Tuesday, May 9, 2017

Benjamin Henry Day, Jr. (1838-1916) was an illustrator and printer, best known for his invention of Ben-Day dots.  Day was the son of Benjamin Day, an American newspaper publisher best known founding the New York Sun, the first penny press newspaper in the United States, in 1833.  The Ben-Day dots printing process is similar to pointillism.  Depending on the effect, colour and optical illusion needed, small coloured dots are placed together, widely spaced or overlapping.  For example red dots widely spaced create pink whereas closely spaced red dots look like a deep red.  Pulp comic books of the 1950's and 1960's used Ben-Day dots in the four process colours (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) to cheaply create shading and secondary colours such as green, orange and flesh colours.  Ben-Day dots are always of equal size and distribution in a specific area.  To put the dots into a drawing, the artist would buy the sheets from a stationary shop.  Sheets were available in various size and distribution, which gave the artist a choice of what tones that wanted to use.  Ben-Day dots were considered to be the signature of the American artist Roy Lichtenstein, who enlarged and exaggerated them in many of his paintings and sculptures.  http://mrterrysartclub.blogspot.com/2012/11/benjamin-henry-day-jr-and-ben-day-dots.html

Ben-Day Dots defined - From Goodbye-Art Academy  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-srlQ6fKEPM  0:31

The Renaissance, a rebirth of celebrating life on earth, began in Italy and spread to the rest of Europe.  Artists painted people to look more like real humans, and used linear perspective to make their works more realistic and three-dimensional.  Fra Angelico (c. 1400-1455) was originally named Guido di Piero, and then took the name Fra Giovanni.  After he died, people called him Fra Angelico for his angelic art.  Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) was not interested in anatomical accuracy as shown by sloping shoulders and elongated body in The Birth of Venus.  In Primavera, Botticelli painted almost 200 different kinds of flowers.  Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was an artist, inventor, architect, scientist and musician.  Leonardo wrote frequently in notebooks, and covered more than 5,000 pages with drawings, questions and ideas.  Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) was a sculptor, painter, architect, engineer and poet.  Michelengelo painted figures on the Sistine Chapel up to 18 feet tall so they could be seen clearly by viewers standing 60 feet below.  Raphael Sanzio (1483-1520), son of a court painter, learned to paint almost as soon as could hold a brush.  Raphael loved to paint bodies twisting in different directions, and he learned a lot from the paintings and sculptures of his rival Michelangelo.  Source:  Go Fish for Renaissance Artists by Wenda O'Reilly

A polyptych (Greek: poly- "many" and ptychē "fold") is a painting (usually panel painting) which is divided into sections, or panels.  Specifically, a "diptych" is a two-part work of art; a "triptych" is a three-part work; a tetraptych or quadriptych has four parts; pentaptych five; hexaptych six; heptaptych (or septych in Latin) seven; and octaptych eight parts.  Polyptychs typically display one "central" or "main" panel that is usually the largest of the attachments, while the other panels are called "side" panels, or "wings".  Sometimes, as evident in the Ghent and Isenheim works, the hinged panels can be varied in arrangement to show different "views" or "openings" in the piece.  Polyptychs were most commonly created by early Renaissance painters, the majority of which designed their works to be altarpieces in churches and cathedrals.  The polyptych form of art was also quite popular among ukiyo-e printmakers of Edo period Japan.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyptych

After comments on Linden Frederick's Night Stories including mention of The Round House by Louise Erdich, I was reminded of Buckminster Fuller's round house:  Dymaxion.  Conceived and designed in the late 1920's but not actually built until 1945, the Dymaxion House was Buckminster Fuller's solution to the need for a mass-produced, affordable, easily transportable and environmentally efficient house.  The word "Dymaxion" was coined by combining parts of three of Bucky's favorite words:  DY (dynamic), MAX (maximum), and ION (tension).  The house used tension suspension from a central column or mast, sold for the price of a Cadillac, and could be shipped worldwide in its own metal tube.  Toward the end of WW II, Fuller attempted to create a new industry for mass-producing Dymaxion Houses.  Bucky designed a home that was heated and cooled by natural means, that made its own power, was earthquake and storm-proof, and made of permanent, engineered materials that required no periodic painting, reroofing, or other maintenance.  You could easily change the floor plan as required - squeezing the bedrooms to make the living room bigger for a party, for instance.  Downdraft ventilation drew dust to the baseboards and through filters, greatly reducing the need to vacuum and dust.  The Dymaxion House was to be leased, or priced like an automobile, to be paid off in five years.  In 1946, Bucky actually built a later design of the Dymaxion House (also known as the Wichita House).  The Dymaxion's round shape minimized heat loss and the amount of materials needed, while bestowing the strength to successfully fend off a 1964 tornado that missed by only a few hundred yards. 

In Kurt Vonnegut’s 2005 essay collection A Man Without a Countryhe includes the following message on punctuation:  Here is a lesson in creative writing.  First rule:  Do not use semicolons.  They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.  All they do is show you’ve been to college.  While semicolons are more present in the Pulitzer winners on the whole, it's not a necessary condition to have them to appeal to literary circles.  Some writers, like Larry McMurtry, whose Pulitzer Prize–winning Lonesome Dove had almost 650 semicolons per 100,000 words, choose to use them often; others, like Cormac McCarthy, who won a Pulitzer for The Road without using a single semicolon, choose to follow Vonnegut's advice and avoid them.   Ben Blatt  Read more and find table of 25 authors comparing their number of semicolons per 100,000 words at http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2017/05/03/does_using_more_semicolons_make_an_author_more_pretentious.html  Thank you, Muse reader! 

Charles Simic (born 1938) is widely recognized as one of the most visceral and unique poets writing today.  Simic’s work has won numerous awards, among them the 1990 Pulitzer Prize, the MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and, simultaneously, the Wallace Stevens Award and appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate.  He taught English and creative writing for over thirty years at the University of New Hampshire.  Although he emigrated to the U.S. from Yugoslavia as a teenager, Simic writes in English, drawing upon his own experiences of war-torn Belgrade to compose poems about the physical and spiritual poverty of modern life.  Link to poems by Charles Simic at https://www.poemhunter.com/charles-simic/


http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1706  May 9, 2017  On this date in 1386, England and Portugal formally ratified their alliance with the signing of the Treaty of Windsor, making it the oldest diplomatic alliance in the world which is still in force.  On this date in 1950, Robert Schuman presented his proposal on the creation of an organized Europe, which according to him was indispensable to the maintenance of peaceful relations.  This proposal, known as the "Schuman Declaration", is considered by some people to be the beginning of the creation of what is now the European UnionThought for Today  Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships. - Charles Simic, poet (b. 9 May 1938)

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