Give me the kids on holiday or a 3-day long weekend and I invariably ask them (in vain!) to spring clean their bedrooms. After the usual outcry and refusal this week, I came with a cunning plan to make us all see our bedroom in a whole new light. We headed to the Pasadena Norton Simon Museum to look at the second version of Van Gogh’s Bedroom, never before exhibited on the West Coast. But wait a minute, second version?? Yes, Van Gogh painted 3 versions of his famous Bedroom. This puzzled my 10-year-old daughter since she described her bedroom as unique as, and I quote, “a chest of awesomeness, fun and feelings”. So what exactly happened with Van Gogh? The first version, called Amsterdam version, was painted in 1888. Van Gogh was experiencing a renewal. Settled in Arles, he was happy, full of hope that Gauguin would come to move in the adjacent bedroom, that together they would paint the town as yellow as the house! The Bedroom is therefore his way to present quite a “mature” life project. Never before did Van Gogh stay in the same place for long as he always struggled in all relationships. Interestingly, […]
A large David Hockney retrospective recently opened at Tate Britain. This is not a review of an exhibition I won’t be able to see in person, instead let’s focus on Hockney’s “perspectives”. These should make YOU want to go check out his work, in London before May 29, 2017 or elsewhere. A quick word on depth and perspective. Artists had not figured it out before the Renaissance so they resorted to stacking figures of pretty much equal size in what’s called medieval overlap. Everything looks quite flat and rigid. With the Renaissance came Brunelleschi and Da Vinci. They worked out linear perspective and vanishing point. Have a look at the picture above: even though you know the pier is made of two sets of poles which remain at the same distance from one another, as it recedes in the distance it looks like they shrink and converge into one point, the vanishing point on the horizon line. It’s called monocular perspective. But David Hockney calls it “cyclopic perspective”. Why is that? In his art, David Hockney wants you and him to be “looking with both eyes”. So let’s dive from multiple vantage points. In the 1980’s, Hockney used Polaroid pictures […]
Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa (1830) has been on my mind a lot recently. As a print, it’s widely owned by museums around the world as about 5000 copies would have been made from the original color woodblock. Yet, it’s rarely displayed because prolonged exposure to light can too easily fade its contrasting Prussian blue and indigo. It’s so iconic and recognizable but most of us would know it from cheap reproductions, so how closely have you looked at its many subtle variations? The Great Wave is an unmistakably Japanese image, charged with the uncertainty that Japan would have faced as it was forced out of its self-imposed 200 years of isolationism by the battleships of US Commodore Perry. Fast forward to our daily dose of news from the world and The Great Wave keeps on resonating, bringing to mind the force experienced in the surf as one wave retreats and the next one crests. Processing my feelings through the filter of Art helps me put things in perspective. Think about it. When you’re looking at the Great Wave, as viewer you are also in a boat! And here, Hokusai provides a canvas of universal appeal for everybody to lay down their big (or small) fears […]
Freshly back to my Art History studies, my friend Lorenza was hoping for a few jewel-related stories into the discussions of our course on Impressionism. Jewelry and gemstones are high on my grid but mixed with Impressionism, isn’t it a stretch? Not in my world: Opal is the Impressionist gemstone par excellence! Look at the range of pastel colors this opal displays: the soft brownish orange turning to a blushed apricot and a hint of coral, the green alternating between moss and forest until it fluoresces neon-like while bright aqua blue is dispersed widely with rare specks of royal blue emerging from the depth. This spectacle is what us gemologists call play-of-color, and it is visually very similar to the open and broken brushstrokes associated with the Impressionists and Monet in particular. Let me take you beyond the surface of opal for a bit of gemology… Erosion can have beautiful consequences. Water runs down, picks up mostly silica and other minor elements and becomes a silica-rich solution which permeates cracks. Once there, such solution deposits as small silica spheres which can vary in size depending on temperature and pressure. As the process repeats itself, a whole structure of tiny […]
While in Havana recently, I stumbled on a sculpture garden tucked away in the backyard of an old pretty house off Calle Oficios. The first surprise was to find a sculpture by Rafael Barrios, an op-art artist I discovered in Los Angeles then admired again in Paris. What a surprise to see his work in Havana of all places! Then my eyes took in this beauty, this jewel-toned 3D mural by Cuban artist Alfredo Sosabravo who was born in the 1930’s. He works with many different materials, from oil paint to colourful glass but let me share what I have actually experienced first-hand: his 1992 Palenzuela mural realized with ceramic tiles. Is it a puzzle? Not really. All tiles are squares, uniform in size and most patterns don’t seem to join up correctly apart from one, almost in the center and made of 4 tiles. It represents a stylized sun. Can you see it? Overwhelmed by the size of the mural, my family and I immediately started to look for recognizable shapes as we got closer (a bird! a fish! a frog!). Known quantities acting as a reassuring starting point quickly became reference points. Wait! You see a crab? Yes, 3 up from the sun and 7 tiles to the […]