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The Pleasanton Scottish Highland Games at the Alameda County Fairgrounds in Pleasanton, California. September 5th, 2009
I feel I should explain... originally this picture was of me laying on my bed with a picture on the wall behind me; then i decided to play around with it and i put it to grayscale nd put tacky little blue stars on it; now it has a weird liney/rainbow-ey effect to it which I kind of like better =/ hmm..
Bird Watchers, 1948
Egg tempera on gesso board
George Tooker (American, 1920 - 2011)
Although he was raised in a religious family, Tooker stopped going to church when he began attending art school. Nevertheless, the religious art of the past affected him deeply, as evident in Bird Watchers. "I wanted to paint a positive picture," he explained, "a religious picture without religious subject matter. I thought watching birds was a good subject which could get close to a religious picture, but I was not yet ready to make a painting with a religious subject." (1)The painting is based on quattrocento Italian prototypes, but the faces are, for the most part, modeled on Tooker himself, his friends, and his family. His sister posed for two figures-the woman on the bridge and the one in the red-cowled coat-and his mother is in the slate-blue coat and hat. (2)
The painting is most likely set in Manhattan's Central Park. Although the figures are clearly from the late 1940s, Tooker removed all excess detail from their clothing in order to emphasize their timeless simplicity. For instance, the topcoat of the main figure has no buttons or buttonholes and becomes a loose robe of indeterminate style.
The composition suggests the Crucifixion, with the figures of the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalen, and the apostles and soldiers at the foot of the cross, which is represented by the tree to the right. The panel itself, with its arched top, refers to Renaissance altarpieces. Tooker often plays deep and shallow spaces against each other. The space in "Bird Watchers" opens deeply on the left and is brought up abruptly on the right, as in many works by the artist.
To begin the painting process, Tooker transfers the outlines of a drawing to the panel by tracing on a sheet of paper coated with red pigment mixed with water or alcohol. He then applies a medium-toned wash across the surface of the entire panel. As Tooker mixes and applies pigment six days a week to a painting created through this process,the image grows in density, richness, and depth. Such a painting may take two or more months of intense effort before it is finished. Tooker paints from back to front, from the most distant part of the image to the foreground. Like the majority of the works he produced after 1945, “Bird Watchers” is executed in egg-yolk tempera. He applied the paint to untempered pressed-wood board that had been covered with five or six coats of gesso, a fine white ground layer made of powdered chalk mixed with thin rabbit-skin glue.
Within the confines of the tempera medium, an artist must work with careful deliberation, precision, and forethought. Thus egg-tempera is just the right medium to showcase Tooker's contemplative sensiblities, which inspire works of art that are intellectually forceful as well as meticulously crafted. By masterfully exploiting the richness and density of that medium, which has played a pivotal role in the history of Western art, Tooker pays homage to the visual past. In so doing, he successfully draws upon traditional themes to enhance his unique contemporary vision.
George Tooker was born in Brooklyn, New York. His father was a municipal bond broker, and the family lived comfortably. Shortly after Tooker was born, the family moved to Bellport, Long Island. He began high school in Bellport, but his parents insisted that he receive a more solid education and sent him to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, for the last two years. While he did not particularly enjoy Phillips, he did manage to spend a great deal of time in the art studio making landscape drawings and watercolors.
After graduating in 1938, Tooker attended Harvard University, where he majored in English literature. At Harvard he began to sense the uses of art as a tool for social change and became an admirer of the Mexican muralists David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jose' Orozco.
After graduating from Harvard in 1942 and a brief stint in the Marines, he attended classes at the Art Students League in New York, where he studied with Reginald Marsh. He made many contacts in New York, including Paul Cadmus and Jared and Margaret French. Under Cadmus's influence, Tooker began to paint in the traditional Renaissance tempera technique that marks his mature works. In 1949 Tooker met the painter William Christopher, who remained his life partner until Chistopher's death in 1973.
Tooker's painting increasingly received recognition with his one-man shows in New York in 1951 and 1955 and the commission to design the sets for Gian Carlo Menotti's opera "The Saint of Bleecker Street" in 1954. His success continued through the 1960s; he was included in numerous exhibitions and taught at the Art Students League from 1965 to 1968.
Tooker now lives in Hartland, Vermont, and spends part of every winter in a studio on Long Island. After moving to Vermont he created a major painting for the Roman Catholic church in Windsor entitled “The Seven Sacraments”, which was dedicated in 1981.
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"Acknowledged as the first museum in the world dedicated solely to collecting American art, the NBMAA is renowned for its preeminent collection spanning three centuries of American history. The award-winning Chase Family Building, which opened in 2006 to critical and public acclaim, features 15 spacious galleries which showcase the permanent collection and upwards of 25 special exhibitions a year featuring American masters, emerging artists and private collections. Education and community outreach programs for all ages include docent-led school and adult tours, teacher services, studio classes and vacation programs, Art Happy Hour gallery talks, lectures, symposia, concerts, film, monthly First Friday jazz evenings, quarterly Museum After Dark parties for young professionals, and the annual Juneteenth celebration. Enjoy Café on the Park for a light lunch prepared by “Best Caterer in Connecticut” Jordan Caterers. Visit the Museum Shop for unique gifts. Drop by the “ArtLab” learning gallery with your little ones. Gems not to be missed include Thomas Hart Benton’s murals “The Arts of Life in America,” “The Cycle of Terror and Tragedy, September 11, 2001” by Graydon Parrish,” and Dale Chihuly’s “Blue and Beyond Blue” spectacular chandelier. Called “a destination for art lovers everywhere,” “first-class,” “a full-size, transparent temple of art, mixing New York ambience with Yankee ingenuity and all-American beauty,” the NBMAA is not to be missed."
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www.nbmaa.org/permanent-collection
The NBMAA collection represents the major artists and movements of American art. Today it numbers about 8,274 paintings, works on paper, sculptures, and photographs, including the Sanford B.D. Low Illustration Collection, which features important works by illustrators such as Norman Rockwell, Howard Pyle, and Maxfield Parrish.
Among collection highlights are colonial and federal portraits, with examples by John Smibert, John Trumbull, John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart, and the Peale family. The Hudson River School features landscapes by Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Martin Johnson Heade, John Kensett, Albert Bierstadt, and Frederic Church. Still life painters range from Raphaelle Peale, Severin Roesen, William Harnett, John Peto, John Haberle, and John La Farge. American genre painting is represented by John Quidor, William Sidney Mount, and Lilly Martin Spencer. Post-Civil War examples include works by Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, George de Forest Brush, and William Paxton, and 19 plasters and bronzes by Solon Borglum. American Impressionists include Mary Cassatt, Theodore Robinson, John Henry Twachtman, J. Alden Weir, Willard Metcalf, and Childe Hassam, the last represented by eleven oils. Later Impressionist paintings include those by Ernest Lawson, Frederck Frieseke, Louis Ritman, Robert Miller, and Maurice Prendergast.
Other strengths of the twentieth-century collection include: sixty works by members of the Ash Can School; significant representation by early modernists such as Alfred Maurer, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Max Weber; important examples by the Precisionists Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, Preston Dickinson, and Ralston Crawford; a broad spectrum of work by the Social Realists Ben Shahn, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and Jack Levine; and ambitious examples of Regionalist painting by Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry, and Thomas Hart Benton, notably the latter’s celebrated five-panel mural, The Arts of Life in America (1932).
Works by the American Abstract Artist group (Stuart Davis, Ilya Bolotowsky, Esphyr Slobodkina, Balcomb Greene, and Milton Avery) give twentieth-century abstraction its place in the collection, as do later examples of Surrealism by artists Kay Sage and George Tooker; Abstract Expressionism (Lee Krasner, Giorgio Cavallon, Morris Graves, Robert Motherwell, Sam Francis, Cleve Gray), Pop and Op art (Andy Warhol, Larry Rivers, Robert Indiana, Tom Wesselman, Jim Dine), Conceptual (Christo, Sol LeWitt), and Photo-Realism (Robert Cottingham). Examples of twentieth-century sculpture include Harriet Frishmuth, Paul Manship, Isamu Noguchi, George Segal, and Stephen DeStaebler. We continue to acquire contemporary works by notable artists, in order to best represent the dynamic and evolving narrative of American art.
Allan Carrington, Learning Designer from University of Adelaide, Australia, explains the teaching implications of Learning Activity Management Systems.
Klopp explain the reason of Liverpool won't replace Coutinho in January anzimag.com/klopp-explain-reason-liverpool-wont-replace-c...
the pink bed is where the women give birth, the bed with the net is where they go through most of their labor
School Visit--After getting permission from the classroom teacher, we talked with the school children, shared gifts with them and spent some time getting to know them.
Hard To Explain interviewed with Metronomy at Summer Sonic 2009 in the press area.
Check the article below.
hardtoexplain.jp/2009/08/metronomy/
Metronomy: www.myspace.com/metronomy
Hard To Explain: hardtoexplain.jp/