Recently in Art Category
Last Sunday we went to the Kroller-Muller museum in the Hoge Veluwe. I had such a great time that I've been nervous about writing about it in case it tarnishes.
They have Seurats! The neo-impressionist paintings were my favourite, including the Pissarros. Another artist who was striking, yet weirdly not tied to any one style was Jan Toorop. After seeing his work I had to go Google him.
The current exhibition of photographs running alongside the main collection, entitled Nature as Artifice was really fascinating. The photographers use different techniques to capture the Dutch landscape, ranging from creating dioramas of the landscape and photographing it as if it were real to attaching a camera to a kite and taking photos by remote control at precisely the moment when the landscape becomes abstract. Again I found the secondary exhibition to be more interesting than the main collection, maybe because it's more current.
I was pretty stunned when I saw that there are paintings dating from 550 AD! I wonder if those people who painted them ever thought that there would be people standing looking at their work in a building so far removed from the monasteries of the 5th century? We are all so contained in our own 'now' that this as a possibility just seems absolutely surreal.
Not as surreal though as the discussion we had cycling back to the car park where we listened to the birdsong and then wondered aloud whether town birds go on vacation to the country in the summer ...
The museum cafe is lovely (beware the richness of the chocolate cake, but order the ham and cheese sandwich as the ham is some of the nicest I've ever tasted) and the surroundings are beautiful and unspoiled. This specific Sunday afternoon was part of one of the nicest days of my life. I started off depressed about Africa and spent the morning in tears but by the afternoon it had all turned to sunshine. Later on there was icecream- mine was melon, pear and peach and then we watched Juno. It's a nice movie but a bit overacted.
And for the next 52 Sundays, (more or less), take a look at this website (Dutch only, sorry). It's the website linked to a great book that takes you for a walk and a meal every Sunday to unusual locations in the Netherlands and Belgium. Now just to decide where to go this Sunday!
Also I have to share the Verve kick I'm on right now ...
They have Seurats! The neo-impressionist paintings were my favourite, including the Pissarros. Another artist who was striking, yet weirdly not tied to any one style was Jan Toorop. After seeing his work I had to go Google him.
The current exhibition of photographs running alongside the main collection, entitled Nature as Artifice was really fascinating. The photographers use different techniques to capture the Dutch landscape, ranging from creating dioramas of the landscape and photographing it as if it were real to attaching a camera to a kite and taking photos by remote control at precisely the moment when the landscape becomes abstract. Again I found the secondary exhibition to be more interesting than the main collection, maybe because it's more current.
I was pretty stunned when I saw that there are paintings dating from 550 AD! I wonder if those people who painted them ever thought that there would be people standing looking at their work in a building so far removed from the monasteries of the 5th century? We are all so contained in our own 'now' that this as a possibility just seems absolutely surreal.
Not as surreal though as the discussion we had cycling back to the car park where we listened to the birdsong and then wondered aloud whether town birds go on vacation to the country in the summer ...
The museum cafe is lovely (beware the richness of the chocolate cake, but order the ham and cheese sandwich as the ham is some of the nicest I've ever tasted) and the surroundings are beautiful and unspoiled. This specific Sunday afternoon was part of one of the nicest days of my life. I started off depressed about Africa and spent the morning in tears but by the afternoon it had all turned to sunshine. Later on there was icecream- mine was melon, pear and peach and then we watched Juno. It's a nice movie but a bit overacted.
And for the next 52 Sundays, (more or less), take a look at this website (Dutch only, sorry). It's the website linked to a great book that takes you for a walk and a meal every Sunday to unusual locations in the Netherlands and Belgium. Now just to decide where to go this Sunday!
Also I have to share the Verve kick I'm on right now ...
'What I said is, just what I`m hoping for.' - Adele, Daydreamer
Georges Seurat has always been one of my favourite artists (despite still not knowing exactly how to pronounce his name). So this afternoon, standing on a bridge on my way to collect the kids, I looked up. Above and all around me was a swirling mass of snowflakes. Little pinpoints of white against a grey sky.
Just like being in a Seurat.
Beautiful.
'They call me the wild rose...' - Nick Cave & PJ Harvey, Where the Wild Roses Grow
Yesterday, before lunch I went to see Millais at the van Gogh museum.
The poetry trail was a stroke of genius! You can listen and watch on the website, or you can download to your ipod and walk around the museum and actually look at the paintings and listen. The John Donne poem, The Autumnal, combined with the painting it inspired, Lingering Autumn, all golden brushstrokes made me gasp. This excerpt from the poem is famous, but no less beautiful for it's fame:
As usual, I liked the pieces that are not the main focus of the exhibition, like the sketches, more. There is a whole section of the exhibition devoted to the sketches and commercial illustrations of Millais. Once the poetry trail was finished I listened to Leonard Cohen and the music blended seamlessly with the pictures. His Take This Longing and The Eve of St Agnes together. 'Oh take this longing from my tongue'.No spring nor summer beauty hath such graceAs I have seen in one autumnal face.Young beauties force our love, and that's a rape,This doth but counsel, yet you cannot scape.If 'twere a shame to love, here 'twere no shame;Affection here takes reverence's name.
A century apart and yet emotionally so close.
The exhibition alongside Millais, called Me, Ophelia is worth going for alone. I was captivated by the work of Hellen van Meene. I paged through her most recent book,
which shows on images of teen pregnancies and was astonished at the
powerful emotions some of the images evoked. Hellen van
Meene captures this perfectly in her photographs.
Rineke Dijkstra's work is also striking. A bloody theme follows through in some of her portraits, many show a smear of blood across a collar, a face, a neck. (Edited to correct an error. See comments.)
One of the images shows a teenager standing holding her newborn with blood trickling down the inside of her thighs. I was a teen mom and I remember sitting on the step outside my flat in Harare, blood trickling down my own thighs through my cotton shorts, two buckets in front of me, washing loads of terry nappies by hand.
The blood loss after childbirth was physically and symbolically, a sort of trickling away of my sense of self, one drop at a time.
**John Everett Millais runs at the van Gogh museum, Amsterdam until 18 May 2008.
Rineke Dijkstra's work is also striking. A bloody theme follows through in some of her portraits, many show a smear of blood across a collar, a face, a neck. (Edited to correct an error. See comments.)
One of the images shows a teenager standing holding her newborn with blood trickling down the inside of her thighs. I was a teen mom and I remember sitting on the step outside my flat in Harare, blood trickling down my own thighs through my cotton shorts, two buckets in front of me, washing loads of terry nappies by hand.
The blood loss after childbirth was physically and symbolically, a sort of trickling away of my sense of self, one drop at a time.
**John Everett Millais runs at the van Gogh museum, Amsterdam until 18 May 2008.
