Friday, May 15, 2009
Monday, April 20, 2009
Thursday, April 16, 2009
New Art!
Sorry for the random splurge of artwork. I just wanted to get it up here for people to see. All of these pieces are for sale. If interested please drop me an email!
Hello all! I am putting together a steampunk inspired event at The Academy Theatre in Avondale Estates, Georgia and am in need of artists, actors, musicians, and fashionistas to fill out this miniature festival June 12th and 13th. The event will be centered around a formal staged reading of a new specifically steampunk work, by local playwright Stephanie Ferguson, The HMS Tempest: A Steampunk Romance. There will also be a fashion show/ costume contest with prizes, an artists market of all the latest and greatest in local science fiction and fantasy artwork, a high tea, and plenty of good music and dancing time! For more details, please check out www.atlsteamfest.com which will be updated as information becomes available on acts performing. Or you may also email me directly with any questions/comments at lainey_welsch@yahoo.com! Thanks!
Friday, March 20, 2009
No New Things...
There has been a distinct lack of art, because I have been busily writing on various projects.
The first being that I am taking playwriting workshop through Working Title Playwrights, which if you are in the Atlanta area and a playwright of any stage, you should check them out because they are seriously good people.
The second project is that I have been requested [or poked rather!] by my friend Stephanie to finish re-writing my adventure play The True History of Henry Rayne and the Airship Pirates
and I have actually had an idea on how to re-vamp it and make it work better, but you will have to read more about that on my writing blog http://ophelia-crane.livejournal.com whenever I actually update! I'm trying to stay away from the blogs because they suck out all of my energy and take up the time I am supposed to be using for writing, like now for instance.
I just wanted to post something to let you know why I haven't put up any new art. May scan some older stuff to show, but we'll see. Now off to write!!
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Alone
From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were-- I have not seen
As others saw-- I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I lov'd, I lov'd alone.
Then-- in my childhood-- in the dawn
Of a most stormy life--was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that 'round me roll'd
In its autumn tint of gold--
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass'd me flying by
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view
-Edgar Allan Poe
Monday, March 16, 2009
Hmm...
Is This a Shakespeare Which I See Before Me?
By JOHN F. BURNS, New York Times
Published: March 9, 2009
LONDON — Nearly 400 years after his death, William Shakespeare
appeared in a new and more handsome guise on Monday, thanks to a recently discovered portrait that a group of Shakespeare scholars and
art historians said was the only known likeness to have been painted
in his lifetime.
The Shakespeare engraving by Martin Droeshout is considered a close
representation.
Stanley Wells, the chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust,
based in Shakespeare’s birthplace of Stratford-upon- Avon, described
the portrait at a news conference as a “pinup.” It shows the Bard as
a far more alluring figure than the solemn-faced, balding image that
has been conveyed by engravings, busts and portraits that have been
accepted by scholars as the best available likeness of English
literature’s most famous figure.
Until now, scholars have deemed the most authentic representations of
Shakespeare to be a black-and-white woodcut engraving by the Flemish
artist Martin Droeshout that appeared in the first folio edition of
Shakespeare’s works in 1623, and a marble bust displayed since the
1620s in a Stratford church.
In their place, the scholars in London showed reporters a portrait
taken from the private collection of an aristocratic Anglo-Irish
family, the Cobbes, who have owned it for nearly 300 years, since
inheriting it through a family relationship with Shakespeare’s only
known literary patron, Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton.
The earl was a rakish aristocrat who eluded a death sentence passed
on him after joining a rebellion against Elizabeth I.
But not all Shakespeare scholars are convinced the Cobbe portrait is
an authentic likeness, or even that it is of Shakespeare at all,
given the aristocratic dress of the man in the portrait and the
idealizing tradition of Elizabethan portraiture, which often produced
images that bore little resemblance to nature.
The Cobbe portrait, as the scholars now call it, shows a head-turner
of a man. In middle age, this Shakespeare has a fresh-faced
complexion, a closely trimmed auburn beard, a long straight nose and
a full, almost bouffant hairstyle. He is dressed in elaborate white
lace ruff and a gold-trimmed blue doublet of a kind worn only by the
wealthy and successful men of his age.
Mr. Wells and other experts said they were convinced after three
years of studying the portrait, and after elaborate scientific tests
at Cambridge University, that it was, in effect, the holy grail
Shakespearean scholars had sought for centuries: a portrait done in
Shakespeare’s lifetime, and the original from which other Shakespeare
paintings of the period were copied. They said their studies showed
it probably was painted in 1610, when Shakespeare was 46, and only a
few years from his death in 1616.
In a brochure for an exhibition opening in Stratford in April, titled
“Shakespeare Found,” the birthplace trust offered a lyrical
interpretation.
“His face is open and alive, with a rosy, rather sweet expression,
perhaps suggestive of modesty,” it said. “There is nothing superior
or haughty in the subject, which one might well expect to find in a
face set off by such rich clothing. It is the face of a good
listener, as well as of someone who exercised a natural restraint.”
In a handout for reporters, the trust said the portrait might open a
new era in Shakespeare scholarship, giving fresh momentum, among
other things, to generations of speculation as to whether the
playwright, a married man with three children, was bisexual. Until
now, that suggestion has hinged mostly on dedications to the Earl of
Southampton that Shakespeare wrote with some of his best-loved poems
and some of the sensual passages in his poems and plays, particularly
his sonnets, most of which, the London scholars said, are centered on
expressions of love and desire for men, not women.
“This Shakespeare is handsome and glamorous, so how does this change
the way we think about him?” the handout said. “And do the painting
and provenance tell us more about his sexuality, and possibly about
the person to whom the sonnets are addressed?”
David Scott Kastan, a Yale Shakespeare expert, said by telephone that
there were reasons to question the Cobbe portrait’s provenance —
whether it was in fact once owned by the Earl of Southampton or
commissioned by him, as the trust representatives believe — and to
doubt whether the richly dressed man in the portrait was Shakespeare.
“If I had to bet I would say it’s not Shakespeare,” Mr. Kastan said.
But even if it was, he said, the traditions of Elizabethan
portraiture meant that it would be unwise to conclude that
Shakespeare actually looked like the figure depicted in the portrait.
“It might be a portrait of Shakespeare, but not a likeness, because
the conventions of portraiture at the time were often to idealize the
subject,” he said.
Scholars searching for a Shakespeare likeness have concentrated on
four other paintings with strong similarities to the Cobbe portrait,
one of them the so-called Folger portrait displayed in the Folger
Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. But the experts in London
said they were sure from their study of the Cobbe portrait that it
was the original from which the other portraits were based.
The experts said the portrait came to light when Alec Cobbe, an art
restorer and heir to the family fortune, visited the National
Portrait Gallery in London in 2006 to see an exhibition, “Searching
for Shakespeare,” at which the Folger portrait was displayed. They
said Mr. Cobbe concluded that the Folger portrait, whose authenticity
had been doubted for decades, was a copy of the one that had been in
his family’s art collection since the mid-18th century, with the
family unaware that the man depicted might be Shakespeare.
Mr. Wells, the Shakespeare scholar, said that compared to the Cobbe
portrait, the other portraits presented “an inanimate mask” of
Shakespeare and that they were “dull copies of the original.” He
added, “No one who has seen the four paintings can doubt that the
Cobbe portrait is the original. You don’t need an expert to see that.”
Scientific studies at Cambridge showed that the oak panel on which
the Cobbe portrait was mounted came from trees felled in the last 20
years of the 16th century, pointing to a date for the painting in the
early 1600s, experts at the news conference said. They said the paint
used was also characteristic of that period, as was the intricate and
costly style of the lace ruff worn by the man in the portrait.
Rupert Featherstone, assistant curator for the university’s
Fitzwilliam Museum, said another clue pointing to the Cobbe
portrait’s claim to be the original from which Shakespeare paintings
of the period were copied came from X-ray studies that showed the
“pentiments,” or changes made by the painter as he progressed. He
said these included the inclusion of a small, fleshy bulge at the
upper corner of Shakespeare’s left eye, a detail typical of the minor
adjustments made in original portraiture.
Mr. Wells and other experts said the Cobbe painting, if accepted as
the only original lifetime likeness of the playwright, could be worth
millions. But they said that pecuniary considerations played no part
in their scholarship. “It hasn’t been for sale for 400 years, and
it’s not for sale now,” said Mark Broch, the curator of the Cobbe
collection.
By JOHN F. BURNS, New York Times
Published: March 9, 2009
LONDON — Nearly 400 years after his death, William Shakespeare
appeared in a new and more handsome guise on Monday, thanks to a recently discovered portrait that a group of Shakespeare scholars and
art historians said was the only known likeness to have been painted
in his lifetime.
The Shakespeare engraving by Martin Droeshout is considered a close
representation.
Stanley Wells, the chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust,
based in Shakespeare’s birthplace of Stratford-upon- Avon, described
the portrait at a news conference as a “pinup.” It shows the Bard as
a far more alluring figure than the solemn-faced, balding image that
has been conveyed by engravings, busts and portraits that have been
accepted by scholars as the best available likeness of English
literature’s most famous figure.
Until now, scholars have deemed the most authentic representations of
Shakespeare to be a black-and-white woodcut engraving by the Flemish
artist Martin Droeshout that appeared in the first folio edition of
Shakespeare’s works in 1623, and a marble bust displayed since the
1620s in a Stratford church.
In their place, the scholars in London showed reporters a portrait
taken from the private collection of an aristocratic Anglo-Irish
family, the Cobbes, who have owned it for nearly 300 years, since
inheriting it through a family relationship with Shakespeare’s only
known literary patron, Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton.
The earl was a rakish aristocrat who eluded a death sentence passed
on him after joining a rebellion against Elizabeth I.
But not all Shakespeare scholars are convinced the Cobbe portrait is
an authentic likeness, or even that it is of Shakespeare at all,
given the aristocratic dress of the man in the portrait and the
idealizing tradition of Elizabethan portraiture, which often produced
images that bore little resemblance to nature.
The Cobbe portrait, as the scholars now call it, shows a head-turner
of a man. In middle age, this Shakespeare has a fresh-faced
complexion, a closely trimmed auburn beard, a long straight nose and
a full, almost bouffant hairstyle. He is dressed in elaborate white
lace ruff and a gold-trimmed blue doublet of a kind worn only by the
wealthy and successful men of his age.
Mr. Wells and other experts said they were convinced after three
years of studying the portrait, and after elaborate scientific tests
at Cambridge University, that it was, in effect, the holy grail
Shakespearean scholars had sought for centuries: a portrait done in
Shakespeare’s lifetime, and the original from which other Shakespeare
paintings of the period were copied. They said their studies showed
it probably was painted in 1610, when Shakespeare was 46, and only a
few years from his death in 1616.
In a brochure for an exhibition opening in Stratford in April, titled
“Shakespeare Found,” the birthplace trust offered a lyrical
interpretation.
“His face is open and alive, with a rosy, rather sweet expression,
perhaps suggestive of modesty,” it said. “There is nothing superior
or haughty in the subject, which one might well expect to find in a
face set off by such rich clothing. It is the face of a good
listener, as well as of someone who exercised a natural restraint.”
In a handout for reporters, the trust said the portrait might open a
new era in Shakespeare scholarship, giving fresh momentum, among
other things, to generations of speculation as to whether the
playwright, a married man with three children, was bisexual. Until
now, that suggestion has hinged mostly on dedications to the Earl of
Southampton that Shakespeare wrote with some of his best-loved poems
and some of the sensual passages in his poems and plays, particularly
his sonnets, most of which, the London scholars said, are centered on
expressions of love and desire for men, not women.
“This Shakespeare is handsome and glamorous, so how does this change
the way we think about him?” the handout said. “And do the painting
and provenance tell us more about his sexuality, and possibly about
the person to whom the sonnets are addressed?”
David Scott Kastan, a Yale Shakespeare expert, said by telephone that
there were reasons to question the Cobbe portrait’s provenance —
whether it was in fact once owned by the Earl of Southampton or
commissioned by him, as the trust representatives believe — and to
doubt whether the richly dressed man in the portrait was Shakespeare.
“If I had to bet I would say it’s not Shakespeare,” Mr. Kastan said.
But even if it was, he said, the traditions of Elizabethan
portraiture meant that it would be unwise to conclude that
Shakespeare actually looked like the figure depicted in the portrait.
“It might be a portrait of Shakespeare, but not a likeness, because
the conventions of portraiture at the time were often to idealize the
subject,” he said.
Scholars searching for a Shakespeare likeness have concentrated on
four other paintings with strong similarities to the Cobbe portrait,
one of them the so-called Folger portrait displayed in the Folger
Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. But the experts in London
said they were sure from their study of the Cobbe portrait that it
was the original from which the other portraits were based.
The experts said the portrait came to light when Alec Cobbe, an art
restorer and heir to the family fortune, visited the National
Portrait Gallery in London in 2006 to see an exhibition, “Searching
for Shakespeare,” at which the Folger portrait was displayed. They
said Mr. Cobbe concluded that the Folger portrait, whose authenticity
had been doubted for decades, was a copy of the one that had been in
his family’s art collection since the mid-18th century, with the
family unaware that the man depicted might be Shakespeare.
Mr. Wells, the Shakespeare scholar, said that compared to the Cobbe
portrait, the other portraits presented “an inanimate mask” of
Shakespeare and that they were “dull copies of the original.” He
added, “No one who has seen the four paintings can doubt that the
Cobbe portrait is the original. You don’t need an expert to see that.”
Scientific studies at Cambridge showed that the oak panel on which
the Cobbe portrait was mounted came from trees felled in the last 20
years of the 16th century, pointing to a date for the painting in the
early 1600s, experts at the news conference said. They said the paint
used was also characteristic of that period, as was the intricate and
costly style of the lace ruff worn by the man in the portrait.
Rupert Featherstone, assistant curator for the university’s
Fitzwilliam Museum, said another clue pointing to the Cobbe
portrait’s claim to be the original from which Shakespeare paintings
of the period were copied came from X-ray studies that showed the
“pentiments,” or changes made by the painter as he progressed. He
said these included the inclusion of a small, fleshy bulge at the
upper corner of Shakespeare’s left eye, a detail typical of the minor
adjustments made in original portraiture.
Mr. Wells and other experts said the Cobbe painting, if accepted as
the only original lifetime likeness of the playwright, could be worth
millions. But they said that pecuniary considerations played no part
in their scholarship. “It hasn’t been for sale for 400 years, and
it’s not for sale now,” said Mark Broch, the curator of the Cobbe
collection.
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