Francis Bacon was one of the great painters of the 20th century. An encounter with one of his works was instrumental in me becoming a painter.
In 1966, Bacon gave an insightful interview on his artistic ideas and practices. It’s interesting to hear him describe his dark practices in such a posh, upper class accent.
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When a classic enters an icon-Pulp Fiction at the Diner.
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Even though he is best known as a film director, David Lynch got his start as a painter. He still makes art, and as they saying goes: the way you do something, is the way you do everything. Lynch’s darkness and humor shine through in the various mediums he utilizes. From 2019:
The American filmmaker known for macabre, enigmatic films such as “Eraserhead,” “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive,” as well as his recently revived hit 1990s supernatural crime TV series “Twin Peaks,” seems to have a manic creative drive that has compelled him to explore every conceivable form of art: paintings, lithographs, black-and-white photographs, drawings, comics, collage, sculptures, stop-motion animation and even anthropomorphic design lamps.
“Yeah, I love to work,” Mr. Lynch said in a telephone interview from Los Angeles, where he lives and has his studio. “Every medium is so beautiful but each in their particular way, and you learn about them by getting in there and working with them and talking with them.”
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
Looks like there not any movies that couldn’t be upgraded with more guns, eye lasers and severed heads. The African practice of DIY film posters tend to add some embellishments to ratchet up the excitement.
Of course, there were no fancy printers or presses, and even if there were, they wouldn’t bother with something as silly as posters for bootleg movies. And so came a tradition of artists who created posters to create interest in these movies, even if they had to hand-paint them on flour bags. Though the means of printing became much more accessible, the tradition survives because of its extremely unique entertainment value.
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
To all appearances, Henry Darger (April 12, 1892 – April 13, 1973) was an isolated, humble janitor. What no one realized until shortly before his death was he was the most prolific and intense outsider artist in America. In the Realms of the Unreal, a 2004 documentary on his life and works, also uses animation to bring motion to his mysterious art. The full film is available on YouTube.
The Trailer:
The full film:
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Documentaries, horror, and romances, there are all sorts of art based movies to enjoy this autumn-including one featuring a favorite artist of mine.
The documentary Philip Guston: A Life Lived (1980) began filming in 1971 at Guston’s Woodstock, NY studio and continued through his last retrospective in 1980 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The artist died that same year. In 2020 a handful of museums including the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. and the Museum of Fine Art, Boston came under fire for postponing a long-planned Guston exhibition due to the controversial nature of his Ku Klux Klan imagery. This film triumphs over censorship and offers the chance to catch up on a recent scandal.
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A zoetrope at Leeds Industrial Museum, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Before there was motion picture film, there was a simple toy that created convincing animations. Contemporary artists are still using variations of that technology to make their works appear to be in motion.
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When I was growing up, I wanted to be a film maker. I ended up becoming a painter.
The great director Akira Kurosawa went about it in the opposite way. However, he ended up using visual art to enhance his cinematic efforts.
Akira Kurosawa: Storyboard Painting for the Film Ran
The great Akira Kurosawa, a famed Japanese filmmaker who directed 30 films across a career spanning 57 years, initially began life as an aspiring painter.
Kurosawa’s elementary school teacher, Mr Tachikawa, was one of the first major influences on his life. Tachikawa’s progressive teaching methods—which encouraged his students to draw with free will—proved to be a moment which set the foundations for Kurosawa’s desire to spill his thoughts into a creative form. Set for a career in art, a young Kurosawa began focusing on the working class of his homeland, aiming to put “unfulfilled political ideals directly onto the canvas.”
However, after heavy influence from his eldest brother Heigo—who was obsessed with foreign film—Kurosawa decided to live with his sibling in Tokyo and began to indulge as much cinema as he could. “I intended to be a painter before I became involved in film,” Kurosawa is quoted as saying in Stephen Prince’s book The Warrior’s Camera. “A curious turn of events, however, brought me to cinema, where I began my present career.”
Kurosawa continued: “When I changed careers, I burnt all the pictures that I had painted up until then. I intended to forget painting once and for all. As a well-known Japanese proverb says, ‘If you chase two rabbits, you may not catch even one’.
“I did no artwork at all once I began to work in cinema. But since becoming a film director, I have found that drawing rough sketches was often a useful means of explaining ideas to my staff.”
Akira Kurosawa: Painted Storyboard for the Film Dreams
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Benedict Cumberbatch stars in the biopic of artist Louis Wain (August 5, 1860-July 4, 1939). Wain was renown for his amusing depictions of cats. However, as he grew increasingly mentally unstable, his cat paintings mutated into psychedelic patterns.
Evolution of an artist, or examples of schizophrenia?
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I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
Actor Vincent Price (May 27, 1911 – October 25, 1993), known mostly for horror movies, was also an connoisseur of art. Price’s knowledge and appreciation of art were so renowned that when Sears wanted to launch a fine art department, he was brought in to run the effort, as I wrote about before: The Vincent Price Collection of Fine Art.
In this video, Price displays some unexpected singing talent as he celebrates the magic of painting.
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I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
THE REMODERN REVIEW 