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Tag: painting

TateShots: Ed Ruscha


TateShots visits artist Ed Ruscha his studio in Los Angeles:

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Midweek Miscellany

I was locked a conference room last week looking at books coming out in the fall, so tI have a lot of catching up to do…

At the Financial Times, Andrew O’Hagan on the influence of other art forms on writers:

Writing novels is quiet work: it can reveal astonishments but it doesn’t usually proceed from them. Maybe that is why novelists are so often attached to second art forms that wear their physicality or their beauty outwardly. Ernest Hemingway considered bullfighting an art form and, indeed, he thought writers should be more like toreadors, brave and defiant in the face of death. For Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima it was the art of the samurai – he loved the poise, the nobility, the control, tradition, all things you would say of good prose – and he died in a ritual self-killing. But most novelists take their influence seriously without letting it take over. They are emboldened by a love of opera, as were Willa Cather and the French novelist George Sand, or by modernist painters, as Gertrude Stein was, each of these brilliant women finding in the spaciousness and drama of the other art form an enlarged sense of what they themselves were setting out to deal with on the little blank page.

And at The Guardian, O’Hagan talks to six novelists, including Kazuo Ishiguro and Sarah Hall, about their passion for a second art forms.

And on a somewhat related subject… Charlotte Higgins profiles painter Leon Kossoff for The Guardian:

His father, a first-generation immigrant from Ukraine, owned a bakery round the corner in Calvert Road; he was one of seven siblings. It was “absolutely not”, he says, an artistic household. “Painting didn’t exist in my family.” What drew him to art as a boy was finding himself, almost without knowing how he had got there, in the National Gallery. “At first the pictures were frightening for me – the first rooms were hung with religious paintings whose subjects were unfamiliar to me.” Later they became old friends: Kossoff spent a long period visiting the National Gallery before opening hours, working from the old masters, making not copies but what you might call translations.

An exhibition of Kossoff’s drawings and paintings of London opens at the Annely Juda Gallery May 8th.

Shuffle — At the Center for Fiction, Dawn Raffell interviews Renata Adler:

I always shuffle. And there, the computer is just a disaster because the only thing I’ve ever been compulsively neat about is typing. I type with two fingers, and so I would always make a mistake near the end of the page, and since White Out is no use, I would throw the thing out and start again at the beginning. Then along came the computer and I thought it was going to help because you can move everything around all the time and you can change every sentence 50 different ways in seconds. But that’s exactly what I don’t want, because then what was I doing? If the computer can shift everything in a split-second, then what am I doing here? That’s what I used to do so carefully. One of the things that’s almost comically a problem is AutoCorrect, and what AutoCorrect thinks I’m saying.

The Amanda Palmer Problem‘ — Nitsuh Abebe at Vulture:

The web offers an opportunity to fall into the open arms of fans, in ways that weren’t available before. Here’s the catch: The web also makes it near-impossible to fall into the arms of just one’s fans. Each time you dive into the crowd, some portion of the audience before you consists of observers with no interest in catching you. And you are still asking them to, because another thing the web has done is erode the ability to put something into the world that is directed only at interested parties… Telling the world all about your life can look generous to fans and like a barrage of narcissism to everyone else.

Also from New York Magazine, the faintly ridiculous ‘At Home with With Claire Messud and James Wood‘:

“There’s been a great deal of closely spaced difficulty to sort through,” she says. “You know that Katherine Mansfield story, ‘The Fly’?” It’s about a fly being slowly drowned in ink. “Well, I am the fly. Every time I hope that things will get better, somebody drops another inkblot on me. So it seems to me if there were a divine lesson it would be to stop hoping that the blots will cease, and instead to come to terms with it … At some point you have to think, All right, it’s not as if someone is promising you something easier or better. You have to be grateful to get it done at all.”

Wood talks about his recent collection of essays, The Fun Stuff, at The Spectator, and Messud’s new novel The Woman Upstairs, was published by Knopf this week

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Oliver Jeffers: A Quantum of Physics

Gestalten.tv talks to Oliver Jeffers, award-winning author of picture books such as Lost and Found, The Incredible Book Eating Boy, and This Moose Belongs to Me,  about his paintings, collages, installations, and collaborative works, collected in his first monograph Neither Here Nor There:

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Something for the Weekend

A rather brilliant cover for The Yellow World by Albert Espinosa, reminiscent of a Matisse cut-out or a Paul Rand illustration, designed by Jon Gray.

The Sickly Glow — John Banville, author most recently of Ancient Light, reviews The Big Screen by David Thomson, for The Guardian:

Thomson worries that something happened to the cinema around the time of Jaws, something cynical, sinister and perhaps even fatal. Part of the fun of Jaws and the other mindless thrills-and-spills imitations that it spawned, he says, “is that the commotion meant nothing. The sensation eclipsed sensibility”. This is the contentious heart of The Big Screen. The deadening process that, according to Thomson, set in the 1970s has now spread across the billions of tiny screens that infest the world, the combined sickly glow of which must be visible from outer space. Watching has become mere gaping, open-mouthed and slow-breathing. “Facebook already takes our earnest admissions about ourselves and trades them for advertising.”

You can read a short interview with Thomson about the book at The Arts Desk:

I went through a stage, particularly when I was teaching, of saying, “Well, these are the great filmmakers, let us explore them as if they were Charles Dickens or Van Gogh or someone like that.” The auteur theory. And now I’ve got to a stage where I sort of feel that every film is more like other films than anything else. Films are all alike, because the technology is more important. The director is fading away – you don’t think to ask who directs television, and yet television today in America is at a very good stage. So I’ve become increasingly interested in the technology, and what that has done to shape the format.

And on a somewhat glummer note… David Denby, movie critic at The New Yorker and author of Do the Movies Have a Future?, on the economics of Hollywood, at The New Republic:

Most of the great directors of the past—Griffith, Chaplin, Murnau, Renoir, Lang, Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, Welles, Rossellini, De Sica, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, Bergman, the young Coppola, Scorsese, and Altman, and many others—did not imagine that they were making films for a tiny audience, and they did not imagine they were making “art” movies, even though they worked with a high degree of conscious artistry. (The truculent John Ford would have glared at you with his unpatched eye if you used the word “art” in his presence.) They thought that they were making films for everyone, or at least everyone with spirit, which is a lot of people. But over the past twenty-five years, if you step back and look at the American movie scene, you see the mass-culture juggernauts, increasingly triumphs of heavy-duty digital craft, tempered by self-mockery and filling up every available corner of public space; and the tiny, morally inquiring “relationship” movies, making their modest way to a limited audience. The ironic cinema, and the earnest cinema; the mall cinema, and the art house cinema.

Viva Hate — Keith Gessen, founding editor of n+1, on Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, at The New Statesman:

They had been brought together by their mutual hatred of the universe, which for a while did a fine job of confirming their feelings about it by rejecting and ignoring them. As they began to find their way in the world it became a little harder to hate it, at least with the same intensity. And so their letters to each other dwindled: What was there to say?

They were rescued by the 1960s. Amis and Larkin managed to greet the transformations, disturbances and new thinking with shared hostility. It brought them a whole gamut of things to hate.

And finally…

Lunch with painter Frank Auerbach, at the Financial Times:

It’s funny, this business of a vocation. One starts from a motive one hardly comprehends. In the school holidays I was an office boy – I found the idea of going into an office horrifying. As a painter, I thought there would be bohemianism, freedom, and there was, but gradually the practice of art took over. As Auden says, in any crisis, the break-up of a relationship, the response is to flee to the arms of the muse. At art school you know at least as many talented students as those who became painters, but they get off the train at some point. I met Stephen Spender once, I expected a poet with a vocation but I found a civilised man, gregarious, leading a varied, entertaining, virtuous life – for whom poetry was only one of the facets. He said one of his dreams was to be a poet, the other to have a lovely life, go to France, know lots of people.

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Gerhard Richter at Tate Modern

With a major retrospective currently in London, artist Gerhard Richter talks about his life and work with Nicholas Serota, Director of Tate, on the eve of the show opening:

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Penguin Book Cover Mystery: Update

Is this the cover in the painting?

Certainly a lot of people seem to think so and some things do fit. Titus Groan is, of course, the first book in the Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake, and this particular Penguin Modern Classics edition was, I believe, first published in 1974. The drawing on the cover (by Mervyn Peake?) is also somewhat similar stylistically to the work of Balthus, mentioned in the title of the painting, so that would make sense I suppose.

However, the features of the faces do not look particularly alike — the features in the painting are more angular — and the hair/shadow to the left of the face on the book cover is notably absent on the cover in the painting. The mood of both seem quite different (to me at least). Can this simply down to artistic license or painterly technique on the part of Hagan?

Other compelling suggestions have been thin on the ground. T.E. Lawrence’s The Mint has been suggested, and there are some similarities to the cover of The Waves by Virginia Woolf, but neither seems quite right and they do not fit with the trilogy alluded to in the title.

There may never be a definitive answer — the artist, Frederick Hagan, died in 2003 — but please let me know if you have any further suggestions or thoughts.

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Penguin Book Cover Mystery

Plant, Trilogy and Balthus, 1982

Do you recognise these books?

Plant, Trilogy and Balthus is going to be part of an exhibition on the work of Canadian painter Frederick Hagan (1918–2003)  at the MacLaren Art Centre this summer and curator Ben Portis would like your helps identifying the Penguin paperbacks in the picture (click the image above for a closer look).

The only other clues we have are that the books form a trilogy and were published prior to 1982.

If you recognise the books or have any further thoughts or suggestions, please leave a comment below or drop me a line and I’ll pass them on to Ben.

Here are the full details of the painting:

Plant, Trilogy and Balthus, 1982
Frederick Hagan (Canadian, 1918–2003)
oil on hardboard
40.4 x 60.6 cm

Thanks!

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The Gutenberg Variations

Beautiful paintings of books and bookshelves by artist Stanford Kay:

(via This Isn’t Happiness)

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