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Mats Gustafson’s Landscapes and Swans

 

Since the late 1970s, Mats Gustafson’s fashion illustrations have decorated the pages of magazines such as Interview, The New Yorker, and Vogue, among others. But by 1997, the artist began shifting his focus to the natural world, starting a series of pastel landscape studies. A couple of years later, Gustafson began drawing swans in the same minimalist style that had defined his work in the fashion industry. “It’d been an ongoing switch in my career—focusing on nature—but it was funny, because I picked the most fashionable parts of nature,” Gustafson said. “The swan is very much the supermodel among birds, and they’re very elegant. I was still looking for beautiful lines, but just in the natural world.”

The gallery John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, in New York City, is now showing “Mats Gustafson: Swan,” a collection of the illustrator’s early landscape and swan studies, as well as recent pieces and a digital wall installation. “I wanted to reduce, simplify, and get to the essence of things,” Gustafson said of the stark but romantic works. Herewith, some images from the exhibition, which is on display until January 23. 

via: Vanity Fair

 

Merry Christmas

 

Snowed

 

Martin dOrgeval: Touched by Fire

On February 1, 2008, a fire ripped through Deyrolle, the venerable Parisian entomology and taxidermy store, in business since 1831. The shop's historic collections of butterflies, rare insects, animals and minerals went up in smoke, and with them the memories of generations of schoolchildren, dreamers and enthusiasts fascinated by their motionless beauty. 

This stunning collection of photographs by Martin d'Orgeval captures the animals and insects that survived the disaster in situ, set against a chilling backdrop of charred woodwork and burned cadavers.

 

"November Night"

Listen. .

With faint dry sound,

Like steps of passing ghosts,

The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees

And fall.

By Adelaide Crapsey

Photograph: Gueorgui Pinkhassov

'October 10'

Now constantly there is the sound,

quieter than rain,

of the leaves falling.

Under their loosening bright

gold, the sycamore limbs

bleach whiter.

Now the only flowers

are beeweed and aster, spray

of their white and lavender

over the brown leaves.

The calling of a crow sounds

loud—a landmark—now

that the life of summer falls

silent, and the nights grow.

Wendell Berry, "October 10"

Fall Out

OP-ART

Ed Ruscha

"An overdose of quirk and colors"

Anyone wondering what an overdose of quirk and colors might look like without having to resort to drugs would do well to check out "Pepperminta." The helming debut of Swiss video-art wunderkind Pipilotti Rist rolls some of her favorite themes -- female sexuality, childlike curiosity and happiness, and abundant use of vivid hues -- into one bombastic, heavily chroma-keyed package. This is take it or leave it material for fest auds, with commercial prospects as flat as a stick of Doublemint gum.

via: Variety

Shooting Craters Around the World

Stan Gaz’s big black-and-white aerial photographs of meteor-impact sites in Namibia, Australia, South Africa, and elsewhere appear prehistoric; with the exception of a crater in Arizona and its attendant industrial sprawl, there are no signs of human habitation. Or maybe these images anticipate the end of history, a time when the earth returns to moonlike desolation, its skies black and its barren surface gouged. Gaz’s decidedly lunar landscapes may not be sci-fi fantasies — he took them hanging out of a hovering helicopter — but they’re almost unrecognizable as our home planet. Magnificent and frightening, they suggest an abrupt beginning and a shattering end.

Vince Aletti 

 The New Yorker Magazine

Sites of Impact 

Meteorite Craters Around the World.

Naming Names

 

 

Today few people are proficient in the ordering and naming of life. There are the dwindling professional taxonomists, and fast-declining peoples like the Tzeltal Maya of Mexico, among whom a 2-year-old can name more than 30 different plants and whose 4-year-olds can recognize nearly 100. Things were different once. In Linnaeus’s day, it was a matter of aristocratic pride to have a wonderful and wonderfully curated collection of wild organisms, both dead and alive. Darwin (who gained fame first as the world’s foremost barnacle taxonomist) might have expected any dinner-party conversation to turn taxonomic, after an afternoon of beetle-hunting or wildflower study. Most of us claim and enjoy no such expertise.

No wonder so few of us can really see what is out there. Even when scads of insistent wildlife appear with a flourish right in front of us, and there is such life always — hawks migrating over the parking lot, great colorful moths banging up against the window at night — we barely seem to notice. We are so disconnected from the living world that we can live in the midst of a mass extinction, of the rapid invasion everywhere of new and noxious species, entirely unaware that anything is happening. 

Happily, changing all this turns out to be easy. Just find an organism, any organism, small, large, gaudy, subtle — anywhere, and they are everywhere — and get a sense of it, its shape, color, size, feel, smell, sound.Then find a name for it. Learn science’s name, one of countless folk names, or make up your own. To do so is to change everything, including yourself. Because once you start noticing organisms, once you have a name for particular beasts, birds and flowers, you can’t help seeing life and the order in it, just where it has always been, all around you.

link: Reviving the Lost Art of Naming the World, By Carol Kaesuk Yoon -- The New York Times