December 15th, 2009
"Blue Experiment", by Marguerita Bornstein (2008)
Marguerita Bornstein – an artist who has in the past been so well known that her first name sufficed to identify her to millions – is the kind of person whose need to create, and whose talent for it, causes her to work across a range of forms. Illustrator, animator, painter, sculptor, and mixed media artist, she has been lauded for drawings that have graced the covers of major magazines and for her contributions to post-modern art exhibitions. “One of the strongest and most sexual works in the show,” wrote a reviewer of 1997’s Sex/Industry (Stefan Stux Gallery, New York), “the mixed media work by Marguerita uses a metal box, an old gourd, and a coconut to create a piece more honestly sexual and arousing than most of the anatomically correct phalluses and cartoon animal jokes in the main gallery.” Alas, I can offer no pictures to match this intriguing description. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: illustration, Marguerita Bornstein, O Rebu
Posted in Art & literature, Film & TV | No Comments »
December 12th, 2009
I produced this somewhat dark-themed picture as a submission to Dinotopia illustrator James Gurney’s “Art by Committee” challenge (which he hosts on his fascinating blog, Gurney Journey). This month, Gurney invited his readers to submit works depicting the hypothetical owner of this (actually quite real) business card:
As you’ll probably deduce from the drawing, my mind went in directions both sci-fi and seedy — triggered mainly by contemplating the male reaction to the implausibly optimistic marketing promise “A Wish Come True”. In terms of materials, I took a step back from charcoal on this one, using it mainly for the rain-esque backdrop and for a bit of skin tone and shadowing. Most of the drawing is rendered in graphite.
Tags: cinderella, james gurney
Posted in Drawings | No Comments »
November 18th, 2009
My apologies for a two-month absence from posting, but I’ve had an autumn which has been filled with distractions — some work-related, yes, but others more enjoyable than that. I had the pleasure of editing a fascinating chapter of a good friend’s upcoming book. I caught up on the first half of the first season of Mad Men. And I finally began to make steady progress on a newly-adopted hobby: drawing.
I’ll tackle the “why” in a later post. For now, glance at the scrappy little drawing above, which for all its lack of polish and professionalism nevertheless marks a breakthrough for me. Until this picture, I’d been drawing faces with pencils (good ones, mind you), and the precision of these tools had encouraged my involuntary tendency to produce fussy little pictures that lacked any shreds of the visual impact that I’d been seeking. The people I drew, however beautiful in reality, consistently ended up narrow-eyed and unattractive on paper.
Finally, I decided to experiment with the big chunks of graphite and charcoal that came with my Derwent sketching kit. I worked carefully, but with increasing pleasure. Thirty minutes later I was finished, and thrilled. This was the look I had been searching for. There’s a real joy that comes with achieving even a modest victory when you’ve had to build your skills up from nothing.
What now? Be assured that I haven’t given up one love for another — I’ll start re-engaging with this blog in upcoming weeks. But over time what I’m hoping to do is to experiment a little with working illustrations into my essays, to see where that leads, whether it improves the final product, and whether anything fun and original comes out of it. I very much look forward to hearing your feedback and suggestions as I go along.
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September 14th, 2009
Though few members of the public give much thought to ranking the prestige of different art forms, if forced to do so it is likely that watercolour painting would be granted an affectionate but decidedly second-tier status. We think of pretty landscapes formed with washed-out pigments: light browns, greens, yellows, pinks and reds that tend to pink, of Englishmen in sunhats sitting patiently in a field, enjoying a hobby for idle gentlemen. Meanwhile, in a stratum below all of this lies our childhood memories of dipping thin brushes in water, rubbing them against coins of hard paint, and applying the resultant mixture to soggy paper.
There is some truth to all of this, but it is at best a half-truth. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the emergence of painters who used watercolours to sublime effect: Thomas Girtin, John Constable, and J.M.W. Turner – who produced three times as many paintings based on watercolours as on oils — elevated landscape art to a position of dominance, at least for a time. Lesser known today but judged by earlier critics to have been one of the most innovative and artistic of the watercolourists was John Sell Cotman (1782-1842).
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Tags: Girtin, John Sell Cotman, Turner, watercolour painting, Wordsworth
Posted in Art & literature, History | No Comments »
September 10th, 2009
Readers of the Globe and Mail will already have seen today’s front-page-above-the-fold article on diplomat Robert Fowler’s return to Canada and his interview on national TV about his abduction last year by a splinter group of AQIM (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb — itself a splinter group of the Algerian insurgency of the 1990s), which adds some interesting first-person colour to this otherwise murky story. If you missed it the first time around, you may wish to read my August 7 post on the recent history and wider context of politics and insurgency in northwest Africa, and on the contested identity of AQIM itself.
Tags: Algeria, AQIM, Mali, Robert Fowler
Posted in Foreign Affairs, History | No Comments »
You say you want a revolution. Didn't you?
September 3rd, 2009
Daughter of a Tamil revolutionary, witness to civil war, refugee, pioneer of “global ghetto funk”, outspoken creator of a politically-charged debut album and of an even more creative follow-up album that she recorded in locations around the world after being denied a visa to work in the U.S. — a rebel’s badge of honour if there ever was one — to many, M.I.A. is nothing less than the street-slanged spokesperson of the twenty-first century Global South.
Yet Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam is also the woman who flew to Los Angeles in February to perform at the Grammy Awards (heavily pregnant, she gave birth to a son a couple of days later) and who is engaged to Benjamin Bronfman, son of Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. (previously the man responsible for — to be diplomatic — misplacing his family’s Seagram liquor empire) — and who will soon become, in tying this particular knot, a part of the establishment. She’s no Che Guevara.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Gil Scott-Heron, M.I.A., Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam, Midnight Oil
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
August 10th, 2009
Those of you who read Sans Everything as well as Archipelagoes will know that every couple of weeks I try to present a capsule profile of an interesting artist or photographer, showcasing his or her work in the banner image at the top of the site. Archipelagoes doesn’t have a banner image, but that seems like little reason to refrain from presenting the same works and talents here. I hope you enjoy them.
"A History of Parrots, Drifting Maps and Warming Seas", by John Wolseley (2005)
Born in England just before World War II, John Wolseley didn’t move to Australia until he was 38. But over the subsequent three decades, the immigrant has made the continent his own, travelling extensively through its length and breadth, and making art that captures its essence as a natural system playing out over the ages of deep history. Incorporating (at different times and in different proportions) painting, drawing, and natural processes and media — including buried paper and charcoaled trees — his work has depicted such phenomena as continental drift, the stages of a brush fire, and the denizens of the Wallace Line, which demarcates the flora and fauna of Asia from that of Australia.
The surface water has invented its own complex geographies alternating times of flow, times of rest – as it dances with the aquifers and deeper water tables. There is an ancient relationship between the waterways , creeks, billabongs and their flood plains. I have been marvelling at the lines of energy radiating from swamps and water holes, and seasonal creeks full of bird, animal and plant life.
More than ever before I found that this process of making a watercolour seemed to be analagous to the action and process by which water moves and forms the landscape itself. I’ve been laying these huge sheets of paper on to softly descending banks of sand hills, and start in a rather wild and physical way by pouring, brushing, sploshing quantities of watercolour which I have previously mixed up in large bowls. All these watery landscape elements around me are then recreated on the paper.
– John Wolseley, “Journal Notes“
Tags: Australia, John Wolseley
Posted in Art & literature, Environment | No Comments »
August 7th, 2009
According to American and European intelligence and military sources, there is a growing menace to Western security in (to use the intervention-justifying cliché of recent times) “the vast ungoverned spaces” of northwest Africa. A New York Times story published earlier this month itemized a string of violent events in the region that officials blame on Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), a group that apparently formed in the final years of the Algerian civil war of the 1990s and that was until recently known as the Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat (GSPC).
“Is there a threat? There sure is a threat,” Gen. William E. “Kip” Ward, commander of the two-year old United States Africa Command, told journalists in June, and the NYT piece echoes his tone of certainty. By only its third paragraph, the idea that the incidents “reflect Al Qaeda’s growing tentacles” in the region has already appeared as a foundational assumption.
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Tags: Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat, Jeremy Keenan, Sahel, Tuareg
Posted in Foreign Affairs, History | No Comments »
July 5th, 2009
Anamaria Marinca in Cristian Mungiu's "4 Weeks, 3 Months, and 2 Days" (2007)
At the beginning of Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or-winning film 4 Weeks, 3 Months, and 2 Days, the camera lingers on a goldfish in a square bowl. The fish seems to be trying to escape, not by jumping out, but by pushing directly against the glass, its tail thrusting spiritedly but without result.
It is an effective if too obvious metaphor for Romanian society under the latter days of communist strongman Nicolae Ceauşescu; the action here takes place in 1987, two years before the dictator’s fall. As the camera pulls back, we see that the bowl rests on a fold-out table in the dorm room of two female students at a regional technical college. The women are preparing for a trip of some kind. Gabita is packing a bag nervously, while Otilia ventures up and down the halls of the dorm, attempting to buy a pack of Kent cigarettes from a student-run black market dispensary two doors down, and purchasing soap for her friend to add to her baggage.
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Tags: 4 Weeks 3 Months and 2 Days, Cristian Mungiu, Das Leben der Anderen, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Posted in Film & TV, Foreign Affairs, History | No Comments »
June 4th, 2009
June 3/09 (Reuters): “Dead whale found on bow of Exxon tanker in Alaska”
Oh, how the entire PR unit of ExxonMobil must have gone to bed on Monday night praising God that no photographer happened to be hanging around the terminal the day that tanker came in. But while this particular image-as-metaphor will apparently have to be provided by and preserved in our own imaginations, the report itself does contain one passage of almost poetic sadness:
Neither crew members on the Kodiak nor those aboard the tugs that escorted the tanker during the final approach to Valdez noticed anything out of the ordinary during the transit, said Ray Botto, external affairs manager for SeaRiver Maritime.
“There was nothing that suggested any deviation from standard operating practice,” he said, adding the poor condition of the whale, which had a noticeable stench, suggests it had been dead for a while.
Sums up the whole progress of civilization, somehow, doesn’t it?
Tags: dead whale, ExxonMobil
Posted in Environment | No Comments »
