In Search of Beauty

gastrogirl:

bbq maple balsamic burger on a pretzel bun.

Ohmagaud I vant thiss!

luzfosca:

Edwin Smith

Roofscape, Whitby, North Yorkshire, 1959

I love how the atmospheric smoke makes the whole photograph look tumoltuous - its as if its a rolling tide not fixed rooftops and chimney stacks.  

cavetocanvas:

Constantin Brancusi, La Muse, 1912

From the Guggenheim:

Brancusi often depicted the human head, another favorite subject, as a unitary ovoid shape separate from the body. When placed on its side, it evokes images of repose. Some of Brancusi’s streamlined oval heads, whose forms recall Indian fertility sculptures in their fusion of egglike and phallic shapes, suggest the miracle of creation.

Brancusi’s marble Muse is a subtle monument to the aesthetic act and to the myth that woman is its inspiration. The finely chiseled and smoothly honed head is poised atop a sinuous neck, the curve of which is counterbalanced by a fragmentary arm pressed against the ear. The facial features, although barely articulated, embody the proportions of classical beauty.

wowgreat:

Sue Fuller
String Composition #55, 1953
25 x 25 inches
plastic string construction

This reminds me of the work of Naum Gabo (oh god, I feel a blogging session about him coming on) who constructed similar sculptures using wire and string. Works like this show the defining leap made in the mid-twentieth century towards the dematerialisation of sculpture and the more away from the figurative into the abstract. Unlike the bronze and marble neoclassical sculptures we are used to seeing, these works play on ideas of the disparities between mass and volume and examine how objects really occupy their space.

Bernini, Apollo and Daphne

Detail of hands in which you can see the struts that have been left in by the sculptor.

rideablackhorse:

Gian Lorenzo Bernini: Apollo and Daphne.

Bernini is renowned for his ability to create a great sense of movement and life within his works, comparatively turning marble into flesh but also showing us the very constructs of his statue, removing the sense of illusion. Like Michelangelo before him, Bernini has left the statue somewhat unfinished; whether this is laziness (he was known to abandon works or just leave them to be completed by his underlings) or design, many of the struts (the pieces left in that strengthen the marble through the carving process which are removed in the final moments) on Daphne’s fingers are left intact. Here, this ‘oversight’ has actually lead the piece to a more intrinsic dynamism, in which we can see Daphne’s transformation into a tree. 

I’ll try and find a close-up of the fingers