Category Archives: Profiles

Photographers: 60-Year Old Hélène Binet’s “Architectural Pathos”

“Hélène Binet has emerged as one of the leading architectural photographers in the world. Every time Hélène Binet takes a photograph, she exposes architecture’s achievements, strength, pathos and fragility.” 

Hélène Binet Swiss-French Photographer 1959 - Present

Hélène Binet was born in 1959 in Sorengo and is of both Swiss and French background. She currently lives in London with her husband Raoul Bunschoten and their two children, Izaak and Saskia. She studied photography at the Instituto Europeo di Design in Rome, where she grew up, and soon developed an interest in architetural photography.

Hélène Binet Swiss-French Photographer 1959 - Present
Hélène Binet

Over a period of twenty-five years Hélène Binet has photographed both contemporary and historical architecture. Her list of clients include architects Raoul Bunschoten, Caruso St John, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Studio Mumbai, Peter Zumthor and many others. While following the work of contemporary architects – often from construction through completion – Hélène Binet has also photographed the works of past architects as Alvar Aalto, Geoffrey Bawa, Le Corbusier, Sverre Fehn, John Hejduk, Sigurd Lewerentz, Andrea Palladio and Dimitris Pikionis. More recently, Hélène Binet has started to direct her attention to landscape photography, wherein she transposes key concerns of her architectural photography. Hélène Binet’s work has been published in a wide range of books, and is shown in both national and international exhibitions.

Hélène Binet is an advocate of analogue photography and therefore she exclusively works with film.

Website

Video Profiles: 89-Year Old London Illustrator David Gentleman On His New Book “My Town” (May 2020)

David Gentleman is an iconic British illustrator and designer who has lived a lifetime in London. Drawing from over sixty years of engagement with this most My Town by David Gentleman Penguin UK May 2020well-known capital city, his most recent book,

My Town presents London as it was and as it is today. His beautiful and intricate work – of the Thames, Hampstead Heath, Camden Town (where David Gentleman has lived in the same house for fifty years), London’s parks and sights – offers us the pleasure of looking again at the everyday.

Accompanied by reflections on the work of an artist, commentary on the possibilities of ink, pen and paint and personal thoughts on the ever-changing city, this is a delight for all those who flock to London.

To review book or purchase

London Illustrator David Gentleman
London Illustrator David Gentleman

David William Gentleman is an English artist. He studied illustration at the Royal College of Art under Edward Bawden and John Nash. He has worked in watercolour, lithography and wood engraving, at scales ranging from platform-length murals for Charing Cross Underground Station in London to postage stamps and logos. (Wikipedia)

Profiles: 55-Year Old Canadian Artist Mark Laguë – “Painter Of Light”

Painter of Light

Canadian Artist MARK LAGUËMark has developed an international reputation and has won numerous awards, both in his native Canada and in the United States. A dedicated painter, Mark Lague was born in Lachine Quebec in 1964 and he has had a fascination with drawing since childhood, a skill he practices constantly, even to this day.

Mark Laguë Artist website collage

Upon graduation from Montreal’s Concordia University in Design, Mark embarked on a 13-year career in the animation industry, working primarily as a background designer and art director. During this time, despite working full time, he began receiving international acclaim for his watercolour paintings through competitions, juried shows, and solo exhibitions.

In 2000, Mark switched to oil as his primary medium, and in 2002 made the jump to full time painter. As an artist he is a realist, who is open to virtually all subject matter. What keeps him excited about painting is his endless quest to simplify and get to the essence of whatever he paints. Mark has been featured in numerous national art magazines, and continues to receive international recognition for his distinctive style of painting.

Website

Profiles: 76-Year Old Country Singer Terry Allen Releases New Album “Just Like Moby Dick”

The connections to Melville’s masterpiece are metaphorical and allusive, as elusive as the White Whale. The masterly spiritual successor to Lubbock (on everything)Just Like Moby Dick casts its net wide for wild stories, depicting, among other monstrous things, Houdini in existential crisis, the death of the last stripper in town, bloodthirsty pirates (in a pseudo-sequel to Brecht and Weill’s “Pirate Jenny”), the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (in the “American Childhood” suite), a vampire-infested circus, mudslides and burning mobile homes, and all manner of tragicomic disasters, abandonments, betrayals, bad memories, failures, and fare-thee-wells.

Iconic and iconoclastic Texan songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen’s heartbreaking, hilarious new album, his first set of new songs since 2013’s Bottom of the World, features the full Panhandle Mystery Band, including co-producer Charlie Sexton (Dylan, Bowie, Blaze), Shannon McNally, and Jo Harvey Allen; mainstays Bukka AllenRichard Bowden, and Lloyd Maines; and co-writes with Joe Ely and Dave Alvin

Album Website

Terry Allen (born May 7, 1943 in Wichita, Kansas) is an American Texas country and outlaw country singer-songwriter, painter and conceptual artist from Lubbock, Texas. He currently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He has recorded twelve albums of original songs, including the landmark releases Juarez (1975) and Lubbock (on everything) (1979). His song “Amarillo Highway” has been covered by Bobby Bare, Sturgill Simpson and Robert Earl Keen. Other artists who have recorded Allen’s songs include Guy Clark, Little Feat, David Byrne, Doug Sahm, Ricky Nelson, and Lucinda Williams. Rolling Stone magazine describes his catalog, reaching back to Juarez as “..uniformly eccentric and uncompromising, savage and beautiful, literate and guttural.”

From Wikipedia

Exercise: 75-Year Old Texas Woman’s Training Routine For The “2020 Eiffel Tower Vertical” Race (665 Steps)

From a Wall Street Journal online article:

At 75, Marsha O’Loughlin competes in tower running competitions and trains at the University of North Texas stadium in Denton, Texas. JUSTIN CLEMONS FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
At 75, Marsha O’Loughlin competes in tower running competitions and trains at the University of North Texas stadium in Denton, Texas. JUSTIN CLEMONS FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Ms. O’Loughlin participates in a sport called tower running, which involves racing up skyscrapers, towers and stadium stairs. She’s ranked first in her age group nationally and 76th among women globally, according to the Towerrunning World Association. “I never take an elevator up a building unless it’s the only way up,” says Ms. O’Loughlin, who lives in a retirement community in Denton, Texas.

Ms. O’Loughlin runs the 20 floors of a building at Texas Woman’s University in Denton on Mondays and Thursdays. There are 20 steps a floor and she usually runs three to four reps. Leading up to a race, she will increase to five reps, and she descends backward, holding the railing. “It saves your knees,” she says. “I realize I’m 75, not 20.”

When Marsha O’Loughlin goes to Paris this March, she won’t be snapping photos of the Eiffel Tower. She’ll be too busy running up its stairs.

The 75-year-old is one of 131 participants who plan to compete in the 2020 Verticale de la Tour Eiffel, a race up 665 of the tower’s stairs.

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Video Profiles: 69-Year Old Singer Huey Lewis Talks About Hearing Loss (CBS)

Huey Lewis and the News are in the mood to celebrate, joking about their age as they prepare for the release of what is almost certainly their last album, titled “Weather.” At 69, Lewis, who has performed in bands for most of his life, had no intention of slowing down, but his diagnosis of Meniere’s Disease – a hearing disorder which has affected his voice – has made the decision for him. John Blackstone reports.

Artists: Belgian Surrealist Painter René Magritte Linked “Consciousness And The External World”

From a Christies.com online article:

René Magritte, The Son of Man, 1964
René Magritte, The Son of Man, 1964

‘The creation of new objects, the transformation of known objects; a change of substance in the case of certain objects: a wooden sky, for instance; the use of words in association with images; the misnaming of an object… the use of certain visions glimpsed between sleeping and waking, such in general were the means devised to force objects out of the ordinary, to become sensational, and so establish a profound link between consciousness and the external world.’

René François Ghislain Magritte (1898-1967) was born in Lessines, Belgium. His father was a tailor and textile merchant; his mother committed suicide in 1912, drowning herself in the River Sambre.

René Magritte 1898 - 1967 Le Somnambule 1946

From the 1930s, Magritte sought to find ‘solutions’ to particular ‘problems’ posed by different types of objects, a method that enabled him to challenge and reconfigure the most ubiquitous and commonplace elements of everyday life. These problems obsessed him until he was able to conceive of an image to solve them.

This philosophical method had come to him after waking from a dream in 1932. In his semi-conscious state, he looked over at a birdcage that was in his room but saw not the bird that inhabited the cage, but instead an egg. This ‘splendid misapprehension’ allowed him to grasp, in his own words, ‘a new and astonishing poetic secret.’

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Video Profiles: 60-Year Old Paddy Renouf Is “The Flâneur” In London (2020)

Directed, shot & edited by Jack Durman

Featuring Paddy Renouf
Shot in Soho, London

If you want to understand what Paddy Renouf does, Google the word flâneur — we certainly had to before speaking to him. The creation of French author Charles Baudelaire, the flâneur, he wrote, was “a passionate spectator,” or a man who wanders the streets soaking in culture at every level.

In Renouf’s case, the streets are London, and the spectating is done on behalf of Sheikhs, celebrities and C-Suite executives from the top brands of the world. And here’s the best part about it: it’s his full-time job, one he began thinking about while in the midst of building a traditional career.

From a WeAreAgeist.com

Tributes: Monty Python Member Terry Jones Is Dead At 77 (1942 – 2020)

Terry Jones, Monty Python founder and Life of Brian director, dies aged 77. Jones, who was diagnosed with dementia in 2015, was the main directing force in Python’s films, as well a prolific creator of TV documentaries and children’s books.

In 1969, Palin and Jones joined Cambridge graduates Cleese and Graham Chapman – along with Idle and animator Terry Gilliam – on a BBC comedy sketch show. Eventually broadcast under the title Monty Python’s Flying Circus, it ran until 1974, with Jones largely writing with Palin (complementing Cleese’s partnership with Chapman). Seemingly chaotic, frequently surreal and formally daring, Monty Python’s Flying Circus would became one of the most influential shows in BBC history, revolutionising comedy formats, spawning scores of catchphrases, and inspiring an entire generation of comedians. Jones’s fondness for female impersonation was a key feature of the show, as was his erudite writing.

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