Recently,  and by that I mean the last two or three years,  I've taken to smoking a pipe.  I own three of them  and they're basically these fascinating works of art.  I like the German styles,  but there are hundreds of different basic types, and thousands of variations.  As a big fan and a student of history (informally but fanatically),  I've seen pipes in the hands of every type of interesting character all through time.  It's the same thing that attracted me to chess and Nine Men's Morris,  in spite of the fact that I had no previous interest in games whatsoever.

I've never been a smoker, either.  Cigarettes smell terrible, they make your clothing smell terrible, they taste terrible,  they're addictive, and quite, quite, expensive.  Pipes, on the other hand,  have to be purchases just once,  and if you're a casual smoker, like me,  it costs next to nothing.  Also,  pipe tobacco smells delicious,  and it makes your clothing smell nice.  Also also,  one doesn't inhale pipe smoke,  but puff it into the mouth for the flavour...then you can blow smoke rings like billio.  Or magic ships,  if you have Gandalf-level skills.  All of mine are wood,  briar and others,  but someday in the near future I plan on getting some clay and also Meerschaum pipes.  If they're good enough for Sherlock Holmes,  then I'm in good company.

Here are some pipe-related works by Ernst_Müller, Abraham Teniers, Josef Wagner, Carl Spitzweg, Wilhelm Benz, Eduard von Grützner, Emile Jean Horace & others.

Tavik František Šimon (the Tavik, according to Wikipedia, was his mother's maiden name) was a Bohemian (now Czech) artist, whose work straddled two centuries.  I was immediately drawn to him;  he reminded me a bit of a Dutch favourite of mine,  Anton Pieck,  with muted colour and mobile, interesting lines.  I've become more a fan of illustration these days,  and most times I enjoy it as well as I do a really fine painting.  The illustrators of his era,  the turn of the 20th century,  were real craftsmen as well as sophisticated workers in line and colour.

Apparently he was very well traveled, which definitely shows in his art.  His choices of subject are international,  and unlike many people who worked in 'oriental' subjects,  his glow with both humanity and reality.  I'm both pleased and intrigued to find that he had done a huge number of 'ex libris' plates;  I'm an avid collector of old books, and these are a pleasant and often passed-over  subgenre of art.   He's excellent.

It's no secret that I love the Dutch and Flemish art;  they have what it takes to touch my heart.  One of the main reasons, I think,  is that they're masters with light.  Vermeer, of course, gets most of the attention,  but the Dutch in general do magic with the brush when it comes to lighting scenes.  Carl Holsoe is very much at the top of my list in this area.  Born in Arhus, Denmark,  He attended the Royal Academy of Art in Copenhagen.

Although he did portraits and landscapes,  what I love is his interior paintings.  Usually featuring a woman engaged in some quite activity,  especially reading,  he evokes a wonderfully peaceful atmosphere.  His lighting and muted colours work together to create this tranquility,  and at a level that I believe is unrivaled in the world of representative painters.  He certainly knows how to bring wall to life!  Witness his masterful arrangement of furniture and wall decor (I've never wanted plates on my wall so much as after looking at his art);  he knows what looks good in a home! 

I can't get enough of his wonderful world...he's made me look at my own domicile with an eye for peaceful living,  and it has done wonders.

It's rare to run into real folk musicians anymore, especially if one is a fanatic.  After a while, as the older and more authentic, unspoiled, pre-modern types die off,  all we're left with in many cases are either quaint revivalist pastiches or glossy commercial musicians.  American oldtime music is like that to a depressing degree.  All of the great naturalistic folk players, like the amazing Roscoe Holcomb (actually spelled Rosco Halcomb), are long gone, leaving the hardcore listener with fewer and fewer discoveries as time goes on.  In the Bavarian Zither player Josef Bauer, we have exactly that kind of musician:  raw, unspoiled, and oozing intense regional flavour in every song.

Born in Greiling, a village in the county of Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen, Bavaria, he was the youngest of nine children,  and he took up the Zither under the tutelage of one of his older brothers.  He enjoyed performing in various local gatherings,  and even entertained his fellow soldiers after being drafted into the army during WWI.  In 1918, after the defeat of the German army,  Bauer happily went home to his family farm, where he returned to performing music.  Around 1920 he joined a musical group formed by  Anna, Benedict and Mary Trischberger, called "Das Gaißacher Sänger und Zitherquartett" (Gaißach is another municipality in Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen), which became very popular across the region.

He married Anna Trischberger, and he settled on Kraudn farm in the village of Lehen in Gaißach;  thus, by Bavarian traditional naming conventions,  he became, and remained,  Der Kraudn Sepp.  Sepp, or it's diminutive, Sepp'l, is a regional nickname for Josef, so he was called "Josef of Kraudn farm".

He played with the quartet until Anna died in 1967, which is an incredible run for a group of any musical style,  and then went on to perform Zither solos and songs alone.  He made a number of albums, and he came to represent, in many ways, the ideal of the regional country lifestyle.  True to the vernacular music of the German-speaking countries, his songs are full of "earthy" (read: bawdy) content;  songs for farmers and carpenters to drink thick, foamy beer to.

I was turned on to Der Kraudn Sepp by my Dutch friend Harry Van Lunenburg, and I've been obsessed ever since.  Real Bavarian music, in the USA, anyway,  is fairly difficult to come by, even when you have any idea who is who;  what an incredible find I have in this amazingly expressive player.  His rustic, yet expressive Zither picking  compliments his unadorned singing in a colourfully unpredictable way.

His album Sonntag (Sunday) is readily available on the web, both digitally and on compact disc.

I wrote the above on my Jim Flora post on my old website Claytonology, and as I reread it today,  I'm pleased by the passion that I had when I wrote it.  You see,  I had just rediscovered his charismatic work;  a friend had purchased one of his albums (Inside Sauter-Finegan),  and the crispness of the image had popped me in the face.  I was reinvigorated!  I was a big record collector in my younger days (until I had to move them several times),  and wherever one goes in pursuit of the LP,  Jim Flora will be waiting, with a humble, yet wry smile,  and any one of a multitude of fantastic cover illustrations.  I nabbed all that I could.

Flora has inspired a generation of bedazzled imitators;  smiling, post-modern,  energetic hipsters with artist's tools in hand, paying homage to the master, and no wonder, too;  when it comes to post-modernity in popular musical illustration, there is nobody who can lay a greater claim to the throne.  He was the benchmark for the the album era,  and a reminder, by way of an LP epitaph,  that popular culture can also be high art,  and that creativity can (and should) be above all else. In the current environment, where derivation and superficial pastiche are the law of the land, we need people like Jim Flora more than ever.

Gustaf Tenggren is one of those great artists that go under that radar of most people,  yet his images are known by legions.  His work in Disney films, such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Bambi and Pinocchio call up the dreaded term "iconic",  and every little child (of my generation at least) knows the covers of the children's books The Poky Little Puppy and The Tawny Scrawny Lion.

Though he was born and educated in Sweden,  he became and American citizen in 1920, apparently never returning to the place of his birth.  He worked for the Disney company for nearly a decade, then went on to do children's books and other projects.  I'm wondering if there's some regional aesthetic in places like Sweden and Finland;  I see commonalities between some of what Tenggren does and in others,  most notably the Finnish artist Tove Jansson. 

His versatility of style and his amazing use of muted colour really grab me;  he had a fairy tale magic in his stuff that has stuck with me all my life. I think his name should be as recognisable as his  amazing work!

There are so many amazing worlds in these images.  I'm stunned by them all.  Each one represents a different kind of journey,  or earthy experience...I love to sit back and admire their textures.   I hope you enjoy them!

Fritz Eichenberg was a Jewish-German woodcut artist, who,  along with living through WWI,  was also politically active against Adolph Hitler and the Nazis, ending with his emigration to the United States well before WWII.  It was a particularly harsh era in which to be a German; the intensity of those experiences are streaked throughout his work, whether he was illustrating a gothic masterpiece like Wuthering Heights,  or his many children's book images.

Though he was  Jewish,  he became a Quaker and did many Christian illustrations.  He taught at a number of famed art schools (including the Pratt Institute),  wrote and illustrated for magazines, and did hundreds of plates for books.  Along with Frans Masereel,  Eichenberg had a fearless and merciless approach to depictions of life; his people are aggressively stern when they are serious,  chillingly baleful in their evils, and superbly beatific in their joy.

There are legions more images available to experience than the ones I have below, but these are among my top favourites.  These seem appropriate after my recent Barry Moser post...I guess I'm just in this mood.  Enjoy, and let me know what you think!

(click image to enlarge, then use the arrow keys ← → to change images )

No matter how you feel about religion,  no matter how you feel about Catholicism,  pro or con,  there's one thing that you have to admit:  Catholics have style.   It is my hope that the haters will set aside their biases and enjoy.

It may be obvious to say, but I do a lot of harvesting of images on the web; it was the sheer mass in my collection that inspired this blog.  The more I grabbed,  the more that I noticed very cool images of the cardinal in his scarlet robes.  The cardinal,  as viewed in these images,  is a very human chap;  pious, educated,  amused,  amusing,  serious,  fun,  artistic,  musical,  and has a good sense of la bonne vie,  or the good life.  I started putting them in a folder on my drive,  and it grew to a huge size!  Now seems like the right time to share these.  I have at least three times as many of them as presented here,  so I picked some of the most interesting and fun ones;  playing games,  playing music,  eating and interacting with pets.

So here they are, by artists such as Georges Croegaert,  Francois Brunery, Victor Marais-Milton,  Jehan Georges Vibert, Alfred Charles Weber,  Andrea Landini, Ernst Nowak,  and Paoulo Bedini.

(click image to enlarge, then use the arrow keys ← → to change images )

To be honest,  I don't know a thing about Barry Moser as a person,  and I really don't want to.  Don't get me wrong,  any person who makes such delightfully ancient-feeling and utterly grotesque artwork must be amazing,  but I guarantee the real Barry Moser of 2014 isn't as cool as the one from 1850 that lives inside my mind.

His work feels old to me; there's a deep 19th century gothic-type streak in him that is so rare these days.  I imagine him, gnarled, bent over a well worn oak table,  carving out these wickedly morbid plates, standing on a bone-strewn floor. His Frankenstein material is shudder-making.

I've been doing lots of colour posts of late, so I'm following Charles Dana Gibson's fantastic B&W's with these horrifyingly cryptic images....

(click image to enlarge, then use the arrow keys ← → to change images )

I had a debate with myself about featuring Charles Dana Gibson.  He's certainly a great artist,  and a famous one to boot,  but when I started this art-sharing journey,  I swore that I wasn't going to tread too many well-worn paths. That's why you won't see any Klimt or Mucha, in spite of my deep love of their work.

Gibson is very well known,  primarily for his iconic "Gibson girl";  one of the first recognisably modern (for better or worse) depictions of the new woman...free (ish)-thinking,  independent, "strong" and all that other nonsensical jibber-jabber.   I love his images of women,  but after 46 years of listening to that sort of association,  I was pretty worn out on him.

Well,  I changed my mind.  Gibson was much more than a tool of modern feminist propaganda.  He was a sharp displayer of the truth of his time,  and his images of all people,  not just women,  were deeply insightful.  The turn of the 19th to the 20th century is oft-ignored in our culture,  and the humanity of those people has been degraded by modern social bias into an era of ignorant, near-inhuman villains.  When I joke about getting a time machine off Ebay and traveling to 1901,  some far-left acquaintance usually feels compelled to spout some perceived evil of the time...as if our own is just jolly.

Rants aside [ahem],  Gibson showed us that people are simply just people.  Whether then or now, people do the best with the silly and often frustrating world that they live in;  that's why I decided to share these great images.

(click image to enlarge, then use the arrow keys ← → to change images )

It's easy for modern people to forget that music has a long and magical history,  full of colour and an amazing array of instruments.  In these times of electric guitars, drum sets (and drum machines) and recorded playback,  most people don't seem to remember that even just a few generations ago that ordinary people played music locally.  There was no "making it" (unless you were some kind of court musician),  people had no singles on the charts (because there were no charts),  and to hear music,  a person either had to play,  or know someone who played.

This is a gentle reminder that music is a verb...

Honestly,  I don't know that much about Antonio Augusto Rubino.  From the scant information that I've been able to gather,  he was a seminal figure in Italian cartoon art,  as well as being a writer,  a poet,  a potter, a journalist, a composer and songwriter.  He was apparently educated as a lawyer,  but the creativity bug bit him, and it took over the rest of his life.  He was monstrously prolific.

What strikes me most about artists like Rubino,  some of these that I find while doing research for these posts, is that there are a lot of geniuses that go unknown to the vast majority of humans.  I know this lesson from music,  but for some reason the point seems more stark in the visual arts.

He seems very much a product of his era;  that florid and lovely Art Nouveau style, alive with colour and panache...back when everything was done by hand,  and illustrators had to have a huge variety of skills so get a paycheck.  What a craftsman. 

(click image to enlarge, then use the arrow keys ← → to change images )