l'air de rien

12 December 2012

St Malo

I have no idea why but I found these houses on the Corniche in St Malo full of personality.

10 December 2012

Cathedral at Tours

The amazing Cathedral in Tours was built between 1170 and 1547. I stopped there for the night a month ago and was bewitched by its elegance and grandeur.

09 December 2012

Kyoto

japan temple kyoto from cloudsandsea on Vimeo.

It isn't often I can say that a particular book has changed something so radical in my thinking. A few, yes, but mostly fiction, and all were discovered when still in school: Nine stories by JD Salinger (notably; For Esme with love and squalor), The Great Gastby and the great Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand, to mention a few.

Altogether different, this is a fascinating but sometimes difficult read for this student who failed dismally in every science, math and biology class. It is a story about the 'Whole' in Nature which so closely relates to all of my artistic thinking, for better or worst. A brief look at the radically new ideas which sprang up in the 1960's in various physics labs around the world and turned Science on it's head. More later, as there is so much to say about its relation to the realm of Painting over the past 100 years.

Good Reading!

Auguri

A clever and astute friend has informed me that the portrait which provoked such emotion in me was done by Peter Lely who painted it sometime in the mid 17th century. Bravo et Auguri Elisabetta a Parigi!

(a web site informs me that auguri also means chestnuts in japanese)

so here is a haiku for you Elisabetta:

Bowing to the storm

The reverent

Bamboo.

08 December 2012

grace

And then,... I almost fell in love with this young woman who graced a large wall at the Courtauld Institute.....and what an idiot that I assumed I could easily access the name of this painter from the web site without noting the painter's name in my notebook!.. It is an unusual thing indeed to feel such an unadulterated attraction for the subject in a painting (A woman in my case). But it does happen from time to time. When I was 20 and walking through the Prado I stumbled across a Portrait of St Marguerite by Titian and I felt this same thing; this overwhelming emotion for a fictitious woman! Not made of blood and skin but of oil and turpentine. It was a very odd sensation especially so considering my age. Romantic, yes I am, but also cynical in the real world of words of love... but this is another story...

This portrait, I believe was painted by a Dutch man who had emigrated to Britain in the late 17th century. But I will have to confirm all this somehow. (Their site is not welcoming to this kind of research without a name) However, there is something so compelling in her regard; so fragile and uncertain.... maybe a broken heart.. but then of course all of this comes from the painter's own heart I believe. Her dress seems like a costume from the Renaissance. Her hands are well done, reminding me of Rembrandt. Indeed her expression reveals that kind of piety one sees in Rembrandt's portraits. Only a delicate hint of sensuality in the treatment of how the dress slides around her bosom... ah,...more to be revealed.

06 December 2012

kangaroo

Gone before
I could get my camera,
The kangaroo.

05 December 2012

attention!: Little brother is watching

Pinokio from Pinokio on Vimeo.

03 December 2012

John Singer Sargent

At the Tate Britain is this lovely Sargent. It would be a beautiful portrait but for the strange treatment of the the right arm on the young woman in the white silk dress. How unfortunate! Here is a detail

His obsession with a kind of anatomical perfection destroys the sense of reality by calling attention to the awkward handling of the poise. It makes her seem spastic. A shame, as the rest of the painting is so beautifully done. He is too fine painter to have allowed this to happen.

sea blue eyes!

Jens Risom's Block Island Retreat by Gary Nadeau for Dwell from gary nadeau on Vimeo.

02 December 2012

Van Gogh

In London recently, I visited the Courtauld Institute at Somerset House. Everywhere, one's attention is split into small bits by so many wonderful things. But it was this self-portrait which hung by itself in a large wood-paneled room which so surprised me. I spent a long time with it and I think because it was alone I was able to completely plug into it. Often paintings hanging side by side in rooms can be a distracting affair. This amazing portrait must have been painted just days after Vincent cut off his ear. I know there is another version with a red background, also with a bandage, but its this one which I find mesmerizing. Firstly, I find it so beautifully done with its cool and disjunctive color harmonies prancing around lime yellow. Its a complex painting despite its apparent simplicity at first view. Its so flat, and distinctly drawn from an obsessive love for Japanese portraiture. The prussian blue hat (which also figures in the other portrait) with its almost black fringe acts like a kind of black hole around which everything seems to gravitate. Well,.. for me it is extraordinary, beautiful, and yes; perfect. Its a truthful portrait and one can only imagine what the ordinary, uninspired folk of the 19th century must have seen: Ugliness! It was Baudelaire who once said that often, new and original works of Art can look ugly on first viewing. How vigilant this forces us to be in our contemporary times.

Ultimately what trapped me in front of it for an hour was its Humanity, the deep rich humility of the person which Vincent so apparently possessed. There isn't a hint of sentimentality anywhere, just a plea perhaps to God, that he might be understood.