More Yves Saint Laurent

 In 1971 YSL lanuched their first perfume for men. Yves Saint Laurent, the founder, designer and the owner of his brand YSL, posed nude for the advertisement. 

What shocked the public, was not only the controversial male nudity, but also his strikingly beautiful body.

At 35, Yves was young, successful, rich and beautiful. He had everything people wished for. But he was also one of the most depressed designers, indulging in drugs and alcohol, slowly killing himself (despite countless rumours about his death since his thirties, Yves passed away at 71, which was....errr..quite impressive)

Yves was known for appearing quiet, timid and nervous when he was younger (despite the fact that he was very good-looking). But he was in fact extremely daring. He made women wearing man's clothes and completely rocked it. He was also proudly gay. 

The human community generally punish people who are different. But Yves was fearless, and being fiercely different is beautiful. 

Apart from Yves, many other top designers like Christian Dior, Coco Chanel also have fascinating life stories that inspire people. It's sad that when people speak of their names nowadays they only refer to the luxury brands. What's truly luxurious, however, is the geniuses' brain. 

***[Updated 7 Dec 2014]***

OK I am addicted. No wonder they call their famous perfume opium. 

I have to stay up till 2:00 a.m. to finish this sketch :p

Yves was just beautiful.

A 50 years snapshot of Yves Saint Laurent

I watched Saint Laurent the movie this weekend with a dear friend of mine. If you're interested and want to watch it as well, make sure you pick someone that is equally interested and shares the same value in life with you. The couple right next to us, fell sound asleep 5 mins into the movie and wasted 3 hours of their lives, literally.

Don't get me wrong it was not a boring movie at all. And I love it more than any movie I've watched in 2014, including the very popular Interstellar (tho I love it very much too). The movie, as the name suggested, was all about Yves Saint Laurent. And I am not going to tell you anything more about it...puahaha.

Instead, my movie review will be done in a form of drawing. This is Yves Saint Laurent in his twenties and seventies.

A genius's 50 years. How precious.
What had changed, what stayed the same?

The hourglass of Dali

After my Duchamp sketch below, I immediately made another Dali Sketch. The earlier drawings of Dali was actually the VERY FIRST portrait I drew in my entire life. And it's now quite embarrassing to look at... (See Dali [1] and Dali [2], although Dali 2 was more a cartoon than a drawing.)

So I started searching for photos of Dali again. The reason why I am so obsessed with him is that there are a lot of interesting photos available, from being young and handsome, to becoming more mature (with his mustache growing ever longer). 

My friends (the very few who bother to know who Dali is)
disagreed that he was handsome. Now look at this.

And This.

(It could possibly make a good Calvin Klein Commercial)

And he got crazier....

.....crazier

.....and yet, crazier....

As I keep searching, I found some rare photos of Dali during his last years. They touched my heart, so deeply that I couldn't help but made another sketch of Dali after midnight...

If you think of Dali, you think of his signature mustache and his huge eyes, full of life, full of energy, full of confidence. It made him a very unique person, very Dali. However the Dali here looked almost vulnerable. He was probably in his seventies. And the intense power in his eyes, that once made him the most fascinating person to look at, has left him.

However rich, however beautiful, however invincible you are,

you will have to face the eventual decline of life. 

Time is cruel, and it's just as cruel to me as to you.

Everybody is equally helpless.

Dali's most famous painting, "The persistence of memory" was about time. If it's the first time you look at this painting, I resist the urge to tell you the academic interpretations of his work. Surrealism is to be felt, not to be explained anyways.

Salvador Dali, 1931
The persistence of memory, oil on canvas

This is probably one of the last pictures of Dali I can find online. His mustache now grew all white. His fierce stare was nowhere to be seen. Dali , for the first time, looked calm and relaxed in a photo.

To balance out the unusual seriousness of this post, I decided to make a cartoon of this picture. XD

Everybody will eventually be memories of the others, 

but every breath you take is a miracle of yourself.

So make it count.

THE VERY CREEPY MARCEL DUCHAMP

Drew Marcel Duchamp last night, left it on the table when finished and freaked me out before I went to bed....hahaha (I guess it means I did a pretty decent job? lol)

There were so many interesting things about Mr. Duchamp I don't really know where to begin.

First of all, He could look very creepy in pictures...

*VERY VERY VERY CREEPY*

He was famous for making a very mean parody of Mona Lisa. He gave the classic beauty a mustache and wrote L.H.O.O.Q. underneath.

In French, L.H.O.O.Q reads "L-(L)ASH-(SH)O-O-KU", which sounds very much like "Elle a chaud au cul", meaning......

"She has a hot ass"

I guess you can imagine why the academics were not very happy....lol

He dressed himself like a woman, and called her Rrose Selavy. In French it sounds like "Eros, c'est la vie" (Eros, this is life)............

Let's meet Ms. Selavy........

No matter what do you think about Mr. Duchamp, you have to thank god for creating interesting people like him, so that the world can be full of surprises :)

 

Pablo Picasso, the eternal kidult

Survived past 91 years old, Picasso was undeniably the most famous, most successful, and probably the richest artist of all time. He started to get famous when he was still in his twenties. People at his time were already crazy about his works.

You can find a lot of photos of Picasso online. And if you study them one by one, it's not difficult to realize the consistent playfulness in his eyes, no matter how old he got, and how seriously he posed. The picture I chose to draw was very likely taken under bright sunlight, that forced Mr. Picasso to frown. Despite all seriousness, you do not see a hint of sadness. (He was probably just putting his game face on :p )

If you look at his less serious photos, do you see the kid inside of him? 

"It takes a long time to grow young." 

"Youth has no age."

-Pablo Picasso

My sketchbook's VIP, Dear Mr. Vincent Willem Van Gogh

Whatever list that I am making cannot be complete without him.

Everyone who knows me understands how much I love him, so much that I traveled 10,000 km to where he lived and died in France.

He's also the reason why I love sunflower, and making it the header of my blog.

"Seek the sun", as in keep looking on the bright side of life, like a sunflower.

(tho our dear Vincent seemed nowhere near being "cheerful" :p )

Sketch of my new hero - Mr. Oscar Wilde

It's not the first time my friends said I might have "met" more dead people than living ones in Paris. No it was not (completely lol) true.

I did make some effort to get to the tombs of some awesome people that I like a lot. But my collection was not complete because I missed Pere Lachaise, where rested the soul of Oscar Wilde, among many other brilliant minds.

I can still remember it was a gloomy late afternoon in early October. The wind was chill, the sky was dark with layers of gray roiling clouds. The cemetery was just closed when I got there. Disappointed, I decided to linger a little longer. The neighborhood was so quiet that I felt slightly uneasy being the only person standing in front of the firmly closed iron gate. And suddenly, a vast throng of crows rose out of nowhere... 

OUTSIDE Pere Lachaise, Paris

OK. Enough of ghost story setting :p 

Now back to Oscar Wilde. I have to confess the first time I have come across the name was when I watched "Paris Je t'aime", 24 hours before I was on the plane flying to Europe this Sep. The witty quotes definitely caught my attention:

"How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being"  

*I really really love this quote

"This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. Either it goes or I do."
*Can you imagine someone cracked this joke when he was on his dying bed..?!

This was widely believed to be Mr. Wilde's last words, when he was dying painfully in a tiny cheap hotel room in France. 

Oscar Wilde vs Alexander Payne playing him in Paris Je t'aime

Before I googled his picture I actually expected Mr. Wilde to look a lot crazier because he said "life is too important to be taken seriously". To my surprise, he looked perfectly like an intelligent English Irish gentleman (I later read that he disliked being identified as an English). 

So here is my sketch of my new hero :)

I guess I now have every reason to visit Paris again in the near future.