Category Archive: ART
Amazing Leonardo
(Directed by Jesus Garces Lambert) (2019) Made to mark the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death, “Amazing Leonardo” has its moments but seems to suffer from constraints of more than budget. This is potted dramatic biography of the great artist, of which much is known through his notes and the art history of Vasari; here we tend to focus mainly on work during his patronage in Milan by its Duke, Ludovico Sforza, (informed by the work of art historian Pietro C. Marani of the Politecnico di Milano, who assisted Walter Isaacson in his recent book.) Italian A-lister Luca Argentero…
Continue Reading →Danielle De Nardis
'Frank' from "Donnie Darko"?
From the slow-flowing religious texts of stained windows, to the functional elegance of cut-glass vessels, to the glass beads used by callow schoolboys and high aesthetes, glass has fascinated for millennia. Glassblowing is fascinating. It combines creativity with industrial techniques to render the amorphous solid into dazzling shapes, sometimes functional, sometimes merely beautiful. The use of small furnaces in individual artists’ studios revolutionised the genre in and from the middle part of the 20th century, and for those artistes prepared to risk the respiratory diseases that can come of the process (without due care), there is an increasing interest and demand…
Continue Reading →Sydney Dance Company: “Neon Aether”/ “Cinco” / “WOOF”
Adelaide Festival Centre, 8 August 2019 *** Sydney Dance Company is marking its fiftieth anniversary with this three part performance, currently touring Australia. Although each half-hour long part is created by an individual choreographer (after which it is named; the title-names above were not used in the Adelaide performance), all three are connected by a sinuous melancholy. The corps, of 5 to 11 male and female dancers occupy an empty space, leavened only by fog and low, diffuse lighting. The first piece, choreographed by Gabrielle Nankivell, begins and is punctuated by darkness and the sound of machinery, perhaps a lift…
Continue Reading →It’s a Date
History and the Everlasting Present History is infinite, Culture diffuse. To aid our sense of perspective, however, to use the past to process the everlasting present, we have to start somewhere; a sketch, in linear fashion, with what we think are key (often approximate) dates, including taking ‘B.C.’ (sorry, we still prefer ‘BC’ and ‘AD’) as modern year zero, rather than 4 years before. Needless to say, this is a work in progress. ‘Years ago’ based on year of first publication – 2019. Too long ago to tell – Fire. The first cave art. Harvest of wheat and grains. The Wheel….
Continue Reading →Fake or Fortune: Artists’ Techniques
A talk by Andrew Durham, The David Roche Foundation, Adelaide, 20 June 2019 In a wide-ranging and rather disordered lecture, Art Conservator Andrew Durham (from Artlab) covered topics as diverse as art forgery, preservation, techniques and use of materials, as well as the problems posed to conservation and preservation by the anarchic and chaotic predilections of artists. Durham moved at speed from one vignette to another, but the Big Theme was the overarching and critical need for care: in use of materials, in execution, and in knowing when to down tools. In the Good Old Days, of course, the first 2…
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