Art: March 2008 Archives
'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.
