Bathers on the Beach
Posted: August 21, 2015 Filed under: Art, Painting/Drawing, Photography | Tags: 20th century spanish art, bathers on the beach, luigi ghirri, modern art, pablo picasso, Picasso, Spain, spanish art Leave a commentOn a Sunny Day…
On a Rainy Day…
Picasso/Dalí
Posted: May 3, 2015 Filed under: Art, Painting/Drawing, Zoowithoutanimals writes about Art | Tags: bathers of es llaner, Dali, group of female nudes, modern art, Picasso, rivals, Spain Leave a commentAs Picasso himself said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” So Dalí began his career by “stealing” from Picasso, stimulating the development of his own unique style. Picasso was 23 years Dalí’s senior and was already an established figure in the art world when Dalí was a young aspiring artist. He was a huge admirer of Picasso and sought inspiration from him.
Dalí’s first associations with Picasso were very literal – he boldly stole from Picasso’s themes and visual language. This can be seen clearly in the two pieces Group of Female Nudes (1921) by Picasso and Bathers of Es Llaner (1923) by Dalí, which are astoundingly close in their style and content. As he progressed, however, Dalí developed his own personal and distinctive expression while still retaining elements of Picasso’s visual language and symbolism, and when Dalí’s career took off, Picasso went from being his greatest source of inspiration to being his biggest rival.
The artists first met in 1926 when Dalí visited Picasso’s studio in Paris. At the time, Picasso was reworking a style of cubism infused with surrealist ideas of dreams, sexuality and the irrational. The visit equipped Dalí with a newfound maturity in his artistic language, making him more conscious of composition and symbolism in his work. Subsequently, they began to develop in parallel, from their work with surrealist “objects of symbolic function,” their powerful responses to the atrocities of the civil war and their work inspired by Velázquez.
In 1947 Dalí painted Portrait of Pablo Picasso in the Twenty-First Century (One of a series of portraits of Geniuses: Homer, Dalí, Freud, Christopher Columbus, William Tell, etc.), a slightly horrific portrait which sums up their deeply contradictory relationship. The painting uses heavy symbolism to criticise the “ugliness” that Dalí saw and disliked in Picasso’s later work while putting him on a pedestal and evoking his genius.
Cut
Posted: December 14, 2014 Filed under: Art, Photography, Poetry, Writing | Tags: blood, bull, chopping, cut, Daniela Edburg, Jamon Jamon, onion, Spain, Sylvia Plath, thumb Leave a commentExtract from Sylvia Plath‘s poem “Cut”
What a thrill —
My thumb instead of an onion.
The top quite gone
Except for a sort of a hinge
Of skin,
A flap like a hat,
Dead white.
Then that red plush.
El Alma Dormida
Posted: October 31, 2014 Filed under: Art, Photography, Poetry, Writing | Tags: cemetery, Cristina Garcia Rodero, death, El Alma Dormida, España Oculta, Garcia Rodero, halloween, Jorge Manrique, life, Saavedra, soul, Spain Leave a commentStanzas about the Death of his Father by Jorge Manrique
OH let the soul her slumbers break,
Let thought be quickened, and awake;
Awake to see
How soon this life is past and gone,
And death comes softly stealing on,
How silently!
Swiftly our pleasures glide away,
Our hearts recall the distant day
With many sighs;
The moments that are speeding fast
We heed not, but the past,—the past,
More highly prize.
El Alma Dormida (The Sleeping Soul) is a photograph taken by Cristina Garcia Rodero in 1981 in Savedra, Spain. As Garcia Rodero was traveling around the country photographing Spanish festivals and traditions, she came across this little girl singing and jumping in front of the cemetery and quickly pulled out her camera. Now the moment is immortalized in this mysterious photograph. The title is inspired by the poem Coplas por la Muerte de su Padre by Jorge Manrique
Blancanieves
Posted: May 26, 2014 Filed under: Art, Film, Music, Photography | Tags: 2012, Blancanieves, bullfighting, Cristina Garcia Rodero, enanos, España Oculta, film, flamenco, Goya, Maribel Verdu, matador, Pablo Berger, premio Goya, Sevilla, Silvia Perez Cruz, Snow White, Spain Leave a commentTe Busco y No Te Puedo Encontrar
Set in 1920s Spain, Pablo Berger‘s black and white silent film, Blancanieves (Snow White), reimagines the classic fairy tale amongst bullfighting and flamenco. A must-see!
“I think a movie’s like a paella, you put all of your obsessions in there. But the first idea came with a photo, of bullfighting dwarves, which I saw in this amazing book, España Oculta. Christina Garcia Rodero spent 15 years travelling around villages in Spain, photographing fiestas. These dwarves were looking at me, because they were looking straight at the camera, and somehow I imagined placing a young woman amongst them, a teenager dressed as a bullfighter, and she’s like Snow White. That was it. Then I started pulling the strings.” Pablo Berger
Entre Dos Aguas
Posted: November 15, 2013 Filed under: Music | Tags: 1976, 70s, Entre Dos Aguas, flamenco, guitar, music, Paco de Lucia, rumba, Spain, water Leave a commentA beautiful song by Flamenco artist Paco de Lucía:
Bored Couples
Posted: November 12, 2015 | Author: zoowithoutanimals | Filed under: Art, Photography | Tags: 80s, 90s, bored, bored couples, couples, documentary photography, finland, France, humour, magnum photos, Martin Parr, photojournalism, social commentary, Spain, UK | Leave a commentBored Couples is Martin Parr‘s humorous study of bored couples around Europe, including Spain, Finland, and the UK, during the 80s and 90s.
“This series of photographs were taken as an opportunity to explore the veracity of the caption.
We do not know if these random couples are bored or not. Who is to say what is authentic when captioned as thus?” Magnum Photos
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