27 August 2014

Le Havre - Aki Kaurismäki 2011


This is such a wonderful film! Weird and retro as if made in the 1950's but a beautiful story set in a France which maybe exists only in the mind today. It stars Andre Wilms. It reminded me slightly of Jules Dassin's remarkable film Rififi chez les Hommes except that Le Havre is in a remarkable color from another era. And in studied kind of way, it also reminded me of Eric Roemer (but without his ennui terrible) In any event, this is a film noir for the 21st century,... a film for lovers of everything so French,.. For that french bucket list


25 August 2014

into


Into the bedroom
Out of the closet
The butterfly.


24 August 2014

l'air de rien #191 (Reidunn au Musée de Grenoble)

This is a little film of my dear friend Reidunn, who, at the Museum, gives guided talks when she is not in her studio as an artist working in glass. It was done with great spontaneity; hurried, and alas, the audio is atrocious. But such is my state.


reidunn from cloudsandsea on Vimeo.


22 August 2014

happy....

For a dose of L.A....(there are lots of imitators out there but he is the real deal...)

19 August 2014

Kenko, from Essays in Idleness, #8


-If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us! The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty. Consider living creatures - none lives so long as man. This May fly waits not for the evening, the summer cicada knows neither spring or autumn. What a wonderfully unhurried feeling it is to live a single year in perfect serenity! If that is not enough for you, you might live a thousand more years and still feel it was but a single night's dream. We cannot live forever in this world; why should we wait for ugliness to overtake us? The longer man lives, the more shame he endures. To die, at the latest, before one reaches forty, is the least unattractive. Once a man passes that age, he desires (with no sense of shame over his appearance) to mingle in the company of others. In his sunset years he dotes on his grandchildren, and prays for long life so that he may see them prosper. His preoccupation with wordily desires grows deeper, and gradually he loses all sensitivity to the beauty of things, a lamentable state of affairs.

14 August 2014

Saul Leiter (encore)




"I like it when one is not certain of what one sees.
We don't know why the photographer (painter) has made such a picture. 
If we look and look, we begin to see and are still left with the pleasure of uncertainty."

"It is not where it is or what it is that matters, but how you see it."

Saul Leiter

These are interesting notions in which I find much truth, at least from my perspective. 

What 'makes' something interesting? Is it surely not Form in a work? How else can we experience something in the visual world if not through our eyes? And what makes Form? And, can we not find it already-made out in the world, man-made and/or natural? Hence the first image above but rotated on its side. Below is a painting made last year which I have grown to like even if I don't have a clue as to its own. Doesn't an artist want to make something to be seen in a new way? Alas, I personally feel that art has been hijacked by those who simply want to present an image which is easily understood, and one which only confirms our understanding of it. (and I include in that not just those who paint pastiches of flower pots and cypress trees but uber-cool contemporary artists who exhibit LED messages in an otherwise clean empty gallery space.

traces


Un poète doit laisser des traces de son passage, non des preuves. Seules les traces font rêver...
René Char

(extrait de la parole den archival)

11 August 2014

A shooter's life (Vivian Maier)


Here is an interesting and well made documentary about the strange and secret life of a woman who worked as a nanny but spent all her time taking pictures of everything.
Her work is good and original but not overwhelmingly extraordinary. Its her life which eclipses her talents as a photographer.
It is also about the young man who discovers her and how he sleuths his way into her strangely weird and exotic world with the help of those who knew her. Somehow it made me think of Looking for Sugarman
Today, more than ever before there are so many remarkably talented young filmmakers exploring all sorts of offbeat stories around the globe. Yes!

09 August 2014

Ann


Alas, I should have stopped at this stage of the painting. But, I didn't. I pushed it into the ground, so to speak. I did have the instinct to take this quick photo with the telephone so as to have a souvenir  of what might have been.....as I liked something.
Its a quick study of a friend with whom I will have dinner this evening in Poët Laval before I leave tomorrow for a new life in Australia.
At the time (which is typical of me) I hated the haunted look of her face coming up, and instead of just keeping it and doing another, I ground it into the metaphysical floor of the studio.
A shame, too, because its the first portrait (in oil) I have done in maybe over 15 years.



03 August 2014

Crete (circa 1986)


So, I went to Crete and painted for a few months such long time ago. I made lots of small oil paintings out of my VW camper van.