Today we are mixing:
- The Painting: “The Morning of Life” by Asher Brown Durand
- The Soundtrack: “A Hidden Life” by James Newton Howard (“A Hidden Life” Soundtrack)
About the Painting
Asher Brown Durand (August 21, 1796 – September 17, 1886) was an American painter of the Hudson River School.
His main interest changed from engraving to oil painting about 1830 with the encouragement of his patron, Luman Reed. During 1837, he accompanied his friend Thomas Cole on a sketching expedition to Schroon Lake in the Adirondacks Mountains and soon after he began to concentrate on landscape painting. He spent summers sketching in the Catskills, Adirondacks, and the White Mountains of New Hampshire, making hundreds of drawings and oil sketches that were later incorporated into finished academy pieces which helped to define the Hudson River School.
Durand is remembered particularly for his detailed portrayals of trees, rocks, and foliage. He was an advocate for drawing directly from nature with as much realism as possible. Durand wrote, “Let [the artist] scrupulously accept whatever [nature] presents him until he shall, in a degree, have become intimate with her infinity…never let him profane her sacredness by a willful departure from truth.”
About the Soundtrack
A Hidden Life (formerly titled Radegund) is a 2019 epic historical drama film written and directed by Terrence Malick, starring August Diehl, Valerie Pachner, and Matthias Schoenaerts with both Michael Nyqvist and Bruno Ganz in their final performances. The film depicts the life of Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian farmer and devout Catholic who refused to fight for the Nazis in World War II. The film’s title was taken from George Eliot‘s book Middlemarch. The film had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2019 and was theatrically released in the United States on December 13, 2019. It was the final film to be released under the Fox Searchlight Pictures name before Walt Disney Studios changed the company’s name to Searchlight Pictures on January 17, 2020.
James Newton Howard (born June 9, 1951) is an American composer, conductor, and music producer. He has scored over 100 films and is the recipient of a Grammy Award, Emmy Award, and eight Academy Award nominations. His film scores include Pretty Woman (1990), Grand Canyon (1991), The Fugitive (1993), The Devil’s Advocate (1997), Dinosaur (2000), Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), Treasure Planet (2002), King Kong (2005), Batman Begins (2005), Blood Diamond (2006), The Dark Knight (2008), The Bourne Legacy (2012), The Hunger Games series (2012–2015), Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016), and Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018). He has collaborated with directors M. Night Shyamalan, having scored nine of his films since The Sixth Sense; Christopher Nolan, having collaborated with Hans Zimmer on The Dark Knight Trilogy, excluding The Dark Knight Rises; Peter Jackson, composing the score for his 2005 remake of King Kong; and Francis Lawrence, having scored all of his films since I Am Legend.