Work Samples - Murals

Art-Deco styled mural on canvas, Hilton Hotel, Gatineau

For 20 years we have been involved in producing digitally-based graphic prints. Mural applications from the very beginning were one of the main products. Many of them I have also designed or collaborated in their design. Installation method varied form self-adhesive vinyl or textile to water-based paste for textured wallcoverings. View few samples.

Group of Seven reproduction on canvas, mural size,
Fairmont Hotel, Chateau Lake Louise, Alberta
 

Canvas mural, Fairmont Hotel - Chateau Lake Louise AB

Chateau Lake Louise was a large project involving producing large scale enlargements from most notable works of the Great Landscape tradition of the 19th and 20th century in America. Transparencies for the reproductions were coming from such  respectable collections as National Gallery of Canada, Canada Pacific, Harward University Art Collection, McCorm and so on.
The project definitely deserves more words and I may create a separate post on this subject.

Design of a mural can based on a photograph, photo-montage, illustration or otherwise composed graphic. The cost of production depends on the scale of the work, design complexity and fabrication.
If you wish to order a mural, please contact me by email at bbstudios@rogers.com

Floral mural, Ottawa

Religious Art - backdrop to sculptural installation;
Saint Thomas University Chapel, Aimes, OH US
Mural design - H.Ratajczak, M.Slota
Sculpture - J. Kenar, Chicago US

Design - Neville Smith, Ottawa

Design - Neville Smith, Ottawa

Allure of France

Among my priced collection of old magazines is a Special Issue a July 1989 issue of House & Garden magazine.

The cover shot - delightful round table, heavy with cloth and colour

This must have been a somewhat "seminal" edition, perhaps a successful predecessor of certain interior decorating style because years later I have spotted photographs from this issues on various blogs. Among them Trouvais showed the very table I am trying to present below and some really coolly adorned contemporary coffee set that I may show later.
You may see more pics from that marvelous issue on Trouvais (found goods) blog by Trish in her
Happy Bastille post:
http://trouvais.com/tag/marie-paul-pelle/
 
Although I loved the "frenchness" of the cover picture, the colours and the nonchalant richness of the scene, the article and more photographs inside the issue shows the beautiful home of wealthy family of profume makers in Provance.

"On the Rue de Rivoli" article show work and small garden of one of Parisian designers, Marie-Paule Pelle. I loved that lush tiny garden wedged between walls of neighbouring mansions.
A different style table, also round, rustic but notably more English rustic style. 

Baobab - my family tree

As I am getting older I notice increasing fondness for collecting certain objects - often not terribly valuable, but connected on a personal level.
I have even initiated and animated for a while a photographic project of family history.
That itself is not an original idea these days, but the fact that it was me, the one who had settled far away from my birth family became the animator of this project for a while was rather telling.
The fact that I was the most geographically distant from my kin was probably the most formative reason. I guess, I have decided to enact a certain ritual around me of creating the historic context of images and stories.
Perhaps I was trying to give myself comfort of familial visual texture of the "iconostas" of the images of kinship, the sense of descent, of lineage.
It is also possible that as I had realized that may be "over the hill" in life, that need for ritualization is instinctive and becomes the inseparable part of family life and just growing old.

The idea grew when several years ago I visited my parents' home near Warsaw, Poland.
My father showed me his album that contained some old photographs I had never seen, those that he inherited after his Mother's passing away while I was already living abroad. 
I asked if I could borrow them and offered to professionally restore digitally, enlarge and print in multiple copies for other relatives. He refused, reasonably concerned that my luggage may get lost and those unique items will perish forever.
I understood the concern.

A half a year later my sister visited me and brought those photographs with her, smuggling the during our fathers leave for a vacation.
So I have scanned the originals, restored, colour managed in a direction that some enhancements will be made to size, contrast, background tone and obvious restoration of dust, scratches, missing fragments etc. The digital copies were to preserve the tonal quality of the originals and therefore avoid crude "sterilization" professed by copy centers.
Most were reproduced at 200%-400% size on Premium Luster 260g by Epson, with ample margins for display using UltraChrome, archival inks.
I have sent them over to Warsaw and therefore my father learned of the smuggling conspiracy just weeks earlier. He was delighted.

The project's DVD back-up collection is called a Baobab as for "large and exotic" family tree, although our family is small and "temperate".
Here is the original inspiration for the cover of the project's DVD archive, incredibly inspirational book by one of my most appreciated Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, consisted of our recommended reading at the Visual Arts' course on photography.
More about that course in another bog, definitely. 
More about Susan Sontag later.
More about Saturn later, defnintely.
Oh, just to make sure - I keep this book at a safe distance from Camille Paglia book....
Just our of respect for the notable adversaries.

Werner Herzog - an apparition?

Once, sometime perhaps in February of hmmm 2009(?) I have gone for a stroll in the direction of Nicastro - a good local Italian delicatessen, well stocked in good variety of quality cheese and all array of pricey charcuterie... A place you can order a sandwich or a cup of aromatic espresso.
While waiting for our salami to be sliced I saw a man to the left of me. He ordered a sandwich.
OMG, I know this voice. He wore a cap, was tall and but since I have never seen Werner Herzog "al dente" I have decided it must have been him.
Maestro himself in Ottawa!

http://www.thestickingplace.com/books/books/werner-herzog/extracts/

At the bleakest of bleak, at the very end of February or March, this god forsaken place needs a miracle. I behaved graciously and did not bother the man with any fan-like approaches.
My heart pounded, but a man - even a genius - deserves to order his sandwich in peace.

But I left the little delicatessen with the feeling that Ottawa has become a different place, a place on the map of he history of art and all great things that matter.
It no longer mattered whether this man was really the great W. Herzog, the director of Firzgerraldo, of Woyzeck, of The Enigma of Caspar Hauser, of Stoszek, Aquirre and Cobra, and famous documentaries.
I have experienced a miracle of faith, of inspiration.
I had amused myself with the excitement of this miniscule event and of the intense mystification that follows, of its undeniable, colourful pleasantness.
I guess, in the middle of winter blahs one needs to invent.

I have later tried to find out on Google whether he might have really been here.
Well, never know, he could have stopped at the Carleton U Film Dept or to visit a friend on a way to the Toronto Film Festival where he was a juror that year.
Regardless, the strength of my inspired belief had made the day shine 'til dawn, and Ottawa feels like a much bigger city now.

Not content with voyaging up the Amazon or making acclaimed documentaries about grizzly men, it seems that Werner Herzog also helps out Hollywood movie stars in peril.
When Walk the Line star Joaquin Phoenix overturned his car on a winding Los Angeles sideroad last Thursday, it was the 63-year-old German director who sprang to his rescue.
Phoenix, who received a best actor Oscar nomination earlier this week, flipped his car over when the brakes failed on a road above Sunset Boulevard. As he lay, disorientated, in the wreckage, he heard a gentle tap on the passenger window.

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2006/feb/03/news2

More posts on my favourite film director here:
Herzog - Essentially Baroque Artist
and here:
Death in Five Voices

Nostalgia and the Lies of the Past

Like cars or buildings or computers, the images that shape the ways we see the world inevitably deteriorate and lose value. Spiritual entropy erodes them. To quote Neil Young quoting an ad of long ago, rust never sleeps.(...) From time to time it must be reviewed, a process that may require dubious cultural strategies.

This has been written by a senior and prominent Canadian journalist whom I respect very much, Robert Fulford. I have taken this quote from an essay of his published by an absolutely great Canadian publication - Queens Quarterly Review in the Spring issue, 2010.
Being a visual professional I am compelled to pay attention to the instruments of visual representation, as much as to everything else...
So my body heats up when reading the author's observations, commenting on the visual clichés, inevitable baggage of travel photography:

    "One day in 1953 (...) seeing Paris for the first time, I climbed 380 steps to the balustrade of Notre Dame Cathedral . There I took a photograph that managed to be both appallingly hackneyed and historically misguided. It has since been lost, fortunately, but I remember that it showed a gargoyle gazing over the rooftops of Paris.
Within the next day or two it became obvious to me that the image I had chosen was a ubiquitous  cliché in a city long notorious for visual clichés.
(...)
Years later it also became clear that my picture was taken under a false impression, the assumption (still shard by most visitors, apparently) that those gargoyles, being attached to a thirteenth-century Gothic cathedral, are therefore thirteenth-century gargoyles
(...) They are, in short, modern.
Installed in millions of imaginations by generations of photographers, they distribute a pervasive falsehood, the perfect stone embodiment of Voltaire's remark that history consists of lies on which we agree. They represent the often questionable role of nostalgia in or encounter with half-understood ancient buildings.
(...)
(...)
    In the middle of the nineteenth century Notre Dame was crumbling, approaching the status of a ruin. It was most famous for Victor Hugo's 1831 novel about Quasimodo, the hunchback. (...)
France spent a sizable fortune on the four-decade project of bringing Notre Dame back to life. Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, the principal architect (...) made Notre Dame into what he thought it should be not what it had been. Reverence for the past surrendered to the ego of the architect and the pride of a nation that would soon be seeing itself as the centre of the modern world.


I loved it!