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.
See pictures
at https://www.bfi.org/about-fuller/big-ideas/dymaxion-world/dymaxion-house
and http://www.yesterland.com/dymaxion.html
In Kurt
Vonnegut’s 2005 essay collection A Man Without a Country, he 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 Union. Thought 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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