Ostensibly Unedited

Posting by Way of Stream of Consciousness 

Andy Warhol
1950

Artist Unknown

 Miller's Falls, Massachusetts

by me

detail from The Judgement of Otto by Luca Penni

Albrecht Dürer

Gino Severini

Armand (François Joseph) Henrion

"Why should a man's mind have been thrown into such close, sad, sensational, inexplicable relations with such a precarious object as his body?" 

 ~Thomas Hardy

Happy Sunday

Art Foraging - The Latest Catch

Online this week, I perused the work of David Alfaro Siqueros...

 Photographer Tina Modotti...

three Andrew Wyeth paintings I was previously unfamiliar with...

and these fascinating images of our planet Earth, from the exhibition Earth As Art, at the Library of Congress

and lastly, a rare photo of Andy Warhol by William John Kennedy
article here

An Andy Warhol Christmas

The American artist and pop icon Andy Warhol was one of the first artists I admired as a middle-school kid in the early seventies.  But I only discovered his sweeter side when I looked at a package of Christmas cards about ten years ago. 

The following is an excerpt from a Washington Post article entitled A Look at Andy Warhol's Spiritual Side:

The man often called the Pope of Pop attended Mass several times a
week, worked in a soup kitchen, kept a crucifix and devotional book on
his bedside table and prayed daily with his mother, a devout Byzantine
Catholic who lived with him until her death in 1972.

(For a more complete post on the life and work of Andy Warhold, please see my post here)

 

ABC Wednesday and Artist of the Week - Warhol

W is for Warhol

 Andy Warhol

(August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987)

American Pop Artist

"An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have."

~Andy Warhol

 (one of my favorite Warhol photos)


“I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say "figment."

Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928, in a two-room row house apartment at 73 Orr Street in Pittsburgh. His parents, Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants Andrej and Julia Warhola, had three sons. Andy was their youngest.
Devout Byzantine Catholics, the family attended mass regularly and observed the traditions of their Eastern European heritage. Warhol’s father, a laborer, moved his family to a brick home on Dawson Street in 1934. Warhol attended the nearby Holmes School and took free art classes at Carnegie Institute (now The Carnegie Museum of Art). In addition to drawing, Hollywood movies enraptured Andy and he frequented the local cinema. When he was about nine years old, he received his first camera. Andy enjoyed taking pictures, and he developed them himself in his basement.  Read the rest of the biography here

"Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes."
Andy Warhol

Self-Portrait

"I am a deeply superficial person." 
~Andy Warhol

Gold Marylin

1962

"I love it when you ask actors, 'What're you doing now?' and they say 'I'm between roles.' To be living life between roles.' That's my favorite."

 ~ Andy Warhol

 Eight Elvises
1963

The highest price ever paid for a Warhol painting is $100 million for a 1963 canvas titled Eight Elvises. The private transaction was reported in a 2009 article in The Economist, which described Warhol as the "bellwether of the art market." $100 million is a benchmark price that only Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, Pierre-August Renoir, Gustav Klimt and Willem de Kooning have achieved.^[1]

 Jackie

1964 

"I think everybody should like everybody."

Velvet Underground album cover

Originally released in March 1967 by Verve Records. Recorded in 1966 during Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia event tour, The Velvet Underground & Nico would gain notoriety for its experimentalist performance sensibilities, as well as its focus on controversial subject matter expressed in many of their songs.

1969

"What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest."
Andy Warhol

Flowers

1970

 Mao

1972

Andy Warhol's Mao Tse Tung (1972) is a silk-screen portrait of the Chinese leader that was made in many versions. It is one of the series of silk-screens that he made on the subject of fame. They began in the early 1960s with his many portraits of Marilyn Monroe whose sad death in 1962 led him to contemplation of what it meant to be famous and what it could possibly be worth. read the rest at Lots of Essays.com

Note:  best for last but chronologically out of order:  Warhol cats from the 1950's. I also like his little Christmas drawings which I hope to feature sometime in the coming week.

 

"It's all about your attitude."

Sources:

The Warhol Museum

 ^{Warhol biography:  scenes of cinema e-journal} 

The Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

 <sup>Lots of Essay.com

The Modern Cat 

Thinkexist</sup>

^{See other participants at ABC Wednesday}

Art Animalia - Le Zèbre

Mario Avati

Six Running Zebras

 (unattributed)

 photo close-up of a zebra

(artist unattributed)

 Lucian Frued

George Stubbs

Father Commerce and Other Post-Holiday Ruminations

Did you cherish your holidays and your family this season? Me, I tried really hard and fell short of my expectations that I would be the perfect person for each and every individual in my life.  Any smart person would have given up trying by now to be perfect but I, alas, mistakenly harbor hope that one day I will not piss off a single person for even one moment.  Ha!

 Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it.

~Salvador Dali

There was lots of champagne and good food and beautiful daughters and a loving Old World mother. I decidedly did not receive an iphone from Father Commerce. I find those little gizmos highly distracting. People use their cell phones and other small electronic gadgets while they operate  motor vehicles. If I did that routinely, starting today, I would be dead in three days. Or less. Oh, but I did get a new Canon with a big zoom lens on it. It will be great to be able to photograph birds and the other wildlife around the river and lake. I'm excited.

I think I have a rare form of attention deficit disorder. This is admittedly a self-diagnosis and it may be wacky but I helps me keep my unruly brain in check. Unlike ADHD people, I am often distracted by too much thought - which is really the result of a very long attention span. I don't want to pay attention to too many things at once. I find it overwhelming.  Particularly when it involves driving or operating heavy machinery. For me, a blender constitutes such. I really have to be careful. I also don't understand why so many people don't get that real thinking takes a long time! I'm having this problem with my current instructor. He's way too zippy for me.

I am in a mood. It's not a bad mood, exactly. I just want to tell everyone I love that they should go away from me, please and let me blog. But then, a wonderful thing happens. My daughter SG2, recently turned 21, accepts my invitation to spend the day together yesterday and we click. I took a chance, not altogether sure we would. And we had a wonderful day.. We had a late lunch and then we got our eyebrows waxed. 
I have decided:  one can only eat sushi satisfactorily with another sushi lover.

I promise not to divulge all the eyebrow waxing details. Suffice it to say that I'm very aware of my eyebrows these days. I have been worried that I may frighten people with my shock of white Andy Warhol hair and my jet-black eyebrows. Don't worry. both the eyebrows and the hair remain, and in their respective natural colors. I have merely cleaned up my eyebrows a bit. My daughter approves.  My eyebrows are now more stylish than Warhol's and I hope I'm a tad bit cuter than Andy.

Oh, I got my mother this Christmas and the salt cod!  :-)  And The Runt got some, too!

Pagan Sphinx Warholized

Happy 2010

Be brave and be happy in the new year!

Pagan's Entertainment Highlights for Sunday and Monday, Current Week

Sunday Night's Entertainment
Count Dracula knows that if he fails to drink a required amount of pure virgin’s blood, he’ll die. His assistant suggests that the Count and he pick up his coffin and take a road trip to Italy, where families are known to be particularly religious, and therefore should be an excellent place to search for a virgin bride. They do, only to encounter a family with not one, but four virgins, ready for marriage. The Count discovers one-by-one that the girls are not as pure as they say they are, meanwhile a handsome servant begins to observe strange behaviour from the girls who do spend the night with the Count. It’s a race for Dracula to discover who’s the real virgin, before he either dies from malnourishment or from the wooden stake of the servant. (Directed by Paul Morrissey)

Monday Night's Entertainment

Putting the post for Artist of the Week up. It's Renee Cox. Take a look here.

click for larger view

River Queen
Renee Cox

I am nothing if not eclectic.

Art Animalia - The Cat

Andy Warhol

Pierre Bonnard

Theophile Alexander Steinlen

Young Tiger Playing With Its Mother
Eugene Delacroix

Gwen John