Category Archives: Paintings

Without paintings we are nothing

Oklahoma!

Paintings, Photography

All that is good and great.

The screen was like nothing I could have imagined. It was simply vast. This was in 1956.

My dad had taken me to the Leicester Square Odeon cinema and the movie was Rodgers’s and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! America. My first childhood inkling of my future home.

Back then actors had to sing (on pitch), act, dance, emote and generally be perfect to succeeed in Hollywood, and you can very much see survival of the fittest from the cornucopia of talent on display here, never less than in Shirley Jones (with her wonderful coloratura soprano) and Gordon McRae.

Yet maybe the greatest magic here is from that technological wonder of twentieth century film, Technicolor. Evidently there are two masters – a 2.55:1 on 35mm film and the real thing, the 2.20:1 70mm original. That’s the one I have and while sometimes characters are cut off at the edge of an already ultrawide image, the quality – today – is breathtaking. You can see just how wide 2.20:1 is from the black bars in the images below, taken from a standard 1.78:1 (16:9) TV screen.

I finally got me to watching it for the first time in 57 years, yes siree, and it is a wonder to behold. And how often can you say that a childhood memory is better today than it was over a half century ago? The widescreen images capture the vastness of the American prairie like no other system possibly could.


Shirley Jones and Gordon McRae.


Jones soliloquizes in gorgeous Technicolor.


Somehow she morphs to a much haughtier Bambi Linn at the start of the surreal dream sequence.


The dream sequence becomes a Western Can-Can with Rod Steiger, no less, with imagery Dali would approve.


Drama reminiscent of Géricault’s ‘The Raft of the Medusa‘.


Oklahoma!

An extraordinary accomplishment in American musical theater with cinematography, music, singing and dancing (choreographed by none other than Agnes de Mille) to die for.

Rodgers and Hammerstein at their very best.

Alleyway

Paintings, Photographs

In North Beach.

Jasper Place, one of the many charming alleyways in North Beach, SF.

The high dynamic range is easily corrected using the superb Highlights and Shadows sliders in Lightroom 4. Abobe did a tremendous engineering job here.

Whenever I traipse along these alleyways Utrillo’s paintings dance in my head:


Maurice Utrillo. Sacre Coeur, Paris.

Panny GX7, 17mm Zuiko.

L’Absinthe

Paintings, Photographs

Hope dissolved.

Degas had a good crack at it in 1876. As the most photographic of painters, he showed life without hope, the pair deep in their cups, drinking ill distilled absinthe en route to blindness and death. And then there’s that wide-angle vision of his, with the signed knife in the foreground.

Until this time just about every painter saw though a 50mm lens, with the possible exception of the incomparable Paolo Uccello (1397 – 1475, quite an innings) whose Battle of San Romano was very much seen through a 21mm. Fortunate Europeans can see this work in the National Gallery, the Uffizi or the Louvre, but without a shadow of a doubt the one in London is a standout, one of the true materpieces of Western art. High time someone in America bought it …. a rounding error for a tech IPO windfall. I so miss standing close to the canvas completely subsumed by the action. After all, it would be a challenge to sanity to return to rain and Ivan saturated London.

I had a go at the same theme recently, at the oldest drinking spot in South Beach, SF, The Saloon, a survivor of the 1906 earthquake and fire. The default beer here, Pabst Blue Ribbon, is arguably worse than badly distilled absinthe. I asked the barman for permission to take pictures yet this image was completely unposed. ‘L’Absinthe’ flashed through my mind as I pressed the button. Degas pioneered the technique of cutting people off at the edge of the frame, one devolved from his photography. I just copied that. This is from the full frame, no cropping.

Nikon D3x, 35mm f/1.4 Nikkor G at f/2 (a loaner, before I finally got a 35/1.4 Sigma which actually focused properly. Decent lens, the Nikkor, focuses well, but no Siggy when it comes to resolution wide open). That said, the 18″ x 24″ print of this little drama on my wall is simply a showstopper, with especially lovely rendering of color. You will not go wrong with the 35mm f/1.4 Nikkor G, though it costs an arm and a leg.

David Hockney at the de Young

Paintings

An exceptional show.


Buying the costly tickets.


The book of the show – highly recommended.

The David Hockney show at the de Young museum in Golden Gate Park is exceptional in every way and a must see for any photographer. Only works by this prolific artist since 2002 are shown in what is the largest exhibition the de Young has ever mounted. Hockney makes use of modern and traditional technologies in inspiring ways and the New York Times’s critic was bang on in describing him as ‘… one of the greatest colorists since Matisse’, though it has to be added that Raoul Dufy is a kindred spirit.


My son Winston approaches the show with unjustified trepidation.

Among the many compelling images on display here are video displays showing Hockney’s iPad compositions in time lapse – quite riveting as you literally see the creation of the work (the artist explains that he discovered that the Brushes app actually records each image creation session) – as well as the huge wall displays of eighteen or more large LCDs showing the beauty of the Yorkshire countryside whence Hockney hails. The last eight years he spent there (he lives in Los Angeles) were exceptionally productive and one room, whose four walls show giant multi-panel paintings of a country lane in each of the four seasons, is perhaps the finest thing in the show. The images are, without exception, joyful and Hockney’s love for his native Yorkshire shines through.

There are also many portraits of his friends done in that somewhat flat and naïve style which maybe could be represented in less volume, but are charming for what they are.


Portraits. No photography allowed.

Another room contains no fewer than twenty-four large LCD panels with motion images of jugglers doing their thing. It’s a lot of fun and reminds us that Hockney never gets pretentious about his art or takes it too seriously. He’s too well grounded in his Yorkshire roots to permit that sort of silliness.


Jugglers.

One large room is dedicated to the ‘Great Wall’, containing Hockney’s clippings of great paintings since 1400 and showing how the use of the camera obscura from around 1420, where painters traced a projected image of the scene in a darkened room, started to affect ways of seeing. The camera may not have been invented for another four centuries but the room shows compellingly how seeing changed with the introduction of technology.

Highly recommended.

All images except the second on the Panasonic GX7 at ISO 3200.