Category: Art

Today’s Guardian Review carries an article by JG Ballard celebrating the life and work of Salvador Dalí. Worth reading. I see that the sub-editors also had a little fun with the title as well.

Get yer Planed here… Piping hot; only until 10th May 2007… And I missed the programme as well. Damn.

I’d never heard of her – fashion being an industry that I tend to avoid – but it sounds as though we’ve just lost a real character in Isabella Blow. The Guardian obituary is a real hoot: "She is survived by Detmar and a considerable hat collection".

…makes the most amazing anthropomorphised creations. Like something from Tim Burton or Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

BibliOdyssey draws our attention to the fact that the artist Sergey Tyukanov has a new web site devoted to his works: the Museum of Art. It’s definitely worth a visit, although I very quickly killed the annoying muzak…

I’m sure that there is a whole volume waiting to be written about the public art that is to be found in The Netherlands. Some is striking, but much of it makes me go "I beg your pardon?". Yesterday, for example, I was cycling through a neighbourhood in the nearby small town of Aalten and I came across this…

 

 

 

There was not a word of explanation as to who the artist was, or what his/her intentions might have been. Merely an official notice stating firmly that it was forbidden to climb upon the art. Says it all, really.

J. Carter Wood, over at Obscene Desserts, draws our attention to the oft-overlooked art of typography. It’s always seemed strange to me that something so ubiquitous can also be something so unnoticed – its effects being wrought often at almost an unconscious level, as if by some strange osmosis.

 

Apparently, the Helvetica font turns 50 this year, and as JCW writes, there is even to be a documentary about it. And it’s feature-length, too. Ye gods – I can easily imagine dedicated typographers having the attention span to be able to sit through this (they seem at times to be a pretty obsessive bunch), but us ordinary mortals?

 

Oh – and check out the article by Mark Simonson on Arial; it’s definitely worth reading. 

The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society draws our attention to the world’s biggest sundial – with a gnomon that is 155 metres (510 feet) high. 

Here’s a terrific little gadget for your Windows Vista Sidebar: Rijksgadget. It displays a new painting each day from the collection in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. If you flip the picture over, you find out information about the painting.

The word Peepshow has come to mean something associated with sexual voyeurism. But it was not always so. And even today, the Dutch word Kijkdoos retains something of its innocent antecedents. In the wider lineage of the kijkdoos, Charles Matton continues the tradition with stunning results. The images of the library draw me in…

Robert McCall is an artist who has specialised in scenes of space exploration or views of imaginary worlds. I became aware of his work in 1968 when the posters for 2001 – A Space Odyssey went up; Kubrick commissioned the poster art from him. McCall’s web site is here. I see that the artwork of the 2001 space station and the spaceship Orion is there (and I had an original poster of this, which, alas, has got lost over the course of the years). One, to me, surprising omission from his web site is the artwork he did of the interior of the spaceship Discovery. You can see it here (it’s the third painting down). That poster, at least, I have still got. It hangs in the library.  

While this is "Art", it’s also a statistical view of society. Running the Numbers. Interesting.

A meditation on the meaning of life. This reminds me somewhat of Ivor Cutler, at least as he would have been, had he been German…

Following on from mentioning the book The Mind’s I in the last post, I was curious to see whether Douglas R. Hofstadter had published anything else recently. A quick scan on Amazon threw up a rather promising-sounding candidate: Masters of Deception, a book profiling the work of over fifteen optical illusion artists (Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Salvador Dalí, Sandro Del Prete, Jos De Mey, M.C. Escher, Robert Gonsalves, Matheau Haemakers, Ken Knowlton, Vik Muniz, Scott Kim, Guido Moretti, Istvan Orosz, John Pugh, Oscar Reutersvärd, Roger Shepard, Dick Termes, Rex Whistler).

 

However, although the work is listed bearing Hofstadter’s name, it turns out that he only provided the preface. The actual author is Al Seckel.

 

Still, there’s a web site associated with the book that is worth checking out, since as Seckel says, some of the work featured in the book actually requires movement to appreciate the full impact. 

…but now I see. Take a look at this wonderful photo-essay by Teju Cole. Gawd, I wish I were an artist!

There’s an art project to put a geostationary banana in orbit over Texas. I suppose it makes about as much sense as some of the other things that hail from that State. It seems appropriate that it’s a banana, as well.

 

(hat tip to BLDBLOG)

I’ve only just caught up with this telling of the story behind Breugel’s Hunters in the Snow. It’s fascinating. Go and read it… 

This is a very evocative photo of the Gouda Townhall (stadhuis). Wish I’d taken it.

A tradition that we’ve had for at least the past ten years is to host a dinner party for friends in December. Last night, we had the first such Christmas dinner party in our new home. To mark the occasion, one of our friends presented us with a ceramic totem pole for the garden. Gerda Grashuis is a potter, and she makes these totems herself. Ours is personalised, with drawings and sentences etched into the clay, giving a flavour of our journey through life to reach this point in time and space.

 

This morning, we selected the spot in the garden where we thought the totem should live, and Gerda and her partner Harich installed it for us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gerda, thank you! We both think this is wonderful. We can sit at our breakfast table, look across the garden and see the totem in the wood, just peeping through the trees at us…

 

The French. Doncha just love them? They’ve given us paté de foie gras. They’ve given us Debussy, Ravel, Berlioz and Bizet. They’ve even given us the guillotine. And now they’ve given us the SpermCube. OK, now I’ve drawn the line.