The biggest and most unusual work of art on display last month at the Agricultural Fair was "The Grim Reaper." Scaring little kids and adults alike with its hollow eye sockets and beckoning bony fingers, this towering wood statue won first prize for sculpture, as well as a Special Award. It's back home now in the Lambert's Cove studio of its creator, carpenter and wood sculptor Simon Hickman.
The Reaper originated as the trunk of a Music Street Elm tree in West Tisbury and evolved over the past year. "You have to hollow out the wood soon after you get it, or it will check, or crack," Mr. Hickman says. Checking occurs when a large piece of wood dries faster on the outside.
The Reaper's skull, skeletal parts, and the blade of the scythe he carries are made of rosewood. The limb of a tulip tree outside Mr. Hickman's workshop proved just the right fit for the Reaper's giant scythe handle. A garment made of hammered copper mail, topped by a short cape, covers the figure's torso. A light bulb gives the creature an eerie glow. To accommodate Mr. Reaper, who reaches 10 feet from his feet to his cowl, Mr. Hickman had to reconfigure his workshop. He installed a carrying beam for a chain hoist so that he could maneuver the tree trunk and "make sure he didn't run out on me."
The Reaper joins many other sculptures in Mr. Hickman's collection, some of which fairgoers may remember from past years. They are the products of a wonderfully perfervid imagination and include Vlad the Impaler, the Tower of Babel, and the Titanic. In addition to the sculptor's stores of wood, objects salvaged from the backyard of his 16-acre former farm make their way into his art. One of his Agricultural Fair entries, a full-sized maple shark, now hangs suspended from airplane wire in the family's pool house.
"If you touch his tail, he'll swim for 45 minutes," Mr. Hickman says, pointing to the surface spalting, patterns caused by a fungus feeding on the sap in the wood."I average about one piece a year," he says. "I only do it when I have a big chunk of time." These products of long, painstaking hours of work have sensuously smooth, highly polished surfaces and all – with the exception, perhaps, of Mr. Reaper – invite touching.
Born in England and raised in Kenya, Mr. Hickman is an inveterate saver and a collector. Arriving on the Vineyard in 1978 to work on an Edgartown restoration project, he never left. He had spent part of his youth hitchhiking in Australia and Indonesia and pursued his artistic bent then by creating oil paintings."I'm kind of saving oil painting for my retirement," he says.
Each of the artist's creations has a story behind it. He bought the rosewood log used in the Reaper 30 years ago. It came from a stack of the tropical wood stored behind the site of the long-gone Nobnocket Garage and former home of the Artworker's Guild, a 70s landmark in Vineyard Haven. A chair in Mr. Hickman's studio is made of native honey locust, and this very hard wood allowed him to incorporate lots of detail while keeping the piece structurally sound. A grimacing head he calls "How Do You Feel" started as an oak burl and has teeth cut from the ivory keys the sculptor rescued off a piano about to be bulldozed at the town dump.
Farm parts from hay wagons, horse buggies, and tools have gone into a throne-like chair, complete with hoofed arms and a tail. Made of chokecherry, a finely hatched lizard has humanoid hands. Pieces of metal Mr. Hickman found in the woods on his property help provide the necessary support for a table fashioned from Linden trees. Serving as a dumping ground for the caretaker of the old Makonikey Hotel, the wetlands at the back of the Hickman property has produced silver forks and spoons, along with many other discards.
Other examples of his skill at rescuing abandoned materials include the concrete balustrade from a French villa on-Island that now rims the family's swimming pool. A massive mantelpiece from the Corbin-Norton mansion in Oak Bluffs graces his living room, and he has fashioned chandeliers from deer antlers. The giant Linden that once shaded Main Street near the Capawock Theatre in Vineyard Haven is now a bar in his pool house. Mr. Hickman volunteered to remove the rotten tree, after the Town advertised to find a home for it. The sculptor discovered the tree was almost entirely hollow, so he made a trapdoor in the oil painting reproduction, lowered himself inside with a chainsaw, and cut it in half to save what had not rotted. When necessary, he makes his own tools, in one case attaching a chisel to a copper pipe so he could work in a narrow cavity.
"As I get older, my sculptures are getting bigger and heavier," Mr. Hickman says. He hasn't exhibited much outside of the Agricultural Fair, although for several years he and his wife Marion, a calligrapher, ran Chickamoo Gallery with the late Richard Lee, in the barn that now houses his Lambert's Cove studio. He suggests the subjects of his often surrealist imagination are no cup of tea for people buying art on the Island.
As “The Da Vinci Code” proved a few years back, people love to uncover the secrets locked away in the masterworks of art history, and though “Tim’s Vermeer” does nothing to interpret Vermeer’s work, it sheds new light on the way he might have gone about it. Technically, the notion that Vermeer might have used a camera obscura as an optical aid has been around for years, backed up by mathematical calculations in Philip Steadman’s book “Vermeer’s Camera.” Jenison proposes an even simpler solution involving a simple hand mirror, enlisting both Steadman and “Secret Knowledge” author — and artist — David Hockney to test his theories as he goes.
But Teller’s inventor/subject goes one step further than the scholars did, attempting to reproduce Vermeer’s “The Music Lesson” himself — and this is where the film crosses over into a fascinating tale of obsession, as Jenison uses his primary expertise (as founder of NewTek, he revolutionized the fields of computer graphics and digital video) to re-create the artist’s studio in a San Antonio warehouse. Using rendering tools to calculate the exact dimensions of every object seen in the original painting, from stained-glass windows to the models’ costumes, Jenison then constructs everything by hand and positions it just right in the room — a 213-day job, short by comparison with the actual task of painting.
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2013年9月2日星期一
Baltimore Woods exhibit features
Skaneateles Lake and the surrounding region have inspired both artists in their creative process, and the show reflects each artist’s interpretation. The exhibit includes drawings and paintings in oil, acrylic, pastel and watercolor and is open to the public with no admission or parking fee.Harms describes her work as becoming more organic in nature since moving away from cities to a rural area, and her artwork leans toward the abstract.
“The mood and nature of Skaneateles Lake, whether driving by, walking by or swimming in, is reflected in my recent drawings and paintings,” Harms said. “I am influenced by place, by color, by light. Not in a direct landscape sense but as memory and sense.” Delmonico’s work has a realistic quality, often depicting local landscapes. Much of her work has an impressionistic feel.
“Painting, for me, is an honor, a privilege, a struggle, and most often, pure joy," Delmonico said. "To attempt to capture a scene or the essence of nature and create something interesting and exciting with light, texture and color is what motivates and defines this ongoing journey for me."Harms earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the Parsons School of Design in New York City and a Master of Fine Arts in painting from the Chelsea School of Art in London.
An English-born artist, Harms has exhibited throughout the United Kingdom and the United States, including London and New York City and recently in Syracuse, Aurora and Skaneateles. Delmonico received her Bachelor of Arts from Boston College, majoring in studio art and elementary education, and a Master of Science in elementary education from Syracuse University.
Delmonico has exhibited widely in central New York and nationally, in venues such as the Everson Museum, Cazenovia College Art Gallery, the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Museum and the Pastel Society of America’s Annual Exhibition.
But the erased workers seem stereotyped and taken advantage of as their identities are elided. Labor can be depersonalizing and demoralizing, but it isn't by default so. These images deny the workers any chance to take pride in their labor or to own it as a personal accomplishment. Like a few other pieces in the show, these worker images need some subsequent thought.
“Worker Skins” is comparable to the white-out works, but it’s the best piece in the show. Hakanson-Stacy cut coveralls into hand-sized human outlines and dragged them through cement. Then she pinned them to the wall in a tight cluster. The more heavily caked ones clump and curl, oil painting reproduction, expressing the physical toll of manual labor. The others give the feeling of staring back at you with a posture of exhausted witness. The overall shape of their cluster is ambiguous—it could be the continental United States or it could be nothing intentional at all.
For the piece “One Minute,” Hakanson-Stacy cites Bureau of Labor statistics to compare a minute’s earnings, represented in pennies, for the average CEO ($116.66) to those of a minimum-wage worker (12 cents). The CEO’s pennies overflow a large glass bowl to scatter on the floor around its pedestal. The minimum-wage worker’s pennies are barely visible at the bottom of the kind of glass ramekin that servers bring your ranch dressing in.
“One Minute” could have been put to better use in WRK, Inc. Rather than locating the pedestals against a wall in the last corner of the gallery that you visit, they could have been placed in the middle of the gallery so that walking the show would redistribute the fallen pennies throughout the whole space, unifying its message.
Instead, a poorly executed video work entitled "Success" dominates the show, taking the front half of the gallery and suffering almost total illegibility from sunlight during the daylight hours. You can’t escape the audio drone of William Penn Patrick—a John Birch Californian who ran for Governor against Ronald Reagan (and lost for being further to the right of the Gipper)—reading his essay "Happiness and Success through Principle." The monologue is perforated occasionally by the pop of a balloon, which is shown onscreen. Hakanson-Stacy very effectively conveys the boom-and-bust economic reality beneath Patrick’s theocratic rhetoric with “Success” but, at almost 30 minutes, the audio loop is too long and a television would have been a better choice than a large video projection screen. One could easily assume that the video was turned off, it’s so washed out by the sun.
More disappointing was "Dreams," an audio piece that you listen to with headphones while staring at red threads pinned to a wall that a fan blows upon. The recording sounds as if it was made in the same bar all on the same night. A succession of young, white-sounding twenty-something voices basically state that, if they could do anything, it would be to travel, drink, and eat, in that order. Unselfish aspirations rarely appear. These narrators fall heavily on the lazy, “I don’t wanna work” end of the labor struggle, and the recording is embarrassing for the unnamed people who lent it their voices.
Frankly, “Dreams” pissed me off. It’s tantamount to middle-class whining, turning an overeducated, underemployed and disenfranchised generation into slackers complaining that their entitlements aren’t being recognized. Meanwhile you can hear the bartenders and dishwashers clinking craft beer glasses in the background, earning their wages. This piece takes a tipsy swing at class struggle.
If this critique is harsh then it’s because Hakanson-Stacy is obviously sincere and passionate about the issues she’s concerned with in this show, namely that a corporate ideology has been so driven into us—governmentally, societally and personally—that we can hardly get outside of it enough to think and talk about it. Her expression embodies that position at the expense of her sincerity and passion at times.
Read the full products at http://artsunlight.com/!
“The mood and nature of Skaneateles Lake, whether driving by, walking by or swimming in, is reflected in my recent drawings and paintings,” Harms said. “I am influenced by place, by color, by light. Not in a direct landscape sense but as memory and sense.” Delmonico’s work has a realistic quality, often depicting local landscapes. Much of her work has an impressionistic feel.
“Painting, for me, is an honor, a privilege, a struggle, and most often, pure joy," Delmonico said. "To attempt to capture a scene or the essence of nature and create something interesting and exciting with light, texture and color is what motivates and defines this ongoing journey for me."Harms earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the Parsons School of Design in New York City and a Master of Fine Arts in painting from the Chelsea School of Art in London.
An English-born artist, Harms has exhibited throughout the United Kingdom and the United States, including London and New York City and recently in Syracuse, Aurora and Skaneateles. Delmonico received her Bachelor of Arts from Boston College, majoring in studio art and elementary education, and a Master of Science in elementary education from Syracuse University.
Delmonico has exhibited widely in central New York and nationally, in venues such as the Everson Museum, Cazenovia College Art Gallery, the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Museum and the Pastel Society of America’s Annual Exhibition.
But the erased workers seem stereotyped and taken advantage of as their identities are elided. Labor can be depersonalizing and demoralizing, but it isn't by default so. These images deny the workers any chance to take pride in their labor or to own it as a personal accomplishment. Like a few other pieces in the show, these worker images need some subsequent thought.
“Worker Skins” is comparable to the white-out works, but it’s the best piece in the show. Hakanson-Stacy cut coveralls into hand-sized human outlines and dragged them through cement. Then she pinned them to the wall in a tight cluster. The more heavily caked ones clump and curl, oil painting reproduction, expressing the physical toll of manual labor. The others give the feeling of staring back at you with a posture of exhausted witness. The overall shape of their cluster is ambiguous—it could be the continental United States or it could be nothing intentional at all.
For the piece “One Minute,” Hakanson-Stacy cites Bureau of Labor statistics to compare a minute’s earnings, represented in pennies, for the average CEO ($116.66) to those of a minimum-wage worker (12 cents). The CEO’s pennies overflow a large glass bowl to scatter on the floor around its pedestal. The minimum-wage worker’s pennies are barely visible at the bottom of the kind of glass ramekin that servers bring your ranch dressing in.
“One Minute” could have been put to better use in WRK, Inc. Rather than locating the pedestals against a wall in the last corner of the gallery that you visit, they could have been placed in the middle of the gallery so that walking the show would redistribute the fallen pennies throughout the whole space, unifying its message.
Instead, a poorly executed video work entitled "Success" dominates the show, taking the front half of the gallery and suffering almost total illegibility from sunlight during the daylight hours. You can’t escape the audio drone of William Penn Patrick—a John Birch Californian who ran for Governor against Ronald Reagan (and lost for being further to the right of the Gipper)—reading his essay "Happiness and Success through Principle." The monologue is perforated occasionally by the pop of a balloon, which is shown onscreen. Hakanson-Stacy very effectively conveys the boom-and-bust economic reality beneath Patrick’s theocratic rhetoric with “Success” but, at almost 30 minutes, the audio loop is too long and a television would have been a better choice than a large video projection screen. One could easily assume that the video was turned off, it’s so washed out by the sun.
More disappointing was "Dreams," an audio piece that you listen to with headphones while staring at red threads pinned to a wall that a fan blows upon. The recording sounds as if it was made in the same bar all on the same night. A succession of young, white-sounding twenty-something voices basically state that, if they could do anything, it would be to travel, drink, and eat, in that order. Unselfish aspirations rarely appear. These narrators fall heavily on the lazy, “I don’t wanna work” end of the labor struggle, and the recording is embarrassing for the unnamed people who lent it their voices.
Frankly, “Dreams” pissed me off. It’s tantamount to middle-class whining, turning an overeducated, underemployed and disenfranchised generation into slackers complaining that their entitlements aren’t being recognized. Meanwhile you can hear the bartenders and dishwashers clinking craft beer glasses in the background, earning their wages. This piece takes a tipsy swing at class struggle.
If this critique is harsh then it’s because Hakanson-Stacy is obviously sincere and passionate about the issues she’s concerned with in this show, namely that a corporate ideology has been so driven into us—governmentally, societally and personally—that we can hardly get outside of it enough to think and talk about it. Her expression embodies that position at the expense of her sincerity and passion at times.
Read the full products at http://artsunlight.com/!
2013年8月26日星期一
Ludington Library truly a community center now
Just in time for Ludington Library’s one year anniversary of its reopening, I found another hero, and this time he is a Republican: former Haverford Commissioner Charlie Bloom, Esq., who heads up the Lower Merion Library Foundation, raising private funds so that all six of the township libraries can be renovated and/or enlarged, just like Ludington and Bala Cynwyd.
Last week, I met Bloom and Margery Hall, head librarian, at Ludington Library and I felt like Alice in Wonderland. Just like falling down the rabbit hole and landing in a strange new world. That’s how different the Ludington Library is from the place I remembered, thanks to Vitetta Architects.
It starts with what is now the entrance from the parking lot. Instead of stairs, there is a ramp made of flagstone, inside the building, and the space created by the sloping entrance is called “The Gallery.” Paintings hang along one wall, and sculpture and ceramics are behind glass on the opposite wall. The featured artists are from the Center for Creative Works in Lower Merion.
Bloom donates so much of his time and talent that he and his committee have already raised more than half the private funds that he was charged to raise. That means $2.6 million in donations, and only $2.4 million to go. The township is supposed to be paying for the oil painting reproduction, which will total $28 million for all six libraries.
Hall said the crowds were so thick at the grand re-opening of Ludington that the electronic counters lost track. She figures more than 4,000 people came that day. The daily count since then is about 1,000 people.
When you enter the library, the first thing you see is New Books. And Hall showed me the Playaway section - that’s like a book on tape, except it is a small self-contained unit, with headphones. You can “read” the book while exercising, walking, any place any time.
There are Kindle downloads as well as ones for Nooks and the Sony Reader and iPads and any other electronic device you can name. And you can check your books out yourself on the electronic card reader, located just below the portraits of Charles and Ethel Ludington. Charles endowed the small existing library in the 1920s in memory of his wife Ethel. Their descendants, Nick Ludington and Ms. Fytie Drayton, are still around and have participated in the capital campaign. The original portrait of Ethel is by Cecilia Beaux, and that’s in a museum in New England. But Ms. Drayton donated an impressive and beautifully framed print of the original portrait.
There is a community room that is free to all organizations, and it is equipped with any audio-visual gadget you could want. Just beyond the community room is the original library with its beautiful dark walnut paneling. The handsome large oil painting of Independence Hall by Walter Biggs was donated by the Curtis Publishing Company in memory of Charles Ludington, who was an executive with the company.
Hall pointed out that the library had taken pointers from bookstores, and there are sections marked with large signs: gardening, travel, cooking, home improvement, etc.
Bloom is especially proud of the Teen Room, and Hall showed me the shelves of graphic novels. I spotted a table with built-in chess/checkers/backgammon board. Edie Dixon, widow of F Eugene Dixon, endowed the Teen Room in memory of her mother, Sarah Robb, who had served as president of the library’s board of trustees. The Teen Room is for those 12 to 18, and Bloom said that every library is destined to have one.
Bloom was delighted to point out a treasure which not too many libraries have: a complete set of Fortune magazines, courtesy of Stanley Ginsburg, who donated the collection and $25,000 for the shelves to hold them.
When a professor read about the donation, he showed up and was ecstatic. Seems for ten years he had been searching for an August 1946 copy of Fortune, and even the magazine headquarters did not own a copy. He needed it for his research, and he found it at Ludington.
The plaque in the newspaper and periodicals section lets you know that Julie Jensen Brysen donated in memory of her father, the physician James A. Jensen. John Bogle endowed the Business Section.
Upstairs you can see how the addition has doubled the Children’s Library. It now can be divided into two sections, according to age. I loved the C.A.T.T. sign on the wall. Hall explained it stands for “cars, airplanes, trucks and trains.” So any little kid interested in those four topics knows exactly where to go. The beautiful huge phonographs on the wall are the work of Hall’s niece, Jennifer Anist. The mural in the Children’s Room was created during the last renovation and was preserved and re-mounted and forms the backdrop for Story Time.
When oil and pastel painter Sara Qualey attended the John Herron School of Art in Indianapolis, Indiana in the 1960s, abstract art was in. But she didn’t see the world that way. When she saw a peach, she wanted to smell it, touch it, taste it, not throw it against the canvass and watch it go splat. For a time, however, she thought maybe she was lacking in some way. Luckily, she got over it. At 63 going on 64 years old, Qualey’s on a roll. Nothing can stop this woman from being who she is: an intensely concentrated, representational painter who eulogizes tin cans, light bulbs, extension cords, flowers, fruit, or anything that otherwise might end up in the trash or the compost heap.
Read the full products at http://artsunlight.com/!
Last week, I met Bloom and Margery Hall, head librarian, at Ludington Library and I felt like Alice in Wonderland. Just like falling down the rabbit hole and landing in a strange new world. That’s how different the Ludington Library is from the place I remembered, thanks to Vitetta Architects.
It starts with what is now the entrance from the parking lot. Instead of stairs, there is a ramp made of flagstone, inside the building, and the space created by the sloping entrance is called “The Gallery.” Paintings hang along one wall, and sculpture and ceramics are behind glass on the opposite wall. The featured artists are from the Center for Creative Works in Lower Merion.
Bloom donates so much of his time and talent that he and his committee have already raised more than half the private funds that he was charged to raise. That means $2.6 million in donations, and only $2.4 million to go. The township is supposed to be paying for the oil painting reproduction, which will total $28 million for all six libraries.
Hall said the crowds were so thick at the grand re-opening of Ludington that the electronic counters lost track. She figures more than 4,000 people came that day. The daily count since then is about 1,000 people.
When you enter the library, the first thing you see is New Books. And Hall showed me the Playaway section - that’s like a book on tape, except it is a small self-contained unit, with headphones. You can “read” the book while exercising, walking, any place any time.
There are Kindle downloads as well as ones for Nooks and the Sony Reader and iPads and any other electronic device you can name. And you can check your books out yourself on the electronic card reader, located just below the portraits of Charles and Ethel Ludington. Charles endowed the small existing library in the 1920s in memory of his wife Ethel. Their descendants, Nick Ludington and Ms. Fytie Drayton, are still around and have participated in the capital campaign. The original portrait of Ethel is by Cecilia Beaux, and that’s in a museum in New England. But Ms. Drayton donated an impressive and beautifully framed print of the original portrait.
There is a community room that is free to all organizations, and it is equipped with any audio-visual gadget you could want. Just beyond the community room is the original library with its beautiful dark walnut paneling. The handsome large oil painting of Independence Hall by Walter Biggs was donated by the Curtis Publishing Company in memory of Charles Ludington, who was an executive with the company.
Hall pointed out that the library had taken pointers from bookstores, and there are sections marked with large signs: gardening, travel, cooking, home improvement, etc.
Bloom is especially proud of the Teen Room, and Hall showed me the shelves of graphic novels. I spotted a table with built-in chess/checkers/backgammon board. Edie Dixon, widow of F Eugene Dixon, endowed the Teen Room in memory of her mother, Sarah Robb, who had served as president of the library’s board of trustees. The Teen Room is for those 12 to 18, and Bloom said that every library is destined to have one.
Bloom was delighted to point out a treasure which not too many libraries have: a complete set of Fortune magazines, courtesy of Stanley Ginsburg, who donated the collection and $25,000 for the shelves to hold them.
When a professor read about the donation, he showed up and was ecstatic. Seems for ten years he had been searching for an August 1946 copy of Fortune, and even the magazine headquarters did not own a copy. He needed it for his research, and he found it at Ludington.
The plaque in the newspaper and periodicals section lets you know that Julie Jensen Brysen donated in memory of her father, the physician James A. Jensen. John Bogle endowed the Business Section.
Upstairs you can see how the addition has doubled the Children’s Library. It now can be divided into two sections, according to age. I loved the C.A.T.T. sign on the wall. Hall explained it stands for “cars, airplanes, trucks and trains.” So any little kid interested in those four topics knows exactly where to go. The beautiful huge phonographs on the wall are the work of Hall’s niece, Jennifer Anist. The mural in the Children’s Room was created during the last renovation and was preserved and re-mounted and forms the backdrop for Story Time.
When oil and pastel painter Sara Qualey attended the John Herron School of Art in Indianapolis, Indiana in the 1960s, abstract art was in. But she didn’t see the world that way. When she saw a peach, she wanted to smell it, touch it, taste it, not throw it against the canvass and watch it go splat. For a time, however, she thought maybe she was lacking in some way. Luckily, she got over it. At 63 going on 64 years old, Qualey’s on a roll. Nothing can stop this woman from being who she is: an intensely concentrated, representational painter who eulogizes tin cans, light bulbs, extension cords, flowers, fruit, or anything that otherwise might end up in the trash or the compost heap.
Read the full products at http://artsunlight.com/!
Broad strokes
Contemporary Chinese painter Luo Zhongli's representative oil painting work Father made a very deep impression on many Chinese people when it won a national prize in 1981. The large-scale photorealist portrait of a weather-beaten old Chinese farmer has a strong visual effect and emotional power.However, few people pay much attention to the small ballpoint pen that pokes out from the farmer's white turban. And even fewer people know that there was no ballpoint pen in Luo's original painting.
Father is currently being exhibited at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai. At the exhibition site, Li Xu, the deputy director of the venue, told visitors the story behind the pen.After Luo finished his original version of Father, many of his friends, who were painters, teachers or professors in China's fine arts circle at the time, reminded Luo that it was better to depict the farmer he painted as representative of farmers in the new, modernized society of post-1949 China.
Therefore, after reflecting on it, Luo added a small ballpoint pen tucked behind the farmer's ear in order to show that he was a "literate (youwenhua)" farmer.Soon after that, in 1981, the painting was awarded the first prize at the second China Youth Art Exhibition, arousing a huge response from the public.
For people today, the story of the pen probably sounds a little absurd, and indeed, the pen looks rather incongruous in the otherwise highly realistic portrait of an old farmer. However, it demonstrates that in that era of China, the desire to adhere to Mao-era political correctness was still deeply ingrained in many Chinese people's minds, even in the circle of fine arts.That is probably the significance of Luo's Father appearing at the retrospective exhibition titled Portrait of the Times: 30 Years of Chinese Contemporary Art at the Power Station of Art.
The ongoing exhibition features about 117 Chinese artists and 300 works of art. The works span from the late 1970s, the era of reform and opening-up, until today and include various forms including painting,oil painting reproduction, installation, video and photography.Li is the curator of the exhibition. He told the Global Times that during the past 30 years, China's economic and cultural development, as well as Chinese people's growing self cognition and social involvement, are reflected by Chinese artists' works over these years.
"Through this retrospective exhibition on the past 30 years of Chinese contemporary art, not only can visitors have an overview of the development of Chinese contemporary art, but more importantly, it shows the huge changes that China and Chinese people have experienced in the past 30 years."In 1993, the 58-year-old Shanghai-born artist Gu Wenda launched his worldwide art project, the United Nations Project, to make a series of installation artworks using human hair and cryptic calligraphy.
The United Nations - Human Space, one of the art works from the series, is currently hanging on the top of the exhibition hall on the first floor of the Power Station of Art. It is a huge installation work consisting of various national flags made from human hair from different countries.
"The hairs could be regarded as a metaphor for the mixture of races," Li said, "and the artist gathered them together to show his idea about the internationalized evolution of human identity."Gu, who studied and worked in the US, Canada and Australia after leaving China in 1987, has achieved recognition on the global stage. The British art historian Edward Lucie-Smith called Gu "the most celebrated of a new generation of avant-garde artists who emerged from China in the very late 1980s and early 1990s."
"I always remember my first solo exhibition held in Xi'an in 1986 was shut down by the local authorities," Gu told the Global Times. The exhibition, which featured paintings of fake ideograms on a massive scale, was thought to carry subversive messages. "But now, almost 30 years later, my works can be displayed in a State-owned art museum." The Power Station of Art is the first State-owned contemporary art museum in China."When I left China in 1987, there were no private art galleries here, but now, the whole country is practically covered with art galleries," Gu said.
The works of Xiao Quan and Lu Yunmin, two well-known Chinese photographers, are also on display at the exhibition. It is not often that an art exhibition in China will include photography works.Xiao's portrait works, Our Generation, focus on the elites in contemporary China's culture and art circles, who were mostly born in the 1950s and started their careers in the 1980s. His subjects include the celebrated film director Zhang Yimou, the pioneering rock star Cui Jian and the well-known contemporary artist Zhang Xiaogang.
Xiao's photos make an interesting contrast with the portrait photos that are hanging on the opposite wall, taken by Lu. Titled Shanghainese, the photos record vivid moments in the daily lives of Shanghainese families.Before she got angry, local artist Elizabeth Berry’s watercolor and oil paintings reflected snapshots of stunning colour and pastoral beauty around the world. Vivid poppy fields in France. Pretty East Coast fishing coves. Strutting, scarlet-crowned roosters in the Carribean.
But then came the morning after the Victoria Day long weekend in May.Her regular, early morning walk on the waterfront brought her to a scene on Woodbine Beach that got her so mad, she immediately beetled back to her home on Neville Park Blvd. (a 6.5-kilometre round trip), picked up her paint gear and returned to the scene of the grime to immortalize what she saw.
It’s evocatively titled Woodbine Beach Litter, a 15-by-22-inch watercolour that took her about four hours to create on site, with a return trip the following day at which she added one of the litter’s few fans, a seagull, and waves.The garbage depicted in the painting — pizza packaging, coffee cups, pop cans, cigarette butts and more — was all real and on the scene — and repeated in various clumps throughout the beach.
It’s nothing new, but it’s getting worse, says Berry, who’s in her late 60s and walks the boardwalk every day. She sees all sorts of litter — from food-related to personal, like abandoned diapers — continually along the route, although the quotient goes up as soon as the good weather arrives and stays high until after the Labour Day weekend.
When the historic Annapolis Market House reopens in the next couple of weeks, patrons will walk underneath Jean Tyson's bright red hollyhocks and Dixie Sangster's Cubist rendition of a vase of flowers.The two women are among 16 artists who contributed artwork for banners that will hang near the ceiling of the Market House. Eight banners, each more than 8 feet long, feature works from the Annapolis Senior Center's corps of art students, one on each side.
All of the artwork features brightly colored flowers. The idea is to give a vibrant pop of color to the interior of the Market House, even when it's dark and gray outside in the winter, said Sally Wern Comport of ArtWalk, the organization that linked the senior center artists with the Market House.
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Father is currently being exhibited at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai. At the exhibition site, Li Xu, the deputy director of the venue, told visitors the story behind the pen.After Luo finished his original version of Father, many of his friends, who were painters, teachers or professors in China's fine arts circle at the time, reminded Luo that it was better to depict the farmer he painted as representative of farmers in the new, modernized society of post-1949 China.
Therefore, after reflecting on it, Luo added a small ballpoint pen tucked behind the farmer's ear in order to show that he was a "literate (youwenhua)" farmer.Soon after that, in 1981, the painting was awarded the first prize at the second China Youth Art Exhibition, arousing a huge response from the public.
For people today, the story of the pen probably sounds a little absurd, and indeed, the pen looks rather incongruous in the otherwise highly realistic portrait of an old farmer. However, it demonstrates that in that era of China, the desire to adhere to Mao-era political correctness was still deeply ingrained in many Chinese people's minds, even in the circle of fine arts.That is probably the significance of Luo's Father appearing at the retrospective exhibition titled Portrait of the Times: 30 Years of Chinese Contemporary Art at the Power Station of Art.
The ongoing exhibition features about 117 Chinese artists and 300 works of art. The works span from the late 1970s, the era of reform and opening-up, until today and include various forms including painting,oil painting reproduction, installation, video and photography.Li is the curator of the exhibition. He told the Global Times that during the past 30 years, China's economic and cultural development, as well as Chinese people's growing self cognition and social involvement, are reflected by Chinese artists' works over these years.
"Through this retrospective exhibition on the past 30 years of Chinese contemporary art, not only can visitors have an overview of the development of Chinese contemporary art, but more importantly, it shows the huge changes that China and Chinese people have experienced in the past 30 years."In 1993, the 58-year-old Shanghai-born artist Gu Wenda launched his worldwide art project, the United Nations Project, to make a series of installation artworks using human hair and cryptic calligraphy.
The United Nations - Human Space, one of the art works from the series, is currently hanging on the top of the exhibition hall on the first floor of the Power Station of Art. It is a huge installation work consisting of various national flags made from human hair from different countries.
"The hairs could be regarded as a metaphor for the mixture of races," Li said, "and the artist gathered them together to show his idea about the internationalized evolution of human identity."Gu, who studied and worked in the US, Canada and Australia after leaving China in 1987, has achieved recognition on the global stage. The British art historian Edward Lucie-Smith called Gu "the most celebrated of a new generation of avant-garde artists who emerged from China in the very late 1980s and early 1990s."
"I always remember my first solo exhibition held in Xi'an in 1986 was shut down by the local authorities," Gu told the Global Times. The exhibition, which featured paintings of fake ideograms on a massive scale, was thought to carry subversive messages. "But now, almost 30 years later, my works can be displayed in a State-owned art museum." The Power Station of Art is the first State-owned contemporary art museum in China."When I left China in 1987, there were no private art galleries here, but now, the whole country is practically covered with art galleries," Gu said.
The works of Xiao Quan and Lu Yunmin, two well-known Chinese photographers, are also on display at the exhibition. It is not often that an art exhibition in China will include photography works.Xiao's portrait works, Our Generation, focus on the elites in contemporary China's culture and art circles, who were mostly born in the 1950s and started their careers in the 1980s. His subjects include the celebrated film director Zhang Yimou, the pioneering rock star Cui Jian and the well-known contemporary artist Zhang Xiaogang.
Xiao's photos make an interesting contrast with the portrait photos that are hanging on the opposite wall, taken by Lu. Titled Shanghainese, the photos record vivid moments in the daily lives of Shanghainese families.Before she got angry, local artist Elizabeth Berry’s watercolor and oil paintings reflected snapshots of stunning colour and pastoral beauty around the world. Vivid poppy fields in France. Pretty East Coast fishing coves. Strutting, scarlet-crowned roosters in the Carribean.
But then came the morning after the Victoria Day long weekend in May.Her regular, early morning walk on the waterfront brought her to a scene on Woodbine Beach that got her so mad, she immediately beetled back to her home on Neville Park Blvd. (a 6.5-kilometre round trip), picked up her paint gear and returned to the scene of the grime to immortalize what she saw.
It’s evocatively titled Woodbine Beach Litter, a 15-by-22-inch watercolour that took her about four hours to create on site, with a return trip the following day at which she added one of the litter’s few fans, a seagull, and waves.The garbage depicted in the painting — pizza packaging, coffee cups, pop cans, cigarette butts and more — was all real and on the scene — and repeated in various clumps throughout the beach.
It’s nothing new, but it’s getting worse, says Berry, who’s in her late 60s and walks the boardwalk every day. She sees all sorts of litter — from food-related to personal, like abandoned diapers — continually along the route, although the quotient goes up as soon as the good weather arrives and stays high until after the Labour Day weekend.
When the historic Annapolis Market House reopens in the next couple of weeks, patrons will walk underneath Jean Tyson's bright red hollyhocks and Dixie Sangster's Cubist rendition of a vase of flowers.The two women are among 16 artists who contributed artwork for banners that will hang near the ceiling of the Market House. Eight banners, each more than 8 feet long, feature works from the Annapolis Senior Center's corps of art students, one on each side.
All of the artwork features brightly colored flowers. The idea is to give a vibrant pop of color to the interior of the Market House, even when it's dark and gray outside in the winter, said Sally Wern Comport of ArtWalk, the organization that linked the senior center artists with the Market House.
Read the full products at http://artsunlight.com/!
2013年8月19日星期一
Airy abstractions alight this summer
As Gary Lichtenstein took in his fill of the artwork around him in the studio of New York City artist Charles Hinman, he said his gaze settled on a series of watercolor images."I took a look at these works, which had been done many years ago, and I thought, those are really nice," he said of the airy abstract images that were reminiscent of kites.
Lichtenstein, a master printer and artist based in Ridgefield, has collaborated with many artists. He and Hinman first started working together in 2011.As the artist and printer looked a bit more deeply at Hinman's work, a creative concept began to take flight -- their next collaboration would be inspired by these images.
"He never lets any piece go out of the studio without a title," Lichtenstein said of Hinman. "So, he said, `Let's call these kites.' "After months of work, the project has landed at the Silvermine Arts Center in New Canaan. "Kites," which features multiple silkscreen prints, is the second major collaboration between Hinman, a painter who is considered a pioneer in the art of sculpted, three-dimensional canvases, and Lichtenstein. Their first project, "Gems," came out in 2011. As with that exhibition, the two worked to employ color and subtle hand embossments to ensure that the suite of prints would maintain the dynamism of Hinman's sculpted canvases.
"It certainly was not the norm," Hinman said of his practice of repurposing the traditional canvas into a sculptural form, by stretching the canvas over multiple frames, creating contours and employing color for sculptural effect. "I like to make work that is a new experience for me and for others."It is a philosophy he has employed since he first made a splash in the early 1960s when he was in his 30s. At 80, he said he continues to look for new ways to create and express himself.
"He happens to be one of the most inventive individuals I know," said Lichtenstein of Hinman.The duo's collaboration appears to foster respect, breed creativity and spur innovation. Both cite the other's knowledge of color as a crucial connection.
"We love discussing color," said Lichtenstein. "It's fascinating because I love drawing out of an artist colors that they really do love ... I get a lot of enjoyment in the interplay."Lichtenstein can draw on his own experience as an abstract painter who has attracted critical praise for the way he layers multiple colors.
Lichtenstein grew up near Waterbury, but has spent much of his 35-year artistic career in California. In 1978, he opened a printmaking studio, SOMA Fine Art Press, which became a hub of artistic collaborations. About 12 years ago, he returned east and has since worked out of his home studio in Ridgefield.
When he works with Hinman, whether in Ridgefield or New York City, Lichtenstein said it is a fluid experience, as Hinman is open to new ideas and ways of expressing his art."After we've made a few prints ... we'll ask ourselves what if we did this or oil painting reproduction," Hinman said. "Much can arise through experiment. Sometimes, we don't know ourselves where we are headed."
A similar quandary awaits visitors to another of the center's galleries, where works from members of the guild are featured in "Where are We (going)?," Silvermine's second summer exhibition. It also will close Sept. 7.New York City artist Emily Cheng curated the exhibition, using the work of guild members as her starting point. After going over hundreds of images, she settled on Easton artist Susan Sharp's abstract painting "Where are We?" and then got to work finding threads that would tie together multiple artists and media.
"I also was taking into consideration that Charles Hinman would be in the next gallery, so I wanted a show that could be different, but compatible," she said. "I wanted it to feel like a continuation or elaboration of a thought."Sharp's piece is abstract, constructed with multiple panels. It was spurred by a photograph in a magazine, an interplay of shadows and water, that Sharp turned on its side. Suddenly, she was inspired.
"I began to pour layers of paint," Sharp said, of the process that begins all of her works. As shapes formed and colors intersected, a landscape formed, albeit one without the concrete shapes and point of perspective of a more traditional scene."I enjoy this sense of disorientation," Sharp said. "It probes this question of where are we ... and further, where am I and where am I in my life.
"For me, what makes this painting exciting is that you can have different interpretations," she said. "You are not able to nail it down."The exhibition features photographs, prints and paintings. As for the theme, Cheng said "Where are We (going)?" is less a statement about the content of the work and more about the state of mind brought on by viewing it -- it's about what you might find when you peer around the corner.
Read the full products at http://www.artsunlight.com/!
Lichtenstein, a master printer and artist based in Ridgefield, has collaborated with many artists. He and Hinman first started working together in 2011.As the artist and printer looked a bit more deeply at Hinman's work, a creative concept began to take flight -- their next collaboration would be inspired by these images.
"He never lets any piece go out of the studio without a title," Lichtenstein said of Hinman. "So, he said, `Let's call these kites.' "After months of work, the project has landed at the Silvermine Arts Center in New Canaan. "Kites," which features multiple silkscreen prints, is the second major collaboration between Hinman, a painter who is considered a pioneer in the art of sculpted, three-dimensional canvases, and Lichtenstein. Their first project, "Gems," came out in 2011. As with that exhibition, the two worked to employ color and subtle hand embossments to ensure that the suite of prints would maintain the dynamism of Hinman's sculpted canvases.
"It certainly was not the norm," Hinman said of his practice of repurposing the traditional canvas into a sculptural form, by stretching the canvas over multiple frames, creating contours and employing color for sculptural effect. "I like to make work that is a new experience for me and for others."It is a philosophy he has employed since he first made a splash in the early 1960s when he was in his 30s. At 80, he said he continues to look for new ways to create and express himself.
"He happens to be one of the most inventive individuals I know," said Lichtenstein of Hinman.The duo's collaboration appears to foster respect, breed creativity and spur innovation. Both cite the other's knowledge of color as a crucial connection.
"We love discussing color," said Lichtenstein. "It's fascinating because I love drawing out of an artist colors that they really do love ... I get a lot of enjoyment in the interplay."Lichtenstein can draw on his own experience as an abstract painter who has attracted critical praise for the way he layers multiple colors.
Lichtenstein grew up near Waterbury, but has spent much of his 35-year artistic career in California. In 1978, he opened a printmaking studio, SOMA Fine Art Press, which became a hub of artistic collaborations. About 12 years ago, he returned east and has since worked out of his home studio in Ridgefield.
When he works with Hinman, whether in Ridgefield or New York City, Lichtenstein said it is a fluid experience, as Hinman is open to new ideas and ways of expressing his art."After we've made a few prints ... we'll ask ourselves what if we did this or oil painting reproduction," Hinman said. "Much can arise through experiment. Sometimes, we don't know ourselves where we are headed."
A similar quandary awaits visitors to another of the center's galleries, where works from members of the guild are featured in "Where are We (going)?," Silvermine's second summer exhibition. It also will close Sept. 7.New York City artist Emily Cheng curated the exhibition, using the work of guild members as her starting point. After going over hundreds of images, she settled on Easton artist Susan Sharp's abstract painting "Where are We?" and then got to work finding threads that would tie together multiple artists and media.
"I also was taking into consideration that Charles Hinman would be in the next gallery, so I wanted a show that could be different, but compatible," she said. "I wanted it to feel like a continuation or elaboration of a thought."Sharp's piece is abstract, constructed with multiple panels. It was spurred by a photograph in a magazine, an interplay of shadows and water, that Sharp turned on its side. Suddenly, she was inspired.
"I began to pour layers of paint," Sharp said, of the process that begins all of her works. As shapes formed and colors intersected, a landscape formed, albeit one without the concrete shapes and point of perspective of a more traditional scene."I enjoy this sense of disorientation," Sharp said. "It probes this question of where are we ... and further, where am I and where am I in my life.
"For me, what makes this painting exciting is that you can have different interpretations," she said. "You are not able to nail it down."The exhibition features photographs, prints and paintings. As for the theme, Cheng said "Where are We (going)?" is less a statement about the content of the work and more about the state of mind brought on by viewing it -- it's about what you might find when you peer around the corner.
Read the full products at http://www.artsunlight.com/!
Change is in the air
It's the sky. In Myanmar, it dominates the horizon and dwarfs you, whether you are passing through the green fields or on the Irrawaddy. And it's a watercolour. It can never be an oil painting. The luminescence of the light will not allow it to be. From the airplane window, Myanmar is spread out like a Kashmiri carpet, all the pastel hues, an orderly pattern of beiges and greens. The sky is big even in Yangon, a city that feels like Rangoon, but not for long.A hotel room under $100 a night in Yangon is a steal. Rents in Yangon are “more expensive than Manhattan,'' says a diplomat. In Golden Valley in Bahan township, a leafy, posh diplomatic area, even the UN has moved out. “It is all the oil money,'' says an embassy official. An expat family recently moved out when their landlord upped their rent to $10,000 a month.
“Traffic jams,'' says Rajeev Rawal, associate director at Dr Reddy's Laboratories in Myanmar, when asked what has changed in the country. “Four years ago, you never had any.” When the Rawals moved in, the junta was in control. “The army could come and check your house at midnight,'' he says. Mentioning anything political was risky.This seems firmly the past today. The chaos of democracy may not be a reality at the moment, with the junta just playing the game, but there seems to be a freshness in the air.
At red lights in Yangon, hawkers can barely hold the newspapers they are selling. There are now more than 30 of them. Most of the newspapers are in Burmese and have been launched recently. An English daily is due to start soon.New flyovers are being built. “You pass something every day thinking one day you will return to take a picture,'' says Anne Celeste, who left Paris for Myanmar, 12 years ago, after a trip to Bagan, the land of the thousand pagodas. “Then, it disappears. Yangon is changing so fast,” she says.
But, it still retains some from the old. The two worlds have not collided as yet. It is chaotic, yet peaceful. Surprising, yet predictable. There are five-star hotels. Even dance bars. But, the image of a monk in deep maroon, walking with an umbrella, oil painting reproduction. That picture, which has come to symbolise the country, the colonial stereotype, is common enough. Women and men with their face covered with a thick paste of tanakha [a cosmetic preparation] still amble along the streets that are lined with hoardings advertising face-creams. Men still wear longyis. Chai stalls dot every street corner. It looks as if time has stood still.
“It is like the India of the 1950s,'' says Anil Vishwakarma, project director of Essar, which handles several projects in Myanmar. There are malls, but they have not really become a way of life. A holiday is still a time for people to stroll down the lake, holding hands. Children play on jungle gyms. Couples armed with huge umbrellas sit with their back to the world, hiding behind the span of the brollies. But that is only half the picture. There is also the skyscraper that is coming up next to Inle Lake hotel, a condominium with a coffee shop. Another shop sells cappuccino and wine, right next to a stall of Aung San Suu Kyi merchandise.
Air traffic is busy, with Myanmar all set to be the next hot destination. The golden triangle of Bagan, Mandalay and Yangon is connected by four flights a day. As one taxi driver puts it, “Myanmar is booming.”Pansodan Gallery, hidden behind a flyover and up a dingy staircase, is reflective of this change. Piled up with old posters, pictures and paintings, the gallery is a treasure trove for those looking for something beautiful from the past or wanting to invest in bolder strokes of new artists. “This was the first window for artists,'' says Aung Soe Min, the owner. “Now, they get paid better than actors.”
Myanmar isn't simple. It is superstitious. Former dictator Gen. Ne Win shot his reflection in the mirror as an astrologer had predicted that he would be shot. International roaming may still not be available—though in Yangon in some places there was signal—yet at a simple restaurant, the waitress will take your order on a tablet.
The junta can willingly 'relinquish' power to start a democracy. The military has donned the civvies and is on the road to democracy. But, “There is not one official in the director level who is an ethnic. Chief ministers of every state are ex-military,'' says a diplomat. Myanmar has a secret police, one of the most efficient in the world. George Orwell apparently got the idea of 1984 from his stint in the country. Yet, trust is something that is handed out like candy. You can leave your bag with jewellery somewhere, even in a taxi, and will get it back.
Identities are complicated in Myanmar. Your family can have lived here for generations, yet you can be identified as Indian on your national ID. “The whole national movement was against the British,'' says Harn Yawnghwe, executive director of Euro Burma Office. “We don't want any foreigners. This feeling carried on with south Asians and even Indians, who came with the British and stayed on. These elements have not been dealt with. We need to revisit history,” he says.
Yawnghwe is back after 48 years in exile, to help cobble together a peace settlement with the armed ethnic groups. His father, Sao Shwe Thaik, the first president of Burma, died in prison. His brother was shot dead by the army in the coup by Ne Win. There are many such stories of suffering.But in Myanmar, you don't speak of suffering.
Than Win Htut, the planning editor of the Democratic Voice of Burma, too, is back, to start a television talk-show, the first of its kind in Myanmar. There is heated discussion about the format. “We interviewed this couple in which one partner was Buddhist and the other Muslim,'' he says. “I suddenly got a call from a Buddhist monk who told me I was a sympathiser.” These issues still simmer. And will determine the country's future. “My friends have told me to be careful. This whole thing may still be an act by the government. This is new for us. Earlier, we were not allowed to interview officials. Now we can,” says Htut.
The feeling that change may not be everlasting, at least when it comes to politics, comes up in conversations. Do not bring up politics on your own, is what the guide book tells you. But, in Myanmar, politics is like the rain, it is a constant companion. “The government has lied to us for years. They may be lying again,'' says Zarni Mann, a reporter at The Irrawaddy Magazine, who lived in Delhi for seven years.
Democracy may not change the fortunes of the country, but economics will. The biggest challenge for the country will be capacity building. “Money is not a problem. It is flowing into the country like the Irrawaddy,'' says an Indian diplomat. Post-1964, all the teaching in schools was done in Burmese.
Convent schools were shut and foreign teachers were asked to leave. “It is a fairly literate country. But, English is a problem, even for engineers and doctors,'' says a diplomat.
Every city has a story, the kind that defines it. In Bombay, it would be a rags-to-riches story. Delhi has its share of crazy drivers. Or the loud Punjabis who insist that you come for a meal to their house without ever specifying the date. But in Yangon, it will be probably be about generosity. It is the kind of city where you can go into a restaurant, order a soup, get it spectacularly wrong, and not get charged for it. Not because you asked. But the waiter noticed you had not touched it.
Read the full products at http://www.artsunlight.com/!
“Traffic jams,'' says Rajeev Rawal, associate director at Dr Reddy's Laboratories in Myanmar, when asked what has changed in the country. “Four years ago, you never had any.” When the Rawals moved in, the junta was in control. “The army could come and check your house at midnight,'' he says. Mentioning anything political was risky.This seems firmly the past today. The chaos of democracy may not be a reality at the moment, with the junta just playing the game, but there seems to be a freshness in the air.
At red lights in Yangon, hawkers can barely hold the newspapers they are selling. There are now more than 30 of them. Most of the newspapers are in Burmese and have been launched recently. An English daily is due to start soon.New flyovers are being built. “You pass something every day thinking one day you will return to take a picture,'' says Anne Celeste, who left Paris for Myanmar, 12 years ago, after a trip to Bagan, the land of the thousand pagodas. “Then, it disappears. Yangon is changing so fast,” she says.
But, it still retains some from the old. The two worlds have not collided as yet. It is chaotic, yet peaceful. Surprising, yet predictable. There are five-star hotels. Even dance bars. But, the image of a monk in deep maroon, walking with an umbrella, oil painting reproduction. That picture, which has come to symbolise the country, the colonial stereotype, is common enough. Women and men with their face covered with a thick paste of tanakha [a cosmetic preparation] still amble along the streets that are lined with hoardings advertising face-creams. Men still wear longyis. Chai stalls dot every street corner. It looks as if time has stood still.
“It is like the India of the 1950s,'' says Anil Vishwakarma, project director of Essar, which handles several projects in Myanmar. There are malls, but they have not really become a way of life. A holiday is still a time for people to stroll down the lake, holding hands. Children play on jungle gyms. Couples armed with huge umbrellas sit with their back to the world, hiding behind the span of the brollies. But that is only half the picture. There is also the skyscraper that is coming up next to Inle Lake hotel, a condominium with a coffee shop. Another shop sells cappuccino and wine, right next to a stall of Aung San Suu Kyi merchandise.
Air traffic is busy, with Myanmar all set to be the next hot destination. The golden triangle of Bagan, Mandalay and Yangon is connected by four flights a day. As one taxi driver puts it, “Myanmar is booming.”Pansodan Gallery, hidden behind a flyover and up a dingy staircase, is reflective of this change. Piled up with old posters, pictures and paintings, the gallery is a treasure trove for those looking for something beautiful from the past or wanting to invest in bolder strokes of new artists. “This was the first window for artists,'' says Aung Soe Min, the owner. “Now, they get paid better than actors.”
Myanmar isn't simple. It is superstitious. Former dictator Gen. Ne Win shot his reflection in the mirror as an astrologer had predicted that he would be shot. International roaming may still not be available—though in Yangon in some places there was signal—yet at a simple restaurant, the waitress will take your order on a tablet.
The junta can willingly 'relinquish' power to start a democracy. The military has donned the civvies and is on the road to democracy. But, “There is not one official in the director level who is an ethnic. Chief ministers of every state are ex-military,'' says a diplomat. Myanmar has a secret police, one of the most efficient in the world. George Orwell apparently got the idea of 1984 from his stint in the country. Yet, trust is something that is handed out like candy. You can leave your bag with jewellery somewhere, even in a taxi, and will get it back.
Identities are complicated in Myanmar. Your family can have lived here for generations, yet you can be identified as Indian on your national ID. “The whole national movement was against the British,'' says Harn Yawnghwe, executive director of Euro Burma Office. “We don't want any foreigners. This feeling carried on with south Asians and even Indians, who came with the British and stayed on. These elements have not been dealt with. We need to revisit history,” he says.
Yawnghwe is back after 48 years in exile, to help cobble together a peace settlement with the armed ethnic groups. His father, Sao Shwe Thaik, the first president of Burma, died in prison. His brother was shot dead by the army in the coup by Ne Win. There are many such stories of suffering.But in Myanmar, you don't speak of suffering.
Than Win Htut, the planning editor of the Democratic Voice of Burma, too, is back, to start a television talk-show, the first of its kind in Myanmar. There is heated discussion about the format. “We interviewed this couple in which one partner was Buddhist and the other Muslim,'' he says. “I suddenly got a call from a Buddhist monk who told me I was a sympathiser.” These issues still simmer. And will determine the country's future. “My friends have told me to be careful. This whole thing may still be an act by the government. This is new for us. Earlier, we were not allowed to interview officials. Now we can,” says Htut.
The feeling that change may not be everlasting, at least when it comes to politics, comes up in conversations. Do not bring up politics on your own, is what the guide book tells you. But, in Myanmar, politics is like the rain, it is a constant companion. “The government has lied to us for years. They may be lying again,'' says Zarni Mann, a reporter at The Irrawaddy Magazine, who lived in Delhi for seven years.
Democracy may not change the fortunes of the country, but economics will. The biggest challenge for the country will be capacity building. “Money is not a problem. It is flowing into the country like the Irrawaddy,'' says an Indian diplomat. Post-1964, all the teaching in schools was done in Burmese.
Convent schools were shut and foreign teachers were asked to leave. “It is a fairly literate country. But, English is a problem, even for engineers and doctors,'' says a diplomat.
Every city has a story, the kind that defines it. In Bombay, it would be a rags-to-riches story. Delhi has its share of crazy drivers. Or the loud Punjabis who insist that you come for a meal to their house without ever specifying the date. But in Yangon, it will be probably be about generosity. It is the kind of city where you can go into a restaurant, order a soup, get it spectacularly wrong, and not get charged for it. Not because you asked. But the waiter noticed you had not touched it.
Read the full products at http://www.artsunlight.com/!
2013年8月14日星期三
Lux Art Institute begins seventh season
Lux Art Institute, closed for the month of August, is poised to enter its seventh season of welcoming selected artists from around the world to spend a month in residence, creating new work and interacting with visitors of all ages.The 2013-14 season will open Sept. 5 with Matthew Cusick, a native New Yorker, currently based in Texas, who makes haunting collages out of fragments of maps inlaid in acrylic.
“Through a process of cutting up and reassembling fragments of maps from different places and times, I am attempting a more complete representation of an existence,” he writes on his website. In honor of his first long-term stay near the Pacific, he will create a large-scale ocean collage.
Nov. 5 will bring Melora Kuhn, a painter who draws her themes from history and myth. Born in Boston and educated at the Art Institute of Chicago and the School of Lorenzo di Medici in Florence, Italy, she lives in Brooklyn, and her work reveals a world where classical and contemporary elements coexist. The piece she creates at Lux will be a response to the history of the American West, and the extermination of the buffalo.
Three more resident artists will round out the season in 2014: Multimedia artist Marcus Kenney, from Savannah, Ga., is known for his “reclaimed taxidermy,” a backhand homage to the family of hunters he grew up in, and his whimsically macabre Southern Gothic pieces. At Lux, he will be working on his version of Bruegel’s Tower of oil painting reproduction.
Jarmo Makila, an artist from Finland who explores disturbing memories of his boyhood experiences, will create a series of clay sculptures of boys, one for each day of his stay that Lux is open to the public.
Beverly Penn, from Austin, Texas, finds inspiration in nature, interpreting delicate flora in durable bronze. She will collect and cast some of San Diego’s native plants, a number of which can be found in Lux’s own native gardens.
The plan was to meet at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday at a coffee shop at Fourth and Gaskill, where Kelly likes to read. But it was pouring rain. So Miller called Kelly on her cellphone - yes, she has a phone - and they agreed to meet at Kelly's current residence, under the canopy at Headhouse Square. Kelly went over to Xochitl, a Mexican restaurant, grabbed a cardboard box from the trash, and folded it nicely as a seat for her guest. Miller, a retired English teacher at Edison High in Philadelphia who lives in Society Hill Towers, took up painting eight years ago.
She sees beauty in the most unfortunate and met Kelly this winter, when Kelly moved back from Boston after nine years. Kelly, who modeled in the nude for many years for art students at the University of Pennsylvania, is quite proud of her appearance. She's trim, clean, with clear skin. She eats no meat or dairy. "I can't keep my sanity unless I have my nutrition," she says. Were it not for her red and blue shopping carts spilling over with plastic bags holding all her worldly possessions, Kelly might resemble any of the other women of Society Hill, right down to the Crocs on her feet, though, she says, "I prefer Benjamin Lovell."
He also demonstrated his artistic prowess by finishing a small painting in front of the guests. The piece was then auctioned off.Describing his art as more expressionist than abstract, Quah said he painted intuitively without any pre-conceived notion of how the final product would turn out.He said his style was influenced by Van Gogh, De Kooning, Zou Wai Ki and other artists."My work depends on my mood. Most of the time, I paint in a happy mood as I always keep myself happy," said Quah, who was born in Taiping, Perak, but moved to Penang when he was 17.
He has written articles for international publications and been interviewed and featured on radio, television and in the print media many times.He said his Retrospective exhibition at the Penang State Art Gallery in November 2011 was one of the highlights of his career.
While enjoying his time back in Penang, spending time with his family, meeting old friends and making new ones, he said he was still painting in his studio, looking over the horizon for more challenges and new ground to cover.
Read the full products at http://artsunlight.com/.
“Through a process of cutting up and reassembling fragments of maps from different places and times, I am attempting a more complete representation of an existence,” he writes on his website. In honor of his first long-term stay near the Pacific, he will create a large-scale ocean collage.
Nov. 5 will bring Melora Kuhn, a painter who draws her themes from history and myth. Born in Boston and educated at the Art Institute of Chicago and the School of Lorenzo di Medici in Florence, Italy, she lives in Brooklyn, and her work reveals a world where classical and contemporary elements coexist. The piece she creates at Lux will be a response to the history of the American West, and the extermination of the buffalo.
Three more resident artists will round out the season in 2014: Multimedia artist Marcus Kenney, from Savannah, Ga., is known for his “reclaimed taxidermy,” a backhand homage to the family of hunters he grew up in, and his whimsically macabre Southern Gothic pieces. At Lux, he will be working on his version of Bruegel’s Tower of oil painting reproduction.
Jarmo Makila, an artist from Finland who explores disturbing memories of his boyhood experiences, will create a series of clay sculptures of boys, one for each day of his stay that Lux is open to the public.
Beverly Penn, from Austin, Texas, finds inspiration in nature, interpreting delicate flora in durable bronze. She will collect and cast some of San Diego’s native plants, a number of which can be found in Lux’s own native gardens.
The plan was to meet at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday at a coffee shop at Fourth and Gaskill, where Kelly likes to read. But it was pouring rain. So Miller called Kelly on her cellphone - yes, she has a phone - and they agreed to meet at Kelly's current residence, under the canopy at Headhouse Square. Kelly went over to Xochitl, a Mexican restaurant, grabbed a cardboard box from the trash, and folded it nicely as a seat for her guest. Miller, a retired English teacher at Edison High in Philadelphia who lives in Society Hill Towers, took up painting eight years ago.
She sees beauty in the most unfortunate and met Kelly this winter, when Kelly moved back from Boston after nine years. Kelly, who modeled in the nude for many years for art students at the University of Pennsylvania, is quite proud of her appearance. She's trim, clean, with clear skin. She eats no meat or dairy. "I can't keep my sanity unless I have my nutrition," she says. Were it not for her red and blue shopping carts spilling over with plastic bags holding all her worldly possessions, Kelly might resemble any of the other women of Society Hill, right down to the Crocs on her feet, though, she says, "I prefer Benjamin Lovell."
He also demonstrated his artistic prowess by finishing a small painting in front of the guests. The piece was then auctioned off.Describing his art as more expressionist than abstract, Quah said he painted intuitively without any pre-conceived notion of how the final product would turn out.He said his style was influenced by Van Gogh, De Kooning, Zou Wai Ki and other artists."My work depends on my mood. Most of the time, I paint in a happy mood as I always keep myself happy," said Quah, who was born in Taiping, Perak, but moved to Penang when he was 17.
He has written articles for international publications and been interviewed and featured on radio, television and in the print media many times.He said his Retrospective exhibition at the Penang State Art Gallery in November 2011 was one of the highlights of his career.
While enjoying his time back in Penang, spending time with his family, meeting old friends and making new ones, he said he was still painting in his studio, looking over the horizon for more challenges and new ground to cover.
Read the full products at http://artsunlight.com/.
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