Do you think religion has a place in politics?
Politics and cleavages always tend to form around contemporary societal issues. It has always been the case. This is why we find Social Democrats vs. Christian Democrats in many traditional European democracies. The debate for most of the 20th Century was split between atheist socialist and christian conservative ideologies. In this sense, it is reasonable to expect that religion marks politics, as it marks the struggles of society. When religion fades as a debate is certain countries, political parties which were defined around those lines, either adapt to their times by re-organising themselves along current ideologies or disappear; this is also why many conservative or leftist parties have split in recent years to rally towards the centre of the political spectrum. That is not to say that states need or not to be religious. But what marks their position, is usually a result of the different identities of a state. In this sense, it is a consequence of democracy that these parties represent the various forces within society.
What made you interested in design?
growing up in 1970s NYC presented many opportunities to see how design and planning affects the human condition in both positive and negative ways. learning about 19th and 20th century urbanism plus an obsession with space travel were the initial sparks of inspiration for me.
List three songs that are key to your life.
Yesterday - The Beatles
That'll be the Day - Buddy Holly
20th Century Boy - T Rex
Which artists do you admire and how do they influence your work?
I love the 20th century masters like Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. They influence my work simply by being who they are.
Declaration: With what person or business would you like to work?
Dreamworks! Universal Pictures! 20th Century Fox! I have so many good ideas for films and I have a dynamic group of writers and creative minds around me.
What is your profession? What is your title printed on your business card?
My profession is finding exceptional people for senior roles in digital and social media working successfully with clients such as Apple, Arena Quantum, Aegis, BBC, Carat, Expedia, Google, Guardian, Lastminute.com ITV, JWT, OMD, Mediacom, Mindshare, MTV, Ogilvy, The Times, ZenithOptimedia, 20th Century Fox & some impressively funded start-ups to name but a few!
What well known writers do you admire most?
James Madison Jr., Founding Father, author of the Federalist 51, and instrumental document and person, argued both for government and for the balance of powers, a political philosopher and the 4th president of the United States. John Lennon, whose peaceful rebellion into love may have been simultaneously infeasible and hypocritical; he was still a powerful and dynamic figure whose touch still influences the world today in a better way. James Douglas Morrison, better known as Jim Morrison of the doors, and little known poet of full volumes such as Wilderness and the American Night; some of this work was distributed in small printings to a close group of associates and some of it never before seen work. And finally, argued by some as the most original American poet of the 20th century, and my name sake; E.E. Cummings (Edward Estlin Cummings: Lawrence Estlin Coffee).
What movies or television shows inspired you to work in this field?
Ken Burn's "Jazz" documentary for PBS was the original inspiration (specifically, the first episode which talks about late-19th and early-20th century New Orleans).
As we have kept working, HBO's "Treme" and several music documentaries (like "No Direction Home", "The Last Waltz" and 1973's "Jimi Hendrix") have all been major influences.
What would be your solution against piracy?
It is time to acknowledge that technology is what allows artists to distribute their creations to millions of people. Without them, all artists would be dirt poor like they have been for millennia before the 20th century.
What past or present day illustrators do you admire most?
I like the illustrators of the early 20th century who made a living full time doing traditional illustration for advertising and books. No computers. I also admired the first Disney animators who worked on the Disney classic movies. For example Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty.
How would you define your design style?
My design style is very influenced by the past. It could be 20th century fashion, or it could be fashions from the 18th century or the Victorian era. There's always something in there to bring into a modern fashion design. I also look at non-fashion objects, art, photography, ephemera, and try to get to root of what I like about that object, then incorporate that "feel" into what I'm working on.
If you were sent to a deserted island, which book, CD and film would you take with you?
If I was on a deserted island...good one. I am bombarded on all sides daily, so I would probably just enjoy the peace and quiet for the first while!
Once I have acquired the perfect tan and become suitably bored with counting the waves hitting the beach...
Book-Chronicle of the 20th Century. I may be there a while and it is a HUGE book. It could also double as a weapon for beating off any intruders, and as a ladder for reaching coconuts. Because, hey, if we are dreaming here the Island has to be tropical.
CD-Adele, the whole album is amazing.
Film-The Godfather (or) Band of Brothers. I could watch both endlessly. Cinematic genius.
What do you think of anorexia? Do you think the fashion industry is responsible for this epidemic in some way?
Anorexia is a very sad disease, its not just physical, but mental as well. I have had friends who have suffered from eating disorders. I think in the past, the fashion industry was partly responsible for this epidemic, but now in the 20th century I think main stream media is more to blame. I don’t believe there is one ideal size. Everyone should diet/exercise for what’s healthy for them. Different body types are beautiful; it’s boring if everyone looked that same!
Should there be more public financing for scientific investigation?
Absolutely, and there are many reasons. We are on the way to become a globalized society that is almost entirely dominated by technology related problems and solutions. We already have the situation that much of our contamporary technology is controlled by corporations - genetic engineering is an example. As a result there is little - or no - democratic control over these technologies and their application, which strikes me as dubious. Another aspect is that privately funded research usually is profit oriented and thus moves wherever the money is. Problems that are unlikely to be profitable if solves are unlikely to be addressed, and existing technologies often block the passage towards new ways of thinking. Peak oil and nuclear energy are examples: as energy prices soar, the old technologies become ever more profitable before they finally collapse, so there is little incentive for corporations for early investment in new technologies. On the contrary.
A third topic is the relationship between fundamental research and innovation. Even as we speak, here in the year 2011, much of our contemporary technology is rooted in the fundamental research of the 19th and early 20th century. Especially Europe has to bank (and bet) on its intellectual achievements - there simply is nothing else. And the invisible hand of the allegedly free market cannot even bail out itself - so I wouldn't trust that one.
Declaration: With what person or business would you like to work?
I'd like to work with people who have a strong idea of what they want but are open to suggestions. I also like this quality in clients I work for.
I would like to work for independent fashion retailers and either create small unique fashion lines for them or offer a made to order service from my own line.
I am also interested in costume design for period drama, especially from the first half of the 20th century in theatre and film/television.
I also make costumes of said periods for fashion or themed photo shoots.
I am happy to work with businesses as well as private people.
What would you do to terminate Internet spam once and for all?
Wow, good question! Well, spam uses up more of the web than pornography does, which makes sense when you think about it, considering we live in a consumerist society where advertising is far more dominant than anything else; why should the web be any different? Maybe we have to revert to people becoming citizens again, instead of just consumers. That was the great unfortunate byproduct of the 20th century.
Which musicians or groups have been inspiring to your career?
The person who has inspired me the most has been my mentor, the man with whom I studied with in university: Maestro Steven Gellman. He is not only a great composer himself, he is a tremendous communicator of ideas and a fantastic teacher. Twenty years after graduating he and I remain in touch and I greatly value his friendship.
A number of great performers have also inspired me in my career as a composer: hearing someone perform with passion and conviction cannot be inspire someone as they work at creating new music. Some of the performers that come to mind would have to be the Kronos Quartet, the Gryphon Trio, the Tokyo String Quartet, and dozens of other ensembles. I couldn't possibly name individual players.
Composers, on the other hand, have been key to my inspiration: Bach and Beethoven have played major roles regarding inspiration, as well as Rachmaninoff, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Chopin, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Bruckner - and then - in the 20th Century - Bartok, Messiaen, Strauss, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Penderecki, Carter, Rzewski, Szymanowski, Scriabin, and again, the list could go on and on.
How obsolete is Freud today?
Freud's major contribution was to emphasizes the importance of unconscious process in human motivation but his theories were ideologically based rather than formed from empirical research, in many ways he slowed the development of psychological understanding in the 20th century. Relevant today/ Not at all.
Piracy continues to grow: What will happen to the music and film
industries and culture in general?
I hope it will become more local and personal. Like it was before the 20th Century.
Who have been the most influential people in your career?
My colleagues within this charity and the dedication of those from the early part of the 20th century who stood up for animal welfare when animals were treated with such terrible cruelty by exploitation of the human animal
Why does hunger continue to exist in the world? Is this the result of a deliberate policy?
since the 20th century and the true green revolution in crop yields, the only famines have been caused politically. Just ask those North Koreans who had to eat grass.
Does photography have the recognition that it should have in contemporary art museums?
No. I'm not sure people have been groomed to see photography as an art form. It was very controversial in the beginning (19th century/early 20th) whether photography was art or purely scientific. There was quite a fight over it.
Now, with mass media and the inundation of images we face daily. A brain has to sort out so much visual information that an artistic photograph just becomes another thing to be sorted. It's unfortunate, but true.
It's why I began taking blurry/bokeh photographs on purpose. I was tired of sharp images that I could easily dismiss. I wanted to see beyond what was obvious. To me they are meaningful, but I'm sure some people just think they are junk.
Photography is an incredibly valuable art form.
Do you participate in competitions? Have you received any awards?
I have participated in a couple of writing competitions and have received some awards such as the: Centeon photo calendar contest, The Best Poems and Poets of the 20th Century, Editor’s Choice Award by the International Library of Poetry, Knoxville News Sentinel photo contest, Empire Who’s Who Empowering Executives & Professionals, and this year I am featured in the 2010 Writer's Byline calendar.
Anymore I don't enter many competitions unless it directly involves what I am writing at the time as it pulls me away from my writing and gets me sidelined if I'm not careful.
What are you working on now?
Zoomed in view of an early 20th century Singer Sewing Machine. Graphite on Vellum.
What type of information should a government be able to legally maintain on about its citizens?
The Holocaust was made possible by the cross-referencing and tabulation of census data dating back to the beginning of the 20th century by Hitler & co. It is the indisputable historical proof that countries should _not_ be allowed to profile their population, for any reason.
The logic behind my objection is, I think, rather self-explanatory but if you don't get it I'll explain.
Once you give the information, you no longer control its access nor in which goal it's used. As a stop sign never stopped a car on a road (it's either its driver or another car on a colision course), no soft caveats will ever prevent a government gone rogue to use the said information for whatever nefastious end.
What type of reading inspires you to write?
True crime genre because nearly all is not written by historians who have researched the archives, but by journalists who rely on interviews and gossip, so most is not good.
Good history, written by historians such as David Starkie, Simon Schama, and most particularly the historians of the French Annales School, one of the most notable being Alain Corbin. They re-create these time capsules of micro-history, including the sounds you would hear the the odours of the times.
I read many 19th Century novels and some 20th Century. Balzac re-created in his 'Comedie Humaine' a faithful history of his times. I read many Russian novels: so beautiful and lyrical. If you want to understand the banking crisis of last year, then read Gogol's 'Dead Souls'!
Which musicians or groups have been inspiring to your career?
All the classical composers. And certain pianists, like Sviatoslav Richter, and Shura Cherkassky (who flutter pedals).
All music from the 12th Century deep into the 20th. Just about everyone well-known.
Pop music, too. Historical popular music (before the 20th century), and mostly American pop from that point, onward.
Swing made a big impression on me. So did Novelty Music. And the studio orchestra sounds that were popular throughout the 1950s up to about 1980.
All the usual vocalists.
I have a special love for Hungarian Gypsy music, the way Bartok did not like it!
What are you working on now?
The novel is called Segue because it's about how modern Britain and the way we lived today was forged in the first twenty years of the 20th century. It's a social history incorporating huge drama through the political changes and the first world war as lived through by my characters. I have personalities in the book from all walks of life. This is deliberate as many class structures were broken down at that time and the role of women changed irreversibly.
How do you feel about the fact that the pieces exhibited in contemporary art museums are often of artists already deceased?
I feel very comfortable with that. "Museum" is for something that is already a "past".
Another question is should we continue calling the 20th century art "contemporary"?
What is your blog address? What subjects do you deal with?
I have two blogs, one that covers anything that happens to interest me, and one that specifically focuses on art.
http://robertwboyd.blogspot.com/ -- this is my personal blog. I like exploring neighborhoods in Houston by bike, and I document those trips here. I write quite a bit about goings on in my home town, but I also write about finance, the energy industry, literature, and anything else that catches my attention.
http://thegreatgodpanisdead.blogspot.com/ -- This is my blog about art. The title comes from a monologue that William Burroughs wrote about graffiti art, and refers to a specific episode in classical myth, in which a sailor heard a voice call from shore instructing him to announce to the world that the great god Pan had died. It is generally assumed to be symbolic of the passing of the pagan world and the rise of Christianity. However, that crepuscular interpretation, as provocative as it is, is not why I chose it as a title.
I deal primarily with art I see in Houston at galleries, museums, art spaces, on walls, in people's yards, anywhere. I also deal with larger art issues occasionally, as well as with comics art, particularly contemporary "alternative" or "art" comics and classic comic strips from the turn of the 20th century up until about 1960. I am a small-scale collector, and my blog is a place for me to show off new acquisitions.
How do you explain the rise in "fame" culture?
Money. Essentially, the adaptation of music and performance to profit-producing industries reached an unprecedented level during the 20th century, due to the mass media machine and innovative technologies. Artists were ever more in the eye of the public, who saw the affluent lifestyles and the glamor of popularity.
What past or present day illustrators do you admire most?
Roberts Risko, Al Hirschfeld, Kirsten Ulve, Tim Biskup, Norman Rockwell, J.C.Leyendecker, J. Phillips, H. Bush, Jean-Leon Gerome, J.S.Sargent, all the pen and ink men of the Victorian and Edwardian periods, the ad art of the 1950s and caricaturists of the early 20th century....and the list goes on.
What is your favorite genre? Can you provide a link to a site where we can read some of your work or learn something about it?
My favorite genre of reading and writing is non-fiction. I enjoy a good novel on occasion, but in general my interests lean towards North American history. As in, the sociology of western society as defined by popular culture, politics, the morality and the accepted social structures from different eras in the 20th century. For instance, learning and writing about the influence of popular radio programs and motion pictures during the Depression years can resemble an archeological dig, while simultaneously appearing to some as somewhat flighty and shallow.
I can offer two links to my seemingly contrary sites. Which is a strange method of saying I have earned a salary for columns and interviews concerning pro wrestling, written in 2007 and 2008 for The Fight Network in Canada. Prior to that, I was a columnist and feature story writer for the glossy magazine, WOW (World of Wrestling).
Thus, I can claim that my area of specialization in this instance concerns itself with what was once called professional wrestling. More than a few of the articles found on this particular website examines the "old school" era, beginning in the 1950s and continuing through the '80s, then contrasts it with what passes for wrestling nowadays. I take pride in the acclaim my columns have received by both the wrestling intelligentsia and people with little interest in the sport/business. The top 20 columns are available in printed book form. More information on that opus as well as some of the columns not included in the book can be found at:
http://www.perspectivesonwrestling.blogspot.com/
My other "home" is devoted to articles of human interest, opinions and humorous anecdotes. There, you will find three columns of varying shades and colors. As in the case of "Perspectives on Wrestling," "RB's POV" has received acknowledgment by providing food for thought and discussion. You may access that site by visiting:
http://rbergerspov.blogspot.com/
In passing, I'll mention that I have edited two books and numerous magazine articles. Currently, I am a freelance/by contract writer and editor. Should you wish to contact me in regards to a potential working relationship, I would be pleased to make your acquaintance and kick around an equitable arrangement.
Otherwise, I invite all wandering eyeballs to drop by one or both places as the mood moves you. Should you wish to do so, feel free to comment on anything you read, be it good, bad or otherwise. For now, I thank you for taking the time to read this "short" answer to the questions. Much longer and it'll be another book...
= Richard Berger =
WriterGuy1A@hotmail.com
What well known writers do you admire most?
Largely 17th to early 20th century writers, such as Jane Austen, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner...the list just goes on and on.
Do you have a favorite work of art?
Anything Jackson Pollock... greatest american painter in the second half of the 20th Century.
Which artists do you admire and how do they influence your work?
Artists from all periods - but I have a particular fondness for artists from the 20th century until now - they influence me because I am a man from this time who grapples with beliefs that pre-date the modern era, but have a strong relationship to it.
Your biography in four lines.
1) I had the good fortune to be born poor, black and female to teenage parents in the Commonwealth of VA just pass the middle of the 20th century. 2) I had the additional luck of loving history, a good story and a good book. 3) In the 9th grade my English teacher, Eileen Rowe realized that I was a writer and encouraged me. 4) I graduated from Penn where I was exposed to writers like Philip Roth, Carolos Fuentes, Sonia Sanchez and Kristin Hunter and, of course, wrote a brilliant and still unpublished 1st novel entitled, "Shadow Portraits".
Who is your favourite artist?
Query, Book Proposal& MS of “Legend” By Christina and Barie Fez-Barringten
Query, Book Proposal & Manuscript’s text only (37 pages)
“Legend”
©2006 Christina &Barie Fez-Barringten
(Under title 17 of U.S. code by section 106; 1976 copyright act)
By Christina and Barie Fez-Barringten
This is a picture book of 21 surreal psychic automatism collages made during the late sixties and is the only collection of its kind. They are a “roman” of mythology, which she calls Romantic Mythology.
For the first time they are scheduled to exhibit in fine art galleries and wish a book to be available for the general public, collectors and connoisseurs.
They currently appear on their website: www.bariefez-barringten.com
The website is not commercial and seen by very few.
Memberships
Alliance for the arts
Gulf Coast Writers Association
American Institute of Architects
American Society of Interior Designers
International Interiors Designers Association
Pratt and Yale University Alumni associations
Please see their website for complete background.
Query Letter
Greetings!
These 21 art works have attracted connoisseurs, collectors, as well as artist’s agents, exhibitors and galleries. The works of art are a one-of-kind unique collection of collages which have become an artifact of the sixty’s, surreal psychic automatism, pop art and sixty’s nostalgia. The collages were made from collections of high fashion magazines (Vintage Fashion) acquired by Christina in the sixties while Barie was a student at Yale and his cousin Louis Abolofia and the "love generation" were spawning happenings, fashion and music. The art captures the popular look and excitement of the period without being psychedelic, but is a kind of expression of the times. They were created in Puerto Rico just before they returned to New York City in 1969 where Barie taught at Pratt and was the co-founder of international Earth Day in 1970.
The art work is briefly annotated with a narrative about the period, art movements of the time and highlights of their life.
Christina's Romantic Mythology is derived from the German language where "roman" means “story” , taking artistic license to develop metaphor and reasonable contexts, events and representations based on what ever is known about something; in this case legendary mythological characters. Christina has done with each legend what story tellers and movie makers have done for ages with all mythology; to create a portrait of the mythological characters in the jargon of her own imagination; in this case the vintage fashion world of the vintage and very precious 1966,1967 and 1968 Harpers, Vogue and Mademoiselle magazines. In this sense, her work shows the superior reality of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought.
It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life. She made these collages in 1968 at the very time of their release with the vision she had of them and their mythological antecedents.
Christina and Barie are both members of Gulf Coast Writers Association and the Naples Press Club attending various writers’ conferences where they plan to offer this proposed book. They are also members of various art, design and professional organizations where they will also offer this book for sale. The original art works themselves are currently not for sale and only being offered to purchase as an entire collection while individual giclees may be purchased for individual personal collections. The book will be a popular way to get the works into the hands of many who would otherwise not have access to the whole collection nor individual pieces.
Christian and Barie have all the originals as well as jpg files and for nine they already have TIF and PDF files for your use. They need only make 12 more TIF or PDF for your use. The images shown are JPG files. Legend is to be printed in color with full-page picture of artwork on the left and on the facing page the description; left sheet picture and right sheet description so that the reader may see the full-page color picture while reading the description at the same place. This is a time when the editions of these fashion magazines are greatly valued and collected in their original form; they are themselves vintage collector’s items.
The book will make an excellent gift and a definite addition to a connoisseur’s collection.
As a trustee of the South West Florida Yale Alumni Association, Barie will also offer the book to its members and their families. They will also be able to offer the book when they speaking at various professional and social groups.
While browsing through Barnes and Noble Christina and Barie noticed that there were other art books being offered for sale by such publishers as Rizzoli, Abrams, Clarkson Potter, Tashen, Cedco, Harper Collins, Lococo fine art; Art Fund; Chronicle Book; Distributed Art Publishers Inc.; Empire, Balcony Press; ARS Libri; and Oak and Knoll, to name a few.
Their books had few words and beautifully printed fine art.
“Legend” should be one of these beautiful books.
Please let us know if you wish a copy of the MS in with the 21 images in PDF or JPEG format which can be send it as an attachment.
However, you can view the collages by clicking on “Christina’s Artwork” on www.bariefez-barringten.com
However, the Book Proposal and text of the MS follows below.
Book Proposal (2,643 words) 7 pages
“Legend”
by Christina and Barie Fez-Barringten
©2006 Christina &Barie Fez-Barringten
(Under title 17 of U.S. code by section 106; 1976 copyright act)
1. The Content (What the book is about)
The problem and the book as the solution
Unique selling proposition
AWR is art within reach for the person who cannot afford to spend $500 for a giclee or $5000 for an original but can spend under $50 for the entire collection of 21 fine art collages. In any case, even if the buyer could buy one he can then have all the rest.
Today, there are other such “within reach” markets for furniture, jewelry and fashion making culture, high styling and great art available for everyone. At the beginning of 2008, Christina’s entire collection will be exhibited in one of the nations largest such furniture chains called Design Within Reach. (DWR).
What’s so important and special about this book?
The book is important because it documents a period, kind of art and a unique person in the world of art. Why should a publisher want to publish it? (Aren’t there enough books out there already without adding another to the pile?) There are few affordable books of fine art and none of this period.
Who’s the core audience for the book, and why will they care about it? People who are just beginning to buy furniture, decorate there homes and begin collecting fine art and cultural metaphors will greatly appreciate this book. Especially those with a love of fashion, myths and legends. Already there is a tremendous market for vintage Vogue, Harpers, Mademoiselle, etc.
Premise:
Today, the popularity of myths, legends and fashion is overwhelming as society seeks heroes, a promising future and solutions to the challenges of our world. While the ugly, dissonant and disgusting have a market the beautiful, harmonious and opulent have even a greater market.
While TV, fashion magazines, comic books, internet, blogs, tunes, etc satisfy some of the markets needs art galleries are filled with fantasy and futuristic works of art. What can be better than to have a whole collection of a single vision of fantasy icons, legends and myths icons, which combine both fashion and myth? Not a replacement for the bible or many other sources of great heroes and fictional deities, Legend presents the look of the legends and links them to our own metaphors.
Manuscript
MS Status: The art work is 100% complete and the narrative is 90 %complete awaiting the input of editors and publishers possible emphasis, direction and redirection
Special Features: The special feature of this book is that it combines full color artwork with metaphorical narrative.
Anticipated Length: The book of 21 fine art images with a one page narrative for each will be proceeded by an eight page introduction and preface for a total of about 50 pages.
Anticipated completion: The manuscript is already complete in its draft form and the authors are ready to work with the publisher’s staff to complete any final editions in a matter of days.
2. The Market (Who will buy the book)
Demographic description:
The predominant segment of human population broken down by age or sex or income etc especially with regard to density and capacity for expansion or decline will be predominantly college, newly weds and baby boomers relocating and reestablishing homesteads. Many of their parents and friends will buy these books to give as gifts, wedding, birthday, home warming and shower presents.
Psychographic description is a graphic representation or chart of the personality traits of an individual or group: The psychographic of the buyers will be happy, positive and optimistic shoppers seeking high end icons, metaphors and symbols of their taste. They will be discriminating and selective buyers.
Affinity group is a natural attraction, liking, or feeling of kinship will be interior designers, academic college students, administrators, professors, schoolteachers, researchers, historians, architects, fashion designers, art collectors, connoisseurs, travelers, airlines, and retired professionals.
Competition: This book will compete with other beautiful fine art books of contemporary fine art now stocked in book stores such as Barnes and Noble and available on line by thousands of internet art and art book sales sites.
Promotion:
Christina’s artwork has a built-in audience on our webpage, galleries and participation with buyers and specifiers. Because we are both active members of interior design, architectural, art, writers and university alumni associations we will be able to bring this book to the attention of many including members of the media. In addition, we are both retired and have the ability to participate in book fairs, conferences and direct and indirect marketing venues.
Book stores now carry a goodly number of art picture books selling as gifts to art collectors and connoisseurs. We are actively marketing our art in galleries and our book about our twenty years in Saudi Arabia. We believe that the confluence of our different projects and involvements will greatly benefit the interest and sale of many of these books.
3. The Author (Why Christina and Barie are the best possible authors for this book)
Previous writing: Barie has had a contract to publish by John Wiley and sons, written and published about fifteen monographs in learned and peer reviewed journals in Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, England, Finland and the United States of America. He has also written many corporate reports and manuals for the Gulf Oil Corporation and Arabian American Oil Company.
Current writing on other projects such as:
1 Saudi Arabian Mission Report: contains news paper collage clippings from the English language Saudi Arabian newspapers prior to 9/11 from 1993 to 1999.
2. Holy Spirit in Saudi Arabia about our twenty years in Saudi Arabia
3. Bronx Stardust about the first 21 years of my life growing up in New York City
4. Autobiographical Memoirs including my views on urbanity, metaphors, cities, family, relationships, schools, etc.
5. Little Fishermen is an illustrated Christian Children's book
6. Look of the End Times is a fine art pen and ink scripturally narrated book.
7. Anagrams (word grams) is a book of illustrated DaDa drawings and poems
8. European Pen and Ink drawings is a book of drawings made in 72 European cities in 1963
9. Sheba-Land is a pen and ink sketch book with brief narrations consisting of surreal fantasy drawings
10. Acrylics in Saudi Arabia made for a one lady exhibit in 1986
11. Architecture, the Making of Metaphors is a compendium of formerly published and unpublished monographs
Personal marketing
Place books and brochures:
• Gift shops
• Decorator and Design offices and shops
• Furniture and decorator shops and show rooms
• High Fashion shops
• Art galleries, which show my art
• Book Fairs
• Writers Clubs
• Book signings
• Fashion shows
• Writer’s fairs and conventions
• Lectures on making collages at art schools, schools, and libraries
Why are we the best persons to write this book?
Christina Fez-Barringten is a Pop Art artist and a writer. Her collages, acrylic paintings, and Plexiglas sculptures were part of the exciting visual arts movement that emerged in the mid 1950's in Britain and in the late 1950's in the United States. Pop-Art was one of the major art movements of the 20th century. It was characterized by “mass-cultural” themes and techniques drawn from popular materials and media such as plastics, magazine advertising, TV, pop-music, space-time relativity, and comic books. While Pop Art, like Pop Music, aimed to employ images of popular culture in art and emphasized the everyday elements of any given culture, Christina's work challenged the depressing “elitist” culture of the 1950's with her passion for harmony, grace and balance. She believed that all of these elements could work together. Furthermore, she believed that the “deconstructivism” of DaDa and Surrealism art of the time could be made popular by mixing them with the jargon of the world of fashion and cosmopolitan urbanism that the new generations understood. Christina's work might be called Existentialism today. This brave young woman turned her beliefs into reality. She broke Plexiglas into fragments and reassembled them into vibrant, colorful sculptures. Christina ripped apart fashion magazines of the early 1960's and gently placed them into compositions of personality, boldness, love, deep thought, and excitement.
Shortly before moving to New Haven to begin his studies, Barie was introduced to Christina. Christina lived at the International House, a home for graduate students on Riverside Drive. She studied fine arts at Columbia University Howard Cook, then, the president of the International House, graciously arranged for Christina to have a large art studio in the same building, where she could work and develop her new kind of sculptures.
Her medium was Plexiglas, which had never been used in fine art sculptures.
David Rockefeller commissioned her work to be exhibited at the Chase Manhattan bank. Other exhibitions followed. The Frank Lawrence Gallery at East 57 Street and Park Ave. Showed and represented her abstract sculptures; which, thanks to her medium, and , her artistry, are not like conventional sculptures where volume is inserted into space which surrounds them. Rather, they have become part of space as air, color and light play through it.
Background:
Christina was born in Leipzig, Germany. 1956 she came to New York to study philosophy. But when she discovered the powerful and inspiring movement of modern art in New York City, and, learned to know Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, and, others. She decided to use her artistic talent and, changed her goals to study fine art at both the Art Students League and School of Visual Arts.
Shortly before she intended to return to Germany, Christina was introduced to Paul Lefson by Max Waldman, a theatrical photographer (Well known for his book "Waldman on Theater", and his photos in Life Magazine). Paul and Christina got married in 1958 and lived on East 31 Street in Manhattan. Sadly, Paul Lefson died accidentally while on business in Chicago early in 1963.
To overcome the devastating loss, Christina turned to her art more than ever. She now studied sculpture at Columbia University under Professor Peter Augustini. In that period, Christina learned to know Barie Fez-Barringten.
Barie and Christina married in 1966 in New Haven, while Barie studied at Yale University, under Paul Rudolf, Charles Moore, Vincent Scully and others. 1967 Barie originated the theory of” Architecture the Making of Metaphors". At that time, Barie conducted a lecture series at Yale University with Robert Venturi, John Cage, Paul Weiss, Christopher Tunnard, and others. This event is partially published in "Main Currents of Modern Thought".
After the completion of Barie's studies in February of 1968, the couple moved for a short while, (To escape the cold of winter.) to Puerto Rico. Barie was appointment junior partner of Schimmelpfennig, Ruiz and Gonzales and designed buildings for Ron Rico and El Mundo.
In Puerto Rico Christina developed a series of original and exciting collages. She was inspired by the most elaborate, rich and opulent editions of the 1960's - Harper's Bazaar and Vogue Magazines.
These collages are excellent posters and are now shown for the first time on the internet.
Back in New York, in order for Barie, now, a licensed architect to do his work, and Christina to have space for her sculptures, the couple moved in to a large loft on East 68 Street. Barie taught architecture at Pratt Institute. And, when Barie accepted the challenge of Mayor Lindsey to bring the first ""Earth Day" to New York City, he encouraged his students to build the stage for that event. Paul Newman and people from Sesame Street, Ally McGraw and others furnished the educational entertainment. The following year, John Mc Connell enlisted Barie's assistance to stage his version the Earth Day in Central Park and to get the General Secretary of the United Nations, U Thant, to proclaim Earth Day as an international holiday (March 21).
In addition, Barie founded a New York not-for-profit corporation: "Laboratories for Metaphoric Environments" with one of its goals to provide under privileged children a glimpse of the creative excitement of the building industry from cabinet work, to carpentry and design. There in order to illustrate his teaching he produced a series of words-drawings now in the hands of several collectors.
In 1973, Barie accepted the challenge to develop two vacation resorts in Tennessee, Sugar Tree and English Mountain. And, in addition, he designed homes for a development in Belmopan, Belize, British Honduras.
Also, Barie the artist developed a series of brilliantly envisioned drawings of futuristic metaphors, which he exhibited in conjunction with Christina's Plexiglas sculpture, at the Jonathan Gallery in Jackson, and in Memphis, Tennessee.
Later, he was recruited by the "Gulf Oil Real Estate Development Company" to be its lead project manager for a new computer building and other new structures in Texas. Because of that, the couple had moved to Houston. Also, Barie always interested to inspire young people in his profession, taught part-time at the University of Houston; and, later, fulltime, as associate professor at college station's Texas A&M University. Professor Fez-Barringten student's benefited by his friendship with the astronaut Joe Allen. Together they looked way into the future and designed space stations furniture and other imagined designed necessities.
By 1981, the Fez-Barringten's moved from Texas to Saudi Arabia where Barie trained Saudi Arabian students to work in architecture department of The Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO).
After moving to Riyadh, Barie got busy and designed 21 new towns for the people of Saudi Arabia. He also designed sport stadiums, office buildings and other building types.
In Riyadh Christina developed, out of necessity a new style of pattern-like paintings. For in this Muslim country objects can not be portrayed through art. 1986, Christina gave a major exhibition of her acrylic paintings sponsored by the American Ambassador in Saudi Arabia. In addition, she taught and was the judge of important art events, especially during the five years when Barie was Professor of Architecture at King Faisal University, located in Dammam on the Gulf of Arabia. Professor Barie Fez-Barringten's articles of metaphors, written during that time, are published in learned journals in the USA, Middle East and Europe.
Barie Fez- Barringten is an architect, philosopher, writer, artist, project manager and teacher. He is one of the world's foremost advocates of the artistic concept called the “Architecture, the making of Metaphors”. His work has been recognized around the world, particularly in the US and Saudi Arabia. According to Professor Fez-Barringten, there is a 3-way symbiotic relationship that exists between architecture, music and art, and the audience that experiences that art within the controlled space of that environment. Using the concept of the “metaphor”, a synergy that can be easily observed when all
three properly work together.
In 1999 the Fez Barringtens left Saudi Arabia...............
Praises of Author’s Work
Both of us have served for many years in secular public as professor, managers, architects, designers, teachers, and clerical positions as missionaries, pastor, and ministers with a following of constituents, congregations, and students who now have families and run business, mange companies and lead governments and government agencies. Because we both are good speakers and teachers the American Institute of Architects, American society of Interior designers, and Interior Design Society continue to invite them to serve in positions of leadership. Barie was recently appointed a trustee of the Yale club of Southwest Florida and Christina has been invited to show her collages in local fine art and internet galleries.
Competition will come from other contemporary artists and fine art publishers who will print and distribute books to the major book stores but will not be able to reach the major design and academic professional community as an insider.
All the chapters, Annotated Table of Contents and Chapter by chapter synopsis can be found in the pdf file.
Creative Interaction between Author and Editor involves listening, receiving criticism and work to develop and improve the ms. it is hoped that the state of this ms is early enough in its development to be able to be developed with shared artistic enthusiasm and interest.
Christina and Barie will await your kind word.
Sincerely yours
Christina and Barie Fez-Barringten
1011 La Paloma Blvd.
North Fort Myers, Florida 33903
239 543 2736
www.bariefez-barringten.com
christinasfineart@gmail.com
Below please find the text only of the manuscript.
LEGEND”
©2006 Christina &Barie Fez-Barringten
(Under title 17 of U.S. code by section 106; 1976 copyright act)
A graphic tale of the love generation’s hippie’s sixties started at
Haight Ashbury, San Francisco
Book of Christina’s Automatic Surrealist Collages
Made in Puerto Rico in 1968 from fashion magazines she collected in Manhattan and New Haven from 1966
By Christina and Barie Fez-Barringten
Artwork by Christina with Barie’s narrative
TOC
A. Preface
B. Introduction
C. Artist’s background
1.Appetite
2.Taproots
3.Kiss
4.Opulent:
5.Quixote
6.Mystery:
7.Easter
8.Creation
9.Lord’sSupper
10.Maria
11.Maya
12.Xanadu
13.Sun-He
14.CoCo
15.Narcisse
16.Salome
17.Vampira
18.Turandot
19.Mercedes
20.Luna
21.Gemini
Preface: Book is to be printed in color with full-page picture of artwork on the left and on the facing page the description, left sheet picture and right sheet description so that the reader may see the full-page color picture while reading the description at the same place.
Christina’s pop art collages are now available as fine art inkjet giclée printed reproductions as the entire collection of the originals is being kept as part of the artist’s estate. This is being done to preserve their integrity and value of their importance and value. Each of the fine art giclees are individually signed and dated and be part of any connoisseur’s fine art collection. Each is truly one of kind, unique and remarkable achievements. With the advent of digital photography and the slow demise of mechanical lithography, digital inkjet high-end printing is expanding exponentially. Giclée loosely means spraying or squirting in French. Christina’s collage giclees are characteristics of a true digital art print:
While the techniques of collage were first used at the time of the invention of paper in China around 200 BC the use of collage remained very limited until the 10th century in Japan, when calligraphers began to apply glued paper, using texts on surfaces, when writing their poems. Her work cries out for words and music only to be found by the viewer. In the 19th century, collage methods also were used among hobbyists for memorabilia (i.e. applied to photo albums) and books (i.e. Hans Christian Andersen, Carl Spitzweg).In this way Christina’s home is filled family photo collages. It is her natural way to express her ideas and relationships of people, places and events. The term collage derives from the French "colle" meaning, "glue”. This term was coined by both Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in the beginning of the 20th century when collage became a distinctive part of modern art.
Introduction:
Art of the so-called Love Generation are Impressions of the psychedelic, Mod, and Hip-art of the sixties, Christina’s Psychic Automatism is graphic memoirs made during the sixties. While they seem to be Pop Art, Surreal, Fantasy Metaphors they are really a re-assemblage of deconstructed reality.
Christina’s Giclées Collages combines the beauty and brilliance of this printing technology. While photographic prints are somewhat dull and limited a giclée print let her collages pop with deep blacks, saturation and gradations hard to achieve with other media. Her jet-printed glossy laminate.
“As she broke the Plexiglas into fragments, she too tore the magazine’s pages. As she reassembled the Plexiglas fragments to a form a new reality so she assembled the bits and pieces of magazine sheets to form metaphors of spirit, fashion, urbanism, and a fantasy life and into a visual memoir of the Love Generation”.
The Baby Boomers of today grew up in the midst of the greatest cultural revolution of our time, a revolution, which emerged out the beat generation into the hippie’s creativity in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury and England’s Soho. It was the beginning of the culture of youth where being over thirty was ancient.
Christina created this collection of collages in 1968 regurgitating pent up sights, sounds, feelings, and impressions of her three creative days between Yale’s school of architecture and Manhattan’s “art scene”. She did this in Puerto Rico while TV programs like:” Laugh In” and the first run of Star Trek was airing in the states. At Yale, they gave a lecture series published as “Architecture the Making of Metaphors” encouraged by dean Charles Moore with John Cage, Paul Weiss, Robert Venturi and others. At the time Timothy Leary was advocating the wonders of LSD while the young were tripping out on Broadway and loving at Woodstock. Society listened to acid rock and painted psychedelic illustrations and paintings. They listened while crowds proclaimed against the Vietnam war to “Make Love and Not War” while the musical Hair reaped in millions at the box office. The streets of New Haven were charged with “blacks” rioting against the “establishment”. Christina dressed in the her own designed and high fashion minis and soaked in the psychedelic sounds of the Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Bee Gees, Beatles and other like the Mamas and the Papas. All the while she collected the many magazines she would later use in her collages. She and her husband made graffiti and gorilla art on buildings, malls and with posters in their apartment and the buildings in Puerto Rico..
Christina’s Pop Art collages are a part of visual artistic movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain. It paralleled in the late 1950s in the United States. The early 50s was the time when Christina had to flee from east to west Germany, leaving her home city of Leipzig, a city once known for its commerce, music and literature. Christina was born educated in Leipzig and its surrounding area. It was the home of Gutenberg, Luther, Bach, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Handel, and Klinger, Goethe’s Faust “Auerbach’s Keller”, only to mention a few. Its neighboring small town is Dessau, the seat of the Bauhaus. Christina grew up in an atmosphere of great music and art. She draws upon that culture and sensitivities of grace and tenacity of that time which is little found in today’s politically correct generation.
Pop- Art is one of the major art movements of the Twentieth Century, characterized by themes and techniques drawn from popular mass culture, such as advertising and comic books. Pop- Art is widely interpreted as either a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism or an expansion upon them. Christina was the first artist to use Plexiglas (acrylic). Her sculptures are amazing examples of three dimensional abstract expressionism and movement in the transparency of space. She studied sculpture under Peter Augustino at Columbia University
While Pop Art, like pop music, aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture, Christina’s work challenged this mundane idea with her passion for harmony, grace and balance. She demonstrated that the two could work together and that “deconstructivism”; DaDa and Surrealism could be made popular into the jargon of the reality of the world of fashion and cosmopolitan urbanism.
Christina’s giclée collages are her response to Abstract Expressionism and marked a return to representational art. She uses images from mass culture and ordinary commerce as a relatively new development. In fact, her work incorporates the shapes and forms of her abstract expressionist foundation where each piece is a whole shape consisting of abstract forms arrayed in a kaleidoscope of shapes and forms in tension and counter tension dynamics and repose.
While Christina loathes any social preoccupation with psychoanalysis, her work is pure imagination drawn from her own pure psychic automatism, by which she proposes to express the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation. She practices what the philosopher Husserl known as the father of phenomenology of subjective experience as the source of all of our knowledge of objective phenomena.
Christina’s Psychic Automatism is a surrealist technique involving spontaneous assemblage without conscious aesthetic or moral self-censorship. Automatism phenomena is perhaps parallel to the non-idiomatic improvisation of free jazz.
Christina’s Collage surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.
Christina’s mass image art combines eclectic mysticism, current high-end fashion metaphors and values of her real and exaggerated impression of the society values around her. With each completed piece we see the combined segments of what man has made out of modern reality. Each piece reifies the potential of the combination of the segments to its aesthetic conclusion. As she breaks and reassembles fragments of Plexiglas to form her sculptures so she cut apart the fashion magazines of the early sixties and reassembled them to compose there own personality. In style, many of her collages are absolutely baroque and busting with dynamic life and exuberance. Her work is in the genre of other pop artist such as English pop artist Sir Peter Thomas Blake and Richard Hamilton; as well as Norwegian artist, Hariton Pushwagner. The tactility and appeal of each of her pieces is irresistible as the origins of each segment. She has made of each much more than the original form and, has immortalized what was once discarded and swept away with time.
Like all the pop artist of her time, Andy Warhol, Rauschenberg, and Liechtenstein, Christina delights in using, reusing, and converting the obvious into the new. This fact remains also true in her acrylic paintings. She is a true maker of metaphors, making the strange familiar and communicating one thing in terms of another. Formally trained also as a fashion illustrator at the New York Art Students League she uses the figures, costumes and textures to recreate styles and fashion looks of the dream world. Each image is bizarre and somewhat extraterrestrial with the art of a Spielberg or Jim Henderson’s Muppets each becomes both the reality of our world and some other.
Christina Fez-Barringten is an international artist. She has exhibited her work in New York City, Connecticut, Tennessee, Florida, Europe and the Middle East.
Living in New York, Christina and her contemporary artists: Andy Warhol, Rauschenberg, Liechtenstein, Peter Augustino and so many others opted to present the obvious in the new, a principle that remains also true in Christina’s dynamic acrylic paintings, and in her first of its kind acrylic sculptures. Rather than selling he originals Christina offers her collages as giclees. The printing technology of the fine art ink jet giclées brings out the beauty and brilliance of her collages. The nature of a giclée print let her collages jump out with deep blacks, saturation and gradations, hard to achieve with other media. Art of the Love Generation are Impressions of the psychedelic, Mod, and Hip-art of the 1960s. It seems Christina’s collages are also an expression of Pop Art, Surrealism, Fashion-Fantasy or Metaphoric-Urbanism. Yet her works are in reality a re-assemblage of deconstructed impressions of the 1960s. Her collages derived from Cut-Outs of magazine sheets, like Harpers Bazaar and Vogue, mirroring the face of that magical period. Christina created this collection of collages in 1968 regurgitating pent up sights, feelings and impressions of that time. Her work is timeless and like a hidden treasure jet to be fully discovered.
Pop- Art is a major art movement of the Twentieth Century drawn from popular mass culture, such as advertising and comic books. While Pop art, like pop music, aimed to employ images opposed to elitist culture in art, and emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of the culture; Christina’s work challenged this depressing idea with her passion for harmony, grace and balance. She believed the two could work together and that “deconstructivism”; Dada and Surrealism could be combined into the jargon of the world of fashion and cosmopolitan urbanism. Christina’s modern art is very easy to comprehend.
She was far ahead of her time when she used images from mass culture and ordinary commerce in her work. Realism and Minimalism are considered to be the current modern art movements. Her collages are a response to Abstract Expressionism and marked already then a return to representational art. San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, England’s Soho and Woodstock stirred the beat generation and hippy’s to bring about the greatest cultural revolution of our time; of which Christina’s collages are one of the finest examples.
Barie Fez-Barringten was born 1937 in New York. He attended Christopher Columbus High School. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in interior design from Pratt Institute. After Several years of working for such architects as Edward Durrell Stone and Morris Lapidus; and a year of extensive travel throughout Europe he returned to the US to continue his studies. By 1968 he received his masters degree in architecture from Yale University.
Shortly before moving to New Haven to begin his studies, Barie was introduced to Christina Lefson. Christina lived at the International House., a home for graduate students on Riverside Drive. She studied fine
arts at Columbia University Howard Cook, then,
president of the International House, graciously arranged for Christina to have a large art studio in the same building, where she could work and develop her new kind of sculptures.
Her medium was Plexiglas, which had never been used in fine art sculptures.
David Rockefeller commissioned her work to be exhibited at the Chase Manhattan bank. Other exhibitions followed. The Frank Lawrence Gallery at East 57 Street and Park Ave. Showed and represented her abstract sculptures; which, thanks to her medium, and , her artistry, are not like conventional sculptures where volume is inserted into space which surrounds them. Rather, they have become part of space as air, color and light play through it.
Christina was born in Leipzig, Germany. 1956 she came to New York to study philosophy. But when she discovered the powerful and inspiring movement of modern art in New York City, and, learned to know Andy Warhol,
Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Liechtenstein and, others. She decided to use her artistic talent and, changed her goals to study fine art at both the Art Students League and School of Visual Arts.
Shortly before she intended to return to Germany, Christina was introduced to Paul Lefson by Max Waldman, a theatrical photographer (Well known for his book "Waldman on Theater", and his photos in Life Magazine). Paul and Christina got married in 1958 and lived on East 31 Street in Manhattan. Sadly, Paul Lefson died accidentally while on business in Chicago early in 1963.
To overcome the devastating loss, Christina turned to her art more than ever. She now studied sculpture at Columbia University under Professor Peter Augustini. In that period Christina learned to know Barie Fez-Barringten.
Barie and Christina married in 1966 in New Haven, while Barie studied at Yale University, under Paul Rudolf, Charles Moore, Vincent Scully and others. 1967 Barie originated the theory of:” Architecture the Making of Metaphors". At that time Barie conducted a lecture series at Yale University with Robert Venturi, John Cage, Paul Weiss, Christopher Tunnard, and others. This event is partially published in "Main Currents of Modern Thought".
After the completion of Barie's studies in February of 1968, the couple moved for a short while, (To escape the cold of winter.) to Puerto Rico. Barie was appointment junior partner of Schimmelpfennig, Ruiz and Gonzales and designed buildings for Ron Rico and El Mundo.
In Puerto Rico Christina developed a series of original and exciting collages. She was inspired by the most elaborate, rich and opulent editions of the 1960's - Harper's Bazaar and Vogue Magazines.
These collages are excellent posters and are now shown for the first time on the internet.
Back in New York, in order for Barie, now, a licensed architect to do his work, and Christina to have space for her sculptures, the couple moved in to a large loft on East 68 Street. Barie taught architecture at Pratt Institute. And, when Barie accepted the challenge of Mayor Lindsey to bring the first ""Earth Day" to New York City, he encouraged his students to build the stage for that event. Paul Newman and people from Sesame Street, Aly McGraw and others furnished the educational entertainment. The following year John Mc Connell enlisted Barie's assistance to stage the epic Earth Day event in Central Park and to get the General Secretary of the United Nations, U Thant, to proclaim Earth Day as an international holiday (March 21).
In addition, Barie founded a New York not-for-profit corporation: "Laboratories for Metaphoric Environments" with one of its goals to provide under privileged children a glimpse of the creative excitement of the building industry from cabinet work, to carpentry and design. There in order to illustrate his teaching he produced a series of words-drawings now in the hands of several collectors.
In 1973, Barie accepted the challenge to develop two vacation resorts in Tennessee; Sugar Tree and English Mountain. And, in addition, he designed homes for a development in Belmopan, Belize, British Honduras.
Also, Barie the artist developed a series of brilliantly envisioned drawings of futuristic metaphors, which he exhibited in conjunction with Christina's Plexiglas sculpture, at the Jonathan Gallery in Jackson, and in Memphis, Tennessee.
Later, he was recruited by the "Gulf Oil Real Estate Development Company" to be its lead project manager for a new computer building and other new structures in Texas. Because of that, the couple had moved to Houston. Also, Barie always interested to inspire young people in his profession, taught part-time at the University of Houston; and, later, fulltime, as associate professor at college station's Texas A&M University. Professor Fez-Barringten student's benefited by his friendship with the astronaut Joe Allen. Together they looked way into the future and designed space stations furniture and other imagined designed necessities.
By 1981, the Fez-Barringten's moved from Texas to Saudi Arabia where Barie trained Saudi Arabian students to work in architecture department of The Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO).
After moving to Riyadh, Barie got busy and designed 21 new towns for the people of Saudi Arabia. He also designed sport stadiums, office buildings and other building types.
In Riyadh Christina developed, out of necessity a new style of pattern-like paintings. For in this Muslim country objects can not be portrayed through art. 1986, Christina gave a major exhibition of her acrylic paintings sponsored by the American Ambassador in Saudi Arabia. In addition, she taught and was the judge of important art events, especially during the five years when Barie was Professor of Architecture at King Faisal University, located in Dammam on the Gulf of Arabia. Professor Barie Fez-Barringten's articles of metaphors, written during that time, are published in learned journals in the USA, Middle East and Europe. 1999 the Fez Barringtens left Saudi Arabia...............
Image insert
1. Appetite
This collage expresses the unsatiated hunger, appetite, longing and dreams of mankind for all the tangibles.
The printing technology of the fine art inkjet giclées brings out the beauty and brilliance of her collages. The nature of a giclée print let her collages jump out with deep blacks, saturation and gradations, hard to achieve with other media. Art of the Love Generation are Impressions of the psychedelic, Mod, and Hip-art of the 1960s. It seems Christina’s collages are also an expression of Pop Art, Surrealism, Fashion-Fantasy or Metaphoric-Fiction. Yet her works are in reality a re-assemblage of deconstructed impressions of the 1960s. Her collages derived from cutouts of magazine sheets, like Harpers Bazaar and Vogue, mirroring the face of that magical period. Christina created this collection of collages in 1968 regurgitating pent up sights, feelings and impressions of that time. Her work is timeless. And, like a hidden treasure yet to be fully discovered.
Image insert
2. Taproots
This collage incorporates the shapes and forms of an abstract expressionist foundation. It is a kaleidoscope of shapes and forms in tension and counter tension, dynamics and repose. This work is pure imagination depicting automatism and repetition by which to express a real function of thought.
Art of the Love Generation are Impressions of the psychedelic, Mod, and Hip-art of the 1960s. It seems Christina’s collages are also an expression of Pop Art, Surrealism, Fashion-Fantasy or Metaphoric-Fiction. Yet her works are in reality a re-assemblage of deconstructed impressions of the 1960s. Her collages derived from cutouts of magazine sheets, like Harpers Bazaar and Vogue, mirroring the face of that magical period. Christina created this collection of collages in 1968 regurgitating pent up sights, feelings and impressions of that time. Her work is timeless and like a hidden treasure yet to be fully discovered.
Image insert
3. Kiss
Lips, heads, and flowers orbit a sky surrounding an eye looking at the yellows, cerulean blues, lavenders and burgundy rainbow. Each are made a family of separated identities in a new structure of this kiss context. The clouds of color carry the content of the figures in an artist’s pallet of complementary hues and tones. All of these images are created in a spontaneous surreal technique called Automatism
Automatism is a surrealist technique involving spontaneous writing, drawing, or the like practiced without conscious aesthetic or moral self-censorship. "Pure psychic automatism" was how André Breton, surrealism's founder, defined surrealism, and while the definition has proved capable of significant expansion, automatism remains of prime importance in the movement. Seeing many of Christina’s works one immediately thinks of Duchamp’s “Nude Descending the staircase”. Duchamp discusses his work saying, `I discarded brushes and explored the mind more than the hands.’
Christina’s work speaks across centuries, cultures and genres. To own her work is to posses a still life of importance and value.
Image insert
4. Opulent:
The focal point is a well dressed aristocrat surrounded by white horses, damsels and exotic dogs as a clouds of ochre, persimmon, blues and gold. Art of the so-called Love Generation are Impressions of the psychedelic, Mod, and Hip-art of the sixties. Christina’s Psychic Automatism is graphic memoirs made during the sixties. While they seem to be Pop Art, Surreal, Fantasy Metaphors they are really a re-assemblage of deconstructed reality. Christina created this collection of collages in 1968 regurgitating pent up sights, sounds, feelings, and impressions of her three creative days between Yale’s school of architecture and Manhattan’s “art scene”. She did this in Puerto Rico while TV programs like:” Laugh In” and the first run of Star Trek was airing in the states. At Yale, they gave a lecture series published as “Architecture the Making of Metaphors” encouraged by Dean Charles Moore with John Cage, Paul Weiss, Robert Venturi and others. At the time, Timothy Leary was advocating the wonders of LSD while the young were tripping out on Broadway and loving at Woodstock. Society listened to acid rock and painted psychedelic illustrations and paintings. They listened while crowds proclaimed against the Vietnam War to “Make Love and Not War” while the musical Hair reaped in millions at the box office.
Image insert
5. Quixote
Like the famous legend of Don Quixote de la Mancha, the lady is dressed in warrior black with a great black hat. The images are a quiet story of the pride and proclamation of knight hood of great and single purpose. Collage is the making of metaphors, which make the strange familiar. Quixote is now a person who is victorious and the metaphor is the bits and pieces of constructed icon combined into the new reality of this surreal automatic expression. Like its Height-Ashbury Love generation contemporaries, this work conjures and freely lets psychic and poetic realities become a medulla upon which to feast the eyes and heart. The Baby Boomers of today grew up in the midst of the greatest cultural revolution of our time, a revolution, which emerged out the beat generation into the hippie’s creativity in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury and England’s Soho. It was the beginning of the culture of youth where being over thirty was ancient.
Image insert
6. Mystery:
As the period, this collage restates the metaphors of a culture, past and future in the form of women in exotic and colorful costumes. Are they gypsies, nobility, or part of a kings harem? Christina created this collection of collages in 1968 regurgitating pent up sights, sounds, feelings, and impressions of her three creative days between Yale’s school of architecture and Manhattan’s “art scene”.
It is a collage of bobbles, bangles and beads with surreal double images and decorated faces hiding the true identity of the one person they represent. Everywhere there are hints of her identity but she still remains illusive.
Image insert
7. Easter
A new beginning in the Grace of God, this collage exhibits the exuberance of victory;
the joy of man and nature of the Lord’s triumph over evil and death.
The printing technology of the fine art inkjet giclées brings out the beauty and brilliance of her collages. The nature of a giclée print let her collages jump out with deep blacks, saturation and gradations, hard to achieve with other media.
Art of the Love Generation are Impressions of the psychedelic, Mod, and Hip-art of the 1960s. It seems Christina’s collages are also an expression of Pop Art, Surrealism, Fashion-Fantasy or Metaphoric-Fiction. Yet her works are in reality a re-assemblage of deconstructed impressions of the 1960s. Her collages derived from cutouts of magazine sheets, like Harpers Bazaar and Vogue, mirroring the face of that magical period. Christina created this collection of collages in 1968 regurgitating pent up sights, feelings and impressions of that time. Her work is timeless. And like a hidden treasure yet to be fully discovered.
Image insert
8. Creation
A new beginning in the Grace of God. This collage exhibits the exuberance of victory.
The joy of man and nature of the Lord’s triumph over evil and death.
The printing technology of the fine art ink jet giclées brings out the beauty and brilliance of her collages. The nature of a giclée print let her collages jump out with deep blacks, saturation and gradations, hard to achieve with other media.
Art of the Love Generation are Impressions of the psychedelic, Mod, and Hip-art of the 1960s. It seems Christina’s collages are also an expression of Pop Art, Surrealism, Fashion-Fantasy or Metaphoric-Fiction. Yet her works are in reality a re-assemblage of deconstructed impressions of the 1960s. Her collages derived from cutouts of magazine sheets, like Harpers Bazaar and Vogue, mirroring the face of that magical period. Christina created this collection of collages in 1968 regurgitating pent up sights, feelings and impressions of that time. Her work is timeless. And like a hidden treasure yet to be fully discovered.
Image insert
9. Lord’s Supper table
The world of the unseen let’s Christina sees Jesus surrounded by worshipers in a swirl of ochre, browns, blues and whites. A winged angel and others in ancient costumes compose a swirl of time and progression of the essence and meaning of communion and fellowship, not religious but a vision of our relationship with the Lord.
While Christina loathes any social preoccupation with psychoanalysis, her work is pure imagination drawn from her own pure psychic automatism, by which she proposes to express the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation. She practices what the philosopher Husserl known as the father of phenomenology of subjective experience as the source of all of our knowledge of objective phenomena. Christina’s Psychic Automatism is a surrealist technique involving spontaneous assemblage without conscious aesthetic or moral self-censorship. Automatism phenomena are perhaps parallel to the non-idiomatic improvisation of free jazz.
Christina’s Collage surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.
Image insert
10. Maria
There is no doubt that this modern day icon represents a female form another time and place. With her reverence of the mother of Jesus she surrounds the hallowed face with soft pastel roses, and winged birds, clouds and shy. This new vision of holiness is a priceless collectors item which can only be compared with the medieval icons. This piece does not deny or embolden misinterpretation but simply expresses the purity and peace of faith and hope.
Christina’s mass image art combines eclectic mysticism, current high-end fashion metaphors and values of her real and exaggerated impression of the society values around her. With each completed piece we see the combined segments of what man has made out of modern reality. Each piece reifies the potential of the combination of the segments to its aesthetic conclusion. As she breaks and reassembles fragments of Plexiglas to form her sculptures so she cut apart the fashion magazines of the early sixties and reassembled them to compose there own personality. In style, many of her collages are absolutely baroque and busting with dynamic life and exuberance
Image insert
11. Maya
To the Hindus Maya is The power of a god or demon to transform a concept into an element of the sensible world. It is the transitory, manifold appearance of the sensible world, which obscures the undifferentiated spiritual reality from which it originates; the illusory appearance of the sensible world. It is another term for the Mayan culture and this collage places a blond female head on female body surrounded by swirl of white and ochre fabrics.
Like all the pop artist of her time, Andy Warhol, Rauschenberg, Liechtenstein, she delights in using and reusing the obvious in to the new. This fact remains also true in her acrylic paintings. She is a true maker of metaphors, making the strange familiar and communicating one thing in terms of another. Formally trained also as a fashion illustrator at the New York Art Students League she uses the figures, costumes and textures to recreate styles and fashion looks of the dream world. Each image is bizarre and somewhat extraterrestrial with the art of a Spielberg or Jim Henderson’s Muppets each becomes both the reality of our world and some other.
Image insert
12. Xanadu
Mongol city founded by Kublai Khan, 1625, Anglicized form of Shang-tu. Sense of "dream place of magnificence and luxury" derives from Coleridge's poem (1816). It is a place of great beauty, luxury, and contentment. A Shangri-La expressed by this exuberant female in swirl of fabrics above and below her upper and lower torso. Her eyes only peek out from behind the swirl and dares us to enjoy the dance, music and excitement of this instant caught by Christina.
While the techniques of collage were first used at the time of the invention of paper in China around 200 BC the use of collage remained very limited until the 10th century in Japan, when calligraphers began to apply glued paper, using texts on surfaces, when writing their poems. Her work cries out for words and music only to be found by the viewer. In the 19th century, collage methods also were used among hobbyists for memorabilia (i.e. applied to photo albums) and books (i.e. Hans Christian Andersen, Carl Spitzweg).In this way Christina’s home is filled family photo collages. It is her natural way to express her ideas and relationships of people, places and events. The term collage derives from the French "colle" meaning, "glue”. This term was coined by both Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in the beginning of the 20th century when collage became a distinctive part of modern art.
Image insert
13. Sun-He
The Korean name conjures light and bursts with energy of musical, acting and artistic talent. This collage is a sole figure of a female wearing a bronze billowing skirt below a great yellow and yellow ocher middle and above her bare waste a copper brown silk and leather topping. Some say Zixiao (Sun-he) was formally Emperor Wen (of Eastern Wu) was a son and one-time crown prince of Eastern Wu's founding emperor Sun Quan during the Three Kingdoms period.
Art of the so-called Love Generation are Impressions of the psychedelic, Mod, and Hip-art of the sixties. Christina’s Psychic Automatism is graphic memoirs made during the sixties. While they seem to be Pop Art, Surreal, Fantasy Metaphors they are really a re-assemblage of deconstructed reality.
Christina’s Giclées Collages combines the beauty and brilliance of this printing technology. While photographic prints are somewhat dull and limited a giclée print let her collages pop with deep blacks, saturation and gradations hard to achieve with other media.
Image insert
14. CoCo
Like Picasso Christina rearranges the human figure in this surreal pink and rose colored burst of petals with her head set in a lower ovary (ovule). Like its name sake for a tall palm tree bearing coconuts as fruits; widely planted throughout the tropics these blossoms are prolific and bountiful. It will be a treasure to its owner to remind about the possibilities of life and creativity with in each person.
While Pop Art, like pop music, aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture, Christina’s work challenged this mundane idea with her passion for harmony, grace and balance. She demonstrated that the two could work together and that “deconstructivism”; DaDa and Surrealism could be made popular into the jargon of the reality of the world of fashion and cosmopolitan urbanism.
Image insert
15. Narcisse
The word is derived from a Greek myth. Narcissus was a handsome Greek youth who rejected the desperate advances of the nymph Echo. As punishment, he was doomed to fall in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. Unable to consummate his love, Narcissus pined away and changed into the flower that bears his name, the narcissus.
Freud believed that some narcissism is an essential part of all of us from birth.
Andrew Morrison claims that, in adults, a reasonable amount of healthy narcissism allows the individual's perception of his needs to be balanced in relation to others.
Some say Narcisse is about sex, religion, power and deceit. Red, gold, purple swirls surround this female seemingly skipping though life.
While Christina loathes any social preoccupation with psychoanalysis, her work is pure imagination drawn from her own pure psychic automatism, by which she proposes to express the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation. She practices what the philosopher Husserl known as the father of phenomenology of subjective experience as the source of all of our knowledge of objective phenomena.
Image insert
16. Salome
Persimmon, gold beige and black furs and adorned with pearls and Arabic hangings is the laughing female face. The shapes and forms are only fantasy shaped animal icons creating a new icon of the famed seductress set on a purple background.
“As she broke the Plexiglas into fragments, she too tore the magazine’s pages. As she reassembled the Plexiglas fragments to a form a new reality so she assembled the bits and pieces of magazine sheets to form metaphors of spirit, fashion, urbanism, and a fantasy life and into a visual memoir of the Love Generation”.
Christina’s pop art collages are now available as fine art ink jet giclée printed reproductions as the entire collection of the originals is being kept as part of the artist’s estate. This is being done to preserve their integrity and value of their importance and value. Each of the fine art giclees are individually signed and dated and be part of any connoisseur’s fine art collection. Each is truly one of kind, unique and remarkable achievements. With the advent of digital photography and the slow demise of mechanical lithography, digital ink jet high-end printing is expanding exponentially. Giclée loosely means spraying or squirting in French. Christina’s collage giclees are characteristics of a true digital art print:
Image insert
17. Vampira
Vampira portrays that seductive woman who uses her sensuality to exploit men. In red silk fur with rode lame she reclines open armed and backward on a gigantic lipstick red divan.
Vampira’s dark eyes and white skinned arm are all that shows covered by the blood red power of red on a purple background. Christina’s Pop- Art is part of one of the major art movements of the Twentieth Century characterized by themes and techniques drawn from popular mass culture, such as advertising and comic books. Pop- Art is widely interpreted as either a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism or an expansion upon them. Christina was the first artist to use Plexiglas (acrylic). Her sculptures are amazing examples of three dimensional abstract expressionism and movement in the transparency of space. Christina studied sculpture under Peter Augustino at Columbia University
While Pop Art, like pop music, aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture, Christina’s work challenged this mundane idea with her passion for harmony, grace and balance.
Image insert
18. Turandot
Discovered in Heidelberg in 1904 by Max Wolf is a minor planet orbiting the sun. Christina’s cousin was an astronomer on the staff of the Max Plank Institute in Heidelberg and as a German appreciates the Turandot of German mythology and Turandot is an opera in three acts by Giacomo Puccini, to an Italian libretto by Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni, based on the play Turandot by Carlo Gozzi. Turandot is a Persian word and name meaning "the daughter of Turan",
Turan being a region of Central Asia which used to be part of the Persian Empire. In Persian, the fairy tale is known as "Turandokht", with "dokht" being a contraction for "Dokhtar" (meaning "Daughter"). Indeed shows the daughter of Turan in great Russian furs.
The story of Turandot was taken from the Persian collection of stories called The Book of One Thousand and One Nights or Hezar o-yek shab (1722 French translation Les Mille et une Nuits by Francois Petis de la Croix), where the character of "Turandokht" as a cold Chinese princess was found. But this story about a Chinese princess bears much resemblance to Persian poet Nizami's story about a Russian princess being pursued by the Sassanid king Behram. The story of Turandokht is one of the best known from de la Croix's translation. Christina cloaks this African Queen in exotic mink, ermine, and fox in an icon of nobility and stature. This vision was merely a precursor to the twenty years she would later spend in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia where her art was very well received in first of its kind one lady shows in the desert capital city of Riyadh.
Image insert
19. Mercedes
While Mercedes is a city in SW Uruguay, on the Río Negro the Infanta Maria de las Mercedes of Spain (1880–1904), Princess of the Asturias, for all 24 years of her life the Heiress Presumptive of the Spanish royal crown, and for a period in 1885–1886, the extant Head of the State of Spain, was born as Doña María de las Mercedes de Borbón y Habsburgo-Lorena, eldest daughter of King Alfonso XII of Spain (Don Alfonso de Borbón de Cádiz y Borbón de España).
Christina engulfs the slender royal in baby blue ostrich feather, silks and vertical high reaching blue timed domed minaret. This vertical axis grisaille is contrast on a stark black background metaphorically linking the royal lady with her dreamy castle and royal structures.
Image insert
20 Luna
The black background sets off the blues and lavender shapes and forms which seems to be a female in flight and the moons way of making shadows in the sky. Part of the abstracted spot design is parts of the moon hovering over the lower blue forms in moon’s shadows.
Christina’s mass image art combines eclectic mysticism, current high-end fashion metaphors and values of her real and exaggerated impression of the society values around her. With each completed piece, we see the combined segments of what man has made out of modern reality. Each piece reifies the potential of the combination of the segments to its aesthetic conclusion. As she breaks and reassembles, fragments of Plexiglas to form her sculptures so she cut apart the fashion magazines of the early sixties and reassembled them to compose there own personality. In style, many of her collages are absolutely baroque and busting with dynamic life and exuberance. Her work is in the genre of other pop artist such as English pop artist Sir Peter Thomas Blake and Richard Hamilton; as well as Norwegian artist, Hariton Pushwagner. The tactility and appeal of each of her pieces is irresistible as the origins of each segment.
She has made of each much more than the original form and, have immortalized what was once discarded and swept away with time. They have been become costumes of the legends they represent.
Image insert
21. Gemini
Gemini is a harlequin of double personality and image this two female figured icon wrapped in pink, persimmon, ocher, gold, red and black furs and plush fabric.
The face look at you and away from each other reifying Christina’s understanding of the Gemini star sign. Gemini is the third sign of the zodiac in astrology. Also called Twins. They are together and share the colors and luxury of a common context.
Like all the pop artist of her time, Andy Warhol, Rauschenberg, Liechtenstein, she delights in using and reusing the obvious in to the new. This fact remains also true in her acrylic paintings. She is a true maker of metaphors, making the strange familiar and communicating one thing in terms of another. Formally trained also as a fashion illustrator at the New York Art Students League she uses the figures, costumes and textures to recreate styles and fashion looks of the dream world. Each image is bizarre and somewhat extraterrestrial with the art of a Spielberg or Jim Henderson’s Muppets each becomes both the reality of our world and some other.
Christina’s work speaks across centuries, cultures and genres.
To own her work is to posses a still life of importance and value.
To see the image inserts please see Christina’s art on their website.
For more of her work and background see her website: www. bariefez-barringten.com
©2006 Christina &Barie Fez-Barringten
(Under title 17 of U.S. code by section 106; 1976 copyright act)
Bioclimactic architecture, domotic systems...do you think we are approaching a profound revolution in architecture?
The revolution is here already. The problem will be thinking in new ways. The 20th century's preoccupation with centralized planning and distribution will be replaced with a more decentralized, bottom-up approach. Energy will be created a variety of ways, and linked in a variety of ways. Systems will be more integrated and indicative of natural ones.
Architecture is already starting to reflect this evolutionary trend. As our understanding of natural systems increases, so will the architecture that reflects it. Buildings, and the urban environment by extension, will be thought of as evolving quasi-organic systems linked into a larger systemic network, rather than just static objects dotting the landscape.
Which musicians or groups have been inspiring to your career?
Majorlabel recording artistz of Western civilization developed inde 20th Century...
|
99700 interviews created
INVITE YOUR FRIENDS