Ordinary finds

Karl Struss: FF, La Danseuse, ca. 1915, silver print (Source)

More background on Struss and some images

Karl Struss (Nov. 30, 1886 - 1981): The Attic Window, Dresden, 1909 - platinum print on paper mounted on paper (Smithsonian)

Karl Struss was a photographer and an Academy Award-winning cinematographer of the 1920s through the 1950s. He was also one of the earliest pioneers of 3D films. While he mostly worked on films, he was also one of the cinematographers for the television series Broken Arrow.

He was born in New York, New York and studied photography with Clarence H. White. His first successes came selling photographs to magazines including Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Harper’s Bazaar. (However, he was quick to insist that he was not doing fashion photography.)

In 1919, he moved to Los Angeles and signed on with Cecil B. DeMille as a cameraman and subsequently worked on many films. He was later also admitted to the American Society of Cinematographers.

In 1949, he began his work in “stereo cinematography”, becoming one of the first proponents of that artform. Unfortunately, he did most of his 3D work in Italy and none of his films were subsequently released in 3D in the United States. (Wiki)

See also…

Click for high-res photo

Clyfford Still: Untitled, 1951-1952 - oil on canvas (SF MoMA)

“After studying and teaching art in Washington State, Clyfford Still influenced a generation of California painters during his tenure (1946-1950) at the California School of Fine Arts, now the San Francisco Art Institute.

He then spent much of the 1950s in New York, but eschewed any association with the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. Still chose to develop his work independently, relying on the primacy of personal experience and the study and distillation of his own painting. Unlike most artists of his day, he ground and prepared his own pigments, applying them to canvas with both a palette knife and brush.

Still’s mature style consisted of jagged-edged fields of pigment, heavily applied and worked into a thick, scabrous surface. He was an outspoken proponent of the idea that abstract painting could portray his inner psychic state, and he vigorously denied any direct associations with landscape imagery in his work: “I paint only myself, not nature.” Nevertheless, Still’s large-scale paintings often suggest primordial landscapes, rendered in the deep colors of the earth.” (Source)

Previously by Still on OF: 1 2

Detail from Nina Leen’s famous photo of ‘The Irascibles’ - the group of American Abstract Expressionists, LIFE, 1950

In the photo, counterclockwise: Clyfford Still, James Brooks, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell…

Clyfford Still: 1952-A, 1952 - oil on canvas. Collection SFMOMA, Gift of the artist; © The Clyfford Still Estate

B. Nov. 30, 1904 (d. 1980) Clyfford Still was a leading American Abstract Expressionist.

“Still was born in Grandin, North Dakota and spent his childhood in Spokane, Washington and Bow Island in southern Alberta, Canada. Although Abstract Expressionism is identified as a New York movement, Still’s formative works were created during various teaching posts on the West Coast, first in Washington State at Washington State University (1935-41). His work of this period is marked by an expressive figurative style used in depictions of the people, buildings, tools and machinery characteristic of farm life. By the late 1930s, he began to simplify his forms as he moved from representational painting toward abstraction. In 1941 Still relocated to the San Francisco Bay area where, following work in various war industries, he became a highly influential professor at the California School of Fine Arts and what is now known as the San Francisco Art Institute. He taught there from 1946-1950 (with a break in the summer of 1948 when he returned to New York). It was during this time when Still “broke through” to his mature style. Still also taught at Virginia Commonwealth University from 1943-45.

Still visited New York for extended stays in the late 1940s and became associated with two of the galleries that launched the new American art to the world — Peggy Guggenheim’s The Art of This Century Gallery and the Betty Parsons gallery. Rothko introduced him to Peggy Guggenheim, who gave him a solo exhibition at her Art of This Century gallery in early 1946. Later that year, the artist returned to San Francisco, where he taught for the next four years at the California School of Fine Arts. He lived in New York for most of the 1950s, the height of Abstract Expressionism, but also a time when he became increasingly critical of the art world. In the early 1950s, Still severed ties with commercial galleries and in 1961 moved to Maryland, removing himself further from the art world. (Wiki)

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From the same year as Brownie McGhee’s blues, 1966 - African-American art by Sam Gilliam:

Light Fan, 1966 - acrylic on canvas (Smithsonian)

“I think being creative means you are both curious and serious about your relationship to your work. It means you are eager to develop the next step even if it has to be invented.” The artist, quoted in Sam Gilliam: Of Fireflies and Ferris Wheels: Monastery Parallel, Art Museum Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen, 1996-97

“Sam Gilliam was one of the youngest members of the Washington Color School during the 1960s and ’70s. In Light Fan he poured vibrant washes of yellow, green, and blue paint over raw canvas to emphasize color instead of form, and appears to have folded the painting as it was drying to create the diagonal line that runs from corner to corner. The plain canvas at the edge of the image captures the movement of the paint as it spread over and soaked into the unprimed fabric.” - Smithsonian exhibition label

Ordinary finds

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