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Very pleased JS Lowry is to get his first-ever retrospective in London. Isn’t it amazing that a painter that good, and that famous, has never been shown in the capital before? I suppose it’s because he’s so popular that he’s so often been overlooked. But no one has captured the essence of the industrial north quite as well as he. Lowry is as profound as he is accessible. A Dickens of the brush. Nice one Tate Britain.
Loving the work of Alain Delorme and his photographs of delivery workers in Shanghai. Are they for real? More over on The Import, a most excellent design, art and architecture blog I’ve been admiring of late.
Have to be. Still good though
I don’t know much about owning art, but I know I like it when i do.
Hmmm…how would that quote goes with Richard Billingham
Thanks to my old friend Sami Haapavaara (himself Porvoo’s answer to William Eggleston) for directing me towards the work of Russian photographer Sergey Larenkov. I like his work a lot. His basic premise is simple enough: artist travels to various European cities – Berlin, Vienna, Leningrad – and revisits the precise locations of old war photographs and then reshoots the image from the same spot. The results, once merged, are as beautiful as they are haunting.
I have just started The Thousand Autums of Jacob De Zoet, David Mitchell’s latest novel. It revolves around the man-made island of Dejima built by the Japanese in Nagasaki bay for Dutch traders, during the country’s prolonged period of cultural isolation between 1639 and 1856.
Here’s a rather charming scene of a Dutch dinner party from the period painted by Kawahara Keiga. Note the hook noses of the “southern barbarians” dining greedily on wine and huge plates of meat, their complexions as pale as porcelain. Notice also the Batavian servant in the background, beturbuned and barefoot and bringing a rather limp cut of meat to the table. It’s a fascinating period and a (so far) fascinating book
New blog post: Just back from a weekend in Yorkshire where we took Darling Anna and baby button to see Salt’s Mill in Saltaire, near Bradford. Famous for its David Hockney gallery, I had feared that, like rain on sandstone, the years since my last visit might have eroded the mill’s artistic vision. Not a bit of it. Salt’s Mill remains just as good as any gallery in the country.
What a BEAUTIFUL picture! Yeah, Salt’s Mlil is great isn’t it!
My latest best find: Glasgow School of Art’s Archives and Library flickr feed. Including this very handsome poster of the great Bridget Riley (right). But also posters for David Hockney; Patrick Heron and George Melly (as the King of Spades). I found this while rummaging around for a print of Riley’s Late Morning (1968/7) currently on show at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery which I stared at for some considerable time at the weekend. I can’t find the print online, which is probably a good thing. A lot of nonsense is talked about art, so I will be careful and I’ll keep it short, but there is little else on canvas that can quite move me quite like the straight, simply painted, lines of a Bridget Riley painting.
Just returned from a fascinating exhibition at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (BMAG). Apart from a few nights out to Snobs (when it was a house club in the early 90s) and one visit when I was at University, for which I can no longer recall the reason, I’ve never really known what to make of Birmingham. I’ve recently moved to the West Midlands, however, and been dragged, like some unsuspecting meteorite, into its gravitational orbit. Birmingham Seen is a really excellent exhibition, a perfect primer to the city for an outsider like me. It’s full of urban landscape paintings, some very detailed old photographs, Balladian photos of the abandoned Longbridge car plant and (above) Barbara Walker’s lovely paintings. I saw the city as a native might, at least for an afternoon
* Birmingham Seen: Birmingham City Museum and Gallery Until 3rd January 2010. Admission Free.
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Ben Kelly, the architect of the Hacienda, has released this stunning pair of limited edition prints (above) of the legendary Mancunian club. They are not photos, nor paintings but digital renderings from a full-scale digital model being produced to celebrate its 25th anniversary. £600 each, £1000 the pair (via the excellent Cerysmatic Factory)
I really want to see Herb and Dorothy, a documentary about an extraordinary couple who built up a major art collection on a humble postman’s salary. Despite their modest means they built up a superb collection of minimalist and conceptual art in their tiny one-bed apartment in Manhattan. After 30 years the collection was valued at several million dollars, so they donated the lot to the National Gallery of Art in the US rather than sell it and be rich. The film by Megumi Sasaki is doing the festival rounds. Hope it comes to the UK very soon.
Качество друзей тоже надо учитывать. Дональд Трамп, например, на двадцатку потянет.
Оригинальная идея. Интересно сколько времени он на это потратил
Я извиняюсь, что немного не в тему, а что такое RSS? и ка на него подписаться?
I wish i knew what you were all saying …
My new favourite illustrator is Jon Klassen, an LA-based Canadian who has recently worked on Coraline, the new stop-motion (ie not digital) animation based on a novella by Neil Gaiman. Klassen worked on the film’s visual development and did some drawings for the sets and props. You can see more of his work on his website, the Burst of Beaden.
Lots of influences in his work, 50s animation and surrealism, for sure, and something of Friz Freleng, the Warner Bros animator who created the animated version of the Pink Panther (thank you Anna). Interestingly, Klasson lists his influences as Pieter Breughel (the elder), the musicians Harry Nilsson and Burl Ives, as well as the great Stanley Kubrick. The picture you can see (above) is actually inspired by Cormac McCarthy’s dystopian novel, The Road.
You can buy prints of his work right here.
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Its like you read my mind! You appear to know so much about this, like you wrote the book in it or something. I think that you can do with some pics to drive the message home a little bit, but instead of that, this is excellent blog. A fantastic read. I will definitely be back.
giant octopus photos,
There’s an inspired post over at Berlin’s Click Opera about the “Berlinification” of cities around the world. The post cites the UK government’s emergency measures to distribute thousands of grants to people who find creative uses for vacant shops as evidence of this emerging trend. Such a move – if successful – they argue should create a creative flourishing or the arts and culture, as happened to Berlin after the fall of the wall:
“Since it’s a global recession, I also like to think Berlin has now become a sort of template for cities all over the world. Whereas we might once have looked like a museum of crusty subcultures past their sell-by date, this city now looks like the future of Tokyo, the future of London, and the future of New York. We’re your best-case scenario, guys, your optimal recessionary outcome. Everything else is dystopia, Escape-From-New-York stuff.”
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Taking a cue from the Royal College of Art’s annual Secret Postcard exhibition, students at Ravensbourne College of Art and Design have come up with an equally inspired way of funding their degree show. Short of funds, but rich in ideas, the students have clubbed together and bought a number of second-hand pieces of bric-a-brac (above) from various charity shops and then sent them to a number of their favourite illustrators and designers to be re-designed.
The list of designers is impressive in itself, including the likes of Jonathan Barnbrook, Michael Beirut, Paula Scher, Airside, NMo Design, David Carson and Kozyndan and many more. What’s more, most of the designers seem to have acquiesced with the request and the resulting re-designed items will be auctioned at the Vibe Bar in Brick Lane in London on April 30.
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Bruce McCall might not own a mobile phone and paint of paper with paint. But he’s always been obsessed with the future. I’ve enjoyed his recent talk at Ted Conference where he pontificates about the notion of “faux nostalgia” a yearning, he says, for imaginary futures that never happened.
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Just love this print of Edward Wadsworth’s Drydocked for Scaling and Painting (Liverpool). It’s a picture of one of his “dazzle ships” from World War I, so called because they deployed a “dazzle camouflage” in an attempt to mess with the minds of the German navy. The technique could disrupt the visual rangefinders used for naval artillery; so making it more difficult for the enemy to detect a be-dazzled ship’s precise distance and speed. Amazingly, the design exploited Wadworth’s experience as a vorticist painter, a British brand of cubo-futurism, that used bold, abstracted lines that similarly tricked the eye.
* A painting of his dazzle ships hangs in National Gallery in Ottawa and it celebrates the dazzling ships with equal boldness.
** Incidentally, the dazzle ships also served as an inspiration for the Factory Record’s Peter Saville, who used the technique to design a sleeve for an OMD album of 1983.
(via ffffound).
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Have enjoyed the New Statesman’s Owen Hatherley recent essay on the Futurist art momement, which celebrates its 100th anniversary this February. He writes:
“Peter Saville borrowed a Depero design for the cover for New Order’s debut album, Movement, and in many respects futurism’s legacy has been more visible in pop music than in fine art. The 1980s group the Art of Noise took their name from Luigi Russolo’s 1913 manifesto of futurist noise-music, “The Art of Noises”, which proposed the harnessing of industrial and electronic sounds, and their percussive mesh of samples and stabs in turn had a huge effect on 1980s hip- hop acts such as Public Enemy.”
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That one has to be manipulated.