https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5Vr2qyPwus
“As an artist you have to fight and survive the wilderness to keep your creative freedom. Creativity is very fragile. It’s like a leaf in the fall; it hangs and when it drops you don’t know where it’s drifting.” –Karel Appel
Karel Appel, (Christiaan Karel Appel April 1921 – 3 May 2006) was a Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet. He started painting at the age of fourteen and studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in the 1940s. He was one of the founders of the avant-garde movement Cobra in 1948.
Continue reading THE REALITY OF KAREL APPEL, 1962, 15 minutes
‘The photograph that Elliott Erwitt made in 1953 of his newborn daughter and her mother in the family’s modest Manhattan apartment is among the most widely reproduced of its time, having appeared in venues as different as Edward Steichen’s seminal 1955 photography exhibition (and book) “Family of Man,” and in magazines, on postcards and even in drug company advertisements. But if Mother and Child is a mainstay of modern photography, to the mischievous Erwitt, 74, it’s just “a family picture of my first child, my first wife and my cat,” he says. “I still see it as a snapshot. But it happens to be a pretty good one.” -Adriana Leshko, Smithsonian Magazine, August 2002″
“Dijkstra also finds rawness and vulnerability in people who are physically exhausted, such as mothers who have given birth, or matadors who have just left the bullfighting ring. Like the teenagers, their identity is in a precarious state, their exhaustion undermining their ability to pose. In this sense, these pictures are the converse of her photos of teenagers, which capture the making of identity. While the bloodied faces and jackets of the bullfighters remind us of the masculine violence and courage that defines their identity as bullfighters, their tired faces are softened and reveal their fragility as human beings. A similar series features the three naked mothers who have just given birth, and look fatigued and afraid. The hint of roundness in their bellies evokes the image of a saintly pregnant woman, and the way in which they clutch their babies to their chest is evidence of the maternal protective instinct. Yet they have just undergone a monumental change, from being pregnant to being a mother, and the photographs primarily confront us with their fear and exhaustion—rarely associated with the image of motherhood.” -Lauren Vanzandt-Escobar, Rineke Dijkstra’s Retrospective: Identity and the Expressive Fallacy, The American Reader,
The Incubator 