4-22-13

The Cyclops, 1898

Happy birthday, Odilon Redon! 

Redon (1840-1916) was a French Symbolist painter.  Born in Bordeaux, Redon started painting at an early age.  After serving in the Franco-Prussian War, he moved to Paris, where he worked in charcoals and lithographs.  In the 1890s he began using oils and pastels and did so for the rest of his life.  Throughout his life, Redon (who was also a printmaker and draughtsman) was interested in literature and architecture.  His charcoal work, called his Noirs, were not publicly successful, but hugely influential on the Parisian avant-garde of the time.  Redon - an artistic ally of the writers Baudelaire and Mallarme - was arguably the greatest Symbolist painter of his generation.  In the 1890s, his works became brighter, more decorative, but still featured dream-like imagery and suggested intense internal states of mind, improbable and invisible beings. 

Symbolism was both an artistic and literary movement, an attempt to see through Realism, to look at the world subjectively, to express reality through artists' spirit and intuition.  Color, line, and shape were not in alignment with the visual, optical image, but at the mercy of personal emotion and insight.  The images were dream-like, fantastic, mysterious.  Symbolist artists - Redon, Gustave Moreau, even at time Henri Rousseau - proved influential to writers of the time and later artists such as the Fauvists and Edvard Munch.        

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Word of the day :

transpire : to take place, occur, or develop

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Well, it's Monday morning in Statesboro, which means back to school for everyone.  Only a few more weeks before our Big Summer Trip and there's plenty to do around the house before we go, plenty of lose ends to knot up, a few necessities to buy, a few TV shows to watch, etc.

Not much on the news front this weekend, nothing Too Horrible happened... oh, wait, I'm reading about a shooting in Seattle... (let's just  skip over that for the minute...)

E.L. Konigsburg, the young adult writer best known for the engaging YA classic From the Mixed-Up Files of Basil E. Frankweiler (a book I highly recommend), died this weekend at the age of 83.  She won two Newberry awards, for Mixed-up... and 1997's The View From Saturday.

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I love this National Geographic article by historian Hampton Sides on Wrangel Island (a place I had never heard of), which is sort of the Northern, colder version of the Galapagos Islands. 

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/05/wrangel-island/sides-text?source=hp_dl1_ngm_wrangel-island_20130417   







Image courtesy of:

http://silverandexact.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/cyclops-odilon-redon-1914.jpg