Frank Beacham's Journal

David Lynch is 76 years old today

David Lynch is 76 years old today.

A film and television director, visual artist, musician, actor and author, Lynch is known for his surrealist films and unique cinematic style. The surreal and, in many cases, violent elements contained within his films have been known to "disturb, offend or mystify" audiences.

Born to a middle-class family in Missoula, Montana, Lynch spent his childhood traveling around the United States, before going on to study painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. It was there he made the transition to producing short films.

Deciding to devote himself more fully to the film medium, he moved to Los Angeles, where he produced his first motion picture, the surrealist horror film, Eraserhead, in 1977. After Eraserhead became a cult classic on the midnight movie circuit, Lynch was employed to direct a biographical film about a deformed man, Joseph Merrick. It was The Elephant Man (1980). With this film, he gained mainstream success.

Then being employed by the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, he proceeded to make two films: the science-fiction epic, Dune (1984), which proved to be a critical and commercial failure, and then a neo-noir crime film, Blue Velvet (1986), which was critically acclaimed.

Next, Lynch created his own television series with Mark Frost, the popular murder mystery, Twin Peaks (1990–1991; 2016). He also created a cinematic prequel, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), a road movie, Wild at Heart (1990) and a family film, The Straight Story (1999), in the same period.

Turning further towards surrealist filmmaking, three of his subsequent films operated on "dream logic." Using non-linear narrative structures, he made the psychological thriller, Lost Highway (1997), the neo-noir mystery film, Mulholland Drive (2001) and the mystery film, Inland Empire (2006).

Meanwhile, Lynch embraced the Internet as a medium, producing several web-based shows, such as the animated short, Dumbland (2002), and the surreal sitcom, Rabbits (2002).

Over his career, Lynch has received three Academy Award nominations for Best Director and a nomination for best screenplay. Lynch has won France's César Award for Best Foreign Film twice, as well as the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and a Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement at the Venice Film Festival.

The French government awarded him the Legion of Honor, the country's top civilian honor, as a Chevalier in 2002 and then an Officier in 2007, while that same year, The Guardian described Lynch as "the most important director of this era."

Allmovie called Lynch "the Renaissance man of modern American filmmaking," while the success of his films has led to him being labelled "the first popular Surrealist."

Paul Cézanne, French painter, was born a 183 years ago today

Paul Cézanne, French painter, was born a 183 years ago today.

Cézanne was a Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the conception of artistic endeavor to a new and radically different world of art.

He formed the bridge between late 19th century Impressionism and the early 20th century's new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism.

The line attributed to both Matisse and Picasso that Cézanne "is the father of us all" cannot be easily dismissed.

Above, Cézanne in a self portrait

Pyramid of Skulls, 1901

Painting by Paul Cézanne

Louis Comfort Tiffany, who died 89 years ago today, was most famous as a designer of stained glass

Louis Comfort Tiffany made this window for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago

“Color,” said Louis Comfort Tiffany, “is to the eye what music is to the ear.”

Tiffany, who died on this day 89 years ago, was the son of the founder of Tiffany & Co., the famous jeweler. But the younger Tiffany found his own success as an artist and designer, most famous for his work with stained glass.

Tiffany is the American artist most associated with the Art Nouveau and Aesthetic movements. He was affiliated with a prestigious collaborative of designers known as the Associated Artists, which included Lockwood de Forest, Candace Wheeler, and Samuel Colman.

Tiffany designed stained glass windows and lamps, glass mosaics, blown glass, ceramics, jewelry, enamels and metalwork.

In 1881, Tiffany helped redesign the interior of a house in Hartford, Conn., owned by Mark Twain, who was making his name after the publication of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.”

The work was followed a year later by a commission with a much higher profile: redecorating the White House. Chester Arthur had been thrust into office after the assassination of President James Garfield in 1881. He hired Tiffany to remodel the mansion to suit his refined tastes.

Tiffany redecorated several rooms, and he also installed a large stained-glass screen in the Entrance Hall. But his mark on the White House did not last. Twenty years later, in 1902, Theodore Roosevelt ordered a major renovation that swept away the building’s Victorian touches — including Tiffany’s screen.

Thanks New York Times

John Backlund designed retro-futuristic guitars that live on today...

50’s era photo of J. Backlund Fine Ass Guitars, with curb service. Perhaps in Rapid City, S.D.

Entirely self-taught as an artist/designer, John Backlund was influenced by retro-futuristic design concepts that are reminiscent of the period from the mid-late 1930's to the early 1960's.

The terms "Aero," "Rocket," "Streamline," and even "Atomic" are often used to describe his design work. Backlund often found himself involved in pursuits besides art and design.

He did stints as a reluctant motorcycle salesman, a terrible guitar salesman, a very young and inept Nebraska sandhills ranch hand and a fairly good flatbed semi-driver running a worn-out Freightliner FLD throughout the Midwest.

Reflecting on guitars and design, John observed, "I like color in my designs. I like bright things. I like two-tones that compliment each other. I like a splash of chrome for contrast, and I like it all integrated into a flowing form that is 'balanced,' well-proportioned and pleasing to the eye.

“Solid body electric guitars are a tempting and wonderful candidate for my style of design, and being a guitar player for many decades, it's only natural that they figure prominently in my efforts.”

J. Backlund Design is in business today as Retronix.

"Sloppy Joe's" in Key West, Florida, 1936

Painting by Waldo Pierce

That’s Ernest Hemingway with the baseball cap leaning in on the bar in the foreground. The artist, Waldo Pierce, is off to the side.

Alzira, Rachael's sister and Pierce's wife is at the bar getting a drink from legendary bartender, Al Skinner, who worked at Sloppy Joe's until his death in 1949.

The Silver Slipper dance hall, part of the original Sloppy Joe's tavern in Key West, Florida is in the background.

"Rules" for Creativity

"I don't know that there are any rules one should follow in the arts, really. I mean, we should be polite and we should engage in whatever studies we need to remain amenable under the duress that awaits us, but rules? I don't know.

I think too many rules are being inserted into the minds of actors and directors and writers. Too many things are expected, and they tend to have little to do with being at your best. They tend, instead, to concern salability and style, and to think too much about either of those things kills almost any artistic endeavor.

The greatest thing to possess and the hardest thing to find is an open mind — in anything, not just the arts. I would urge any artist to wonder why certain things can't be done, rather than adhere to how things have always been done. Be open to everything; be as kind as you can to what your peers are doing.

Tennessee (Williams) spoke of the fatal amber dream from which we, as young artists, must emerge, to grow and to fully understand things, and the only way we can do that — or one of the strongest ways — is to loosen the embrace on what we felt and believed when we were first captivated by the theatre or film or dance or whatever.

Jesus, I look at certain films that galvanized me when I was young and I wince that I thought it was so brilliant. Well, it was brilliant to the seventeen-year-old Arthur Penn, and it was necessary and I love it, but I know it is not the lodestar I thought it was.

It was a stepping stone, and now I need to go higher. And the plays? Plays that tore the top of my head off just thirty years ago now have moths flying from their pages, and I think: Why did I love this? Well, I did love it; I learned from it; I grew because of it.

But times and talents change, and we have to move forward, and we can no longer believe that the way it was done in New York or Paris or Moscow decades ago — times and emotions and memories lost to us — define an experience or us.

Grow or die, you know? Build the greatest foundation from what you now love and move one. Move up."

— Arthur Penn in a 2006 interview

Christopher Street, Greenwich Village, 1934

Painting by Beulah Bettersworth

Winter Morning

Painting by Walter Launt Palmer

Palmer, born in 1854 in Albany, New York, was an Impressionist painter. His father, Erastus Dow Palmer, was a sculptor and their residence was frequented by his father's friends, notably landscape painter, Frederick E. Church.

Palmer began his formal artistic training under Charles Loring Elliott, but it was Church who trained Palmer in landscape painting. He frequent and lengthy trips to Europe, and acquired a growing interest in French Impressionism as well as an enduring attraction to Venetian subjects.

When Palmer returned to the United States, he spent most of his time in Albany, where artists like William and James Hart, Homer Dodge Martin and Edward Gay also painted. He also spent some time working out of New York City at the Tenth Street Studio Building.

Palmer specialized in winter landscape scenes, a tradition he carried throughout his career. He died in 1932 in Albany.

Henri Matisse was born 152 years ago today

Henri Matisse was born 152 years ago today.

A French artist known for his use of color and his fluid and original draughtsmanship, Matisse was also a printmaker and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter.

Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.

Although he was initially labelled a Fauve (wild beast), by the 1920s he was increasingly hailed as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting.

His mastery of the expressive language of color and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century, won him recognition as a leading figure in modern art.

Matisse died in 1954 in Nice, France.

Above, Matisse in 1933

Blue Nude (II), 1952

Painting by Henri Matisse

Dance, 1910

Painting by Henri Matisse

Cityscape by Aeon Videos