed in. The photographer looked over the shirts that Mr. Ford had brought, then he took off his own shirt, handed it to Mr. Ford, and said, “Put this on.” The photographer remained shirtless for the duration of the shoot.

Gifts

• When King Charles II visited St. John’s College, Oxford, he was much taken with a portrait of Charles I and asked that the Head of the College give it to him. The Head of the College was unwilling to do so, so the King said, “I will grant you any favor in return.” With this proviso, the Head of the College gave him the portrait. “Thank you,” King Charles II said. “What now is your request?” The Head of the College replied, “Give it back.” (The portrait can still be seen at the College.)

• Bruno, the pet dog of children’s book illustrator Victoria Chess, frequently brings to her odd presents — a dead squirrel, a dead woodchuck, a live chicken, a red ball with blue stars, a bottle of suntan lotion, etc. Ms. Chess jokes that the best present he ever brought to her was a purse belonging to a neighbor lady — not only did the purse contain $80, but it also contained 15 credit cards!

Inspiration

• Dr. Seuss got an idea for a book when a gust of wind blew a drawing of an elephant on top of a drawing of a tree. He looked at the two drawings, then asked himself, “An elephant in a tree — what’s he doing there?” Then he answered his own question: “Of course! He’s hatching an egg!” This idea resulted in Dr. Seuss’ book Horton Hatches an Egg.

• Bil Keane is the artist behind the comic strip The Family Circle. One day, while he was drawing the cartoon, his young son Jeffy watched him for a while, then asked, “Daddy, how do you know what to draw?” Mr. Keane replied, “God tells me.” Jeffy asked next, “Then why do you keep erasing parts of it?”

Landscapes

• John Banvard worked for years on a painting of the Mississippi River, eventually producing a work of art that was first displayed in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1845 — the painting was three miles long. To enable people to see it, it was exhibited like a scroll that was unrolled from one spindle onto another spindle. He exhibited the painting in the United States and England, but when he died it was cut up into pieces, some of which were used as backdrops for plays.

• Winston Churchill was an amateur painter. Once he showed a group of landscapes to a friend, who asked why he painted only landscapes and not portraits. Sir Winston replied, “Because a tree doesn’t complain that I haven’t done it justice.”

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Copyright by Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved

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The Funniest People in Art — Buy:

The Paperback

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Apple

Smashwords: Many Formats, Including PDF

Music Recommendation: Ice Cream — “Dove’s Cry”

BRUCE’S RECOMMENDATION OF BANDCAMP MUSIC

Song: “Dove’s Cry”

Artist: Ice Cream

Artist Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Info:

Facebook

Twitter

SoundCloud

Instagram

Price: $1 (CAN); this song is a single.

Genre: Synthpop.

Links:

Ice Cream on Bandcamp

https://icecreeeammm.bandcamp.com

“Dove’s Cry”

https://icecreeeammm.bandcamp.com/track/doves-cry-3

David Bruce: The Funniest People in Art — Food, Forgeries

Food

• Tom Clark of Davidson, North Carolina, is famous for his designs of gnomes. He has designed well over 1,000 gnomes, and in 2006 he estimated that a complete collection would cost a collector approximately $200,000. His fans are around the world, and one fan who brought Mr. Clark to his house to autograph all his gnomes took him as his guest behind the scenes of a movie starring Lloyd Bridges. They ate lunch with the cast of the movie, and the gnome collector showed members of the cast a catalog filled with Clark’s gnomes. A woman at lunch, who also collected Clark’s gnomes, asked if the gnomes were by Mr. Clark, and the gnome collector replied, “Yes,” then he pointed to Mr. Clark and added, “And that’s Tom Clark.” The shocked woman choked on her food and had to be rescued with the Heimlich maneuver.

• In the late 19th century, preachers in the United States were sometimes paid in part in the form of food. When architect Frank Lloyd Wright was eight years old in 1875, dinner in the household of his preacher father sometimes consisted of seven varieties of pie.

Forgeries

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City collected three magnificent examples of Etruscan sculpture in the early 20th century: two full-sized fierce warriors and a helmeted head that was over five feet tall. Many experts thought that the sculptures were genuine, but a few argued that they were fakes. In 1960, art expert Harold Parsons proved that they were fakes by finding the man who had created them. Alfredo Fioravanti and his partners had worked in the business of restoring antiquities before they started to create their own. They created pieces that were so large that they couldn’t be fired whole, so they broke them in pieces, then fired them. After creating the pieces, they gave them to an art dealer who then sold them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After Mr. Parsons revealed that the statues were fakes, they were re-examined, and scholars discovered that the “Greek black” glaze of the statues contained the dye magnesium dioxide, which was not available to the Etruscans. Of course, that was enough to prove that the statues were fakes, but Mr. Fioravanti had another convincing piece of evidence. When he had created one of the stone warriors, a thumb had broken off. Mr. Fioravanti had kept the thumb, and when he held it against the statue, the fit was perfect.

• Husband-and-wife children’s book author/illustrator team Martin and Alice Provensen created such picture-books as the Caldecott Medal-winning The Glorious Flight: Across the Channel with Louis Blériot. This book is about the first man to fly solo across the English Channel, a feat he accomplished in 1909. One of their copies of the book has an inscription written in French. Translated, it says, “For the Provensens — Alice and Martin — with my sincere good wishes, Louis Blériot.” No, the famous French aviator, who died in 1936, did not write the inscription — Mr. Provensen forged it. Inscriptions are not the only things he forged. Before his death in 1987, he frequently forged masterworks by such artists as Picasso and Rembrandt. He hung the forgeries in his and his wife’s home, and he enjoyed watching the faces of their visitors as they tried to figure out how the Provensens could afford to own such masterpieces.

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Copyright by Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved

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The Funniest People in Art — Buy:

The Paperback

Kindle

Kobo

Apple

Smashwords: Many Formats, Including PDF

Music Recommendation: Dawn Landes & Piers Faccini — “Heavens Gate”

BRUCE’S RECOMMENDATION OF BANDCAMP MUSIC

Song: “Heavens Gate” from the EP DESERT SONGS

Artists: Dawn Landes & Piers Faccini

Artist Location: New York, New York.

Info:

“Piers Faccini’s album Songs of Time Lost was in NPR’s top 10 world music albums of the year as well as in Songline’s UK’s 10 best albums of 2014.

“Dawn’s album Bluebird won the 2015 IMA award for ‘Folk/Singer-Songwriter album of the year’ […]. She was invited to give a TED Talk and perform in Lincoln Center’s prestigious American Songbook Series.”

Price: €1 (EURO) per track; €3 (EUROs) for five-track EP.

Genre: Country. Folk.

Links:

Dawn Landes & Piers Faccini on Bandcamp

https://dawnlandespiersfaccini.bandcamp.com

EP: DESERT SONGS

https://dawnlandespiersfaccini.bandcamp.com/track/heavens-gate

David Bruce: The Funniest People in Art — Exhibitions, Fathers

Exhibitions

• By the 1970s, African-American folk artist Clementine Hunter had become famous, although she had not started to paint until she was 53 years old. President Jimmy Carter sent her an invitation to attend an exhibition of her work in Washington, D.C., but Ms. Hunter had been born in 1886 and she did not like to travel. She said, “If Jimmy Carter wants to see me, he knows where I am. He can come here.”

• American Impressionist artist Mary Cassatt was talking with some friends at an Impressionist exhibition in Paris when a woman turned to her and said, “But you are forgetting a foreign painter who [Edgar] Degas thinks is first rate.” Ms. Cassatt asked, “Who is that?” The woman replied, “Mary Cassatt.” Ms. Cassatt said, “Oh, nonsense,” and the woman turned away, murmuring, “She’s jealous.”

• Berenice Abbot once exhibited her photographs in Brussels, but although they sold well, she didn’t receive any money from them. The art dealer who had arranged the exhibition kept the money, telling her that he “did not have the courage to be poor.”

Fathers

• Stanislaus Szulkalski was a Polish sculptor who always met his father for a walk every Sunday morning in a park in Chicago. One day, he arrived at the park to find a crowd around his father, who had died after being run over by a car. At the hospital, people asked what he wanted to do with the body. Mr. Szulkalski was poor, and he didn’t have the money to bury his father. In addition, he was an artist who was too poor to pay for lessons to learn about human anatomy. So he solved two problems at the same time — he took his father’s body home and dissected it, thus disposing of the body and learning about human anatomy. Later, people looked at his sculpture and told him that he certainly knew a lot about human anatomy — they also asked how he had come by that knowledge. Mr. Szulkalski always answered, “My father taught me.”

• The father of American realist painter Andrew Wyeth was the eminent illustrator N.C. Wyeth, who trained his son to be able to follow his profession. As a young man, Andrew was given a book to illustrate, but he struggled with the assignment because the book was so badly written. His father knew why he was struggling, so he told him, “Andy, it’s utterly ridiculous for you to do that book. Go to Maine and paint like hell! I will support you. You don’t have to be an illustrator.” Andrew followed his father’s advice, winning his father’s praise for the work he did. In fact, Andrew succeeded so well that soon a young painter asked N.C., “By God, are you the father of Andrew Wyeth?” N.C., of course, was disgusted by this question, preferring to be known for his own work.

• The father of choreographer Bella Lewitzky taught her the importance of having an art to practice. He worked an ordinary job, but when he came home, he painted. Ms. Lewitzky says, “He taught me that it didn’t make a d*mn bit of difference what you did for a living, as long as you had something that rewarded your life.” He also didn’t feel that it was necessary to have an audience for his art because the act of creation was rewarding in itself. Bella and her sister used to steal their father’s paintings — because if they didn’t, he would paint another work of art on top of the one he had already created.

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Copyright by Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved

***

The Funniest People in Art — Buy:

The Paperback

Kindle

Kobo

Apple

Smashwords: Many Formats, Including PDF

 

David Bruce: Dawn Landes — “Southern Girl”

BRUCE’S RECOMMENDATION OF BANDCAMP MUSIC

Song: “Southern Girl” from the album MEET ME AT THE RIVER

Artist: Dawn Landes

Artist Location: Nashville, Tennessee

Info: “Dawn Landes is a singer-songwriter with roots in Kentucky and NYC, now living in Nashville, TN. She has released multiple albums and her songs have been featured in commercials, popular films, and TV shows. Landes tours internationally and has performed with The Boston Pops, NYC Ballet, and at TED.”

“Meet Me At The River is Landes’ self-described ‘Nashville record,’ and she has assured its pedigree by enlisting the production skills of Fred Foster, the Country Music Hall of Fame member who played a pivotal role in the careers of Dolly Parton, Roy Orbison, and Kris Kristofferson. Two years ago, Landes reached out to Foster, and a four-hour visit to his Nashville home convinced both they were musical kindred spirits. With roots in both Louisville, Kentucky, and Branson, Missouri, Landes has been attracting ardent fans and critical acclaim since entering New York’s music scene in 2000. Along the way, she has collaborated with such contemporaries as Sufjan Stevens, Justin Townes Earle, and Norah Jones, creating music for albums, movies, and television that crosses folk, rock, and alternative genres.”

Price: $9 (USD) for 12-track album. Songs cannot be purchased separately.

Genre: Country.

Links:

Dawn Landes at Bandcamp

https://dawnlandesofficial.bandcamp.com

MEET ME AT THE RIVER

https://dawnlandesofficial.bandcamp.com/album/meet-me-at-the-river