Focus On Design: Charles and Ray Eaes

The story of modern design has been a very sombre one. Charles and Ray Eames added a touch of whimsy, lightness and delicacy, which expanded into their museum installations and films. They could easily get away with it because of their combined characteristics and superlative technical knowledge coupled with a sharp discerning eye for color and form.

Charles Eames was already working as an architect when he met Eliel Saarinen, head of the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. In 1938 Eliel Saarinen offered Charles Eames a scholarship to Cranbrook Academy to study design and architecture. Charles Eames became a teacher of design at Cranbrook in 1939 and, in 1940, head of the industrial design department there. Charles Eames's friendship with Eliel Saarinen's son Eero was also of paramount importance for his subsequent career. Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen collaborated on designs to be submitted to the "Organic Design in Home Furnishings" competition hosted by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1940. Their main design, an armchair with the seat and back formed three dimensionally of a single piece of molded plywood received an award at the MOMA competition but proved unsuitable for mass production. Other designers who collaborated with Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen on the designs submitted to the MOMA competition included Harry Bertoia, Don Albinson, who would later play an important role in Eames's office, and Ray Kaiser, whom Charles Eames married in 1941. The couple moved to Los Angeles, where they continued in their flat to experiment on developing an efficient and cost-effective method of molding plywood in three dimensions, using a press they dubbed "Kazam! Machine".

In 1942 Charles and Ray Eames founded the Plyformed Wood Company and made splints and stretchers of molded plywood for the US Navy. Financial straits forced them to sell the business to the Evans Product Company, where Charles Eames became head of the research and development division. Eames's office produced more prototype plywood furniture, which MOMA exhibited in 1946 at the one-man show "New Furniture by Charles Eames". The Eames designs shown included the "Lounge Chair, Metal" featuring a tubular steel framework and the "Lounge Chair, Wood", based on a 1940 design and made of bentwood elements. Further developed with armrests, this Eames chair became the prototype of the celebrated and sophisticated 1956 "No. 670" lounge chair with the "No. 671" footstool. Ray and Charles Eames also experimented with fiber glass in the late 1950s, producing the revolutionary "Plastic Shell Group", that included the "La Chaise" chair (1948), the "Dining Armchair Rod" and the "Rocking Armchair Rod" (1948-1950). The "Aluminium Group" dates from 1958. Furniture designed by Charles and Ray Eames is produced mainly by Herman Miller and Vitra.

Focus On Art: Jonathan Borofsky

Jonathan Borofsky's oversized sculptures are a prominent feature of many European cities, but the American artist came to wider attention in his native country only with a well-received temporary installation at New York City's Rockefeller Center in the fall of 2004. His immense Walking to the Sky , a steel pole featuring a series of life-like figures striding up it, was viewed by some as an unofficial tribute to the victims of 9/11. It was part of a series that had been replicated elsewhere, and while Borofsky was heartened by the response, he asserted that he simply wanted the piece to represent all human-kind. "These are human beings around the world; they represent all kinds of humanity, " he explained to Carol Vogel in the New York Times. "They are not New Yorkers, not Americans. This piece can stand anywhere—Africa, India, Hawaii."

Focus On Art: Banksy

Banksy is a graffiti artist from Bristol, UK, whose artwork has appeared throughout London and other locations around the world. Despite this he carefully manages to keep his real name from the mainstream media. However, many newspapers assert that his real name is Robert or Robin Banks.

Banksy, despite not calling himself an artist, has been considered by some as talented in that respect; he uses his original street art form, often in combination with a distinctive stencilling technique, to promote alternative aspects of politics from those promoted by the mainstream media.

Some believe that his stencilled graffiti provides a voice for those living in urban environments that could not otherwise express themselves, and that his work is also something which improves the aesthetic quality of urban surroundings; many others disagree, asserting that his work is simple vandalism (a claim made by at least Peter Gibson, spokesperson for Keep Britain Tidy), or that his (apparently left wing) beliefs are not shared by the majority of the inhabitants of the environments that he graffitis. This political purpose behind his vandalism is reminiscent of the Ad Jammers or subvertising movement, who deface corporate advertising to change the intended message and hijack the advert.

Focus On Music: New Order

New Order arose from the ashes of Joy Division, one of the most influencial bands in the alternative music scene in the late 70's and early 80's. Joy Division were Ian Curtis, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, and Stephen Morris, four young men from Manchester, England. Joy Division drew attention to themselves with the release of their first full-length album, Unknown Pleasures, in 1979. The music they played was a sign of the times: angst-ridden, moody, enchanting, haunting.

New Order was known as the quitessential singles band of the 80's, releasing songs that weren't on any albums, or at least remixing them from the albums. In 1987, these singles (many of them long out of print and difficult to find) were collected on the double-album "Substance". Many of these songs topped the 5 and 6 minute mark, with a few going beyond that. It was with the release of "Substance" that New Order gained even greater worldwide recognition. Many argue that New Order could have been bigger if only they did things differently. They didn't splash their faces all over their album covers, they rarely even put their own names on their record sleeves. In fact, all of the designing of their record sleeves, from their days as Joy Division up to the present, has been left up to Peter Saville, a graphic designer who has sometimes been referred to as the fifth band member.

New Order identified themselves as New Order, not as Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook and Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert. No one personality stood out from the others. They were the type of people who could walk out onto the floor after playing a concert and would barely be recognized. Also, remaining on an independent record label, Factory Communications, Ltd., probably didn't help either.

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Focus On Music: Indie Pop

In popular music, independent music, often shortened to indie music or "indie", is a term used to describe independence from major commercial record labels and an autonomous, Do-It-Yourself approach to recording and publishing.

Independent labels have been known to strive for minimal influence on the artist they represent, avoiding the artist-cultivating behavior of many major labels.

Focus On Art: Mr. Brainwash

The relationship of street art to the commercial art world has always been a tricky one. In the past few years, as street art has exploded from variations on fat- lettered graffiti to sophisticated murals and stencils, works by its top practitioners have sold at auction for hundreds of thousands of dollars: a far cry from such art’s usually subversive origins. But whereas many street artists now create work expressly for galleries, starting out—and, often, continuing—in the trenches of “outside” art is what gives them credibility and, ironic as it is, market legitimacy.

Which is why one of the most famous street artists is also one of the most controversial. Thierry Guetta, aka “Mr Brainwash” or “MBW”, got his start by befriending and filming some of the world’s top street artists, including Banksy, an elusive Brit famous for hanging spoof paintings at the Tate Britain and painting whimsical scenes on Israel’s West Bank separation wall. At some point Banksy suggested Mr Guetta do some graffiti of his own. As chronicled in “Exit Through the Gift Shop”, a documentary that Banksy subsequently made about Mr Guetta (using some of Mr Guetta’s own footage), the French artist moved quickly from pasting up stencils on walls to paying a large team of elves to churn out pop art en masse. The film is now on the longlist to be nominated for an Oscar.

Debating the merits of his work is easy, and somewhat sterile. Explaining his motives is more complex. Mobbed by enthusiastic visitors to the show—some of them other artists—Mr Guetta revelled in not taking his work seriously, chuckled at people who were intensely scrutinising an array of upended buckets that he had created to serve as seats and tables, and took sheer delight at a child riding a bicycle over one of his exhibits. One of his mottoes is “art for the people”, and while quoting a healthy six-figure price to an inquiring collector, he seemed to care about the money chiefly as a symbol of his success at upstaging the conventions of the art establishment. “I believe my art will be worth millions of dollars.

Focus On Music: Depeche Mode

Originally a product of Britain's new romantic movement, Depeche Mode went on to become the quintessential electro-pop band of the 1980s. One of the first acts to establish a musical identity based completely around the use of synthesizers, they began their existence as a bouncy dance-pop outfit but gradually developed a darker, more dramatic sound that ultimately positioned them as one of the most successful alternative bands of their era.

Depeche Mode influenced many of today's popular recording artists, in part due to their recording techniques and innovative use of sampling. For example, Pet Shop Boys cited Violator (and "Enjoy the Silence" in particular) as one of the main sources of inspiration during recording of their critically acclaimed album Behaviour. Neil Tennant says, “We were listening to Violator by Depeche Mode, which was a very good album and we were deeply jealous of it.” Bandmate Chris Lowe agrees, “They had raised the stakes.”

Techno pioneers Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson and Juan Atkins regularly cited Depeche Mode as an influence on the development of techno music during the Detroit Techno explosion in the mid 1980s. Appreciation of Depeche Mode within today's electronic music scene is shown by the numerous Depeche Mode remixes by contemporary DJs such as Ricardo Villalobos' remix of "The Sinner in Me" or Kruder & Dorfmeister's remix of "Useless".

According to Matt Smith, the former music director of the modern-rock radio station KROQ, "The Killers, The Bravery, Franz Ferdinand — that whole wave of music owes a tremendous amount to Depeche Mode."

In an accompanying interview for his piece in The New Yorker evaluating the impact of British acts on the US market, Sasha Frere-Jones claims that "probably the last serious English influence was Depeche Mode, who seem more and more significant as time passes."

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Focus On Art: William Eggleston

William Eggleston assumes a neutral gaze and creates his art from commonplace subjects: a farmer's muddy Ford truck, a red ceiling in a friend's house, the contents of his own refrigerator.

In his work, Eggleston photographs "democratically"--literally photographing the world around him. His large-format prints monumentalize everyday subjects, everything is equally important; every detail deserves attention. 

A native Southerner raised on a cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta, Eggleston has created a singular portrait of his native South since the late 1960s. After discovering photography in the early 1960s, he abandoned a traditional education and instead learned from photographically illustrated books by Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Robert Frank. Although he began his career making black-and-white images, he soon abandoned them to experiment with color technology to record experiences in more sensual and accurate terms at a time when color photography was largely confined to commercial advertising. In 1976 with the support of John Szarkowski, the influential photography historian, critic, and curator, Eggleston mounted "Color Photographs" a now famous exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. William Eggleston's Guide , in which Szarkowski called Eggleston's photographs "perfect," accompanied this groundbreaking one-person show that established his reputation as a pioneer of color photography. His subjects were mundane, everyday, often trivial, so that the real subject was seen to be color itself. These images helped establish Eggleston as one of the first non-commercial photographers working in color and inspired a new generation of photographers, as well as filmmakers.

Eggleston has published his work extensively. He continues to live and work in Memphis, and travels considerably for photographic projects.

Focus On Music: Cover Songs

The term 'cover version', coined in 1966, originally described a rival version of a tune recorded to compete with the recently reeased original version, e.g. Paul Williams' 1949 hit tune "The Hucklebuck" or Hank Williams' 1952 song "Jambalaya (On the Bayou)", both crossed over to the popular Hit Parade and had numerous hit versions. Prior to the mid-20th century the notion of an original version of a popular tune would, of course, have seemed slightly odd — the production of musical entertainment being seen essentially as a live event, even if one that was reproduced at home via a copy of the sheet music, learned by heart, or captured on a shellac recording disc. Popular musicians (and especially modern listeners) have now begun to use the word "cover" to refer to any remake of a previously recorded tune.

In previous generations, some artists made very successful careers out of presenting revivals or reworkings of once popular tunes, even out of doing contemporary cover versions of current hits. Musicians now play what they call "cover versions" (e.g. the reworking, updating or interpretation) of songs as a tribute to the original performer or group. Using familiar material (e.g. evergreen hits, standard tunes or classic recordings) is an important method in learning various styles of music. Most albums, or long playing records, up until the mid-1960s usually contained a large number of evergreens or standards to present a fuller range of the artist's abilities and style. Artists might also perform interpretations ("covers") of a favorite artist's hit tunes for the simple pleasure of playing a familiar song or collection of tunes. A cover band plays such "cover versions" exclusively.

In the contemporary world, there are broadly three types of entertainers who depend upon cover versions for their principal repertoire.

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Focus On Art: Tyeb Mehta

Tyeb Mehta was a well known Indian artist, who was known all over the world for his brilliant painting. A multifaceted personality, he also dabbled in filmmaker and made a mark there. He held the record for the highest price for which an Indian painting has ever been sold, in a public auction. It was his triptych painting Celebration that, on being sold for 15 million Indian rupees ($300,000 USD), gave him this honor.

Tyeb Mehta was born on July 26, 1925 in Kapadvanj, Gujarat. He initially worked as a film editor in a cinema laboratory. However, his interest in painting took him to Sir J.J. School of Art, Bombay, where he studied painting from 1947 to 1952. There, Mehta also came in contact with Akbar Padamsee and became a close associate of the painters in the Progressive Artists' Group.

In 1954, Tyeb Mehta visited London and Paris for four months, following which he returned to India to concentrate on painting and sculpture. He took part in numerous group exhibitions and organized his first solo exhibition of drawings, paintings and sculptures at the Jehangir Art Gallery, Bombay, in 1959. He lived and worked in London from 1959 to 1965.

Tyeb Mehta returned to India in 1965 and lived in Delhi till 1968. In 1968, he visited United States, on a Rockefeller Fellowship. Around this time, he also dabbled in films. His film 'Koodal' won the Film fare Critic's Award in 1970. In the 1980s, he worked as an Artist in Residence in Shantiniketan. He was also awarded the Kalidas Samman by the Madhya Pradesh Government in 1988.

In his lifetime, Tyeb Mehta participated in several international shows, like Ten Contemporary Indian Painters at Trenton in the U.S. - 1965; Deuxieme Biennial Internationale de Menton - 1974; Festival Intemationale de la Peinture, Cagnes-Sur-Mer, France - 1974; Modem Indian Paintings at Hirschhom Museum; Washington - 1982; and Seven Indian Painters at Gallerie Le Monde de U art, Paris - 1994.

On 2nd July 2009, Tyeb Mehta left for the holy abode, following a heart attack. He is survived by his wife - Sakina, a son and a daughter. Tyeb Mehta's large body of work, spanning over six decades, established him as one of the greatest names in the field of Modern Indian Art. His paintings raised numerous questions about the human condition, some of which remain unanswered till date.

Focus On Art: Francis Newton Souza

"I seek Beauty more than knowledge. In fact, knowledge can be ugly."
-Francis Newton Souza

Francis Newton Souza was an Indian painter and writer, active in Britain and the USA. After a difficult upbringing, he joined the Sir Jamshetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art, Bombay, in 1940 but was expelled in 1943. For a short period afterwards he was a member of the Communist Party of India and painted in a Social Realist idiom. In 1946-7 he initiated the Progressive Artists' Group in Bombay, which promoted modernism in Indian art. By this time he had abandoned Social Realism and was influenced by European Expressionism. His work became known and in 1947 he won the award of the Bombay Art Society. In 1948 his work was represented in an exhibition of Indian art at Burlington House, London. The following year, after his paintings were removed from the Bombay Art Society and his flat was raided by the police to seize 'obscene' works, he decided to move to London, where he supported himself by painting and writing.

Through Krishna Menon, the Indian High Commissioner to Britain, he received a commission to work on a series of murals in the Indian Students' Bureau in London (since destr.); Menon also arranged an exhibition of his work at India House. In 1954 he had an exhibition in Paris and in 1955 at Gallery One in London.

These exhibitions brought his work to the attention of the public and, with recognition, further exhibitions and sales followed. In 1957 he won the John Moore's Prize and in 1960 visited Italy on an Italian Government scholarship. From Italy he travelled to India for his first visit since 1949, but soon returned to London.

His paintings, executed in a forceful, expressionist manner, included Christian themes (inspired by his Roman Catholic upbringing), caricatures of social types, women, erotic scenes, still-lifes, landscapes and such paintings of cities as Las Ramblas, Barcelona (oil on canvas, 0.85*1.29 m, 1961; New Delhi, N.G. Mod. A.). He was influenced by the works of Georges Rouault, Cha?m Soutine and Pablo Picasso, and also by Mexican artists such as Diego Rivera and Orozco. An articulate writer, he disseminated his sometimes controversial views on art in catalogues, articles and essays. His works are in numerous private and public collections including the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, the Museum and Picture Gallery, Vadodara, and the Tate Gallery, London.

Focus On Art: Farhad Hussein

Farhad Hussain, born in Calcutta in 1975, is among those young artists who have been contributing with panache to the current renewal of contemporary Indian art. Paintings by Farhad Hussain have the direct, fresh gaiety of a Matisse cutout, and the nuclear family his iconographic focus. These paintings could be family photos taken by a Walt Disney in the throes of a psychedelic episode. The illusion of happiness is omnipresent, the ecstatic atmosphere redolent of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” family-style.

Focus On Art: Christine Berrie Illustrations

Originally from Glasgow, Christine Berrie gained a 1st Class BA from Glasgow School of Art before heading to the Royal College of Art in London where she graduated with an MA in Communication Art & Design in 2002.

Currently, everyday scenarios and objects are her favoured subject matter and she has long had an interest in creating colourful, detailed imagery with a hand-rendered approach.

Christine is particularly fond of drawing architecture, old cars, cameras, machines, retro objects, mechanical contraptions, signage & lettering, london scenes and scooters, to name a few!

Her drawings have appeared in several publications including Communication Arts, Design Week, Creative Review and Varoom. Christine has also worked on Hand to Eye and The Picture Book, both published by Laurence King.

Clients include: The Guardian, Microsoft, The New York Times, New Scientist, Howies, Time Out, Wallpaper, Soho House, Dwell, The Independent, Esquire, GQ.

purchase her artwork HERE

Focus On Music: Tracey Thorn

One of the most enduring English singer/songwriters since the early '80s, Tracey Thorn began making music with the all-female quartet Marine Girls, a minimalist pop group that released a pair of albums. She also recorded A Distant Shore, a relatively moody, if similarly skeletal solo album, for Cherry Red in 1983. Around that time she met Ben Watt -- who was also signed to Cherry Red -- and formed a partnership as Everything But the Girl. From 1984 through 1999, Thorn and Watt released ten albums that shifted from indie pop to slick sophisti-pop to downtempo club music.

Shortly after having twin daughters together, they put EBTG on ice. After several years of inactivity, Thorn began writing again and recorded her second solo album, Out of the Woods, which was released in early 2007. Throughout the years, she has guested on songs by a number of groups, including the Style Council, the Go-Betweens, Massive Attack, and Tiefschwarz.

Tracey Thorn's third solo album, Love And Its Opposite, is out May 17, and capitalises on the critical acclaim of her 2007 release, Out Of The Woods, a mixture of hard-edged dance music and folk fare which bridged the gap between the acoustic and the electric.

Love & Its Opposite finds Tracey and producer Ewan Pearson stripping things back to more organic essentials, embracing a retro sound that references the type of music she would have grown up listening to. Thorn is in pensive mood for much of the album, which is as much about her own experiences as a forty-something trying to make sense of her life as it is about the relationships of others, resulting in a mature and often cynically humorous set of songs that’s sure to be embraced by her stalwart fans.

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World AIDS Day

Ways AIDS are contracted::
- blood transfusions (not common)
- being born with it.
- having unprotected .
- getting infected blood into yours.

In 2006 UNAIDS estimated that there were 5.6 million people living with HIV in India, which indicated that there were more people with HIV in India than in any other country in the world. However, NACO disputed this estimate, and claimed that the actual figure was lower. In 2007, using a more effective surveillance system, UNAIDS and NACO agreed on a new estimate – between 2 million and 3.6 million people living with HIV. This puts India behind South Africa and Nigeria in numbers living with HIV.

In terms of AIDS cases, the most recent estimate comes from August 2006, at which stage the total number of AIDS cases reported to NACO was 124,995. Of this number, 29% were women, and 36% were under the age of 30. These figures are not accurate reflections of the actual situation though, as large numbers of AIDS cases go unreported.

Overall, around 0.36% of India’s population is living with HIV. While this may seem a low rate, India’s population is vast, so the actual number of people living with HIV is remarkably high. There are so many people living in India that a mere 0.1% increase in HIV prevalence would increase the estimated number of people living with HIV by over half a million.

The national HIV prevalence rose dramatically in the early years of the epidemic, but a study released at the beginning of 2006 suggests that the HIV infection rate has recently fallen in southern India, the region that has been hit hardest by AIDS. In addition, NACO has released figures suggesting that the overall rate of new HIV infections in the country is slowing. Researchers claim that this decline is the result of successful prevention campaigns, which have led to an increase in condom use.

Some AIDS activists are doubtful of the suggestion that the situation is improving, though:

“It is the reverse. All the NGOs I know have recorded increases in the number of people accepting help because of HIV. I am really worried that we are just burying our head in the sand over this.”
-Anjali Gopalan, the Naz Foundation, Delhi