One of Linder’s most recognizable works of art first appeared on the sleeve of the 1977 Buzzcocks single “Orgasm Addict.” On the cover, Linder utilized what would become her signature mass-media collage strategy to adorn or violate—or, really, both—a classical nude female torso with mouths at the nipples and a household iron in place of the head. By the time the single was released, Linder Sterling, born in 1954 in Liverpool, had already become a fixture in the Manchester punk and post-punk scene out of which bands like The Fall, Joy Division, the Buzzcocks, Magazine, and The Smiths emerged. In many ways, her collage works from the period have much in common with the subversive practices of punk: Ripping things apart and reassembling them was a way of showing the counterfeit quality and construction of any social image. But Linder’s art went even beyond the rebellion of her underground musical counterparts. Much like Hannah Höch in the Weimar era, Linder fused capitalism, sexuality, violence, feminism, desire, morbidity, and hope in her collages. Those fantastic and yet quotidian works have gained perhaps even more biting currency in today’s culture.
Linder has transformed herself many times as an artist since those first collages. She performed as the lead singer in the art-punk band Ludus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvryKnzZtZE
(Source: interviewmagazine.com)
Voyage to Summer, Konstantin Kalinovich
Serenity, pacification, quiet… The circle of life, revolving unhurriedly, is approaching to the Eternity. In Konstantin Kalinovich’s etchings all senses and emotions have united into one entity. You cannon grasp gladness without sorrow. Just a moment before there was life here, and now we have the Eternity.
Yulia Bezrodnaya (fragment of the book introduction)
(Source: brodovych.com)
Museum of Butterflies, Konstantin Kalinovich
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3im0xe5M8S4
Lear (1812-1888) is best remembered as a master of nonsense in verse, prose, and song. He gave the limerick new life, and along the way created the “runcible spoon,” “the Jumblies,” and the “bong tree.” But Lear was also an accomplished landscape painter and travel writer.
Even fewer people know that the young Lear was a meticulous painter and illustrator of natural history.
By age 17, Lear was well-known among naturalists at the London Zoo for his precision illustrations. And by 19, he published a gorgeous monograph on parrots, what he said was the first of its kind on a single species. “Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots” (1832) includes 42 lush and large, hand-colored lithographs of the birds he most loved. (Lear didn’t mind dying and going to heaven, he once said, but would be more comfortable if parrots were there too.)
The monograph did not make the young Lear rich, but it made him one of the most accomplished natural history artists of his era. He influenced two icons of nature illustration, John Gould and John James Audubon, and worked with both.
(Source: news.harvard.edu)
Parrots, Flamingo, Edward Lear
