Tag Archives: bust

Arts and Culture

The Story Behind A Charming Street Art Enigma: The Spray Paints Series

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beauty photo by gail worley
Beauty (All Photos By Gail)

While most of the street art that I discover on my adventures is clearly tagged, sometimes that tag is hard to decipher, and I need some assistance identifying the artist. By connecting with artists on Instagram, I’ve learned that they all seem to know and support each other, which is cool and very helpful.  If I don’t know the artist behind a work that I want to put on the blog, and the first person I ask doesn’t know, then they know someone who does. This is how I ended up connecting with the creator of an unsigned series of works that I’ve been seeing on the streets, and documenting, since around Christmastime last year. Each of the paste-ups in this very distinctive series features one to three still life images accompanied by a one-word title, and the artist’s signature conspicuously absent. If you live in the east village or downtown, there’s no way you haven’t seen them. All I can say is that they speak to me.

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Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Marble Bust of Mary Shelley By Camillo Pistrucci

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bust of mary shelley photo by gail worley
Photos By Gail

“Singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind.” This is how the radical philosopher William Godwin described his daughter, the Romantic novelist Mary Shelley, who achieved fame and infamy for her groundbreaking Gothic fiction Frankenstein (1818), written at the remarkable age of twenty-one.  Here, the Italian neoclassicist Camillo Pistrucci uses the imposing genre of the white marble portrait bust (1843) to present Shelley in the grand manner of a virtuoso. Balancing the rhythmic forms of the face and drapery with the dazzling details of her sweeping Victorian hairstyle, Pistrucci achieves a precision and finesse that betrays the influence of his father, Benedetto Pistrucci, the unrivaled cameo carver. The artist carved the bust in Rome in the year of Shelley’s Italian sojourn.

bust of mary shelley photo by gail worley
Mary Shelley (1797 – 1851)

Photographed in the British Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Salvador Dali, Retrospective Bust of a Woman

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retrospective bust of a woman by gail worley
All Photos By Gail

The idea for this work began when Salvador Dalí discovered an inkwell illustrated with the praying couple (from Jean-Francois Millet’s painting The Angelus, 1857–59). He embedded the inkwell in a loaf of bread and placed them both on the portrait bust of a woman.

retrospective bust of a woman detail by gail worley

In 1931, Dalí described Surrealist sculpture as “created wholly for the purpose of materializing in a fetishistic way, with maximum tangible reality, ideas and fantasies of a delirious character.” Retrospective Bust of a Woman (1933) not only presents a woman as an object, but explicitly as one to be consumed. A baguette crowns her head, cobs of corn dangle around her neck, and ants swarm along her forehead as if gathering crumbs. Ants, of course, are a common reoccurring motif in Dali’s work.

retrospective bust of a woman side view photo by gail worley

Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.

retrospective bust of a woman detail photo by gail
Detail

Arts and Culture

Pink Thing of The Day: Miniature Greco-Roman Bust in a Pink Glow

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Miniature Marble Bust
Photo By Gail

This little bust of a Greco-Roman soldier sporting a super fancy helmet caught my eye despite its diminutive size of maybe 2 inches in height. And as is basks in a pinkish-hued glow, it’s easy to believe that the statue is in fact pink; but it’s not. The tiny bust is white, but by shooting it with my phone from a low angle, I was able to maximize the pink reflection of the room’s walls through the glass shelf on which it sits. It’s art!

Photographed at Wonderworld Space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Arts and Culture

The Bird Is The Word Lime Green Fiberglass Mickey MAO Bust by Frank Kozik

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The Bird Is The Word
Photos By Gail

Concert Poster artist and collectible figure aficionado Frank Kozik has been churning out limited editions of his Mickey Mao bust, officially entitled The Bird is the Word (because “Papa Ooh Mao Mao,“ I guess?) for a decade, I think. I’ve seen them in all sizes, colors and finishes, but this one measures an imposing 30″ x 20″ x 18″ and comes in a Lime Green Sparkle Automotive finish that can be yours for just $7,500!

The Bird Is The Word