Mind the Image

1976 Disappear – acrylic on canvas

Sharon Anderson — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 04:27:13 +0000

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Mothership – collage on canvas

Sharon Anderson — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 04:14:17 +0000

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Plugged In – collage on canvas

Sharon Anderson — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 04:12:07 +0000

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Repose – collage on canvas

Sharon Anderson — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 04:10:32 +0000

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Remembering Helen Frankenthaler

Sharon Anderson — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 16:15:11 +0000

Originally published in the Northside San Francisco March 2012

Whatever the medium, there is the difficulty, challenge, fascination and often productive clumsiness of learning a new method: the wonderful puzzles and problems of translating with new materials. –Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler, an award-winning American painter, died at the age of 83 on December 27. Many regarded her as the country’s most prominent female artist. From the early 1950’s until her death, she produced an enormous and vital body of work.

After finding inspiration at a Jackson Pollock exhibit, Frankenthaler forged her own style of post abstract expressionism which became known as color field painting. She experimented with large canvases stained with thin washes of oil paint producing watercolor-like floating shapes of rich pigment.

Born in New York City, her parents nurtured her creative instincts and supported her painting studies, enrolling her in the Dalton School at age 15 where she studied under the artist Rufino Tamayo. Frankenthaler met art and literary critic Clement Greenberg resulting in her inclusion in the 1964 exhibition Post-Painterly Abstraction, solidifying her place among the color field painters and in the New York art world.

The sweetly hued biomorphic shapes in her paintings were considered by many to be completely abstract, but Frankenthaler’s spontaneous methodology of pouring paint directly on the canvas was not without meaning. The imagery was often based on nature, in particular landscapes surrounding her Connecticut home.

In her later years she continued her painting while also exploring other media like clay, welded steel sculptures, book illustration and stage design.

Frankenthaler’s large scale canvases, which were sometimes as much as ten feet high, were covered with oil thinned by turpentine to create the impromptu stained shapes she was known for. This soak stain creates a halo effect around the color area. Oil saturation ultimately results in the fading of color over time and the erosion of the painting. Like Tibetan sand paintings meticulously constructed and then allowed to be blown away by the wind, the paintings impart the temporary nature of existence, a meditation on impermanence and the unplanned. An instinct that Frankenthaler describes as “… one really beautiful wrist motion, that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it. It looks as if it were born in a minute.”

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Logos

Sharon Anderson — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 00:26:58 +0000

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BINARY-EROSION-STYLE

Sharon Anderson — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 17:41:42 +0000

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Intermission

Sharon Anderson — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 04:25:04 +0000

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The film Le Voyage Dans La Lune (A Trip to the Moon) re-released with new soundtrack by AIR

Sharon Anderson — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 20:23:00 +0000

Originally published in the Northside San Francisco January 2012

After its original release in 1902, the French science fiction film Le Voyage Dans La Lune has now been re-released with a new soundtrack by the French group AIR. Directed by Georges Méliès, Le Voyage was the first science fiction film and was loosely based on Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon and H.G. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon.

Upon its initial release, Le Voyage was extremely popular within the newly formed genre of moving pictures. Its most famous image depicted the moon as a human face with a bullet-shaped spacecraft painfully crashed into its right eye. In the story, earth travelers arrive on the lunar surface to discover that it is nothing more than a man’s face populated by little green men, a deliberate, surreal mockery of scientific beliefs regarding outer space. This was also the first film to utilize hand painted color, dissolves, time lapse photography and multiple exposures.

Despite its popularity and innovation, Méliès’ film was not the success it should have been during its time. Thomas Edison and his technicians, taking advantage of an era before copyright laws, reproduced and distributed this groundbreaking film throughout the United States and realized great profits from its success, profits that contributed to the financial ruin of Méliès.

Fast forward to 1993 when the only surviving hand-colored print of the film was discovered by the Filmoteca de Catalunya. The restoration process of the badly decomposed film took many years, culminating in the digital restoration at the Technicolor Lab of Los Angeles in 2010. The producers approached Jean-Benoît Dunckel and Nicholas Godin of AIR to compose the contemporary soundtrack to the restored version of Le Voyage. AIR’s minimal, melodic and dreamlike sound sequences have been widely integrated into television and film by directors such as Sofia Coppola. Though Le Voyage is only 14 minutes long, AIR were so honored to be chosen to compose the music for this classic French film that Dunckel and Godin composed an entire album devoted to the re-release of Le Voyage.

Le Voyage dans La Lune, a newly restored part of film history, is now living its second life in 2012. AIR’s original film score and full length feature CD soundtrack will be released on February 7th in the United States and Canada.

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Too Far

Sharon Anderson — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 20:16:53 +0000

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