The Colourful Mr Eggleston

William Eggleston is one of the most influential and original photographers alive today.

A Mississippi aristocrat with a fondness for guns, drink and women, he dragged colour into the world of art photography. Reviled in the 1970s, he is now considered a legend whose unique visual style has influenced generations of photographers and filmmakers.

Imagine shows the normally shy and elusive Eggleston at work - taking photographs on the road, in and around his home town of Memphis.

Click here to watch

Maurice de Vlaminck

'Good painting is like good cooking; it can be tasted, but not explained.' Maurice de Vlaminck

Village on the River, 1915


The Mortagne Road


The Harvest


'I heightened all my tone values and transposed into an orchestration of pure color with every single thing I felt. I was a tender-hearted savage filled with violence. I translated what I saw instinctively, without any method, and conveyed truth, not so much artistically but humanely.' Maurice de Vlaminck

Fauvism is the movement with which Vlaminck will always be most closely associated.

However, Fauvism was a very short movement and the artist had a very long career. His work briefly leaned towards Cubism (which he professed to loathe) prior to World War I; afterwards it settled into an Expressionistic style that Vlaminck maintained for the rest of his life. The important thing to remember is that, regardless of which labels we now assign to his work, he (a self-taught artist) operated instinctively. He didn't and wouldn't care what we call his approach--he was simply being true to his gut.

How He Came to Art

Vlaminck had taken a smattering of drawing classes and tried his hand at painting, but it was a chance incident that reportedly led him to make art his career. While serving his mandatory 3-year military obligation, he met the painter André Derain in 1900, when the train on which both men were riding derailed. A lifelong friendship was struck, as well as a deal to share a studio in Chatou. It was in this picturesque Seine valley village--previously popular with the Impressionists--that Vlaminck began painting in earnest. (Never a thought towards selling, mind you. He quite simply was overcome by the urge to paint.)

When Art Noticed Him

Vlaminck attended a Parisian van Gogh exhibition in 1901 and was blown away by Vincent's color choices. At this same show, Derain introduced his studio mate to Henri Matisse--perhaps the most bold colorist to ever hold a brush. Vlaminck absorbed these options, and spent the next few years pouring riotously-hued landscapes back out onto canvas.

Convinced by Derain and Matisse to show, Vlaminck began exhibiting with them in 1904. The 1905 Salon d'Automne exhibition was where the trio and a few other like minded artists received the (snarky) moniker fauves (wild beasts) from the art critic Louis Vauxcelle.

Ironically, the indifferent-to-sales Vlaminck began to sell any- and everything he painted, so in demand were the canvases of this "wild beast." After meeting Paul Cézanne, Vlaminck's work took a turn towards balancing color with more structured compositions.

He is best known today for his Fauvism period--a span of no more than seven years. Vlaminck's later work (the bulk of his career) continued to concentrate on color, sell well and be seen in exhibitions that he did not attend. In addition to painting, he produced some fine lithographs, etchings and woodcuts, and authored and illustrated a number of books.

Blaise Cendrars

'The devil plays piano
His gnarled fingers titillate all the women '



Still, I was an extremely bad poet
I didn't know how to go about it
I was hungry
And all the days and all the women in the cafés and all the glasses
I so wanted to drink them and break them
And all the houses and all the streets
And all the wheels of the carriages, twisting like cyclones
over the bad pavements
I would have liked to plunge them into an armorer's furnace
And I would have liked to smash all the bones
And tear out all the tongues
And liquify all those big bodies, unfamiliar and naked under garments
that made me crazy ...
I foresaw the coming the big red Christ of the Russian Revolution ...
And the sun was an ugly wound
Split open like glowing coals.

extract from La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France

Brilliant interview from the paris review

Ron Mueck: Hyper-Realist Sculptor

Fernand Leger

Soldier With a Pipe - Oil on Cavas - 1916


Nude on a Red Background - Oil on Canvas - 1927

Combining the classical with the modern, Léger's Nude on a Red Background (1927) depicts a monumental, expressionless woman, machinelike in form and color. His still life compositions from this period are dominated by stable, interlocking rectangular formations in vertical and horizontal orientation.

The Builders with Ropes - Oil on Canvas - 1950

This painting shares the cubist motif of creating a not-figurative realism, however it is distinguished from the Montmartre artists by imposing not an intellectual, but a visual cubism. Its concern is not indeed to appear the totality of the object, but to distinguish each object in volume and plan within an ideal space. It practices, according to Louis Vauxcelles, the "tubisme". Uncoupled, geometrical volumes are not static any more and indissociable, but autonomous, creating between them a dynamic antagonism.

Engadget goes behind the Dolby logo

Have you ever wondered what the differences between Dolby Digital Plus, Pro Logic and TrueHD were? Still trying to get your head around the evolution of digital surround sound in the past ten years? Yeah, you're not the only one so the crew over at Engadget HD made the long haul to Dolby Laboratories to learn everything there is to know about modern surround sound and what makes it work. In other words, if you are even the least bit interested in being surrounded by sound when watching movies or playing games, head on over and check it out!

link, via engadget hd

Nicolas De Staël

Noon Landscape

Seaside Railway Line in the Setting Sun

De Staël's painting career spans roughly 15 years (from 1940) and produced more than a thousand paintings. His work shows the influence of Gustave Courbet, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso (especially Picasso in his Blue and Rose periods), Georges Braque, Fernand Léger and Chaim Soutine, as well as of the Dutch masters Rembrandt, Vermeer and Hercules Seghers. During the 1940s and beginning in representation (especially landscapes, but also still lifes, and portraits), de Staël moved further and further toward abstraction. Evolving his own highly distinctive and abstract style, which bears comparison with the near-contemporary American Abstract Expressionist movement, and French Tachisme, but which he developed independently of them. Typically his paintings contained block-like slabs of colour, emerging as if struggling against one another across the surface of the image.

De Staël 's work was quickly recognised within the post-war art world, and he became one of the most influential artists of the 1950s. However, he moved away from abstraction in his later paintings, seeking a more "French" lyrical style, returning to representation (seascapes, footballers, jazz musicians, seagulls) at the end of his life. His return to imagery during the early 1950s can be seen as an influential precedent for the American Bay Area Figurative Movement, as many of those abstract painters made a similar move; returning to imagery during the mid-1950s. His painting style is characterized by a thick impasto showing traces of the brush and the palette knife, and by a division of the canvas into numerous zones of color (especially blues, reds and whites). His most well-known late paintings of beaches and landscapes are dominated by the sky and effects of light.

Much of de Staël 's late work - in particular his thinned, and diluted oil on canvas abstract landscapes of the mid-1950s predicts Color field painting and Lyrical Abstraction of the 1960s and 1970s. Nicolas de Staël 's bold and intensely vivid color in his last paintings predict the direction of much of contemporary painting that came after him including Pop Art of the 1960s.

from wikipedia