charles marie dulac:
DULAC Charles 1865-1898
Painter and engraver
Lithographs
Symbolist, “fin de siècle” artist, Dulac was influenced by Puis de Chavannes and Eugène Carrière. He specialized in landscapes, which he treated through decorative simplification of line and texture. In 1892, he converted to Catholicism and began lithography with six to seven portraits including Sister Marie-Madeleine seated, the portrait of a little girl, a young girl, etc.Then came in 1893, his first album, Suite de Paysages, which includes eight color lithographs (The Beginning, The Sun, The Moon, The Fire and the Water, The Earth, The Final Song...): “ It is no longer a question of expressing purely objective impressions of shapes and colors but, this time, “personal emotions” (L. Bénédicte); emotion which is inspired by the symbolist movement, is shown in this album by a mystical atmosphere.
His Song of Creatures (1894, Pellet éd.), illustrating the poem of Saint Francis of Assisi, brings together his best symbolist plates (nine color lithographs, lithographed coverby Eugène Belville, text Ch. Clair s.j. decorated with gypsographs by P. Roche, Lemercier imp.). Dulac gave the fullness of his talent, based on a religious and emotional understanding of nature, which did not fail to touch Huysmans (cf. The Cathedral, Paris, 1898). In 1894, three lithographs appeared in the album of Peintres-lithographes, and two in those of L'Estampe originale, (Paysage, 1893 and Bouquet trees, 1894). The lithographs were brought together in two albums in 1893 and 1894. Charles Dulac himself defined his art: “I seek to express fleeting emotions [...].Idealize as much as possible, without distorting the real forms, that is my goal. » (Preface to album I.) Just before his death, he made several attempts for a pictorial translation of the Creed; Only three of them were completed and lithographed: a torrent rolling between rocks and two landscapes. Mellerio was able to define Dulac's art very well: “His lithographs are colored pencil, wash, the drawing is sometimes hesitant. Nevertheless the artist achieves a real effect. This is because the effort of feeling, the emotion truly felt, is there. It is expressed softly, in harmony with the weak range a little past where he stands.The work in black is often apparent, the total number of different colors too much [....]. Dulac besides what he didshows a personal sensitivity in a range of its own and originalized a banal process still has the merit of producing careful prints. » Less than a year after his death his friends organized a retrospective at Vollard's house bringing together his painted and lithographed work.
Dictionnaire de l'estampe en France, 1830-1950
https://archive.org/details/dictionnairedele0000bail/page/108/mode/2up- triptych
- Erotic: long trail of saliva flowing into a receiving mouth, a soft tongue tracing skin, folds and twining of flesh, gripped hands
- Charles Marie Dulac lithographs and mystical landscapes
- Languid, anemic pallor
- Moving image against the backdrop of tears, mapped unto the trees
- Possible music:
- Gardermoen - Julia Kent
- Aphrodite
Tentatively thinking of making a triptych of sorts using Charles Marie Dulac lithographs as foundation and mapping masks of layered + blurred moving image among the landscapes.
Considering a meditation on women in solitude as the theme; the “glamour” of the convent/nuns a la Virgina Postrel book, ethereal wandering, crone pastoral. Glimmer of erotic undertones
Really dreamy sparse contemporary classical that’s still stirring
I want it to be moody and anemic. Sickly pallor, dew of sweat on the skin, shallow breaths
Research:
The Power of Glamour: "1939 book America at the Movies, the researcher Margaret Farrand Thorp defined movie glamour as “sex appeal . . . plus luxury, plus elegance, plus romance,” suggesting that this elusive quality emerged from the mixture of all these elements.5 Like a complex perfume, glamour is enriched by layered notes, each with a different emotional resonance. Yet even astute analysts often try to reduce glamour to a narrow appeal. “ ‘Elegance’ seems dubious and ‘romance’ a euphemism,” writes the fashion historian Valerie Steele, responding to Thorp. Conflating glamour and its ironic impersonator “glam,” Steele declares that glamour is “never discreet or ladylike”
“Mystery is required, and the most glamorous objects often contain a tantalizing element of denial, as the film critic Manohla Dargis recognizes when she lauds contemporary Chinese films, “cinemas of longing,” for creating “an extraordinary glamour born from the tension between release and repression.”9 Glamour leaves us wanting more.”
“So here is one answer to the question of what glamour does. It offers a lucid glimpse of desire fulfilled—if only life could be like that, if only we could be there, if only we could be like them. For all its associations with material goods, the fundamental and insatiable desires glamour taps are emotional.”
“By turning diffuse yearnings into specific but selective images, glamour concentrates what the Japanese call akogare: “unfulfilled longings,” aspiration, and idealization, with a suggestion of the distant, foreign, or unattainable.”
“It gives form to what the advertising pioneer Lois Ardery, writing in 1924, described as “inarticulate longings.”We all know the woman who went to buy a practical blue gingham dress and came home with an impractical pink silk negligée. We all are that woman now and then. . . . Our known want and recognized need is for a blue gingham dress. But the sight of a pink silk negligée somehow sets aflame a desire which, until this unrestrained moment, we have not known existed! Dormant desires, unknown even to ourselves; but how full of possibilities.”
“Glamour takes many forms because both the objects that embody such longings and the longings themselves—the cladding and the armature—vary from person to person.”
“However illusory its particulars, glamour is always emotionally authentic.”
“Yet so common is (or was) the glamorization of nuns that it has caused problems for real-life sisters. “It was the icon of veiled, virtuous virginity that audiences flocked to” in movies about nuns, “not the complicated women behind them,” writes Rebecca Sullivan, a scholar who has studied portrayals of nuns in American popular culture. In the mid-twentieth century, she notes, nuns had an “aura of sacrificial glamour.”
- Begin with a triptych inspired by Charles Marie Dulac lithographs, portraying nuanced aspects of female solitude.
- Explore panels representing the ethereal wandering, the crone pastoral, and the contemplative glamour of the convent.
- Utilize moving images within the landscapes, embodying solitude without relying on explicit or erotic themes.
- Overlay masks of layered and blurred moving images to evoke a dreamy, introspective quality.