Spirit of progress

The Spirit of Progress was the premier express train passenger service on the Victorian Railways in Australia. It was launched on 17 November 1937.

 Spirit of Progress at the beginning of its inaugural run, November 1937

VR S 301 (locomotive), North Melbourne, 1937

Victorian Railways engineers famously road-tested the new train's smoothness on curves by studying a full bowl of soup in the dining car as the train took curves at full speed; if the soup splashed over the side of the bowl, a decision would be taken whether to modify the curve for higher speeds or reduce the speed limit for the curve.

When introduced, the train featured many innovations new to Australian railway practice, such as streamlining (a streamliner is a vehicle incorporating streamlining in a shape providing reduced air resistance; the term is applied to high-speed railway trainsets of the 1930s to 1950s), full air-conditioning and all-steel carriage construction.

VR Spirit of Progress ad

VR Spirit of Progress ad altered

Its overall exterior and interior design reflected the latest Art Deco style, and interior fittings used materials such as stainless steel and native Australian blackwood veneers.

 Spirit of Progress kitchen

 Spirit of Progress parlor car

 Spirit of Progress parlor car

 Spirit of Progress parlor car

French from Chinese: chinoiserie

Alibaba wallpaper

Definition of chinoiserie
A style in art (as in decoration) reflecting Chinese qualities or motifs; also: an object or decoration in this style.

Origin of chinoiserie
French, from chinois (Chinese), from Chine (China)

Chinoiserie noun (concise encyclopedia) 
Fanciful European interpretations of Chinese styles in the design of interiors, furniture, pottery, textiles and gardens.

•

The expansion of trade with East Asia produced a lively vogue for Chinese fashions in the 17th–18th centuries.

The most outstanding chinoiserie interior was the Trianon de Porcelaine (1670–71), built for Louis XIV at Versailles.

The style featured lavish gilding and lacquering, the use of blue and white (as in delftware), asymmetrical forms, unorthodox perspective and Asian motifs.


Enjoy my collection of chinoiserie wallpapers.

 Fowler le Maison wallcovering

 Griffin and Wong collection

 Fromental catalogue

 Jiang Nan Garden collection (This Handcrafted Life)

 Jean-Baptiste Pillement (1728–1808): A Chinoiserie Procession of Figures Riding on Elephants with Temples Beyond

Jean-Baptiste Pillement was a French painter and designer, known for his exquisite and delicate landscapes, but whose importance lies primarily in the engravings done after his drawings, and their influence in spreading the Rococo style and particularly the taste for chinoiserie throughout Europe.

 Made in China: chinoiserie silk wallpaper

 Nsr Handcrafts: hand painted paper

 Paul Montgomery studio

 Moon Bounce portfolio

 Scalamandre wallpaper

 Decorative Imaging: hand-painted chinoiserie panel

Zoe Design

Hyper-refinery

Joseph Stashkevetch: L.A. Refinerie #1 - conte crayon and watercolor on paper 1997

A refinery is a production facility composed of a group of chemical engineering unit processes and unit operations refining certain materials or converting raw material into products of value.


Hyperrealism is a genre of painting and sculpture that resembles a high quality photograph. It's the type of art that your mind might not accept it as a handmade artwork. Hyperrealism is far more advanced than photorealism by the methods used to create the resulting paintings or sculptures. The term is primarily applied to an independent art movement and art style in the US and Europe that has developed since the early 2000s. Salvador Rudy @ Deviantart


Joseph Stashkevetch was born in New Jersey, USA in 1958. He lives and works in NYC. Joseph Stashkevetch does not take photographs; he draws (with Conté crayon) and he paints (with watercolor) industrial scenes (my selection, mostly) that look like (very large) photographs. What an extravagant talent!

  Machinery NJ - conte crayon and watercolor on paper 1995

  Tressle #5 - conte crayon and watercolor on paper 1993

  Imperial Highway - conte crayon and watercolor on paper 1997

  L.A. Refinerie #3 - conte crayon and watercolor on paper 1997

  L.A. 405 #1 - conte crayon and watercolor on paper 1997

  Overpass - conte crayon and watercolor on paper 1998

  Richmond Towers #1 - conte crayon and watercolor on paper 1998

  Richmond Towers #2 - conte crayon and watercolor on paper 1998

  Richmond Towers #4 - conte crayon and watercolor on paper 1999

 Richmond Towers #5 - conte crayon and watercolor on paper 1999

  Peony - conte crayon on paper 2006

  Palisade #1 - conte crayon on paper 2009

 Sonata IV (Presentation) - conte crayon on rag paper 2012

I made a very industrial selection and invite you to click here to check out several other extravagant drawings by Joseph Stashkevetch.

Comme des garçons

Comme des garçons © Peter Lindbergh, photographer (1988)

Comme des garçons is a Tokyo-based Japanese fashion label headed by Rei Kawakubo, who owns the company with her husband, Adrian Joffe.

Comme des garçons Wikipedia
Comme des garçons Official site


Peter Lindbergh is a German photographer and filmmaker, born in 1944 in Leszno, Poland (the city was German between 1939 and 1945 and called Reichsgau Wartheland).

He moved to Paris in 1978 and started working internationally for fashion magazines. His mostly black-and-white photographs implement a pictorial language that takes its lead from early German cinema and from the Berlin art scene of the 1920s.

In the 1980s, he made a series of photos for the label Comme des garçons.


« In the works of Peter Lindbergh easily guessed by the influence of films and Fellini, Wim Wenders, Peter Handke, the eternal feminine 30-ies. and his love and admiration for both ironic Greta Garbo, Josephine Baker and Marlene.

If fashion is by definition created for, . to then go out of fashion, . his photos, . opposite, . survive the changing seasons and the ephemeral journals, . because they represent a warm friendly or whimsical look at the men blushing women, . are in cahoots with him and who graciously accepted signs of admiration,»

(…)

Peter Lindbergh Biography (dot ru: kinda lost in translation but still …readable and interesting!)

Peter Lindbergh Official site
Peter Lindbergh Wikipedia

Comme des garçons © Peter Lindbergh

 Comme des garçons © Peter Lindbergh (1988)

 Comme des garçons © Peter Lindbergh (1984)

 Comme des garçons © Peter Lindbergh (1980)

 Comme des garçons © Peter Lindbergh (1983)

Comme des garçons © Peter Lindbergh

Single large or several small

Big Sloss Iron Furnaces, Birmingham

Big Sloss… Didn't know what Sloss meant before I clicked SLOSS debate @ Wikipedia. Oh I see, Sloss is an acronym. SLOSS.


The SLOSS Debate was a debate in ecology and conservation biology during the 1970s and 1980s as to whether a single large or several small (SLOSS) reserves were a superior means of conserving biodiversity in a fragmented habitat.


Oops, I am lost now. So let's click Sloss furnaces @ Wikipedia instead.


Sloss Furnaces is a National Historic Landmark in Birmingham, Alabama in the United States. It operated as a pig iron-producing blast furnace from 1882 to 1971. After closing it became one of the first industrial sites (and the only blast furnace) in the US to be preserved for public use.


Paintings of abandoned machinery and industrial ruins by Anna Held Audette

Leave the Slosses alone and let's hear about the American painter who created the atmospheric iron painting above, Anna Held Audette, how she sees her art.


My paintings comment on the melancholy beauty found in relics of our industrial past. 

 Factory (2005)

 Factory (1999)

Old New Haven, CT (2007)

Both the literal and evocative meanings of these subjects strike a responsive chord in me and provide variations on a theme that has been central to my paintings for a long time.

The relics remind us that, in our rapidly changing world, the triumphs of technology are just a moment away from obsolescence. Yet these remains of collapsed power have a strength, grace and sadness that is both eloquent and impenetrable.

Transfigured by time and light, which render the ordinary extraordinary, they form a visual requiem for the industrial age. –Anna Held Audette

 Mingo Junction, OH (2006)

 Fog (1994)

 Helicopter 1 - Blue (1984)

Artists who have shaped my vision are as diverse as Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Piet Mondrian, Walter Murch and Franz Kline.

While my paintings are representational, their formal relationships are of equal concern to me.

 Sloss 1 (2002)

 Sloss Exterior (2002)

Snowplow at Scranton, PA (2006)

The ways in which the solids and spaces interact, the visual complexities of the shadows, and the changing surface qualities are all important considerations in each composition. 

 Suisun Bay XII (1996)

Weirton, West Virginia (2007)

I share the duality of this outlook with Charles Sheeler, another artist I admire, who also felt "that a picture should have incorporated in it the structural design implied in abstraction and be presented in a wholly realistic manner". –Anna Held Audette

American Landscape (1930) by Charles Sheeler