Category Archive: ART
Mr Turner
Mr Turner embraces the culture of varnish (by Thomas Fearnley, 1837)
(Dir. Mike Leigh) (2014) “Grrrrr.” Stoically holding back the memories of Dali’s opinion of J M W Turner (1775-1851) which we largely share, and of many of Mr Leigh’s previous films (a herd of head-in-oven slices of domestic life), The Varnished Culture settled down to see this handsome period piece on the famous British proto-impressionist. To our disadvantage, we had failed to recall the usual outcome of painterly biographies – more agony than ecstasy. It doesn’t look bad – lots of lovely brown and gold set pieces, a la Peter Greenaway, and a terrific re-creation of the Fighting Temeraire tugged to its last berth…
Continue Reading →“I shall freeze after the sun”
Albrecht Dürer (1471 – 1528) Anthony Bertram, in a note that is a masterpiece of concision, stated: “Dürer is one of the very few artists of whom it may be said that their craftsmanship was nearly too much for their genius.”`~ His level of detail is almost insane, but he was also a radical innovator in terms of imagery. As an illustration of his growth, stemming from troubled personal identity and the stirrings of the Reformation, consider the beautiful, albeit traditional, Sorrows: …and compare it to the painting of Christ among the doctors, in a dazzling modern rendering from Luke 2:47, and…
Continue Reading →Canaletto
Giovanni Antonio Canal (1697 – 1768) had perfect name for a master painter of Venice scenes but he adopted the diminutive Canaletto, which had been used to distinguish him from his scene-painter father. His hundreds of beautifully precise and detailed pictures of the city-state of his birth, suffused with wonderful light, have attracted veiled criticism as proto-photographic (camera obscura) and lacking imagination. Actually, his art exceeded that of photographs. Try comparing any of his works re-produced here at random with some Venice photographs produced by the singular professionals at The Varnished Culture… “[T]he Venetian school…was still lively enough to provide the swan-song of…
Continue Reading →Cry Jailolo
Oz Asia Festival, “Cry Jailolo” (Dunstan Playhouse, Festival Theatre, Adelaide) (24/9/15) Jailolo, part of the Indonesian archipelago, has coughed-up a troupe of seven fit young men who (choreographed by Eko Supriyanto) present a genuinely novel dance sequence based on indigenous tribal myth from North Malaku, with modern overtones of environmental threat to a pristine local environment. Sinuous, mesmerizing, ephemeral and fluid, involving moves that are both new and alien, this is an interpretation that intrigues and engages lovers of dance and agnostics alike. Their unusual motion, use of light and shade, stillness, subtle use of hand and foot for percussion, and sense of space,…
Continue Reading →Alexandros of Antioch
Louvre photo of Venus by Chosovi
The Venus from Melos, gesturing toward Cupid, shows the apotheosis of the ideal sculptural style under the stewardship of Hellenistic Greece, as produced by the superb Alexandros, who with a handful of colleagues cruelly leave the ruins of their works, deistic and profane (e.g. Nike of Samothrace, the Apollo Belvedere, the head of Alexander, the Altar of Zeus, the Laocoon) to shame and humiliate the abject poverty and sloppiness of all efforts in the plastic arts in the 22 hundred years since. We are near the ninth circle of hell in respect of the plastic arts today. Exhibit A: the work of Jeffrey…
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