Monday 30 August 2010

Beatles Album Sleeves

Whatever your opinion of the music The Beatles made, I reckon there's no denying they had some great Album Sleeve designs - remember this is the 1960's and  maybe the high point of  Sleeve design - the 12" format allowing for rather more input that a CD Cover (actually the last one tipped into the 70's, and is the worst of them). The Beatles made twelve studio albums in the seven years they were together, which is some going in itself. Here are the Sleeve designs in chronological order:

1963 Please Please Me


1963 With the Beatles


1964 A Hard Day’s Night


1964 Beatles For Sale


1965 Help


1965 Rubber Soul


1966 Revolver


1967 Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band


1968 The Beatles [White Album]


1969 Yellow Submarine


1969 Abbey Road


1970 Let It Be

Friday 27 August 2010

Motel Postcards

Linen postcards are easily identifiable by the type of high rag card stock they were printed on which was produced with a linen finish; a textured pattern distinguished by parallel and intersecting lines resembling linen cloth. The face of the card was the textured side and the reverse was smooth just like other postcards.

Due to the use of this paper, linen postcards could be printed with brighter inks creating brightly coloured images, making them a huge advancement over the earlier white border postcards. Linen postcards' heyday was from the 1930's when they were introduced to about 1945.
I have quite a collection of these linen postcards mainly featuring town views, ‘important’ buildings, and factories. I believe they are mainly heavily retouched black and white photographs, rendered in vibrant colours. This retouching gives then a unique look.

























Monday 16 August 2010

Anthony Green RA

It seems appropriate somehow to follow my post on the portraits of Henri Rousseau with those of an old friend of mine, Royal Academician Anthony Green. Anyone who has been to visit the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition in the last forty years can't have failed to have been struck by Anthony's highly personal portraits which are very frequently autobiographical, his subject matter almost always inspired by his relationships with his wife and family.

Anthony Green was born in 1939 and studied at the Slade School of Art, where he won the Henry Tonks Prize for drawing in 1960. This was followed by the Gulbenkian Purchase Award in 1963 and the Harkness Fellowship in the USA from 1967-69. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1971. He is a Fellow of University College, London and serves as a Trustee of the Royal Academy.



He has experimented with irregular shaped compositions since 1966, which have on occasion progressed to freestanding 'sculptures' incorporating real objects as well as beautifully executed attention to detail. One of the most popular artists in the Royal Academy of Art Summer Exhibition each year, his paintings intrigue, amuse and enchant his many fans with their mood-enhancing sense of colour, humour and remarkable ability to capture life's events, both happy and sad, in a way that people readily identify with.



Anthony Green's work is included, among many other venues, in the public collections of the Tate Gallery, Setagaya Museum, Tokyo and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He has also exhibited internationally in London, New York, Berlin, Tokyo, Sidney, Chicago etc. He has had over 100 one-man shows since 1962.




























Friday 13 August 2010

Henri Rousseau's portraits


I said in my last posting that I would follow up the naive painter Henri Rousseau's more famous jungle paintings with some portraits of his. Having started a few posts ago with some very modern minimalist portraits by Julian Opie, and then contrasting those with the more naive (faux naive?) style of Frida Kahlo's self portraits I thought I'd contrast those with one or two other painters' works.

The style of Rousseau's portraits are more traditionally what one associates with naive painting, and I like them a lot. I've always been a fan of early American naive painting and portraiture, and I would have to say that Frenchman Rousseau's work has a similar charm. The first one shown here is a self portrait.