#walter hopps

[mclusky]

william eggleston, 1970 – '74

[pathofregeneration]

Joseph Parker, Untitled (1973)

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The Visions of Joseph Parker, part IV

“Walter Hopps, former curator of the Smithsonian Institute and Senior Curator at the Guggenheim Museum, included Joseph Parker’s work among the California visionaries celebrated in his decisive book of 1977, Visions. Hopps describes the artist as presiding ‘over his model universe like an ecstatic god, bestowing it with a wealth of finely detailed contour, texture and local color, all executed with a consummate, meticulous, precision-tooled craftsmanship, breathtaking in its hyper-real clarity.’

Parker worked from the memory of his super-conscious visions. His kaleidoscopic skies, like Persian rug sunsets, present complex, mandalic haloes radiating from a brightly dawning, transcendental sun. Great artists map a new region in our consciousness, and their depictions allow us to visit the Divine imagination where, in the words of Ibn Arabi, ‘God meets God.’ Parker’s body of work evokes the heavenly world to come. As there is a ‘Blake Land,’ a ‘Fuchs World’ and a ‘Mati Klarwein Island,’ there is a mapped area of awareness called ‘Joseph Parker.’ Joseph Parker painted the sun’s rays expanding out in boundless brocade tapestries, patterned fields of rich color, both intricate and elegantly simple. The recurring motif of a centralized sun over landscape, ocean or mountain, became emblematic as Parker’s signature.

In an homage to Joseph Parker, in December of 2008 Alex began the painting, ‘Ocean of Love Bliss.’ Two lovers in the ocean embrace before a sky resonant with the patterns of Joseph Parker. In the hearts of the lovers is a bright light, shared by the sunrise. While painting this piece we got the tragic news of Joseph Parker's death. Thank you, Joseph Parker, for mapping an authentic aesthetic advancement toward super-consciousness. ...

Joseph Parker died to this world, at age 79, at 6:30 a.m. on May 17, 2009, in Desert Hot Springs, CA.”

— Joseph Parker, Carl Hammer Gallery

[archivist-dragonfly]

Book 377

Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay…Eterniday

Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, Walter Hopps, Richard Vine, and Robert Lehrman

Thames & Hudson 2003

Every few years or so, someone publishes a new book on Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) to mark a new retrospective or anniversary, and I seemingly need to buy all of them. This one was published to celebrate the centennial of Cornell’s birth, and it’s very well done. With over 200 illustrations of Cornell’s work, many in detail, it’s an impressive volume. What’s different about this book are the various perspectives offered about Cornell and his work from the four essayists, and the DVD-ROM included with the book that includes a compendium of the art and source materials, commentary by scholars and critics, and access to his experimental films.

[ffactory]

Marcel Duchamp, “Wanted $2,000 Reward, A Retrospective Exhibition by or of Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy” (1963)

[oldfilmsflicker]

book #37 - Mick Rock. The Rise of David Bowie, 1972-1973 by Barney Hoskyns, Michael Bracewell, and Mick Rock book #38 - Dennis Hopper: Photographs 1961-1967 by Tony Shafrazi, Walter Hopps, Victor Bockris, Jessica Hundley and Dennis Hopper

[dailycontents]

FERUS gallery

[pathofregeneration]

Sheila Rose and Gage Taylor, Manifestation (1976)

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“Imagine a timeless place: suspended before a brilliant, bulging world bathed in spellbinding silence, where matter and energy fuse in compelling clarity and monumental mystery. An unnerving sense of revelation streams forth from every surface, as if a film of familiarity were peeled away from the eye itself, unblinking and impaled. Not a dream, not a mirror, but a vision in the most ocular sense of the word: a world sensationally seen, possessing its own teeming, overwhelming mind, which grips the viewer in its serene stare, gazing back with the cosmic calm of a third eye, radiating knowledge of vast spheres manifest in every minute leaf and ripple. This world is our own, but now incredibly visible—atmospheric distortions vanish, and distances rush forward with the speed of light. Or is it I myself who rush forward, irresistibly drawn to the spiritual centre of this magnetic world, falling upwards toward the still focus of eternity, where each object is the shore of a fathomless ocean of light, and of utter implication…”

— Walter Hopps, Visions

[dailycontents]