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oliviayamaoka · 3 years

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The Roseville Murders (Chapter 2)

Hi, just wanted to say I adjusted the plot slightly and will go into more detail with the story next chapter! This was a bit experimental and I wanted to write the growing relationship / rivalry between Y/N and Danny. I also wanted to write Y/N as a girlboss and to be just as witty as Danny!

Anyways, please comment any ideas or suggestions you may wanna see in future chapters! I have this planned out but would love any ideas or stuff I can add into the story! Tysm for reading!

It rained softly outside as you took a seat at your workplace. The desk was a bit cluttered with your art, notes, junk, and your papers regarding your current investigation.

One of the drawings on your desk was a sketch of Ghostface’s mask, attached to it was a few notes regarding the origin of the mask. Did Ghostface care for the history of it, anyways? You already theorized he was a narcissist who took pride in his work. Perhaps, he admired Edward Munch and his infamous “The Scream” artwork? Or maybe he based his persona off of it? You weren’t too sure but you did research the distribution and the company that made the masks. It wasn’t a particular popular company but it only distributed to the USA, Canada, and Brazil.

Ghostface didn’t seem too caring when it came to where he stabbed victims. As long as there was a lot of blood and something only he could perceive as art. And maybe you too. You felt excited, you already had a three year timeline. Maybe, you could get ahold of other states and ask if there’s been similar killings. Maybe even Brazil and Canada? You had to pinpoint a location and see if you could find just one name, any name.

Three years. Three countries. A part of you doubted he was Brazilian. Maybe Canadian? You weren’t so sure, you were pretty sure he was American. Y/N would probably have to go to the library tommorow to do research and use the slowly growing internet. Your research was suddenly halted when you knocked your sketchbook over.

Our slid a page. You kneeled down to pick it up, holding it as you examined the dark sketch. On the paper was a sketch of claws? No, they also looked like tentacles. Ever since the incident, you had dreams of these tentacle claws grabbing you and pulling you away from life as you know it. It must’ve been a sign of trauma or maybe it represented what happened through the nightmares? You slid it back into your sketchbook, deciding not to dwell on it. It would only make your room feel more depressing.

Beside your sketchbook was your leather journal. Y/N wrote everything in there, for mental health reasons. You included the incident and what Jonathan did for you. Your previous therapist said journaling your thoughts helped the healing process. It worked but journaling about how you killed your abuser was hell.

Your thoughts were suddenly interrupted when your phone rang. It was a chunky, black mobile phone you got about a week ago? Y/N reached for it and answered.

“Hello?” You answered, using your other hand to organize your desk.

“Hello?” A voice answered, it was a male by the sound of it.

“Hi, who’s this?” Y/N asked, paying no mind to the phone call as she started to put some of her stuff away. Art supplies.

“Who’s this?” He replied.

“Y/N L/N, am I who you’re trying to reach?” You asked, sitting back down.

“Ah, you’re no fun, detective.” He chuckled as you stopped, furrowing your eyebrows in confusion. Who was this?

“My apologies but, this is my personal phone. Can I ask who gave you this number?” You questioned him.

“Why does it matter, gorgeous? I know it’s you now.” He responded.

“Please don’t call me that. And yes, I am indeed a detective but I’d feel more comfortable discussing anything with you on my work phone.” Y/N said sternly.

“Oh, yeah… Detective L/N, huh? Think you’re some sort of hotshot because you’re new? Where did you come from? Washington? Gonna take more than the feds to catch me.” He said to you.

You listened intently and stopped for a moment. Catch him? Must be a stupid prank. Although, not a funny one since he had your personal phone number. An eyebrow raised as you looked at your notes on Ghostface.

“You still haven’t told me your name. Let’s not be rude, yeah?” You responded, being a little more cocky since you were off-duty.

“Awe, don’t tell me you forgot my name. I’ll give you a hint… I’ve been quite famous lately. In fact, I think you’ve taken quite the interest in me, Y/N.” The man teased. It was 100% Danny.

“I asked for a name, not an alias.” You said.

“Maybe after dinner, hotshot.” Danny said to you as you furrowed your eyebrows.

“I’m not in Roseville to play games. Either verify you are who you claim to be or quit wasting my time.” Y/N spoke with a stern tone.

“My last victim had three stab wounds to the throat. It was going to be two but their scream wasn’t as satisfying as I thought it would be. And they had a tattoo on their upper thigh. Bella Smith.” He said as you froze for a moment.

It was true. The latest murder victim was a middle-aged woman named Bella Smith who worked at a convenience store. She had multiple stab wounds but it was pretty much impossible to see she had three wounds on her throat just looking at photos of the crime scene.

“Okay and how did you get my number? I imagine the infamous Ghostface doesn’t have access to these types of things. How do I know this isn’t some sort of elaborate prank orchestrated by my coworkers?” You questioned.

“Honey, I am Roseville. Also sounds like you have experience with these kinds of things. You ever get humiliated like that?” Danny asked, grinning widely.

“No, it’s just a very logical conclusion. And why would you be talking to me anyways?” You asked him.

While you spoke to him, you quickly wrote down what he said and what he sounded like. You quickly speculated what his age may be, maybe 25?

“I keep tabs on the cops who are investigating my work and to be honest? They’re all stupid, it’s pathetic. Although, I noticed something about you. You come from one of the big cities, don’t you? You’re actually smart compared to those other pigs.” He said.

“Those pigs you speak of have tried their best in pursuing you. They have families too.” You responded.

“Really, huh? You’ve only been here three weeks? I think you should just trust me on this one because those other officers really don’t know what they’re doing. If you actually find out who I am, are they gonna give you credit? The newbie? A woman?” He asked.

“I don’t understand why gender is an issue. And why would they try to steal credit?” You questioned.

“They’re stuck in this shit hole city and I bet they could just really use a promotion right now. They want so badly to be the hero that arrests me… but first, they’ll let the freshly graduated detective do the work. It’s so easy to overshadow women in this world.” Danny said.

“Well, I don’t care. As long as you’re put behind bars.” Y/N responded.

“The bars at this station? I must say, your desk is quite cute. A bit plain but I like your style… interesting files too.” He mused.

“Huh?” You responded, furrowing your eyebrows.

“Your lil’ office at the station, I like it. This place has always been easy to break into. You noticed it too, didn’t you? Their security sucks and their morgue is just too damn small.” Danny said as you frantically looked around, shoving your shoes on.

“I’m going to call them right now and tell them you’re there. That was a stupid move on your part.” You said, practically yelling.

“So young and naive. I’ll be long gone.” He responded, chuckling as you hung up.

“Fuck, shit!” You said, quickly dialling the number to the police station.

You practically flung your door open, sprinting down the hallway and out through the front doors of the apartment complex after three flights of stairs. Your heart rate increased as you continued running down the sidewalk, feeling more frantic when there was no answer.

“Answer…!” You yelled, calling the emergency number.

“911, how can I help you?” A staticky voice answered as you continued running.

“I’m Detective Y/N L/N! Please inform the police station that there’s an intruder! He might be armed and dangerous! Do not touch anything since there may be forensic evidence!” You instructed.

“Oh—yes, right away, ma’am!” The dispatcher answered as you hung up, continuing to focus on your running towards the station.

Back at your apartment complex, there stood Danny with his own mobile phone. It couldn’t be traced back to him since it was stolen and he didn’t leave any DNA on it. If anything, it had the previous owners. Bella Smith. Your apartment complex had fire escape stairs outside your window. Easy enough, he thought. His outfit was black and had some stuff hanging off it. Strings? Ribbons? Danny was quite quick and extremely quiet when it came to climbing the set of stairs.

He reached your window, pulling it open gently and hoisting himself through, landing gently whilst kneeled down. For precaution, he had his knife gripped in one hand. This was purely for investigation and to see what you truly had on him. His head tilted curiously as he noticed your desk. Your art and notebook. His gloved hand reached out to your sketch of him.

Danny was truly impressed at how detailed and good it was. He read through your sticky notes and theories. Other than the fact he was blown away, he knew you were a threat since you successfully guessed his age range and height. Wait, his height? You did a careful examination of the footage he was in, looking at objects around him and his boots to correctly guess a height.

“What the fuck…?” Danny muttered as he looked at your notes.

The Scream by Edward Munch and a costume company? He skimmed over your notes and the psychological profile you built on him. He felt somewhat panicked since you were indeed no joke. His gaze averted towards your leather notebook. Eagerly, he grabbed it and opened it. Most of it was your thoughts and causes of your stress and anxiety. He stopped flipping through when he saw a darker page. It was dark because of the writing and how crumpled it seemed.

December 23rd, 1992

I was walking down an alleyway two weeks ago. It was cold so I had a jacket over my uniform. I suppose that’s why the man didn’t know I was an officer.

At first, I thought that he was going to try and rob me. It took me a while to realize that my money and belongings wasn’t what he was after. I suppose it would be appropriate to say that I was in shock for a moment. He never finished what he started. Despite being in shock, I was able to feel everything and the adrenaline only helped my rage.

Why? Why did this have to happen to me? After getting him off, I pulled my gun out and he stopped. I still remember the look on his face after I shot him. He was scared and pathetic, as he was in life. I don’t regret killing him. I never will. I just feel utterly violated. Never once have I been touched like that so violently. Is this what this fucked up world has come to? What if I didn’t have my gun and training?

He definitely did this to other women… he deserved to die. And I would do it all over again to him and to other men just like him. Of course, I had to call the police. They were going to charge me with manslaughter but they said that they would push this all under the rug, just as long as I never tell anybody. Did I contribute to corruption in the police force? This getting out would ruin everything. I don’t know but I do know that this was my gift.

Freedom was my gift for killing that man. It felt oddly exhilarating. I hope nobody remembers him, I hope his family know what kind of monster he was. Anyways, I’m being reassigned somewhere. They said they’ll give me my first investigation. In a smaller city.

Danny’s fingers trailed over the page. He felt angry and sad for you. That this happened to you. But, something arose in him when he kept re-reading that paragraph. You… enjoyed it? Behind the mask, he had a soft expression on his face. He imagined your beautiful face full of blood with you and your gun. He smiled gently as he kept the notebook.

He did indeed feel bad for you but he wasn’t satisfied with his limited knowledge of you. Danny decided to use this notebook of incriminating evidence to hold some leverage over you. Not only that but he figured he’d get to know you better if they had something interesting to talk to you about. Danny couldn’t help but grin when he thought about your journal entry and the sketches you made of him. So smart yet so naive.

Danny quickly took a look around your apartment to see all points of entry. He took a peak into your bedroom, it was neat and tidy. He seemed somewhat paranoid so quickly went back to your living room window, making his swift little escape. Not without taking some of your notes on him and your sketchbook.

About two hours later, you rubbed your eyes in frustration as another officer came to talk to you. There was a forensic team still investigating your little office space. Apparently, there was nobody here and your office seemed untouched. For about thirty minutes, you inspected any points of entry and tried to look for out of place shoe marks since it rained outside.

“Detective, are you certain it was the killer who called? We get prank calls a lot.” He said as you nodded.

“Yes, I’m certain. It was him, he knows I’m going to catch him soon.” You said as he nodded a bit.

“Okay, well, we’ll take it from here. Come early tommorow.” He said as you sighed.

“I will but please, don’t miss anything. I’m starting to think he was lying. It was him though.” You said as you turned, walking down the hallway towards the exit.

It seemed to be evening at this point and the rain stopped pouring. It was slightly humid but the city looked oddly beautiful when it was wet? You couldn’t stop thinking about your phone call with Ghostface earlier. Y/N already had some tech professionals try to track the number he called from and all of the information regarding the phone company. You’d have to wait two days at the latest for the results to come back.

As you walked through light puddles, you felt more and more tired. All the running and frantically searching for him was enough to just make you exhausted. It was all last-minute too. Y/N stopped dead in her tracks when she felt her mobile phone ring. You pulled it out of your pocket and answered it.

“Hello?” You asked, tired.

“Hey, gorgeous. Just wanted to apologize for my little deception trick earlier.” He responded as your eyes widened.

“Ghostface…” You responded, shocked that he had the courage to call you again.

“God, hearing that from you…” He said with a slight husk as you took a deep breath quietly to calm yourself.

“You know I’m close, don’t you?” You questioned him as he chuckled.

“Of course, I do… only these hands of mine can do wonders for you.” Danny said to you as you scoffed.

“You’re disgusting.” You say to him.

“Don’t lose your temper now, detective. There’s… things we should discuss.” He cooed.

“Things? Seriously?” You asked him, already tired of his bullshit.

“Yeah! Like, this lil’ notebook of yours! Really deep stuff… Victor Houston, was it? The serial rapist? Must’ve felt real good to put him down, didn’t it? Did it feel as good as you said it did in this thing?” He asked as you froze.

You probably let out a small whimper of shock as your hands trembled. Your heart pumped hard and fast. It was all you can hear as you felt your face heat out of pure embarrassment and shock. He… read your journal? This wasn’t good, this wasn’t good.

“W-What…?” You asked as he cackled.

“God, you’re so hot when you sound scared. Don’t be offended though, babe. You still sound real sexy in your cop tone.” He said as he continued.

“Yeah, I read all about the guy you killed. And how it was all covered up to accommodate you. Are you a star student or something? It’s hard covering up murders… or has it always been easy for you?” He asked.

“I-I, um… how did you get that…?” You asked him, trembling.

“You see, Y/N… we’re the same. You and I are too smart for Roseville. It’s just that I got the upper hand this time. While you rushed to the police station, I took a quick trip into your apartment.” He said as you let out a light gasp.

“Yeah, that’s right! I know where you live, I know where you’re from, and your number. I know who you truly are, Detective Y/N L/N.” Danny said mockingly.

“And what are you going to do with it?” You asked him.

“Always so straight to the point. I might give that annoying little journalist Jed Olsen. You’re trying to work with him, aren’t you? You mentioned in one of these notes… you also think he’s handsome.” He said as you covered your eyes.

You fought tears.

“Why? Why would you do this?” You ask.

“I should be asking you that. I’m a bit jealous you find someone like Olsen… attractive. He’s so boring, so normal, so… ugh, I hate talking about him. Still though, nice to know I have another fan besides him.” He said to you.

“Where are you going with this?!” You snapped as he chuckled darkly.

“I won’t tell anybody. Just as long as you halt your investigation for a while. I still want to have fun in Roseville here and well… get to know you.” He said.

“Go to hell.” You muttered.

“How original… so what’ll it be? I kinda need to know now since I’m also on a bit of a time crunch.” Danny asked you.

“W-What the fuck do you want me to do? Sit back and watch as you kill more innocent people?! I won’t let you.” You said with a venomous tone.

“What are you gonna do? Stop me behind bars?” He asked mockingly.

“Fuck you.” You said.

“I’m sure we will. But first, I just want you to sit back and not do anything stupid. We’ll see each other eventually. I’ll call you from another phone soon.” He said, hanging up.

You held your phone in disbelief and quickly made sure you had your gun. How the hell could you have been so dumb?! It was genius, leading you away from you apartment and finding such leverage against you purely out of luck. Your breath trembled as you walked back to your apartment, having your gun ready in your pocket as you did so.

#dbd x reader #ghostface x reader #the ghostface #ghostface dbd #danny johnson x reader #jed olsen x reader #jed olsen #danny johnson #dead by daylight x reader #dead by daylight

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architectuul · 3 years

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Sail Hejduk, Sail!

The Unfolding Pavilion is an expanding curatorial project that pops-up in the occasion of major architecture events, with an exhibition featuring each time a different theme inspired by the space it occupies, made of commissioned original works that react to it as well as to its cultural and historic background.

Unfolding Pavilion: Rituals of Solitude, 17th Venice Architecture Biennale. | Photo © Marialuisa Montanari / Unfolding Pavilion

In its first edition, the Unfolding Pavilion entered Ignazio Gardella’s Casa alle Zattere on the occasion of the 15th International Architecture Exhibition at the Biennale di Venezia, transforming one of its apartments in a temporary gallery of installations made by some of the most unique authors of architecture-related curated archives. In its second edition, it entered Gino Valle’s Giudecca Social Housing on the occasion of the vernissage of the 16th International Architecture Exhibition at the Biennale di Venezia. In order to do so, it refurbished one of its empty dwellings to convert it into a temporary gallery of works, and use the common spaces of the complex as the poetic backdrop for a three days-long program of public events.

The Unfolding Pavilion 2021 was this year housed inside of the belly of “Il Nuovo Trionfo” - the last authentic Venetian trabaccolo, moored at Punta della Dogana. | Photo © Travelscapes

In this year's third edition, the Unfolding Pavilion popped-up on the occasion of the 17th International Architecture Exhibition at the Biennale di Venezia, inside of the belly of an old mercantile sailboat - a trabaccolo - moored at Punta della Dogana. The trabaccolo once belonged to Countess Luisa Albertina di Tesserata: an eccentric art collector who in the 1970s commissioned the construction, on a small island of the Venetian archipelago she owned, of an almost exact replica of an unrealised project by John Hejduk: the House for the Inhabitant who Refused to Participate. Unfortunately, the house was demolished in December 2020.

Artist impression of the House of Contessa Luisa Albertina di Tesserata. | Digital drawing © Giovanni Benedetti / Unfolding Pavilion

The curators Daniel Tudor Munteanu and Davide Tommaso Ferrando came to know about the house by pure chance, and decided to organise an exhibition inside of its spaces. An agreement was made with the current owners of the island, who were about to demolish the house in order to build a luxury glamping facility in its stead: the house could be temporarily occupied for artistic purposes, but no images of the event were to be published before the demolition took place. It is so that, in the summer of 2020, twelve architects and scholars were invited to spend one week of residency locked inside the replica of John Hejduk’s house. One per room. Each room was equipped with only one piece of furniture, which they couldn't choose. The outcome of the one-week residency were twelve site-specific works dealing with issues of privacy, domesticity and isolation. Rituals of Solitude, the 2021 edition of the Unfolding Pavilion, is the first documentation of the installations made by the twelve contributors during their one-week residency.

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What is the Unfolding Pavilion presenting?

Daniel Tudor Munteanu: The Unfolding Pavilion is always experimenting. We ask ourselves every time what is an (architecture) exhibition and how we can transcend the simplistic format of displaying representations of architecture in neutral white cube galleries. We tried every time to create special experiences for the visitors: such as the experience of being the first people to enter a famous work of architecture, like we did in Ignazio Gardella’s Casa alle Zattere, or the experience of being part of a project that leaves a legacy like we did in Gino Valle’s social housing. While looking for a venue for this year’s edition of Unfolding Pavilion we wanted to explore more into the sensorial aspect of such experiences. Arranging an exhibition inside the belly of an old boat was quite a fascinating idea. A dark, extremely narrow space that smells heavily of petrol and is shaking from the waves of the Grand Canal.

The Unfolding Pavilion at Punta della Dogana. | Photo © Stefano Di Corato, atelier XYZ / Unfolding Pavilion

Davide Tommaso Ferrando: Daniel talked about the sensorial part, but there is also an intellectual dimension to it, where we are constantly trying to put in question what an architectural exhibition is. The fact that we don’t choose white boxes is not simply because of the kind of atmosphere of the white box but is really to test the configuration of what an exhibition space can be and what it produces. So we never know what the final outcome will be. Several things that are discovered during the process can become the most important points of the project, so we really engage with reality that is experimental every single time. And then regarding the mediatic side of it, from the moment that we discovered the story of this boat by having an informal conversation with Hesperia Iliadou, we immediately understood that this was the perfect location for an exhibition. Full of problems but a memorable event for the visitors.

What is the motivation behind the whole project?

DTM: It is a way to organize an independent project in the context of big institutions. The Unfolding Pavilion is not related to any institution, so we have complete freedom, which is extremely important for us. We engage into a dialogue about what the institution of the Biennale is and how it functions, and we establish a love-hate relationship with it. We acknowledge the importance of this event in gathering visitors from all over the world, this is the ‘love’ aspect, but there is also the ‘hate’ aspect of the big, often menacing, economic apparatus of the Biennale.

DTF: Each year there are very specific conditions under which we operate and we engage critically with. The first year the condition was the budget as we didn’t have any sponsors we created everything with a total budget of 2000 EUR from our pockets, 1000 each. By choosing not to enter the specific trajectory of investing 30.000 or more money we needed to find another way to solve the problem. The second year we agreed with the city council that we would refurbish one apartment of the housing complex in Giudecca, which we did with a sponsorship from Innsbruck University plus our free engagement. The way me and Daniel are operating is quite consistent, we both started to work independently on our critical projects online on our platforms of communications. We transferred the way of working to the production of architectural exhibitions and we still work in the same way as we both started separately.

Sketches of the Exhibition Design for the Unfolding Pavilion 2021 | Drawing © ErranteArchitetture / Unfolding Pavilion

DTM: Regarding the institutional critique, as Davide said, in the first edition we reacted to the budget that is associated with making a pavilion in Venice and we defined the rule that we would deal with only one percent of the regular budget (which is about 200.000 EUR), so we made an exhibition with a budget of 2.000 EUR. In the second edition, we consumed almost the entire budget for refurbishing our temporary exhibition space - the apartment in Giudecca - and hence making it again available as a social housing unit for a new family. The ‘Architectural Review’ recently critiqued the fact that an extreme amount of resources go into building these temporary exhibitions for the Biennale, which have a carbon footprint quite disproportionate to their lifespan. For the third edition we asked ourselves - do we consider it a good way of practice to build up an exhibition that lives only for a few days or weeks and is then stored somewhere or even trashed? We decided right from the beginning to design everything as a travelling exhibition and so Venice is only the first stop of this project, which will travel and expand in the near future.

The exhibition inside of the belly of Il Nuovo Trionfo. | Photo © Stefano Di Corato; atelier XYZ / Unfolding Pavilion

How did you guys meet?

DTF: The very first contact was when Daniel was doing OfHouses and he invited me to curate an edition for it. At the same period I was doing research at OII+ on how people were using Tumblr to produce architectural knowledge so I published an interview with Daniel. The real moment with Unfolding Pavillion started in January 2016, when Daniel proposed to me to organize an exhibition during that year’s Venice Biennale. And I said: “why not?”.

DTM: The idea to organize the independent exhibition came out when I was working on the competition for the Romanian Pavilion. I had some very critical ideas and, while finishing the proposal, I realized that this project will never be selected, because it will never get the approvals from the official bodies, institutions and politicians who want to control the country's image. When you want to communicate a critical message, creative freedom is of the utmost importance. So, instead of self censoring your message in order to win a competition, maybe it is just simpler to organize and finance a ‘pavilion’ by yourself...

The Vernissage | Photo © Stefano Di Corato, atelier XYZ / Unfolding Pavilion

Tell me more about the Rituals of Solitude; why did you invent this story?

DTM: The story that accompanies our exhibition is not necessarily an invention and it’s not necessarily a reportage. It is something in between. We acted less like journal editors and more like film editors, mixing and montaging different bits and pieces that are real. The story has several layers, and you may disregard some at the first reading - for example the very real part documenting the accelerated privatization of islands in the Venetian lagoon. In the end, if the story is true or false doesn’t really matter. Did this Contessa actually exist? Some say it did, some say it didn’t. It’s totally up to the reader, because the ‘action’ in the story is more of a pretext for unfolding different themes we were interested in: the enforced isolation, the obsessive-compulsive daily rituals, the propagation of fake news… The story is very much fitted to our current context; for the first time in history the entire planet was faced with this crisis, that meant curfews, isolation, lockdowns, elimination of social life... When we studied the design of a John Hejduk project titled “The House for the Inhabitant who Refused to Participate” we immediately recognized in its facade the typical Zoom interface, where people show their private spaces to others, designing their own backgrounds to communicate their personalities. Our concept was to invite 12 teams to work on the interior space of a similarly “public” kind of room, where to imagine a daily ritual. Each of these 12 rooms was to be furnished by a single item of furniture related to only one domestic function, and this idea was taken from the script that John Hejduk imagined for the House. One room had a toiled, one an armchair, one a bed, and so on. We imagined how it is to live in a room that is specifically designed for one purpose. The new rituals - working in bed, the compulsive washing of hands, the consumption of digital junk food - are some of the responses of the 12 invited contributors.

From the book “10 immagini per Venezia” edited by Francesco Dal Co, Officina Edizioni, Rome (1980).

DTF: The whole narrative and protocol behind the exhibition was a very specific and intentional take on how to conceive an architecture exhibition which deals with the concept of How will we live together? after and during the pandemic without adopting the two easiest strategies, which for us are both inappropriate. The first would be not to deal with the pandemic issue, as the vast majority of the projects shown at this Biennale do - which makes them already a bit outdated in this sense. The second would be to directly deal with the pandemic, having the pretension that architectural speculation can solve the problem, which is ridiculous. What we did was to incorporate ideas and reflections on the contemporary conditions in a diagonal, indirect way. We made reference to a project that has nothing to do with the current situation but still was capable of activating many analogies and correspondences with it. This looked like the only way in which we could deal with this topic. How to not mention the pandemic but still talk about the new inhabiting conditions was a main question for us and this was for us the best possible answer.

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All the exhibited works have been exclusively produced for the Unfolding Pavilion by: (ab)Normal, Aristide Antonas, Bart Lootsma, Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski (WAI Architecture Think Tank), ErranteArchitetture, Fosbury Architecture, Giovanni Benedetti, James Taylor-Foster & Anton Valek, Fala Atelier, Mariabruna Fabrizi & Fosco Lucarelli (Microcities / Socks-studio), MAIO, Matteo Ghidoni, Shumi Bose & Space Popular and Traumnovelle.

#VAB #unfolding pavilion

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sunritual · 3 years

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Robots don’t need to be sentient to destroy us.

Navy mock neck long sleeves big orange and little white stripe on tube cage sides

A veritcal line stretch waistband

Cross cross and straps back

Square high neck

Scarlet polka dots around can light blue text and beach image as front

Blue stroke red inside square, blue triangle rainbow with eye and funky font

Y either know a particular topic or not , but it’s hard to pin down intelligence on one category

Cream background , ice cream pink script name kinda bev hills hotel script looking ish

Move your mouth in a differ way

Supersonic vibrating butt cleaner

Half magenta half red violet a blue teacup in the center with white floral frills thick serif font

Pink background am orange flower in a vase white present ribbon n red as a table

An app that familiarizes people with science - through experimental learning ― hands on experiences that make it seem less top down and authoritarian , and more like a set of steps that we take, things that anyone can do to get closer with nature and the world

A social media philosophy app - teaches what others said and gives people a chance to express their views , postulate, argue, etc gadfly? How would be avoid a shit show, how can we make social media more humanitarian. how can we care about people while also expressing deeply held ideas , how can we encourage users to examine their deeply held ideas without alienating them. How can we discourage hatred and abuse and groupthink with design? How do we slow people down and encourage them to recognize the human behind the screen. Street epistemology? Socratic dialogue?

Socrates - asking questions. Breaking it down to bits. Deeply understanding their argument. Asking about different possibilities and circumstances. Take vast assumptions and show scenarios that make go against them.

Build fact checking into apps

Narrative self vs experiential

Walks you through steps of the sciefitifc method and encourages you to explain how you feel each step actually helped you- then walks you through a scientist doing the same for their reasarch

Republicans only want to be free in the specific ways that benefit corporations

Are Christians more willing to support the death pen early because they already believe in the cruel and overstepping punishment of hell?

Where did the idea come from that you need to remain impartial when trying to persuade

The idea that there is someone in a similar but different dwelling, hearing similar but different sounds and feeling similar but different feelings is wild

We synthesize sets of traits, and particular actions in a super biased culturally constructed way

With the way we see things as humans- we categorize things into groups that aren’t really reaaal ― paratheletic groups

I just want the people and jobs that benefit society

Connection to nietzsches Dionysian art and eckheart tolle/Taoism

No matter your personality, there is probably a part of the world that you would fit in with naturally.

An ordinary girl is selected as one of the representatives of earth in the first meeting of various alien species after one advanced planet discovered and United 10. Confused as to why she was chosen, she goes on her journey meeting

Wha ba Bada da da da da dada he’s a wha ba ba dadada as a matter of fact it’s not my fault if you came up here thinking that you would win

Wanting to break boundaries and rules for the sake those who are hurt by the rules

You are imagining the best case scenario of the life you want to have and experience Ming the reality of the life you so have.

Yes her drips cosmetics line to students i. Class

Chez it people can goldfish people

Your personality flows where a system needs it to go to maintain balance

Ah you fucking saw a tik Tok about that didn’t you

Coincidence and intention are two sides of a tapestry, my lord. You may find one more agreeable to look at, but you cannot say one is true and the other is false.””

Clay busts with abstract art and philosophical musings (throws up)

Do a sketch a day

What if someone ran for president as an impression of a famous person

Full stemmed flowers, wiggly text creeping behind

Balloons of various sizes and cooors holding people and things

Kelly green cream hot pink black

Green outline one pink air brush cream background black marks

Emdr applebees , bat mitzvah toasts Amitals bat mitzvah , Fiona - i like her better just kidding ,

We tend to learn words by synonyms and not definitions

A bully who takes a kids lunch money everyday all through out high school and secretly puts it in a Roth IRA and presents it to them at graduation

Set up drum set

When it comes to something we have no knowledge of or evidence or proof being certain is the most illogical thing you can be

Getting a degree in philosophy is the not going to college of going to college

It ain’t what they call you it’s what you answer to

You don’t just get to jump from bright moment to bright moment - part of the job is the frustrating ones and the climb to get to be actually good. It’s gonna be bad in the beginning but it’s a measure of how dedicated you are to your craft. Frustration is the process.

You have to decide whit shit sandwjicj you prefer - everything is gonna suck some of the time but if you pick your dream you’ll have those bright moments and at least that shit sammie will be worth it - the bad parts of job you have no interest in don’t add up to anything. If you love what you do you will accept the downsides.

People are like tape. Going through the world collecting bits and pieces of things but none of those things are really them . We can identi ft with them and create with them but we can also escape from them.

I wonder what all these people think about being alive

Curiosity makes everything play. It invites exploration. It makes me see opportunities everywhere makes everything new

Bias to action. Try things. Get your hands dirty, fail Fortean and find what works. Remaining nimble and constantly rethinking

Reframe the problem. Step back, re-examine the problem, examine biases and be open to new solutions

Clay matches clay fire

The differences and similarities between us

Looking back, historical events seem bound to happen, but a few small events could’ve stopped them. Thinking diffently.

“They became revolutionaries despite themselves”

Artists way workbook design

I’m at Eton having to walk around to quell the feeling of being so exited about the future and my possibilities and so sure of success and beauty and magic and love and adventure. I’m going to make beautiful pictures I’m going. To tear down the status quo I’m going g to make people feel like they have on antigravity. I’m so a part of it i made it. I’m a muse I’m it omg I’m so exited - listening to John Denver

Joy is just a thing that he was raised on love is just a way to live and die.

The only thing that made Abe Lincoln Abe Lincoln (tm) was doing what Abe Lincoln (tm) did. The actions that he took made him a hero in history. There was nothing i ate in him that made his great, his actions did. Whatever help inate qualities may have gave him in terms of doing the actions that made him what he was could be negated by pma and doing the damn work to get yourself to where you need to be. Believing it so makes you inclined to take the actions that improve your skills and get to to the point where you can do the things it takes to be who you want to be.

Little vases

I feel like we’ve become addicted to finding things wrong with what people say. Silence the critic. It’s fine. Most people have the best intentions. It’s not that serious. The group you are offended for likely aren’t mad anyway. There is way more you can do - they don’t care about picking the right term

I wanted a very simple menu that could maximize customization options in The shortest amount of time possible for a very fast paced food truck. The system allows the customers to design their own grilled cheese sandwich but ideally would save time by not requiring each guest to decide which cheese and which bread from a long line of choices.

I feel I’m so afraid of being dunning Krueger that i tell myself i am terrible at everything no matter what i actually think about my abilities. You can just say your a beginner you don’t have to say you suck. Plus thinking you suck doesn’t make you any better, honestly worse. You don’t have to rate your abilities just focus on the future, make sure your doing baby steps and make sure they are the right baby steps

Chives ward off insects

Loving thebsunlightttttyt!!

I don’t think music is really something that needs to be critiqued for me ― it’s more about feeling it’s about magic and truth and light or darkness. Getting whatever needs to be out out. it all serves a purpose and is for an audience , if your not in that audience then there’s no need to comment

I have to is weird backwards idea that it’s Nobel to be like you know what I’m not good at this imma bow out. But that is so wrong you have to struggle through it. Pike how i feel like my thoughts are more concise then my writing. There’s no glory in not trying to improve that. You have to awkawardly write until you can beautifully write.

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mythicamagic · 4 years

Text

Sesskag week Day 4: Comedy

Summary: Kagome resolves to snap a photo of the infamous Killing Perfection, which proves more difficult than expected. Oneshot.

AN: For Sesskag Week Day 4 - Comedy.

Rated T

2,900 words

(all prompts posted on Ao3, fanfic.net and Dokuga)

Camera Shy

To the surprise of pretty much all who knew her, Kagome pursued art and photography in those three years away from the feudal era. In fact, even after the well re-opened, she continued to take classes, often creating life-like drawings from whatever photos she'd taken.

After joining everyone on a warm spring day for a picnic, Shippo had innocently inquired;

"What's that, Kagome?" pointing at a square black box hanging around her neck.

Grinning, she tapped it with pride.

"This is my instant polaroid camera. Very vintage, very hipster- some might say," she giggled, noting everyone's puzzled looks. Raising it, she took a snap of the fox demon, who yelped and ducked behind Sango's leg.

Crouching down, Kagome held out the photo once it had slid from the camera, shaking it gently and showing him the blank space that slowly filled with his image.

"Fascinating," Miroku hummed, while Sango nodded in awe. Inuyasha merely snorted, unimpressed since he'd been exposed to so much future tech already.

Kaede gasped, staring at the picture with mild concern.

"You have imprisoned him."

"What? No-" Kagome smiled and shook her head. "It's just a photo. Kind of like a painting. I feel bad that I never took any before but I was always so busy with Naraku or studying for tests."

Taking the photo gingerly, Shippo grinned at himself. He then beamed brighter and tugged on Kagome's sleeve. "Let's go show Rin!"

---

After taking various photos that would make a historian lose their mind, Kagome sat back within Kaede's hut and sketched some snapshots. She quietly giggled at the candid pictures; Inuyasha caught mid-yawn, exposing his thick fangs. Miroku studying a scroll while holding his youngest son, who drooled all over his robes, Kirara playing with a ball of yarn, Sango teaching her daughter a style of kickboxing, or Shippo trying to cram an entire sandwich in his mouth at once.

While looking through them, however, one particular figure seemed to be missing among her collection.

Approaching the stoic demon lord with perhaps a little too much familiarity and enthusiasm, Kagome smiled at him as he peacefully reclined against a tree.

"Sesshoumaru," she raised her camera slightly from where it hung around her neck. "I don't know if you've noticed on your visits but lately I've been taking-"

"Photos. Rin showed me some."

Kagome stopped and hummed. He caught on fast. And judging by how warily he eyed her camera, the answer to her question simmering right on the edge of her tongue would be a big fat no.

"Right! Sooo I've taken photos of just about everyone now," dragging her sneaker back and forth over the dirt, a hopeful smile graced her mouth. "All except you."

"No."

Ah, no use in sugar-coating it, huh?

Kagome rose a brow and folded her arms. "May I ask why?"

Giving a sigh that bespoke of his annoyance with having to explain himself, Sesshoumaru idly studied sharp nails. "I do not believe you have earned it."

Out of all the things she'd expected him to say, that wasn't on the extensive list. "I haven't earned a picture of you?"

"Hn."

Smiling slightly, she sized him up. "And what do I need to do in order to get a snap of the illustrious Lord Sesshoumaru?"

Golden eyes slanted up at her and crinkled at the edges in slight amusement. Kagome's insides went all warm for some reason, cheeks reddening. "You needn't do anything grand. This one is merely discontent with letting you capture a picture of me so easily. I will not forbid you from trying, however."

Kagome tried to follow his line of logic, experimentally shifting- before grabbing her camera and rapidly pressing the button.

Sesshoumaru blurred away from his spot.

Jolting, the miko whipped her head around, grasping her photo and watching as it cleared to reveal a plain tree. No Daiyoukai in sight.

A piquant scent filled her next inhale. Kagome's skin pricked, hot breath dancing over the nape of her neck.

"Do you understand now, miko?" he rumbled.

"Y-yeah," glancing at him over her shoulder, she tried in vain to ignore the heat in her cheeks and pleasant twinge in her lower stomach. "Sure, I'll play your game- and win too."

Confidence clung to Sesshoumaru like a second skin as he tilted his chin up, the ghost of a smile curling his mouth. "Hn."

---

The next time Lord Sesshoumaru deigned to grace the village with his presence, Kagome was ready. Having memorised his visiting schedule with Rin long before, she lay in wait within the trees.

Grinning sharply, she let out an evil laugh reminiscent of Naraku's 'kukukuku.'

Straddling a tree branch and hearing Shippo's signal (a whistle from further away in the trees) Kagome tightened both legs around her perch and held the camera, holding still. It had only taken a few lollipops to persuade the kitsune to help.

Heart thundering and eagle-eyed, Kagome waited with bated breath for any sign of the Daiyoukai wandering below en-route to the village.

Upon glimpsing the tell-tale red and white silks and silver hair, Kagome swung herself down. Gripping the branch hard with her legs, dark hair flew up, leaves being knocked free and cascading around her as she appeared before him, hanging upside down.

With a smirk, she struck her finger onto the button- just as Sesshoumaru blurred through the air, palm closing over the lens.

Kagome squeaked, mouth falling open. Her gaze slid from camera to Daiyoukai, who gazed at her, face quite close to hers. Thin lips then curved down, but from her flipped perspective, she realised the jerk was smirking at her.

Kagome's legs then lost their grip. Yelping, the miko dropped like a sack of potatoes, landing hard at his feet in a sprawl of limbs. Letting out a long groan, Kagome patted around, hands empty. Something light was then placed onto the crown of her head. Reaching up, she felt the camera and frowned just as Sesshoumaru smoothly stepped over her body and sauntered away, continuing on without a care in the world.

Growling, Kagome sat up, rubbing her throbbing skull.

Shippo burst from the trees and landed beside her. "Ahh that was a colossal failure! You okay Kagom-"

A giggle slid out from the miko, shoulders shaking. Shippo's tail puffed up, observing her wide smile with slight unease.

"Heh, he's pretty good," she flashed a sharp grin, cheeks glowing. "This is fun. Who knew such a stuffy guy could be playful."

Shippo tilted his head to the side, not exactly understanding but smiling anyway. "Let's go with plan B!" he encouraged.

Kagome nodded with determination.

---

Typically during the afternoon portion of his visit, Sesshoumaru would leave Rin to her duties and go recline against a tree situated near a small lake, sometimes reading. Following this ritual, the Daiyoukai now sat at the base of a tree and drew up one knee. Drinking in the quiet serenity of the picturesque scenery, Sesshoumaru leaned his head back and looked out at the glittering water-

-only to notice a reed moving.

Raising a brow, he blinked. Relaxed muscles then stiffened, and he reacted seconds before Kagome lunged up from within the water, a waterproof camera in hand and reed clutched between her teeth as a breathing tube.

Yanking her camera up, Kagome's victorious expression changed the second she registered red youki cloaking his form, curling around it like a thick mist.

By the time his energy dissipated, a giant silver furred inuyoukai towered above her.

Blue eyes widened, which only caused the smirk to grow wider on his feral jaws. Sesshoumaru slammed a paw down into the water.

Yelping, Kagome was soon consumed in a mini tidal wave.

By the time she'd surfaced, coughing and minding slick hair away from her face, the dog demon had trotted away, tail swishing behind him with an arrogant flair. Kagome glared and trudged to shore, leaving soggy footsteps on the sand.

"Uh...Plan C?" Shippo chanced weakly, hopping out of some bushes.

Kagome nodded, sputtering some lake water from her mouth. "Plan C."

---

The way she figured, Sesshoumaru was one of the fastest beings alive. Yet with every attempt to take his photo, he'd not turned tail and ran once, instead meeting her head-on.

This led her to believe that if she could distract him with enough things, he'd stay rooted to the spot out of sheer bullheaded pride but be too overwhelmed to react as she took a photo.

With all this in mind, Kagome adjusted the bow and quiver of arrows over her shoulder before gripping a saddle and unsteadily climbing onto the back of a horse.

"Are you sure this is a good idea?" Shippo said, tail twitching worriedly as he gazed up at the tall steed.

"Kaede said she didn't mind me borrowing her horse, I don't see the problem," Kagome wobbled and clutched at the reins.

"But you don't even know how to ride a horse!"

"I know the basics," she huffed, clicking her tongue and urging the horse into a walk. "See? Easy. Now, let's just do this as we practised and it'll run smoothly," touching the camera hanging around her neck, she grinned.

The fox demon hurried alongside the horse to keep up with her. "When we practised you weren't on a horse," he mumbled worriedly. "Can we go through it again, just to check?"

"Oh alright, worry-wort," Kagome smiled. "Sesshoumaru is going to come from that direction," she pointed further along the dirt road. "You'll burst out of the forest and turn into a smoke bomb to disorientate him. I'm going to come galloping by and release one of these," Kagome touched the fletching of an arrow. "Which has been modified to be soft pointed and filled with a strong perfume that'll release on contact. This'll temporarily daze him further while the smoke clears- and when that happens, I'll loop around him and snap my picture."

Shippo continued on all-fours, frowning to himself. "I'm still not too confident in my smoke bomb illusion though."

"I know you can do it," she smiled. "Don't sell yourself short."

"But maybe something else would work better, like this-" he hopped up and burst into his floating pink ball form with a loud 'pop!'

The horse suddenly reared, making a whinny of distress, eyes wide with fright. Kagome gasped, clinging to it's back and yelping as it bolted.

Shippo gaped and popped back into his regular form, watching her image draw further away at a breakneck speed. "Kagome!"

Squeezing her eyes shut and feeling the horse gallop with powerful strides that threatened to knock her off, all she could do was cling to its neck. The reins flailed in the air- and if she could just grab them and pull the beast to halt, maybe he would stop. Kagome whimpered, body jolting from the movement. Cracking open fearful blue eyes and trying to reach for them- she felt her thigh slip slightly. Quickly abandoning that idea, she clung like a madwoman, tears stinging her lashes from the breeze racing by.

I screwed up! This was a terrible idea!

Looking ahead of them with mild disorientation caused her breath to hitch the second she caught sight of a pale figure. She stiffened.

Sesshoumaru stood on the road. They were headed right for him!

"Sesshoumaru!" she cried, trying to get across to move aside.

The Daiyoukai observed them with a frosty expression, slowly raising his claws.

Noticing the toxins colouring them green, her eyes widened. "Don't hurt him!" she burst. The fault lay with her, not the horse.

Sesshoumaru's eyes flickered with mild frustration. He then leapt up in the air to avoid a collision, floating above their heads. The sight of him became blurry because of tear-filled eyes, and Kagome ducked her head into the horse's mane.

Speeding before them again and landing, Sesshoumaru then drew his sword. Lifting it- he then slammed the blade into the earth. Bakusaiga emitted a large burst of green youki, skittering over the ground in a wide arch that flashed like minty lightning.

The horse skidded to a stop, kicking up dirt and neighing, rearing back on hind legs. Kagome gasped, unprepared for the movement- but clinging hard.

Slamming both hooves down and whickering, the horse panted wildly, finally still. Feeling hands slide under her numb thighs and wrap around her torso, Kagome stiffly unfolded from the saddle, placing her hands on broad shoulders as she was lifted down.

Kagome buried her face in the demon's neck, shuddering violently. She muffled sobs into his flesh, gripping his exquisite silks so tight her knuckles bled white.

Sesshoumaru held her without a word, nose dipping into windswept dark hair.

When Shippo finally caught up, having pursed on all fours, he jumped up into her arms and wailed louder than she, crying and nuzzling the frazzled miko.

Calming and smiling tiredly, she petted his soft red hair, looking up at Sesshoumaru. He gazed back, face closer than expected. He then shifted mokomoko beneath her legs to support her weight, picking up the reins of the horse and leaving the road.

"Are you angry with me?" she muttered, feeling the tension in his frame.

"Answer me this; can you ride horses?"

"N-no..."

"Then you were foolish," Sesshoumaru bit out. "But one cannot completely predict horses. I do not care for them," he threw a glare over his shoulder at the steed dutifully following them. He then released a hard exhale through his nose, levelling a frown at her. "Never do something so ridiculous again for a game, miko. My picture is not worth injury...or worse."

Kagome rested her cheek against his furs, looking up at him and feeling a twinge in her chest. His worry felt better than any blanket and hot cocoa could right then.

Noticing what direction he headed in, Kagome touched a striped cheek. "L-let's not head to the village just yet. I'd rather...calm down in the forest somewhere."

Sesshoumaru rose a brow but nodded, feet shifting and changing direction, walking beneath the shadows of the trees.

---

She felt glad of the quiet, the calm serenity surrounding their afternoon after all the chaos earlier. The horse grazed within a clearing near the lake, seeming to comfort eat. Shippo had fallen asleep, curled into a ball at her side. Kagome quietly sketched with a notebook and pencil in hand, sitting against a tree. Opposite her, Sesshoumaru reclined against his own, gazing at the scenery with a touch of daydream hazing his eyes. The light bathed his hair in a gentle glow, eyes the colour of milky honey instead of the usual burning embers.

So lost in thought was he that Kagome smiled. She then cleared her throat to gain his languid attention, turning the sketchbook around so that the page faced him.

"I win," she said softly.

Surprise slackened his expression, attention flitting over the paper where his likeness lay with impressive attention to detail. The pencil shading captured the soft shadows of his face, the richer, darker tones coloured his chest armour. Even the long silver hair looked sublime, life-like. Somehow the minute details and the idea of her watching- staring at him for so long made his ancient blood heat.

He realised, somewhat belatedly, that this was what he'd sought. Not a quick, cheap snap of a camera, but her willing and arrested attention upon his face.

Sesshoumaru dragged his gaze from the picture to dancing blue eyes.

"Indeed."

Kagome smiled, turning the picture back to gaze at it with affection.

"Why did you desire a picture of this one so badly?" he asked.

Not looking up, she brushed a thumb over the sketches pointed ear. "I like having pictures of my friends. Besides, this is yours now. A thank you gift for saving me."

Sesshoumaru observed her carefully, noticing the quiet fondness gentling her features as she looked at the picture instead of him. Because it was safer than gazing at him.

"Let me see it up close," Sesshoumaru uttered.

Kagome raised her head and blinked but nonetheless rose and walked over. The second she crouched before him- a clawed hand shot out, wrapping around her wrist and tugging.

This resulted in her body swaying forward, nose stopping inches from his as she squeaked.

"You seem to find satisfaction in looking at this one, miko," his voice curled into a teasing tone. "Perhaps this proximity is preferable."

Kagome's mouth turned dry, heart thundering. Setting the sketchbook down and shifting her knees beneath her, she nodded with a shy smile. "Y-yeah...it is. I'm glad you noticed," she murmured, placing her hands on the cool, steady metal of his chest plate. When she did not pull away in rejection, Sesshoumaru's clawed hand slid possessively to her waist. An aristocratic nose brushed hers, mouth hovering close.

"Do you do this with your friends too?"

She huffed, blushing. "No, only with crushes."

Thin lips tugged up at the edges before spreading wider with victory, flashing a fang. Kagome found it perfectly endearing. A rare, beautiful moment she wished she could capture forever. But, as the Daiyoukai guided her mouth to his wickedly grinning one, she figured they had plenty of opportunities to repeat such a soft moment, however many times they wished.

End

#sesskag #skw2020 #Sesshoumaru x Kagome #sesskagweek 2020 #Kagome Higurashi #Sesshoumaru #Inuyasha

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waltereliasmickey · 3 years

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Here is The Walt Disney Company’s official biography of Walter Elias Disney, born 119 years ago.

During a 43-year Hollywood career, which spanned the development of the motion picture medium as a modern American art, Walter Elias Disney, a modern Aesop, established himself and his product as a genuine part of Americana.

David Low, the late British political cartoonist, called Disney "the most significant figure in graphic arts since Leonardo." A pioneer and innovator, and the possessor of one of the most fertile imaginations the world has ever known, Walt Disney, along with members of his staff, received more than 950 honors and citations from throughout the world, including 48 Academy Awards® and 7 Emmys® in his lifetime. Walt Disney's personal awards included honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, the University of Southern California, and UCLA; the Presidential Medal of Freedom; France's Legion of Honor and Officer d'Academie decorations; Thailand's Order of the Crown; Brazil's Order of the Southern Cross; Mexico's Order of the Aztec Eagle; and the Showman of the World Award from the National Association of Theatre Owners.

The creator of Mickey Mouse of Mickey Mouse and founder of Disneyland and Walt Disney World was born in Chicago, Illinois, on December 5, 1901. His father, Elias Disney, was an Irish-Canadian. His mother, Flora Call Disney, was of German-American descent. Walt was one of five children, four boys and a girl.

Raised on a farm near Marceline, Missouri, Walt early became interested in drawing, selling his first sketches to neighbors when he was only seven years old. At McKinley High School in Chicago, Disney divided his attention between drawing and photography, contributing both to the school paper. At night he attended the Academy of Fine Arts.

During the fall of 1918, Disney attempted to enlist for military service. Rejected because he was only 16 years of age, Walt joined the Red Cross and was sent overseas, where he spent a year driving an ambulance and chauffeuring Red Cross officials. His ambulance was covered from stem to stern, not with stock camouflage, but with drawings and cartoons.

After the war, Walt returned to Kansas City, where he began his career as an advertising cartoonist. Here, in 1920, he created and marketed his first original animated cartoons, and later perfected a new method for combining live-action and animation.

In August of 1923, Walt Disney left Kansas City for Hollywood with nothing but a few drawing materials, $40 in his pocket and a completed animated and live-action film. Walt's brother Roy O. Disney was already in California, with an immense amount of sympathy and encouragement, and $250. Pooling their resources, they borrowed an additional $500 and constructed a camera stand in their uncle's garage. Soon, they received an order from New York for the first "Alice Comedy" short, and the brothers began their production operation in the rear of a Hollywood real estate office two blocks away.

On July 13, 1925, Walt married one of his first employees, Lillian Bounds, in Lewiston, Idaho. They were blessed with two daughters — Diane, married to Ron Miller, former president and chief executive officer of Walt Disney Productions; and Sharon Disney Lund, formerly a member of Disney's Board of Directors. The Millers have seven children and Mrs. Lund had three. Mrs. Lund passed away in 1993.

Mickey Mouse was created in 1928, and his talents were first used in a silent cartoon entitled Plane Crazy. However, before the cartoon could be released, sound burst upon the motion picture screen. Thus Mickey made his screen debut in Steamboat Willie, the world's first fully synchronized sound cartoon, which premiered at the Colony Theatre in New York on November 18, 1928.

Walt's drive to perfect the art of animation was endless. Technicolor® was introduced to animation during the production of his "Silly Symphonies." In 1932, the film entitled Flowers and Trees won Walt the first of his 32 personal Academy Awards®. In 1937, he released The Old Mill, the first short subject to utilize the multiplane camera technique.

On December 21 of that same year, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first full-length animated musical feature, premiered at the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles. Produced at the unheard of cost of $1,499,000 during the depths of the Great Depression, the film is still accounted as one of the great feats and imperishable monuments of the motion picture industry. During the next five years, Walt completed such other full-length animated classics as Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi.

In 1940, construction was completed on Disney's Burbank studio, and the staff swelled to more than 1,000 artists, animators, story men and technicians.

During World War II, 94 percent of the Disney facilities were engaged in special government work including the production of training and propaganda films for the armed services, as well as health films which are still shown throughout the world by the U.S. State Department. The remainder of his efforts were devoted to the production of comedy short subjects, deemed highly essential to civilian and military morale.

Disney's 1945 feature, the musical The Three Caballeros, combined live action with the cartoon medium, a process he used successfully in such other features as Song of the South and the highly acclaimed Mary Poppins. In all, 81 features were released by the studio during his lifetime.

Walt's inquisitive mind and keen sense for education through entertainment resulted in the award-winning "True-Life Adventure" series. Through such films as The Living Desert, The Vanishing Prairie, The African Lion and White Wilderness, Disney brought fascinating insights into the world of wild animals and taught the importance of conserving our nation's outdoor heritage.

Disneyland, launched in 1955 as a fabulous $17 million Magic Kingdom, soon increased its investment tenfold and entertained, by its fourth decade, more than 400 million people, including presidents, kings and queens and royalty from all over the globe.

A pioneer in the field of television programming, Disney began production in 1954, and was among the first to present full-color programming with his Wonderful World of Color in 1961. The Mickey Mouse Club and Zorro were popular favorites in the 1950s.

But that was only the beginning. In 1965, Walt Disney turned his attention toward the problem of improving the quality of urban life in America. He personally directed the design on an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or EPCOT, planned as a living showcase for the creativity of American industry.

Said Disney, "I don't believe there is a challenge anywhere in the world that is more important to people everywhere than finding the solution to the problems of our cities. But where do we begin? Well, we're convinced we must start with the public need. And the need is not just for curing the old ills of old cities. We think the need is for starting from scratch on virgin land and building a community that will become a prototype for the future."

Thus, Disney directed the purchase of 43 square miles of virgin land — twice the size of Manhattan Island — in the center of the state of Florida. Here, he master planned a whole new Disney world of entertainment to include a new amusement theme park, motel-hotel resort vacation center and his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.

After more than seven years of master planning and preparation, including 52 months of actual construction, Walt Disney World opened to the public as scheduled on October 1, 1971. Epcot Center opened on October 1, 1982.

Prior to his death on December 15, 1966, Walt Disney took a deep interest in the establishment of California Insitute of the Arts, a college level, professional school of all the creative and performing arts. Of Cal Arts, Walt once said, "It's the principal thing I hope to leave when I move on to greener pastures. If I can help provide a place to develop the talent of the future, I think I will have accomplished something."

California Institute of the Arts was founded in 1961 with the amalgamation of two schools, the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music and Chouinard Art Institute. The campus is located in the city of Valencia, 32 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles.

Walt Disney conceived the new school as a place where all the performing and creative arts would be taught under one roof in a "community of the arts" as a completely new approach to professional arts training.

Walt Disney is a legend, a folk hero of the 20th century. His worldwide popularity was based upon the ideas which his name represents: imagination, optimism and self-made success in the American tradition. Walt Disney did more to touch the hearts, minds and emotions of millions of Americans than any other man in the past century.

Through his work, he brought joy, happiness and a universal means of communication to the people of every nation. Certainly, our world shall know but one Walt Disney.

#walt disney #walter elias disney #biography #biografia

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pretoriuspictures · 3 years

Photo

https://www.talkhouse.com/on-the-virtues-of-cinematic-failure/

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Most journalists who have spoken to me about my new erotic drama PVT Chat (starring Peter Vack and Julia Fox and streaming now on most VOD platforms) assume it’s my first feature film. Actually, it’s my third. My first two features never played a single film festival and haven’t been seen by more than a few hundred people (mostly friends and/or curious followers of my rock band, Bodega). They were financial failures (even though they were made extremely cheaply), but you couldn’t call them critical failures because nobody has ever reviewed them. I spent the last decade working on these films and yet their cultural footprint is practically nonexistent.

Despite that, I still believe in them and hope one day I’ll make a movie (or record) that inspires people to seek them out. My early cinematic attempts certainly failed at behaving like normal movies, but to me it is precisely this failure that makes them interesting.

Godard said of Pierrot le Fou (1965), “It’s not really a film. It’s an attempt at a film.” This is a purposefully cryptic statement, but I think I understand what he meant. There is a sketch-like quality to his films from that period. He was less interested in following a particular plot through to its conclusion than suggesting narrative ideas and moving on. He enjoyed employing classical narrative tropes but didn’t want to waste screen time on the proper pacing required to sell those tropes to an audience. Instead he filled his screen time with spontaneous personal, poetic, and political ruminations that occurred to him literally on the day of filming. Many found – and still find – this approach infuriating, but for a select number of Godard disciples, like me, this type of filmmaking is still revolutionary. I remember seeing Weekend during my sophomore year of college at the University of South Carolina and having my mind completely ripped open. Suddenly the world wasn’t a small, mediocre, predictable place – it was full of music and color and philosophy and eroticism. There were people out there genuinely disgusted with the status quo and boldly proclaiming it with style.

Godard’s work is a fulfillment of the dream of the caméra-stylo – a term coined in 1948 by Alexandre Astruc that argued it was theoretically possible for someone to compose a film with as much direct personal expression as exists in prose. In order to achieve this level of expression, one often needs to move beyond the realm of mere plot and narrative naturalism, the principle that what you are seeing on screen is real. (On most movie sets, the filmmakers and actors work overtime to sell this illusion.) Films that focus solely on plot, character psychology, and one literary theme have to direct the majority of their screen time toward plotting mechanics and emotional manipulation of the audience. What you gain in dramatic catharsis you often lose in intellectual honesty. There’s always a tradeoff. I am invested in a cinema of the future that veers toward self-expression, but doesn’t need to avoid dramatic catharsis as Godard’s films did. Certainly many filmmakers my age are working to achieve such a synthesis of intellectual directness and narrative pleasure. Experimentation is required and many “bad” films need to be made to pave the way for future successes.

I graduated college in 2010 high on this dream of the caméra-stylo and philosophy (my field of study) and in 2011 started filming my first feature, Annunciation, with experimental filmmaker Simon Liu. Annunciation is an “adaptation” of the Mérode Altarpiece, an early Northern Renaissance oil painting triptych by Robert Campin. The film features three short separate narratives, one for each panel of the famous 15th-century painting. I wanted the performances in Annunciation to be controlled and somewhat surreal, as if the whole film existed in a heightened but slowed-down hypnotic state; I was thinking about Bresson, Ozu, Antonioni and, of course, Godard (particularly his work from the ’80s). There is some plot, but the main goal of the movie was to reveal the miracle of existence in the everyday. And because the Mérode Altarpiece depicts the scene in Christianity where the Virgin Mary was impregnated by light alone, the film had to be shot on 16mm film.

Now picture this: a 22-year-old walks into a conference room in Midtown Manhattan and gives this pitch to a producer who was then investing in thriller movies: “Every time light strikes a piece of celluloid, a miracle similar to the Annunciation scene occurs: an image appears in the likeness of man that redeems our fallen world and reveals it to be the beautiful place that we take for granted in our normal day-to-day.” This wasn’t met with the enthusiasm I was hoping for. “Don’t you see,” I said, “this is a film about the ecstatic of the quotidian! This is a film that audiences will flock to! It could do for Williamsburg and Bushwick what Breathless did for Paris!” Looking back, I am both shocked and charmed by my youthful naiveté, courage and idiocy.

I was laughed out of the room, but the producer was kind enough to wish me good luck and welcomed any future pitches, should I come up with something any “normal” person would want to watch. I never thought of films in the tradition of the caméra-stylo as being elite works only for the gallery or the Academy. I, like Godard before me, have always assumed that audiences are intelligent and long for thoughtful, challenging movies. That belief I carry to this day and thankfully it sometimes seems to be true. How else could you explain the recent success of heady films by Josephine Decker or Miranda July?

Thanks to small donations from family members (and credit cards), I was able to shoot Annunciation without any official backing. I cast the film with a mixture of non-actor friends and some undiscovered Backstage.com talent and dove head first into the production. Right as our principal photography began, Occupy Wall Street gained momentum, so Simon and I spent time at Zuccotti Park filming our actors experiencing the movement. The hopeful promise of OWS seemed to reflect the yearning desire of our film’s protagonists as well as our own idealist cinema experiment.

When the film was finished and edited, I naively assumed that we were well on our way towards global cinematic notoriety. Surely, I thought, this important film that manages to blend fiction with actual footage of OWS would premiere at Cannes or Berlin and the Criterion Collection would issue the DVD shortly after. In actuality, it was rejected from every single film festival we submitted to.

Undeterred, I conceded that maybe there were a few minor structural flaws in the edit. It was probably a little too long and perhaps the three separate narratives would work better if they were crosscut more. A year later, this new edit was again rejected from almost 100 festivals. Stubbornly, I thought that perhaps what could really bring the movie together was a comic voiceover by my then cinematic muse Nick Alden (who is a lead in both Annunciation and my second film, The Lion’s Den). Audiences seemed to ignore the comic tone underlying Annunciation. If only I could unearth it, they wouldn’t be put off by the pretensions to greatness the movie wore on its sleeve. There is nothing so offensive to American audiences as pretentiousness.

I didn’t send the overcooked voiceover version to festivals. I knew it was forced and worked against the core concept of the film. But it was then that I started for the first time to have doubts about Annunciation. Maybe my film wasn’t as emotional or clever as I imagined. Maybe it was bad? “No,” I decided. The film, whatever its flaws may be, has value. Herculean delusions of grandeur come in handy when you are trying to become an artist.

I opted to edit the film back to its original state, but without some of the weaker, obviously didactic moments, then hosted a few local screenings in NYC (most of them at DIY venues where my rock band would play) and put the film up for free on Vimeo. Around this time, it occurred to me that editing Annunciation had been my film school. Failure is a wonderful learning tool. Editing the same raw material in a myriad of different ways taught me about pacing and tone. Still to this day, when I find myself in a certain state of mind, I open up the Final Cut sessions and do a new edit of the footage just for fun, like some sort of DIY George Lucas tinkering with the past. Last year during quarantine, I did a new edit of Annunciation and uploaded it to Vimeo without telling a single person. It has become my own little cinematic sandbox to play in.

When people did chance upon one of my myriad edits, they often commented that they enjoyed its style but found the acting too unnatural. My response to this was to make my next film, The Lion’s Den, a cheaper HDV feature that doubled as a political farce and an essay about naturalism in cinema. The film is about a group of ding-dong radicals who kidnap a Wall Street banker and plan to donate his ransom money to UNICEF so salt pills can be provided for dehydrated children. The UNICEF plot was drawn from Living High and Letting Die, a 1996 work of moral philosophy by Peter K. Unger. It was both a serious attempt at political philosophy and a total slapstick farce; I was imagining the comedy of errors in Renoir’s The Rules of the Game mixed with the Marxist agitprop of Godard’s La Chinoise.

The acting style in The Lion’s Den was purposefully cartoonish; at no point in the film could an audience member believe that what they were seeing was real. I like to think that The Lion’s Den was an attempt at theatre for the camera, part Shakespeare and part Brecht. This was my own personal response to our epoch’s hyperrealism fetish. At the time, I believed that the current obsession with neo-neorealism, mumblecore and reality TV was worth combating. Art with a realistic aesthetic, I thought then, was inherently conservative and accepting of the political status quo (whether the artists were aware of this or not). Art with an imaginative anti-realistic aesthetic, so I thought, was utopian. It opened new vistas and ways of thinking and being. It dared to believe in a more beautiful world than the one we are living in.

The making of The Lion’s Den was extremely difficult. It was by far the hardest thing I have physically done in my life. At the time, I was malnourished and broke, not unlike the character of Jack in PVT Chat; my diet for that month we made the film consisted mostly of coffee, rice and beans, ramen, light beer, and the occasional waffle or fruit smoothie from the vegan frozen yogurt stall I worked at. Unlike Jack, my addiction wasn’t cam girls or internet gambling, but independent filmmaking. I begged, borrowed and scrimped $10,000 to make a film I knew I wouldn’t be able to sell. Despite having some key collaborators near the beginning of the shoot, most of the film was made with just me, the actors and a loyal boom operator, all living together in a house in Staten Island. This meant that I had to assemble all of the cumbersome lights for every setup, handle the art for every scene (which involved a lot of painting), block the scene and direct the actors, throw the camera on my shoulder and film, and then at the end of the day transfer the footage while logging the Screen Actors Guild reports and creating the call sheets for the next day’s scenes. Exhausted both mentally and physically, I often couldn’t stand up at the end of the day’s filming.

Once we’d wrapped and everyone had gone home, I stood in the middle of our set and played Beethoven on my headphones. Within seconds, I began bawling my eyes out, partly from exhaustion but also from the melancholy that all my friends had left and I was now alone for the first time in a month. I collapsed and slept for hours. When I woke up, it was my 26th birthday. I celebrated by watching Citizen Kane alone and then started the process of painting the walls back to a neutral white. The actor Kevin Moccia (who has been in all three of my films and actually works as a house painter) heroically came back to set and helped me. I told him that despite all of the agony of the past weeks (my bank account was now in the red, with overdraft fees piling up), I was happier than I had ever been. Working passionately on something that has great value to you is, without a doubt, the key to happiness.

Shortly after returning to the real world and my job at the vegan yogurt shop, I passed out while on the clock and was taken to a hospital by my very supportive girlfriend. Turns out, all I needed was an IV and some nutrients to get back on my feet, but unfortunately the trouble with The Lion’s Den had just begun. At some point, I formatted the production audio memory card and, in one instant, accidentally deleted everything on it. For the next two years, my friend Brian Goodheart and I worked with all of the actors to dub all of the dialogue and sound effects in the movie. Each actor had to completely re-do their verbal performance. It felt like remaking the entire movie. The result made the film especially un-naturalistic (which pleased me at the time) and it turned out far better than I think Brian and I expected.

By then, I had some hopes that The Lion’s Den could reach a small audience. It is aggressively philosophical but also features a love triangle, a car chase and a final shootout. Its comic style, I was hoping, would attract people who were put off by the purposeful flatness of Annunciation. Nevertheless, the movie was also rejected from every conceivable festival. I now realized that submitting an aggressively experimental narrative film without a single famous person in it to festivals is basically like flushing your money down the toilet. Yet I continued submitting, like an addict at a casino putting all of their savings on the roulette table. You never know, right?

In hindsight, I now see The Lion’s Den as a very angry film that perhaps uses comedy to soften the blow of some of its hotheaded fervor, and suspect some of its critique of capitalism and naturalism came from hurt and jealousy. “You think my work isn’t natural enough, eh? I’ll show you motherfuckers naturalism!”

Sometime in 2017, to my surprise I became smitten with certain neo-neorealist filmmakers (Joe Swanberg, in particular) and decided I wanted in on the mumblecore party, albeit from my own outsider perspective. I began to see how I could work symbolically with naturalistic performances, which led me to my latest film. PVT Chat is by no means a work of strict realism, but nevertheless focuses on believable dramatic performances. The film’s cast blends some actors from my past work (Kevin Moccia, Nikki Belfiglio, David White) with some heroes of the modern neo-neorealist indie cinema (Peter Vack, Julia Fox, Buddy Duress, Keith Poulson).

I want to end with a bit of advice to other filmmakers: Don’t put your self-worth into the hands of festival reviewers or distributors. The future of the moving image will belong to the films that are willing to risk cinematic failure. If you make an earnest film that doesn’t behave like a normal movie, I want to see it, even if it is full of technical or narrative mistakes (which it most likely will be). There’s no right way to make a movie. Follow the dream of the caméra-stylo and make a film that if nobody else made, wouldn’t exist.

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eleedsfineartblog · 3 years

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THOUGHTS ABOUT MY WORK 03-03-2021

My main goals in my last update were to keep on attending workshops and artist talks and step up my video work by incorporating sound and learning how to use more advanced software - and I am happy to say that I think I’ve been keeping up with these goals pretty well!

So far, I have enjoyed working with mediums such as videography, photography, projection, and digital image manipulation. A lot of what I have done has been mostly experimental, nothing that I would define as "finished works" by any means for there is a lot of room for development in everything I have explored. However, pieces such as Incoherence + Nonsense and my photography series A State Between States are a little more polished and are the result of honing in on and combining some of the more experimental work I have done prior.

I have continued to explore my relationship with home, using my room as a headquarters for my practice and pushing the limits of what I can do in such a limited space with limited materials, building on my own emotions to activate a space. In my work, there is still the running theme of transition and liminality, which is something I am really pleased that people are picking up on when I show them my work without me having to explain that this was the intention. Some other feedback I have gotten from my peers is that my work reminds them of occult themes or of faded dreams or memories, which are both really interesting readings of the work and definitely things I am interested in looking into and perhaps intentionally incorporating.

On the topic of expanding thematically, I have noticed that there has been a natural evolution in my work that has caused me to present myself as an otherworldly creature, such as a ghost or spirit stuck between realms, haunting my environment. I think this may be a result of my wavering, but slowly growing, confidence in showing my own body in my work which causes me to blur or obscure myself from the viewer like I am only half there. I am really interested in the idea of me playing a ghost-like character in my work that is more of an extension of myself rather than a straight portrayal of myself. In the past, I have been very uncomfortable videoing or photographing myself but it is something I am learning to get more confident with, inspired by great artists such as Shana Moulton and Francesca Woodman whose work, though vastly different in delivery, both involve the artist’s body.

I have stepped up my video art by taking some workshops going over the basics of using Adobe After Effects. Having access to more advanced software has really opened up a broader range of paths I can go down in terms of video and installation work. Pieces such as Incoherence + Nonsense could not have been possible if I didn’t do any exploring in this program so I’m really glad that I took a bit of time to learn how to use it. I have only scratched the surface of how elements such as motion graphics and green screens can be used in my art work, but I definitely see it having a big part in my artistic process in the future.

Also on the topic of learning new software, I have continued doing workshops with the EMS department on topics such as augmented reality, virtual reality, 3D printing, and 3D scanning. I am finding these sessions super interesting and I have been experimenting a bit with using basic apps to do 3D scans of objects in my room. I am still in the process of figuring out how to implement these things into my practice, but at the moment I am okay with just attending the workshops and learning all that I can about this new media - I am thinking that these sorts of techniques will be easier to implement into my practice when I am back on campus and able to get access to more equipment and guidance.

I have been really enjoying the work I have been creating, yet I am inclined to shake things up a bit and to see what new ideas can arise. I am considering expanding the mediums of working and seeing how painting, collage, or sculpture can incorporate themselves into my artistic practice and if I can relate these things to what I have been doing with photography and video. On one hand, I am thinking that such work should be left to explore within my reconsidering drawing module, for I already have a lot of avenues I can go down with digital work. Yet I don't think having a go at different things can harm my work and I think it would be really interesting to see how the themes I have been working within translate into more tactile mediums.

This is not to say that I don't want to do more photography/video experiments going on the side of my new experiments, because I have a lot of ideas in my head that I want to try out. I’m the kind of person that likes to have a few different things on the go at once so it would be good for me to bring some new ways of working into the mix as well as build upon things I have already done. I have got into the habit of drawing in my sketchbook regularly. Sketching is a really useful way for me to get my ideas down on paper before I forget about them. I might not have time to explore each idea at the time but it is useful to have a collection of scribbles to go back to for inspiration when I get stuck with what to do next. I’m not the best at drawing but perhaps these sketches could transform into a work of their own somehow.

At the moment, I don’t have any ideas for a final piece in mind for this project - I am just following what my intuition is telling me and playing around with all of these smaller ideas I have going on in my head. I think further down the line an installation like those by multimedia artist Laure Provost would be interesting where I display lots of different pieces in the same space as a multimedia/multi sensory experience. However, at this point in time, I’m still in the experimental phase of my project.

However, for the time being, my main goal is to keep exploring new mediums and push myself out of my photography/video comfort zone. Not to say that I am not going to continue to develop the work I have been doing, I just want to expand my practice even further and get more experimental. Let's see how it goes!

#art #fine art #artist #art student

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drawinginwater · 4 years

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Evaluation ‘Belonging my place’

Artists who have impacted my work are Egon Shiele, Robert Rauschenberg and Stanley Donwood. Each of these artists have impacted differently to my whole project. From Egon’s strange mutated faces-that I took inspiration from and included in lot of my work, to Robert’s eclectic range of imagery. When covering Egon’s work in Derek’s sessions, and when I worked back into the weird portraits, I was greatly inspired by the way he works and the way he portrays his lines in a free-flowing manner. Thus making his figures disproportional, I managed to capture that in some of the things I drew and created. Although I didn’t use his style of work for my mixed media boards, he greatly influenced a lot of my sketch book and portfolio work. (include images). Stanley Donwood influenced a lot of my print making work throughout my sketch book, where monochrome and contrasting lines and making sure there was enough positive and negative space, which he showed throughout all his work, especially his lino prints. Almost all my prints were inspired by the way he worked, also Ross Loveday was a positive influence when it came to my dry point work, as his prints were very paint-like and abstract. Robert Rauschenberg influenced the way I laid out and created my mixed media boards, over lapping things, adding different materials and textures painting over things it was definitely inspired by his work and style. In the end, the outcomes were a lot more neat and precise compared to his work, simply because that’s how I wanted it.

My concepts and ideas:-

Initially my ideas were to do my family, however, I thought that would be a bit too basic, so I decided to go with things I enjoy and make me feel happy, such as hobbies pets etc.

I based both boards on these ideas. Outcome one was all about my cats and love for music and instruments. I played around with materials and compositions, making the end result almost symmetrical. I decided to put these things together on a board because they are the things I see and do daily that make me feel happy and like I belong. The second idea that came to my mind instantly was my boyfriend, he makes me feel super happy and safe and is a huge part of my life, when deciding on what to print and draw. I didn’t want something too obvious, so when someone looked at it they couldn’t tell it was just about my boyfriend. I included places we have been, as we go on lots of walks, and zoo animals from when we visited in the summer. Those were my thought processes for the boards, and in turn, I drew and printed lots of things based on these ideas.

Throughout the project I have experimented with a lot of print making techniques such as Lino, screen printing, dry printing and intaglio. I also did a lot of fine liner work with blind drawings, continuous line drawings and left hand drawings etc. I had to learn how to not be so precious over something and not worry too much if something isn’t how I wanted it to turn out. I learnt how to screen print, it was definitely a fun process that took some time to get used to and perfect, but once I got the hang of that my prints turned out really well with a few that didn’t work out, but that’s part of the process.

Things I learnt from Thursday’s lessons were to create more abstract art and to be able to draw quicker, creating pieces from nothing. Thursday was definitely an experimental day and something out of my comfort zone. This allowed me to create things I wouldn’t necessarily do normally. Some of the things I gained from those lessons I will definitely use and remember for future projects.

The one piece of art which I think was really successful, was the Lino print of my cat Storm I really like how all my lino prints turned out, with them being really vibrant and colourful with some of them being textured and unique. The process of creating the lino print was informative and I really want to expand my knowledge in this area.

The process from initial ideas to the end results was a big learning curve, from learning how to print and cut lino safely, to being more open about making mistakes it was definitely an eye-opener, from doing strange portraits on a Thursday to detailed drawings on my day off, the overall project was really interesting and I learnt a lot from it.

Perhaps I would liken my work to that of Andy Warhol, in that I feel my pieces work well with the contrasting colours and repetition of prints, it would fit in well amongst work in that era. As lots of Andy Warhol’s prints have many bright colours, similar to that of my screen prints, so I feel it would definitely work.

My final boards and words to describe them

· Colourful

· Bold

· Simple

· Harsh lines

· Expressive

· Emotive

· Contrasting

· Blended colours

· Symmetrical

· Intricate

If I were to have music as soundtrack for my outcomes, these would be my choices because these would be the songs I would listen to whilst creating the art work so I would definitely include these in a soundtrack.

· Dancing in the moonlight – Toploader

· Build me up buttercup – The Foundations

· Born to die – Lana del Rey

· Radio – Lana del Rey

· Burning pile – Mother Mother

· Fake plastic trees – Radiohead

· Sparks – Coldplay

I would spend around 10-15 hours a week, either on my days off or weekends, depending how much I have achieved in the time I had off, leaving enough time to do other things that I need to do in my life.

From starting the project I can now screen print and lino print successfully.

My initial ideas developed throughout the project, from just words on some paper to lots of varied drawings, detailed ones to abstract landscape, all linking to my theme one way or another, combining those ideas and drawings I came up with different compositions for my outcomes. I even used some of the drawings on my board, I learnt many techniques throughout this course and wanted to include them on my final boards. A lot of my research I was able to link back to my work, such as Andy Warhol and Stanley Donwood, who really influenced my print making and designs . Jemma Gunning also influenced my intaglio prints, as I wanted to recreate a smudged background like she had. Throughout the project many artists influenced the way I worked and created things. My artistic skills developed throughout the project into my mixed media boards with links to many different drawings I have done and artists I have researched.

( sadly I could only include 10 images per post all other drawings and artists work you can find through out my blog )

#abstract #art #painting #artists on tumblr #portrait #portraiture #traditional art #photography #sculpture #cats

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esmelbye · 3 years

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Final evaluation

flow map

1st step: research.

inspiring

sparks ideas

interesting

2nd step: creating my tower

looming

towering

tall

3rd step: photoshop

bright

bold

striking

4th step: taking it further

pastel

cool tone

graphic

during this project I have used a variety of processes. I started by sketching out designs on paper. Drawing the tower in different mediums. When i took the photo of my homemade tower i made sure to get a low down angle so the tower appeared taller than it is. The mediums i used to draw my initial sketches was pencil, fine liners and pastels.

I decided to start using an app to edit my tower in different ways, I created a few different outcomes with this. I used an app called Bazaart to do this with.

I began doing this by editing out the back ground with the “magic” option, this basically cuts around the main object and removes the background for you.

I played around with a few different options and decided to duplicate my tower. I wanted them to look like a city of abstract tower buildings.

Here are the two I liked most that I did. I think the more colourful one looks the best. The way the colours all go together to create a mellow atmosphere is calming. As well as the block colour adding to the graphic style of the piece.

I took my tower to photoshop next. My outcome from this is a bright, graphic piece that has the texture of a screen print.

I am a fan of abstract art and I wanted to go this direction with this. I decided to keep everything very minimal as I wanted the texture to be as visibal as it could.

I loved all the different processes, I like how with photoshop you have a lot more control and features to use. But even so I actually like the outcomes that I made using the editing app on my phone. I never thought making good art on your phone was possible, but now I’ve tried it I will definitely be using this a lot more in the future.

A problem I had when working on this project was when I was using photoshop. I had just finished drawing the blocks of colour in the tower when I realised I hadn’t made a new layer for it. I tried using tools that help to select the object you’re trying to keep, but everything would rub out ! So I had to carefully erase all on the background with the eraser. This was a little bit time consuming, but it’s definitely made me check twice for layer placement when using photoshop.

From my initial works and research, I managed to create a variety of different graphic style art. They are digital collages of colour and texture. From drawing and sketching out ideas I developed that into photo editing experimentation and then finally took it to photoshop to test out my skills on there.

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studiesinconnoisseurship · 4 years

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Vermeer

Inside my copy of Ludwig Goldsheider's Phaidon Press Vermeer I wrote my name and the date of purchase, 1958. I was then fourteen years old. The battered volume is a record, therefore, of an attraction to this artist that stretches back to childhood. Not unnaturally I would like to find a way to acknowledge all that he has meant to me over the intervening years. I have no gift to write of his art like Lawrence Gowing - still less like Proust - but in any case my preference is to use connoisseurship to extend, if possible, our understanding of his oeuvre by seeing if there are viable addenda that can be appended to it; and that is the main purpose of this Study. A secondary aim is to draw attention to the dangers involved in 'cleaning' what we already have. By way of caveat I urge any readers I may have not to expect everything adduced to look like their idea of 'a Vermeer'. Connoisseurship has to allow for development. An early Cézanne does not look much like a late one.

To begin at the beginning of Vermeer's career as a painter is chronologically proper but somewhat frustrating because we know that he is farthest from where he needs to be and where we wish him to be. Through his and his father's picture-dealing he comes into contact with Italian paintings of a religious and mythological nature which encourage him to try his hand in a similar vein. What survives of this derivative, experimental period is the St Praxedis - his version of a composition by a Florentine artist Felice Ficherelli - and the Diana and her Companions.

St Praxedis by Ficherelli (left) and Vermeer’s copy (right)

Being by Vermeer, these are not bad pictures; indeed the St Praxedis is that rare thing, a copy better than its original. In both works there is a fluency of brushwork, a Baroque rhythm, and a palette that at this stage includes a yellow, a deep blue, a winey brown, and a rose red that, mixed with white, becomes a violet.

I can only suggest one work to add to this early phase of Vermeer's oeuvre and that is a picture of the head and shoulders of a rosy-cheeked girl.

Portrait of a Girl by De Bray (left) and detail of St Praxedis (right)

When it passed through the hands of a London dealer (Chaucer Fine Arts) in 1989 it was attributed, not very accurately, to Jan de Bray. The face is painted in a style hard to reconcile with any of the young female faces in later Vermeer, but it does seem close to that of St Praxedis and to the facial types in the Diana picture. Common to all of them are the rose-white-violet juxtaposition, the swirling drapery and soft sfumato.

Christ at the House of Mary and Martha (National Gallery Scotland)

With the large ‘Christ in the house of Mary and Martha’ at Edinburgh we may be moving backwards rather than forwards chronologically, but Vermeer seems recognizably more Vermeerish. He is still in his broad-brush Religion and Myth phase but the religion is as domesticated as it can be in that story of Mary and Martha, so one feels that he is moving towards the territory that he will make his own. Even in the earliest pictures it is noticeable how women predominate as we know that they will in the future. On the relative merits of Mary’s life and Martha’s, Vermeer's art is, and remains, tacitly neutral: it pays tribute to both. As if to illustrate this there is a study in watercolour for the figure of Mary, and a drawing that is not for the figure of Martha (being stylistically later) but certainly alludes to her servant role.

In the Printroom at Leipzig is a remarkable wash drawing which Bernhard Degenhart included in an anthology of European drawings (Europaisches Handzeichnungen) published at Dresden in 1943 as the work of the landscapist Jan Siberechts.

Drawing attributed to Siberechts (Leipzig) and detail of Martha

That attribution can be dismissed because there is nothing in Siberechts to support it beyond the flimsy fact of there being a landscape drawing on the verso. The little pen sketches of figures at the top and lower right of the sheet are by another artist; disregarding those, I think that there is a strong possibility that what we have here is a study by Vermeer for the figure of Mary in the Edinburgh picture; there the listening head is swivelled a little further round towards Christ. The light in consequence falls differently, but otherwise the similarities are close: there is the same profile with slightly parted lips, the same headcloth with the same striped pattern on it, and the same bright lighting from our left if we allow for the turn of her head.

It is the dramatic lighting, with maximum contrast in the folds of drapery and in the face too, not of Mary in the picture (now in shadow) but of Martha, that most accosts me. I notice as well the jugular vein in the neck of Christ. The wash is applied quickly but with complete assurance. The shadowed area of the face is conveyed in a manner that looks forward to the shadowed halves of the two heads in Washington, the Girl with a Red Hat and the Girl with a Flute.

Girl with a Red Hat (left) and Girl with a Flute (right) (National Gallery Washington)

The strange wavy border that the bright light creates on her cheek, from the near edge of her eye down to her chin is typical of Vermeer’s observation of light, how it produces form, without line, in the most surprising ways. In this respect the Leipzig drawing seems more advanced and prophetic of his future powers than the painting.

The Leipzig drawing, as we have seen, is scarcely a drawing in the linear sense at all, but at Besançon there is a sketch of a more conventional kind. In what becomes his favoured graphic medium - black chalk heightened with white on blue paper - it shows a servant holding a shallow circular basket or tray.

Woman with Tray signed ‘De Hoogh’ (De Hooch)

She is probably not a study for Martha, but one can see the folds of her sleeve following the pattern of light and shadow that is distinctive at Edinburgh in the sleeves of all three participants but more particularly on Christ’s outstretched arm. Her face has the signature oval shape and high-arched brows.

Portrait of a Lady (Royal Collection Windsor)

A third drawing may still be quite early but marks a change to something less loose, less generic, much more personal. This is in the Royal Collection at Windsor, a ‘Portrait of a Lady, Anonymous, Flemish school 91/2 x 7in, black chalk on white paper with red chalk for the flesh and the necklace of pearls’. The cataloguist comments that it is the ‘work of a follower of Rubens lacking peculiar characteristics’. If we stop thinking about Rubens, perhaps its characteristics will start to seem more peculiar, and peculiar, I suggest, to Vermeer. It is likely to be later in date than the Edinburgh picture, but the similarity of facial features if we compare the profile of this middle-aged woman with that of Christ is, for me, compelling.

Detail of Christ at the House of Mary and Martha (left) and Portrait of a Lady (right)

It cannot be proven but my hunch is that this tender portrait is of Catarina Bolnes, Vermeer’s wife, bearer of their many children, and also likely model for the painting at Amsterdam of the pregnant Woman in Blue reading a Letter.

Woman in Blue and detail of face (Rijksmuseum)

Placing her tête-a-tête with Christ and putting aside the double chin so truthfully recorded, notice the mouth, the cupid’s bow upper lip and projecting lower, the depth of the upper eyelid, and the straight nose that nevertheless marks where the bone ends and softness begins. As for ribbons and pearls, they are fashion accessories worn by women in the paintings of other Dutch artists, so their presence in this drawing can only be corroborative evidence; still, we know from later paintings by Vermeer how much he liked his family members to sit or stand for him wearing these adornments, particularly pearls because they represented drops of light.

Whether or not I am right about Catarina, this sensitive, fairly rapid sketch does demonstrate that Vermeer needed to make drawings of his models. The camera oscura was invaluable for helping to accurately determine how furniture and figures are disposed within a chosen perspective, but that tool does not solve everything and I always thought it probable that for the faces at least he would have made some preliminary studies in chalk or oil paint on paper, even if no such drawings survived. Fortunately, as already suggested, a few have, and this is a particularly beautiful example.

Portrait of a Young Man - Anonymous

At Rennes in France there is another close-up drawing, of a youngish man's face, his eyes directed down to our left as we look up. This is texturally very similar to the Windsor drawing, but it more particularly demonstrates three features found in the paintings. One is the drawing of the eyes, the almond shape of the eye itself, the broad strap of upper lid, and the elevated brow. This is famously clear in the Girl with a Pearl Earring at the Mauritshuis, but also in the Kenwood Girl with a Guitar, the Wrightsman Study of a Young Woman (Metropolitan Museum NY) and the two close-ups at Washington, Girl with a Red Hat and Girl with a Flute.

Details clockwise from top left: Girl with a Pearl Earring, Study of a Young Woman, Girl with a Guitar, Portrait of a Young Man, Girl with a Red Hat, Girl with a Flute

A second feature is the lips being parted, as in several of the works just cited. A third is the generous oval or elliptical shape of the face as a whole, which is the result of underplaying the chin and cheekbones.

Studienkopf - Study of a Boy’s Head, attributed to Vermeer

‘Oil paint on paper’ and the above remarks about oval faces are a cue to insert here a small study of a face in that medium that is in the Berlin Printroom. This has long been attributed to Vermeer, not by all but by many scholars from 1907 onwards. It bears all the signs of being by his hand and, besides being a fine and precious thing in itself, is a helpful link to other things. Notice, again, the shape of face that is different from what we find in other artists’ work, the mouth with its wavy upper and sensuous lower lip, a certain relationship and distance between eyebrow and eye, and of course the light that shapes everything. Whether this is an abandoned self-portrait no one can say for sure, but it could be. If one looks hard at oneself in a mirror, the eyes do narrow and squint a little, producing the fixed ‘tunnel’ gaze that this face returns to us so straightly and directly while giving, it must be said, nothing away (but what else would one expect of Vermeer?).

Singender Jüngling - no attribution

From Berlin to Vienna now, and from oil on paper to oil on oak: a small panel in the Kunsthistorisches Museum. This is of a young man singing (Singender Jüngling). The piece of paper he is holding does seem to be a sheet of music and as he is turned towards us with his mouth open he is probably singing, not talking to us about a letter. In any case what matters is that a living moment is caught in a turn of attention with a turn of the head, and thereby temporally and pictorially stopped for ever, as happens over and over in Vermeer. Is this picture by Vermeer? I offer it for consideration. If it is, it is not classic mature Vermeer, nor on the other hand is it very early. I would place it close to the Boston Concert (now sadly missing), the Frick ‘Girl Interrupted At Her Music’, the Metropolitan’s Servant Asleep. It is smaller than any of them, only 91/4 x 71/4 inches, the size, roughly, of the Louvre Lace Maker or the two Washington Girls.

The Concert (stolen)

Girl Interrupted at her Music (Frick)

Servant Asleep at a Table (Metropolitan Museum)

At this point the Berlin oil study on paper provides a helpful comparison: for the shape of the face and of the eyes, the form of the lips (albeit closed in Berlin) and for the lighting if one imagines the face at Vienna upright, not tilted, and facing us straight on.

Detail of Singender Jüngling (left) and Studienkopf (right)

As for the palette the wine-dark brown mantle over the Singing Boy’s right arm reminds us of the colours in the dress of the Sleeping Servant and of the companion of Diana who sponges her foot.

Details of Servant Asleep (top) Singender Jüngling (btm left) and Diana’s servant (btm right)

From surviving images of the Boston Concert, we can not be certain but it seems likely that boy's orange ‘beret’ may be comparable with the chairback of that missing artwork.

Orange beret from Singender Jüngling (left) Chair-back from The Concert (right)

Lighting here is from a source to our left, but Vermeer – if it is he - is not yet committed fully to daylight; the boy is lit within an ambient darkness, much as in a Caravaggio or any number of portraits. The other thing to notice is the way the boy is holding the paper with both hands. One might think that numerous Dutch pictures would show hands in a similar position, but it does not appear that this is so; it is, however, a gesture that recurs in Vermeer, in the Lady in Blue at Amsterdam, the Girl Interrupted at he Music in the Frick, in the Dresden Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window and, we shall see, in another putative Vermeer.

Details from Singender Jüngling (top), Woman in Blue (left), Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (centre) and Girl Interrupted at her Music (right)

With the Vienna Singing Youth we are, as noted, not out of dark and into sunlight; we are by no visible window and the light has no sparkle. We are in an enclosed world like that of the tavern or the brothel, the venue of the Procuress at Dresden where what light there is, golden and silent amid the muted voices, seems to move surreptitiously, illuminating part of a collar, a bit of wall, a patch of rug before landing in a blaze on a yellow jacket, a scarlet jerkin, a binary echoed in the carpet.

Here is another large early work, disconcertingly different from what precedes and what follows it. The oil medium is drier here and carefully applied with no broad-brush bravura, no squiggles of highlight. Where in the future it is light that will seem liquid, poured into a room as into a tank, here it is shadow that spreads downward, drowning much of the left side of the picture, all but hiding faces, turning the folds of the carpet into dark ravines, and generally claiming the territory. Here is an artist revealing himself, for now, to be potentially as great a poet of shadow as he will be of light; one is readily reminded of Caravaggio’s Calling of Matthew in Rome.

Detail from The Procuress

If we are to find anything to accompany the Procuress in this possibly short-lived stage in Vermeer's development, it must exhibit that dry handling of paint that we see in the depiction of the woman and her client. Again what I offer is a suggestion appended to a sad admission in this case that I have no idea where the picture is. It is a portrait known to me only as an old photo placed among other portraits that have been attributed at some time or another to Velasquez. It is at any rate not by him. It once belonged to a Mr A. W. Leatham.

Portrait - attribution and whereabouts unknown

Here we clearly see, even in a photo, the dryness; but what lends credence to a Vermeer attribution is the face when one compares it with that of the Berlin oil study: within the same generous oval are the same eyebrows, nose and lips; the eyes in the Leatham picture are much more open but otherwise compatible. If this were to be Vermeer's it would be our only independent painted portrait - of whom we may never know.

Maidservant Warming Her Feet - attributed to Vermeer

In the volume referred to at the top of this essay, the 1958 Phaidon Vermeer by Ludwig Goldscheider, there is one drawing included among the main body of plates, a drawing therefore that Goldscheider clearly thought was definitely by Vermeer. It had been published once before, by H Leporini in 1925, but Goldscheider helpfully reproduces it in its actual size. He calls it Maidservant warming her Feet; the original is in the museum at Weimar. The monochrome reproduction gives one a good idea of the soft graininess of the black chalk finely hatched in strokes that run at right angles to the pose of the seated servant. What cannot be seen are the touches of red chalk added to neck and forearm (much as in the Windsor drawing) or the white heightening that in a photo looks deceptively like the white of the paper though the paper in reality is blue.

Why is this beautiful drawing omitted from subsequent books on Vermeer? Could it be that scholars are sceptical on account of the artist’s monogram V M drawn on the side on the footwarmer? One can agree that this is unusual, but that by itself should not be ground for exclusion; genius can be allowed some eccentricity, and anyway it is not too difficult to imagine that this very finished and presentable drawing was in fact presented to someone, possibly the model for it, and that the monogram was added as a mark of the special occasion or as a token of gratitude or to pay a debt. Nobody suggests that it is an outright fake from a later century, so it has to be of Vermeer's time and I question whether any contemporary could produce a drawing of this quality and of this kind - a drawing where form is defined so consistently by light. This is Vermeer's photographic vision, as it would be Seurat’s in a later age.

The Love Letter - Vermeer’s use of light is comparable to Maidservant Warming Her Feet

The sitter, besides: is surely the family's stalwart servant, Tanneke, the same who pours milk and delivers a letter (in two paintings) and maybe holds a jug as she opens a window.

Details from The Love Letter and Milkmaid for which Vermeer used his maid Tanneke as a model

The date of the drawing is anyone's guess, but it clearly belongs in the period of the great cameral pictures. Another drawing, of unknown whereabouts and less remarkable is of similar facture and shows a servant asleep.

Drawing of a Servant Asleep - unknown

View of Delft by Moonlight - attributed to Vermeer

Scepticism regarding the Weimar drawing seems to have led to doubting generally that any extant drawing is by Vermeer. This is a pity because there is much to be learned from his draughtsmanship. Take this drawing at Frankfurt, a supposed copy of the famous View of Delft from across the canal to the south of the town.

The Original ‘View of Delft’ by Vermeer

Why would a copyist take such liberties with what he is copying from? Why alter the arrangements of the buildings, omit barges, totally change the sky and foreground, remove figures and substitute fishermen in boats? He would be a remarkably inventive copyist who did all that! How much more likely that this is a drawing Vermeer made in situ on a day when there was a busy sky with rain-threatening cloud but with sun behind him that lit the south-facing walls, towers and spires of the town. The painting in the Mauritshuis, like a large ‘Academy’ Constable, is the outcome of onsite visits and studies all of which contributed to his decision-making, but none of which was exclusively determining.

It is very believable that a painter with Vermeer's temperament, seeking always a calm resolution, would not in the end choose a hectic cloudscape, would want to clear the foreground of weeds and bushes, would reject as picturesque a man in a boat who distracts attention from the town across the water, and would decide that the town could not cohere if too many surfaces were lit at the same time across the whole piece. Instead, as we can see in his final consummation, he creates a series of long horizontals from the left, lowers the red- tiled roofline, extends the town wall and the quay, and emphasises all of this with a long placid reflection in the water.

The gap in the reflections comes where the two southern gates of the town connect at the bridge, and that is where he chooses to have the sunlight begin to illumine, not the immediate edge of the town but the buildings beyond and within it; this illumination then continues, ducking and weaving, to the limit of the picture on our right. It can therefore be said to be an outdoor view with an interior, of the town, lit from the right, as only the Lacemaker is among his indoor pictures.

Something curious about the painting vis-a-vis the drawing is the effect created by clearing the foreground of everything except very small figures that lead our eye from a point directly under the reflected left tower of the Rotterdam Gate, across the deserted sandy back to the two women talking, and thence to the group waiting for the ferry at the far left. Vermeer has radically revised in a way that manages to make the town as a whole seem nearer than the foreground figures but as calm and reflective as any of his single figures in a room. At the same time he has concentrated the light in the right half of the picture and given it a warmth to match the pale ochreous emptiness of the foreground that starts from the left, dies towards the right.

Old reproductions of this extraordinary painting show that the cloudscape was perhaps once much more modelled and interesting than it now is. As too often happens, there has been a flattening, a loss of density and volume in clouds that Vermeer knew to have both.

Vermeer’s painting before (left) and after (right) cleaning

If the drawing is original, then it tells us that Vermeer was no different from Ruysdael, Jan van der Cappelle or any of his country's great skyscapists in his understanding that clouds have a superstructure and an undercarriage and as such constitute a sort of moving architecture as they build, dissolve, and build again - a match for earthly buildings shaped by light.

Painting of Maid and Child - attribution and location unknown

The same lesson may be learned from the last item I can offer which, like the Leatham portrait, I know only from a photograph. I do not know its whereabouts or even whether it exists. Coming across the photo lying among unattributed Dutch paintings was nevertheless a memorable moment because I connected the image at once with Vermeer, specifically with his family’s servant, Tanneke, she of The Milkmaid, sitting in her place in the kitchen with a letter held between her hands - in that now familiar position - as she turns aside to attend to a child with a bowl. It seemed clear that the original, of which this may be the only record, was unfinished, abandoned by the artist for whatever reason.

If the original was indeed by Vermeer, then it would be unique among his known works in being a composition with a child in it. Why are there no children in Vermeer's paintings? Did he exclude them because they were too excitable, would never stay still? Did he exclude the elderly because they reminded him of the nearness of death, the fate of too many children of his time, including some of his own? In this case a child does get included, but how securely? Did the artist have doubts? If he took the child out, it would leave the servant looking down to our right for no obvious reason. Her pose is towards our left but her attention is to our right. If the child stays, the chiasm demands something - a small window - in the upper left corner.

Such is the rationale of the image as a composition, but the photo also suggested something about the original’s texture and lighting, factors which go together. What I particularly noticed and was excited by were incipient signs of those lovely beads of light so uniquely characteristic of Vermeer's art.

Details of painting techniques in The Milkmaid (left) and The Glass of Wine (centre) which could be compared with the portrait of Maid and Child

I had supposed that they were last touches, yet the photo appears to make them part of the earlier planning of a picture, prefigured elements in his vision of a scene. If the original ever turned up, we could be satisfied about these technical mysteries.

For myself, I am not sure that I want or need to know how Vermeer painted his pictures; I am reasonably content to marvel at the mysteries and credit them to genius. However, in view of the damage, as I see it, done by conservators to some of the Vermeers that we have in our museums the above old photo from 1947, of a lost picture that passed through the hands of a dealer called Katz, is valuable evidence that from the start of a painting Vermeer knew that what he wanted to record was light, and that light falls in a logical way which creates, according to the time of day, profound areas of shadow that can abut the light with little or no gradation.

Above are two photos using natural light and shadow (left and right) Detail from Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid (centre)

This is most true on a sunny day in the morning, less true by early afternoon. The contrast, clearly visible in the photo, between the lit and shadowed side of a sleeve is extreme. We all know this because we all live in the age of photography, the age that began just before Vermeer started to be rediscovered. Unfortunately for his paintings - and certainly not only his - we also inherit the preoccupations of the twentieth century which to a large extent revolved around the picture plane and its flatness. Combine flatness with iconography, another leading concern, and you get a visual sensibility that finds the pattern on a carpet more important to clarify than the logic of the light which would keep it dark. Here are two photos to illustrate (in the original sense of the word) the contrast that must be respected.

I am not a conservator. Even the thought of surgical intervention in the surface of a Vermeer makes me nervous; but if intervention is ever necessary I think two rules must apply: always respect the logic of the light, and never, if you can help it, reveal the canvas or other support. Vermeer's art is one of illusion, a very poetic and light-sensitive version of trompe l'oeil. Expose the canvas and you destroy the illusion; a wall ceases to ‘be’ a wall and becomes what it mostly is in de Hooch, a bit of brushwork pushed around over a bit of stretched cloth.

In conclusion I hope it is clear that drawings and even old photos can tell us important things about the essential nature of an artist's vision, the imagination that shapes images, in Vermeer's case through light and light’s dark accomplice. Having opened this essay testifying to my own long admiration for the art of Vermeer, I can best end it on a similar note but in the context of Delft. A painter called Cornelis de Man lived there at the same time as Vermeer and painted some pictures of domestic interiors that are testimony to his own admiration for those of Vermeer, a fellow-townsman and Guild member whom he personally knew.

Still Life with Lute and a Jug - De Man

The picture of Vermeer that is now at Miami (and which was later engraved) is by this artist and very much in the Vermeer manner though crude and inferior by comparison.

Portrait of Vermeer by De Man (left) and engraving thereof (right)

Also by this artist is a far better and more finished picture at Polesden Lacy near Dorking.

The Game of Cards - De Man

It shows a middle-aged man facing a young woman over a table where they are playing cards. A young child to the right who stands hardly higher than the table on which one hand rests looks out of the picture to direct, perhaps, another child's attention to the grown-up’s game. The young woman looks round towards us as one might turn to a camera.

Details from De Man’s Portrait of Vermeer and The Game of Cards

Comparing the face of the man with that of the painter in the Miami picture, I think it very probable that we are looking at Vermeer himself relaxing opposite one of his daughters, with another of his many children beside him. The picture can stand in any case as a pleasant memorial to that genius of a ‘family man’, celebrant of town, home, kin and friends, who was happy to include those closest to him in what are still, despite the cleanings, some of the greatest of all representational paintings.

Julian Pritchard

March 2017

#vermeer #art history #dutch painter #flemish school #art theory #painting techniques #stolen art #frick museum #metropolitan museum of art #kenwood house #cornelis de man #girl with a pearl earring #connoisseurship

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comicteaparty · 4 years

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January 27th-February 2nd, 2020 CTP Archive

The archive for the Comic Tea Party week long chat that occurred from January 27th, 2020 to February 2nd, 2020. The chat focused on HOPE KILLERZ by stc019.

Featured Comment:

Chat:

Comic Tea Party

BOOK CLUB START!

Hello and welcome everyone to Comic Tea Party’s Week Long Book Club~! This week we’ll be focusing on HOPE KILLERZ by stc019~! (https://tapas.io/series/HOPE-KILLERZ)

You are free to read and comment about the comic all week at your own pace until February 2nd, so stop on by whenever it suits your schedule! Discussions are freeform, but we do offer discussion prompts in the pins for those who’d like to have them. Additionally, remember that while constructive criticism is allowed, our focus is to have fun and appreciate the comic!

Whether you finish the comic or can only read a few pages, everyone is welcome to join and chat with us!

DISCUSSION PROMPTS – PART 1

1. What did you like about the beginning of the comic?

2. What has been your favorite moment in the comic (so far)?

3. Who is your favorite character?

4. Which characters do like seeing interact the most?

5. What is something you like about the art? If you have a favorite illustration, please share it!

6. What is a theme you like that the comic explores?

7. What do you like about the comic’s story or overall related content?

8. Overall, what do you think the comic’s strengths are?

Don’t feel inspired by the prompts? Feel free to discuss anything else that interested you!

SAWHAND

Ooh! The first thing I'm noticing about this comic is the colors, which are lovely!!

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

agreed! the characters designs made me laugh, too. Haven't finished it yet but will definitely pop in to say a few words when I do

LadyLazuli (Phantomarine)

I'm going through this too - what an awesome style!

RebelVampire

I'm a prompt kind of person, so I'm gonna answer this a bit going by those. XD I like how the comic opens up, mostly at the end of the prologue with the ominous phone message about Isa and Scotty being dead. Like, just when you thought things were ominous enough, there's already a quick payoff, and I like that about this story. It's not holding its punches. As for a favorite moment, I really liked the argument between Hodori and Behzad, because that moment didn't go how I expected. I actually thought Behzad would include Hodori, not go for immediate betrayal. So to me that was interesting and I like things that don't go with my expectations. This is why they are also my favorite characters to interact, cause I liked Hodori was also the one to know what was going on, and I can't wait to see how Hodori will react when Behzad's sort of betrayal is revealed. For a favorite character, at the moment Chaker cause I think Chaker is the most mysterious and I'd love to learn more about Chaker. Who doesn't like mysterious characters with secrets?

In terms what I liked about the art, I find the use of color interesting. I'm not sure I'd classify as like persay, but it's interesting to see how the colors are used to sort of experiment with the mood or each image. Which for me I feel is the comic's strength. Regardless of how you feel about the content, the comic is intriguing to look at and catches your eye.

Comic Tea Party

DISCUSSION PROMPTS – PART 2

9. Do you think what Behzad wants is justice or vengeance? How will he get it ultimately do you think? Overall, what do you think the story might show us regarding the line between the two and how the pursuit of either can change someone?

10. How do you think everyone’s relationships with each other will be challenged given both Behzad’s solo pursuit of the murderers and some of the team member’s withholding information? Will the team be able to survive the conflict?

11. Do you think the characters will be able to recover their hope after losing Isa and Scotty? Overall, given the themes of hope within the story, what do you think is the overall message regarding it?

12. What do you think the ultimate plan of 58 is? Why does it involve murdering Isa and Scotty and replacing them with doubles? Why do you think Behzad wasn’t killed yet, and what might the villains have planned for him?

Don’t feel inspired by the prompts? Feel free to discuss anything else that interested you!

snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)

I'm absolutely loving Hope Killerz! The artstyle is amazing, as everyone's said. I love how each panel sets the mood with its unique playing of color palettes! I am curious as to what the ultimate plan is, replacing Isa and Scotty with doubles and seemingly wanting to use this version of Behzad too. Perhaps... 58's plan is to create a team consisting of the most "bold" versions of each hero? Like, Behzad went off on his own rather than waiting around for an investigation - 58 wants a whole team of people like him. As for why... perhaps vengeance for 58 losing his own team?

RebelVampire

Vengeance is plausible. Although I kind of feel there's gotta be more to it than that. Since you can get vengeance without needing to create doubles.

I really like that this comic kind of explores the theme of justice vs. vengeance. With the rise of superhero movies and such, it's kind of easy to forget that there is a really fine line between them. Which in this case, I think Behzad definitely wants vengeance, although I don't think Behzad will get it. I think someone will knock some sense into the idea before it gets that far. However, overall though, I think the story does a great job that it only really takes one step to go from justice to just wanting to hurt people because you're hurt - even at the cost of your personal relationships. Which is definitely going to be a big thing. I definitely think the other characters, especially Hodori, is gonna feel betrayed by Behzad's action. Maybe empathetic, but no way there isn't a rift created. And as more comes to light, none of them will be sure they can trust each other, and that will make Isa and Scotty's loss even more poignant and bring up the question if the group can survive without them.

But I don't think it's all hopeless. I kind of feel that despite their feelings at the moment, time will heal the teams wounds and that they'll find the resolve to hope. Cause you can basically pull hope out of nothing.

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

Unfortunately I'm feeling a bit lost in the story. There are a lot of characters and a lot of scene changes, and I'm having a hard time differentiating the personalities of all the characters. Maybe I just wasn't reading closely enough? Or maybe the plot'll be more clear in the future? The story is just getting started, after all, so I figure the author is kind of front loading all the setup and character introductions. I do really like the art. It's fun and different. I stumbled across this comic a while ago but didn't read much of it, and the art was memorable enough that seeing it again in the bookclub I immediately recognized that I'd seen it before. 9) Both. Don't think he's really thinking straight due to his grief, and is mostly just driven by emotion right now. 10) Probably, just going from the tone of the comic and the art I feel like this will have a happy ending. I think this is an optimistic comic. 5) The author seems to have a love of drawing butts. I appreciate that. Particularly in the little end chapter sketches. 1) I liked everything about the beginning of the comic. Though it was very strong. Not often do you see a vigilante character feeling regret over their chosen path

Comic Tea Party

DISCUSSION PROMPTS – PART 3

13. What are you most looking forward to seeing in regards to the comic?

14. Any final words of encouragement for the comic?

Don’t feel inspired by the prompts? Feel free to discuss anything else that interested you!

RebelVampire

For this comic, I'm definitely looking forward mostly to finding out about 58's plan since there's a lot of directions the story could go at the moment. I'll be interested to see which path will be taken. Regardless, I hope the creator continues with the color experimentation in the comic since it makes it visually stand out, and it'll be interesting to see how this plays out when the comic is further along.

snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)

Yeah for Hope Killerz, what I'm really looking forward to is... more. Like the art is so unique and so stylish, and the characters have interesting motivations behind them, I'm just curious to see where this all pans out.

Comic Tea Party

BOOK CLUB END!

Thank you everyone so much for reading and chatting about HOPE KILLERZ this week! Please also give a special thank you to stc019 for volunteering the comic and creating it! If you liked HOPE KILLERZ, make sure to continue to support it via some of the links below!

Read and Comment: https://tapas.io/series/HOPE-KILLERZ

stc019’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/stc019

stc019’s Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/stconineteen

stc019’s Storenvy: http://stc019.storenvy.com/

stc019’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/stc019?lang=en

#ctparchive #comics #webcomics #indie comics #comic chat #comic discussion #book club #bookclub #webcomic book club #webcomic bookclub #comic tea party #ctp #hope killerz #stc019

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theeverlastingshade · 5 years

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Ashes Grammar- A Sunny Day In Glasgow: 10th Anniversary

Of all the artists that emerged throughout the prior decade, there wasn’t another quite as elusive, mercurial, and underappreciated as A Sunny Day in Glasgow. They released their debut record, Scribble Mural Comic Journal in 2007, and its homespun concoction of hazy atmospherics and sun-kissed melodies that peaked out from beneath layers of playful noise bridged the gap between Creation Records and Flying Nun, but it also established them as an island unto themselves. They seemed considerably more reserved than most of their peers, and not nearly as easy to peg. Two years later they dropped their stellar sophomore LP, Ashes Grammar, and all those points became even more pronounced. AG is a collection of 22 tracks that run from 11 seconds to just under 6 and a half minutes, and the sequencing is impeccable. Nothing sounds accidental or ill-placed, and while the idea of an album playing through like a single song is a tired cliché at this point, there are few records that fit that description as well as AG. The record is more fleshed out and stranger than its predecessor, and the palpable glee that the band have as they take immense risks throughout is infectious. It’s one long, joyful dream that finds the band upending the well-worn conventions of shoegaze and dream pop to delirious affect, and in the process creating a future benchmark for these respective genres.

AG unfolds like a euphoric fever dream pitched somewhere between a religious ceremony and a twee dance party. ASDiG was a seven-piece band when they recorded AG, and so unsurprisingly there’s quite a bit going on at all times. There’s a sharp pop sensibility coursing throughout the record’s veins, but the band rarely engages that impulse directly, more often than not they tuck their melodies under waves of guitar distortion, four on the floor beats, and a wide assortment of texture. When the melodies are pronounced, as on “Close Chorus”, or “The White Witch” the results are simply breathtaking, and that playful sense of mischief that renders those moments far and few between is a large part of the record’s appeal. The vocals are consistently gorgeous but many of the actual lyrics are indiscernible, and so even when the vocals soar they still function as additional texture. On many of the songs the vocals don’t seem like the true focal point of the music, but there are plenty of stunning vocal melodies and harmonies throughout AG that negate the sense that they were an afterthought. And for a band that understandably scans entirely as headphone music, ASDiG provide these songs with quite a bit of infectious rhythm that you can actually dance to. The juxtaposition between the rhythms and the rest of the arrangements that their songs are composed of is remarkably fluid from start to finish, which gives AG on the whole a potential appeal beyond the the vast majority of comparable contemporaries.

The majority of the tracks that AG consists of scan far closer to sketches and interludes than they do proper songs. There are a few obvious high points that are far more fleshed out than the bulk of what’s here, but most of the songs on AG are just a few minutes long, and develop their ideas quickly without overstaying their welcome. In this way AG is more reminiscent of a Flying Lotus record in structure than most of the obvious shoegaze and dream pop touchstones that they’re building off of sonically, and that approach remains engaging because it consistently keeps the listener on their toes. No two songs sound alike, but they’re clearly the work of the same band, and more so than any other ASDiG record AG showcases a staggering amount of range from a fairly well-defined set of parameters. Songs like “Headphone Space” and “The White Witch” are among the best songs that ASDiG ever recorded, and necessitate their respective lengths to develop their exceptional melodies and mesmerizing arrangements. Most of the record is told through short, sweet bursts like the touching guitar drone of “Miss My Friends”, the stomp/clap rhythm and high-pitched synth squeal of “Canalfish”, or the alluring combination of bass, harmonica, and sleigh bells on “Loudly”. These songs succeed in building an engrossing patchwork of disparate pieces that, when listened to within the proper sequencing, showcase a staggering amount of growth from their relatively lean and more straightforward debut.

While every track on AG bleeds together superbly, there are a few songs here that loom large over everything else. Opening to clanging guitar riffs, a simple tom beat, and a gorgeous, wordless vocal melody, “The White Witch” takes a little over a minute to establish its presence before the arrangements break away to reveal a gorgeous dream pop song hiding beneath the squalls of distortion. The song chugs along for another two minutes steadily incorporating additional guitar overdubs before dipping into a mesmerizing outro with the surging guitar easing up for an emphasis on pure atmosphere. The following song “Nitetime rainbow” is one of the more interesting songs on AG, and opens to a rapid-fire procession of hi-hats while waves of bright synths wash over them. A hand-clap/kick drum rhythm emerges alongside scattered chants, faint harmonies, and jangly guitars that create an alluring framework, but everything dissipates shortly thereafter, replaced with nothing but a four on the floor bounce. That tension of building up their arrangements, and quickly cutting them back down persists throughout the following few minutes, and as the song concludes they bring everything back for a satisfying conclusion that transitions superbly into “Canalfish”. The 41 second interlude “Life’s Great” only exists for pure kindling, but it’s a perfect segue into closer “Headphone Space”, the grand culmination of everything that the band accomplished on AG. On “Headphone Space” ASDiG set colorful synths that explode like fireworks against a throbbing low-end while angelic harmonies triumphantly swirl around the chaos in pitch-perfect harmony.

While many of the songs on AG are among their best, the absolute best song that ASDiG has ever released is hands down “Close Chorus”. A quick burst of kick drums ignites an immediately entrancing vocal melody that the band lay softly over synths that swell with euphoria, jangly guitars, and a bouncing bassline. Shortly afterwards they add a hi-hat polyrhythm, and continue to build on this groove before everything drops away save for the vocal melody, a procession of heavenly harmonies, and a kick/snare rhythm. “Close Chorus” then hits a bridge that locks everything into a sort of spiraling stasis before a chugging hi-hat/kick rhythm comes barreling into the mix alongside the guitar, bass, and synth motifs from earlier. After the vocals return to build the intensity back up “Close Chorus” erupts into a fit of pure ecstasy propelled by their finest vocal melody to date. ASDiG then go into a legitimate guitar solo that flexes their pedal board acumen, and from there the song crescendo’s into one of the most cathartic moments in any song that I’ve ever listened to. It’s difficult to genuinely talk about a song as good as “Close Chorus” and do it justice without lapsing into hyperbole, but it’s the kind of song that you remember where you were when you first heard it, and it’s a perfect demonstration of ASDiG firing on all cylinders while making something that no one else could have.

After AG ASDiG continued to undergo several more lineup changes, most notably adding Jen Goma into the fold whose vocals played an increasingly large role in defining their sound on subsequent LPs. Following AG came their short and sweet Nitetime Rainbows EP in early 2010, their underrated third LP, Autumn Again, in late 2010, their masterful fourth LP, Sea When Absent, in mid-2014, the surprisingly heavy and too brief No Death EP in early 2015, and a solid double EP called Planning Weed Like It’s Acid / Life Is Loss in late 2015. They’ve never released anything that’s less than good, but their profile has never really seemed to rise above unanimous critical acclaim, and outside of specific music-obsessive circles they remain almost universally unknown. No other artist has managed to fuse shoegaze, dream pop, psychedelic pop, and experimental electronic music in a way that’s anywhere near as exciting or singular since ASDiG dropped SMCJ in 2007. While AG doesn’t quite sustain the immediacy of SMCJ, nor does it consistently impress with its songwriting like SWA, AG is nonetheless an impressive work of art that finds the fluid septet’s sound crystallizing into something wonderfully inimitable. ASDiG have always seemed to own their elusiveness though, and just like the rest of their records, AG seems meant to have been a lost secret brimming with colorful vistas worth exploring for those curious and patient enough to give them the time that they necessitate.

Essentials: “Close Chorus”, “The White Witch”, “Headphone Space”

#A Sunny Day in Glasgow #ashes grammar #mis ojos discos

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bbclesmis · 5 years

Audio

Exclusive Track & Interview: 28 Days Later composer John Murphy’s “Les Misérables”

Check out this exclusive premiere of John Murphy's "Les Misérables" from the BBC/PBS's Masterpiece Les Misérables now. This version is very close to Victor Hugo's original novel, and hence is not a musical. The soundtrack will be available May 3.' Murphy also dishes on the challenges of scoring such a huge, epic, and sweeping story (and a lot more) in the interview below.

Exclusive premiere: John Murphy's "Les Misérables" from Masterpiece's Les Misérables Lakeshore Records is set to release the original soundtrack to the critically-acclaimed BBC/PBS Masterpiece mini-series Les Misérables, written by composer John Murphy (28 Days Later, Sunshine, Kick-Ass). Check out our interview with Murphy and the exclusive song directly below this article. Les Mis the album will be released digitally on May 3 with CD and vinyl versions forthcoming.

This Les Mis is NOT a musical; in fact, it is relatively faithful to the source novel. It premiered April 14 on PBS, but all episodes can be watched with PBS Passport.

Les Misérables is a six-part drama adaptation starring Dominic West (The Affair) as Jean Valjean, and David Oyelowo (Selma) as Javert in this landmark take on a classic, timeless, and sweeping story. They are joined by Lily Collins (Rules Don’t Apply), in the role of Fantine.

With a striking intensity and relevance to us today, Victor Hugo's novel is a testimony to the struggles of France’s underclass and how far they must go to survive. The six-part television adaptation of the renowned book vividly and faithfully brings to life the vibrant and engaging characters, the spectacular and authentic imagery and, above all, the incredible yet accessible story that was Hugo’s lifework.

The distinguished British cast includes Adeel Akhtar (The Night Manager) and Academy Award winner Olivia Colman (The Favourite) as Monsieur and Madame Thénardier, Ellie Bamber (Nocturnal Animals) as Cosette, Josh O'Connor (The Durrells in Corfu) as Marius and Erin Kellyman (Raised By Wolves) as Éponine.

Liverpool born John Murphy began scoring movies at the age of 25. In 2001, following the success of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, he moved to Los Angeles.

Since then he has worked with some of the industry's most respected and luminary filmmakers, including Danny Boyle, Guy Ritchie, Stephen Frears, Matthew Vaughn and Michael Mann, producing film scores as prominent and diverse as Sunshine, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Miami Vice, Snatch, Kick-Ass, and the seminal 28 Days Later.

Murphy's movie trailers include: Captain America: Winter Soldier, Gravity, X-Men: Origins, Cloverfield, War of the Worlds, Cowboys and Aliens, Blindness, Ex Machina, Southpaw, X-Men: Days of Future Past, and Avatar. His music has been featured in advertising campaigns for Nike, Audi, Microsoft, Louis Vuitton, Samsung, Google, and Apple.

After Kick-Ass, Murphy set up the record label Taped Noise and began work on several non-movie projects. BBC/PBS Masterpiece Theatre's Les Misérables is his latest project.

Les Misérables director Tom Shankland wanted John to tell a fresh musical story and to ultimately create a raw and uncompromising score to reflect the trials and misery of "Les Misérables." John describes the scoring process as an "experimental journey."

Initially, Tom wanted a gritty, folk-oriented score, but as they began the process, he and John quickly realized that the story would need a broader musical palette. John ended up incorporating less obvious elements such as bowed electric guitar, analog synths, experimental viola, and backwards loops, with a nod to the classic French romantic scoring of the '60s. Despite mixing instrumentation, the elements fused and the sensibility stayed true throughout.

John described the scoring process further:

"My original idea for the score to Les Mis was '1816 Velvet Underground meets '60s French film music.' While director Tom [Shankland] was thinking 'gnarly, down in the dirt, French folk music.' Producer Chris Carey suggested, 'let's do both, but throw in some vintage analog synths.' I then gleefully tried all of these elements, often at the same time. And we discovered that you can actually mix a hurdy gurdy with a Moog Sub Phatty, and we loved it. And what started out as a musical standoff, became our score for Les Misérables."

Interview: John Murphy

Hello John and welcome!

Hey Wess. Good to talk with you!

Likewise. To start things off, what attracted you to this telling of Les Mis as a project? I really appreciated how it was based on Hugo's novel, and not a musical. The novel, in my opinion, does not get enough praise.

Yeah, sadly the musical has pretty much hijacked this great novel. I read it in my early twenties. I was a session player back then and I spent a lot of time on tour buses, so I got through a lot of reading. Aside from all the ideas and themes, it's a great story – hope, despair, sacrifice, redemption, all the good stuff. I loved it.

I read it when I was in my twenties as well. Such a great novel.

So when the call came in, I did some Skype meetings with the director Tom Shankland and producer Chris Carey, and they were so passionate about it, and so hell-bent on going back to the source, the book I loved. I knew I had to do it.

That's fantastic. I was hoping we could get an idea of your overall creative process on the project. It really is very sweeping in the emotions of the story and the history it covers.

Well I've really only ever done movies so I knew the production process would be different. For example, before they started shooting I had to write a lot of the in-camera music they needed to shoot to; the scene with the band in the pimp's den, Cosette's piano pieces, Gavroche's song when he runs out to collect the bullets, that kind of thing.

Oh wow.

Which was cool because I'd never done that before. And then there was a big break while they filmed and put together the episodes. So rather than sit around and wait, I started sketching out themes and ideas from the script, which is actually way more creative than writing to picture. But having this pot of ideas was a life saver because, when the episodes finally did come, they came thick and fast.

But the actual creative process wasn't too different from scoring a film. I always write the themes first, and I try to write them away from picture. And then I'll work to picture and write the featured cues, the montages, the chases, that kind of thing. And then you're down to the underscore cues and you're just connecting the dots really.

Interesting process John. What were the challenges like?

I think the biggest challenge was time. Even though I had ideas sketched out for most of the themes, there's only so much you can do until they give you locked picture. And when the final locked cuts started coming, I had about 20 days per episode from start to delivery. And this is when I would score everything in, write the underscore, record the soloists, and mix the tracks ready for the dub. There was usually about forty cues and forty minutes of music per episode. So there were a few long nights!

Were there huge differences between Les Mis as a project and working on your more conventional titles like 28 Days Later? You've scored quite a bit in the horror realm.

I've actually only scored a few horror films. They just tend to be the ones people remember!

[Laughs] good point. I was thinking just relative to other composers I've talked to…

Because of the musical, there's kind of a skewed perception of Les Miserables. But a lot of the book is actually very dark. And, for whatever reason, I find it much easier to work with darker material.

I find myself attracted to darker art as well; not just film.

For me, it's just a deeper well to draw from. So even though it's based upon an historic work I never felt like I was writing outside of my own instincts. At the end of the day, whatever the scale, it all comes down to ideas, story and characters.

Absolutely. Any memorable or funny moments that stick out from that behind the scenes process of scoring the series?

There were, but none I could mention! [Laughs]

[Laughs] fair enough. A question I ask most everybody: what scores and films have molded you most as an artist?

I think the first time I became aware that movies used music was in A Fistful of Dollars. I must have been six or seven and it was on TV one night. I remember thinking why is there music playing? Where is it coming from? After that I started listening for it when I watched movies. So, I think my love for [Ennio] Morricone started there. And after that it was the James Bond movies, and the great John Barry themes. Another film composer I love to this day. I was just a kid, but I remember getting hyped up whenever I heard that guitar riff. A few years later, when I started to play a few things, I discovered Bernard Herrmann.

Psycho always stands out for me when I think of a great score. It may be cliché to say but it is true.

I couldn't fathom how he could make music that was so dark and so beautiful at the same time. I'd never heard anything like it and it blew me away. It was like magic.

So, those three made more of an impression on me than any specific movies. Thinking about it now it's probably why I'm so theme-heavy today. Because those guys definitely knew how to write a theme.

That they did. One other big question which is sort of related, what makes a great score?

That's such a difficult question and I don't think there's a definitive answer. But if it truly moves you and takes you somewhere else, then it's doing something right.

Well said. Last, what's next for you?

Well, Les Mis was like doing six movies back to back, so I won't be jumping into another big project just yet! I'm going to mess around with one of my own projects for a few months and then see what's around. Maybe a cool little indie where I get to play everything myself!

https://www.thefourohfive.com/film/article/exclusive-track-interview-28-days-later-composer-john-murphy-s-les-miserables-155

#les mis bbc #bbc les mis #soundtrack #audio #Interviews #john murphy

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