Don Schaefer's List: arts

The arts, which probably offer a man more satisfaction, are uncertain. It is difficult to make a living.




If I had my own life to lead over I presume I would still be a writer but I am sure I would give my first attention to learning how to do things directly with my hands. Nothing gives quite the satisfaction that doing things brings.

"Some of the world's earliest colour movies have finally been shown to the public 120 years after they were shot having been painstakingly restored by film archivists.

The obscure film segments, which give a never seen before glimpse of the Edwardian age, were long considered to be failed prototypes and had been consigned to an archive.

But after recording the footage digitally, workers at the National Media Museum in Bradford were able to unlock remarkably modern-looking images created more than a century ago."

"When London threw its name into the hat for the 2012 Olympics, many had doubts. Not former sport minister Tessa Jowell. Interviewing Tony Blair, Ken Livingstone, and others Jowell recruited to her cause, Michael Joseph Gross details the grueling, often farcical campaign that won the city its prize—plus a $14.5 billion tab."

“Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me.”

Her recently uncovered stunning drawings inspired me to revisit The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, who began keeping journals at the age of eleven and remained a diarist until her death at the age of thirty. Among the diary entires and letters to friends, culled by Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, their children, Frieda and Nicholas, and Smith College rare books curator Karen Kukil, is this existential gem from July 1950, when Plath was 18 years old — a meditation so emphatic, so embracing of the world, so full of presence, it makes it hard, tragic even, to know that only twelve years later, this wholehearted being would take her own life

When the JOBS Act was signed in April, the startup community gave itself a collective high five. Crowdfunding would enable startups to reach out to the whole world to get access to funding, not just a small cabal of investors living in a 20-mile radius of Menlo Park.

But hidden in the headlines was a much more powerful underlying trend. With the JOBS Act came the creation of an entirely new class of capital that could be far more valuable to startups: customer capital.

An artist statement, ideally, is a short summary that informs others about you as an artist, and leaves them wanting to know more about your art.

The artist statement should help others appreciate your art, and your standing as an artist.

Lumiere Technology, a start-up based in Paris, reveals the true colors of the Mona Lisa.

Pascal Cotte, engineer and founder of Lumiere Technology, largely contributed to the knowledge of the Mona Lisa thanks to the multispectral digitization of the famous painting, whose report is detailed in the famous book “Mona Lisa - Inside the Painting”, recently published by Abrams in USA,  Gallimard & the Editions of the Louvre in France, Shirmer Mosel in Germany.

The hidden knowledge of the true colors was revealed by multispectrally scanning the painting in thirteen channels – from Ultra Violet to Infra Red.  Then the spectral response curve of the varnish in each pixel was isolated and subtracted from the digital file to virtually reveal the surface of the painting when it had freshly exited Leonardo da Vinci’s workshop.

The engineer Pascal COTTE has invented the first multispectral camera (from ultraviolet to infrared).
On 19 October 2004, he took pictures of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre’s Laboratory of the Museums of France.
The quality of this photo is unique.
For the first time ever, we can admire the original colors (i.e. the colors of the pigments used by Leonardo da Vinci) as well as the infrareds superimposed on the color image.

After X-ray photography, infrared reflectography, X-ray fluorescence, the spectrophotometric approach to color and high-resolution 3D scanning – the first scientific tests undergone by the Mona Lisa for the last fifty years – Pascal Cotte, the founder and scientific adviser of Lumiere Technology, has now added spectrocolorimetric analysis through multispectral photography.

This was a new feeling for George Lucas. He made a movie about a plucky band of freedom fighters who battle an evil empire — a movie loaded with special effects like no one had seen before. Then he showed it to executives from all the Hollywood studios. And every one of them said, “Nope.”

Most folks who resolved to cut down on coffee this year are driven by the simple desire for self-improvement.

But for coffee drinkers in 17th-century Turkey, there was a much more concrete motivating force: a big guy with a sword.

Sultan Murad IV, a ruler of the Ottoman Empire, would not have been a fan of Starbucks. Under his rule, the consumption of coffee was a capital offense.

In 1984, when he was 64 years old, Fellini agreed to make a miniature film featuring Campari, the famous Italian apéritif. The result, Oh, che bel paesaggio! (“Oh, what a beautiful landscape!”), shown above, features a man and a woman seated across from one another on a long-distance train. The man (played by Victor Poletti) smiles, but the woman (Silvia Dionisio) averts her eyes, staring sullenly out the window and picking up a remote control to switch the scenery. She grows increasingly exasperated as a sequence of desert and medieval landscapes pass by. Still smiling, the man takes the remote control, clicks it, and the beautiful Campo di Miracoli (“Field of Miracles”) of Pisa appears in the window, embellished by a towering bottle of Campari.

Barring an unforeseen rescue, Saab‘s long, strange trip through Swedish courts and Chinese office towers appears to be over.

As reported in The Times on Monday, the automaker’s attempts to work out a deal with a Chinese company ran aground on the refusal of General Motors, its former owner, to allow critical technology licenses to be transferred. G.M. retained a veto over the deal through key stock ownership and it did not want some of the technologies to surface as potential competition to its joint venture in China with the S.A.I.C. Motor Corporation.

Writer Christopher Hitchens, who died on Thursday from complications of cancer at the age of 62, leaves behind some 18 books and countless essays on politics and public figures. But his most lasting legacy may be his atheism and his long-running duel with what he considered the world's most dangerous threat: religion.

"Francesca Woodman committed suicide at the age of 22, jumping from a window. She had only about five years of photography behind her, much of it done as a student. Working in black and white, she frequently took self-portraits or depicted other young women, sometimes nude. Often the figures are only partly visible or blurry, as if trying to escape the frame.

Even though they are quite small, about 5 by 5 inches, Woodman’s haunting photographs have drawn admirers for decades. Writing in The New York Times in 1986 the critic Michael Brenson wrote: “Mythology, literature, painting and photography seem to have been in her bones. She also had the rarest link with her medium. Like the self she flaunted and concealed, the camera is both public and private, a force both of glamour and detachment.” "

Deaf Professional Arts Network

"Hundreds of mourners have attended the funeral of Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni, who died on Monday at the age of 94.

The square outside Ferrara's San Giorgio cathedral in northern Italy was filled with local residents.

His widow Enrica Fico and film luminaries flanked the wooden casket during the service inside the building. "