Catching up: Doing Art 4

 

Two RSA Exhibitions
If you think this looks like it might have been a rather strange exhibition, you're quite right. It was bizarre, amazing, horrifying, and beautiful all at once.

What struck us most forcefully was the "creative taxidermy", whereby separate parts of different animals had been melded together to create fantastical other creatures. Probably not everyone's taste - but we have strong stomachs and didn't mind at all!

Our favourite piece was Out Bursts My Heart by Ashley Niewenhuizen.

Alice said if she'd had hundreds of pounds to spare, she would have bought it! (Heaven alone knows where she'd have worn it...)  The photo here is only a detail, I'm afraid.

And here is one of the artist wearing this necklace / cape, plus very little else, and wildly dancing in it. Wow! She's a real feisty lady.

There's lots more to see on her website by the way. This was under Performance.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi was an eighteenth century artist, and the Royal Scottish Academy put on an exhibition of some of his etchings in their "Lower Level" gallery. This sign pointed down to the depths indeed. It was very dimly lit, too, so the old prints wouldn't fade. I just loved his Carceri, or prisons, and the one on the poster (open it in a new tab to get full size) reminded Alice of some of Escher's impossible perspectives.

This one of a man on a rack should be pretty gruesome, but the victim appears to be quite calm. Not a very pleasant setting, however!

It was really interesting to see how he made his etchings. They had to be done back-to-front, as though in a mirror, so that when they were printed, they came out the right way. The RSA had an example of a tracing he must have made, with pin pricks in it to guide the actual scratching of the wax. Must need a lot of patience. But I'm fascinated by the way these prints make light and dark just with lots of lines.

Alice wants to add that Tenniel's wonderful drawings were made into woodcuts for printing in the Wonderland and Looking Glass books. Yes, yes, that Alice again.

A puzzle for you

Hee-hee! You'll never guess where I am...

 I've become part of art!

Look here, and pick Summerhall to see the answer. 

Alice's friend has kindly put lots of  photos on her SmugMug site, so you can see the other exhibition we went to this Autumn.

There's also even more ones of me in my own gallery there. So feast your eyes, my friends...

Catching up: Doing Art  3

National Galleries of Scotland

Oh dear! We're about to go Down South again, to visit Alice's friend who suggested this blog in the first place. (See 2012 May: Here we go!) And we'll be off to the wonderful Tate Britain Gallery this time, to see the Pre-Raphaelites. Should be positively luscious. So we'll be coming back with even more photos and new insights.

And we still haven't told you about the other exhibitions we saw recently nearer home...

The main Scottish National Gallery (above) is in the centre of Edinburgh, near Princes' Street Gardens. You can see the relatively new cafe and bookshop area which links it with the Royal Scottish Academy building. (Off camera to the right.)
Do click on the images, won't you?

Here's the front of the Royal Scottish Academy, where in fact most of the SNG big exhibitions are held - and advertised between the pillars. A shame I'm so fuzzy, but my photographer said we couldn't have me and the building in focus at once. Sigh...

Van Gogh to Kandinsky

I told Alice to keep it brief (though I doubt she's capable of that!) and not to worry about the extra comments and links - that stuff she so loves hunting out - but just include all the photos of me, and a few interesting ones of the pictures we saw, to give you the general idea.

The exhibition itself was a bit of a cheat - only two each by the named artists, and the original of the famous Sower on the giant poster is really tiny! But it was still exciting to see the marks of every stroke VanG had actually made in 1888 with his own hand and brush. His is a sad story however. Doctor Who and Amy once visited him, to cheer him up by telling him how he became appreciated much later on.

Symbols

The other paintings though, were quite lovely. They said they were all by Symbolist Painters. Now this is what symbols mean to me! Alice has included quite a few astrological ones (trust her!) but the point I'm making is clear, anyway. If you follow the Link, you'll read that these painters were trying to portray emotions and moods. Which they certainly did!

Even gloomy old Munch managed a nice snow scene (Left). You can see the lines and shapes are similar to the ones in his more depressing prints. (See 2012 October: Doing Art.)

And this beautiful woodland scene, (Right) Dew-Drenched Furze, by John Everett Millais was just huge. When you looked from the other end of the gallery, you felt you could walk right into it! Aaah...

Crane's Horses of Neptune (Left) was full of fascinating details when you went up close. Click to see what I mean.

Watts' After the Deluge: the 41st day (Right) was another giant canvas. You'd need to see the original to get the full impact of the brilliant colour. I assume it's meant to be the view after Noah's flood. Alice objects that the supposed flood wasn't created by Noah - but you know what I mean!

One of my favourites was this tiny little painting, Le Pouldu, by Charles Filiger. I liked the simple flowing lines and the pretty colours.

I thought you could make out a woman, with a ragged cloak blowing in the wind, holding onto a tree stump.
Alice just snorted, but agreed to type in my "associations".

Her favourite was Lake Keitele by Akseli Gallen-Kallela. It was truely atmospheric, I have to admit. The guide said it showed the ripples left in the water by Vainamoinem's boat in the Epic of Kalevala. No, I'd never heard of the artist OR the myth, either - but that's the joy of going to these exhibitions. Always something new to learn! So I forgive them the misleading title.

Well, that was definitely not brief. Just as I suspected!

There's still more to come, so watch this space if you're interested in our arty expeditions...

A musical interlude

 

Actually it was a whole concert: but it made an inspiring and enjoyable interlude in our busy lives. A friend had invited us to accompany her, or maybe we wouldn't have spent the money. Wow, it wasn't half good! Worth every one of Alice's pennies. The main item was Carmina Burana, by Carl Orff (that is his name) - an unusual piece of choral music, some bits loud and angry thumping cacophonies (what a lovely noun that is) some parts soft, flowing and mellow. I didn't understand a word, because it was either in Latin or German, but there was a translation in the program. It's based on poems by some renegade and lascivious (a gorgeous adjective too) medieval monks, and is all about boozing and love and sex. Really. One part, O Fortuna, about the Wheel of Fortune which takes you down as well as up, has been used a lot in films and even ads.

Daniel Taylor

There were three soloists, as well as a huge orchestra and choir. The guy with the really deep voice and the soprano lady were both excellent. I felt rather sorry, though, for the man with the pure sweet voice, who only sang for a few minutes out of an hour. Apparently he was portraying a swan being roasted. He actually acted it, with gestures and all. He's Daniel Taylor, fantastically good, and is called a Countertenor. Alice told me about that later on. Back in the 16th century, when the Pope forbade women to sing in church or on stage, boys used to be castrated (shudder) to keep their voices high. Nowadays they don't practice such horrors, and some men can sing these notes with training. But deary me, those popes had a lot to answer for - and still do.

There was a super film about one of the famous nineteenth century "castrati", Farinelli, and Anne Rice (who's mostly known for her vampire books) wrote a beautiful and serious novel on the subject, Cry to Heaven. Apparently these men were as celebrated as today's pop stars, and supposedly were much in demand as lovers, too. Did you ever?

It was freezing cold when it came time to go home again. I was grateful to Alice for so kindly knitting me a scarf like hers to help combat the weather. She did it mostly while watching TV.

But not Homeland! Far too exciting to miss a second...

P.S. Six-year-old Angelina (remember her from August 2012?) who is learning to knit herself, declared it "awesome"!

Recent Films: our top three
NOTE: don't forget to click on the pictures...

Our Favourite
Absolutely the very best of the all the films we've seen recently is the beautiful Beasts of the Southern Wild. It tells the tale of a poor south-of-the levee community in Louisiana, seen through the eyes of a young child. Quvenzhané Wallis was only five when she was cast in the part (all of seven when filming finished) and she's absolutely brilliant! Maybe even a youngest-ever Oscar contender? This first feature from Benh Zeitlin was very much a group effort, and deservedly won accolades at both Sundance and Cannes.

It's about environmental issues, class, poverty, race - as well as being the powerful story of a troubled daughter-father relationship.

The eyes and imagination (both!) of Hushpuppy, as she's called, command the point of view. The eponymous (what a pompous word, but Alice insists) beasts are the aurochs she's been told are prehistoric monsters buried under the ice-caps.

Since she's also learned these are now melting, when a Katrina force storm arrives, she "sees" the aurochs unleashed. They were wonderfully magnificent - and scarey! Alice says this is called Magical Realism. Sounds like an outright contradiction to me...

Alice thinks it's OK to enter another reality through a portal, like Cocteau's Mirror or C S Lewis's Wardrobe: in fact she loved all the Narnia stories as a child. And the Alice books, of course, were an early favourite. But she finds it somewhat disturbing to have it just happen without any transition.

There's a fascinating Making of Beasts of the Southern Wild video here. Yes, we do understand that some people don't like to know anything about a film before they've seen it. However, I like knowing all the ins and outs - it adds to my appreciation, in fact.  

Hear, hear, says Alice.
Hear? I'll never get used to these bizarre human expressions. Seems this one is historical...

Our Second Choice
From indie to block buster! But our tastes are quite eclectic. We actually went along to our second favourite art-house cinema to see this new Bond movie. Why? Because I hate iMax (it gives me a crick in my neck); they have lovely, comfortable, red seats in their Screen One, and it was cheaper there, too.

Skyfall was certainly over-hyped, but only in the sense of there being so very much of it: Moviejuice, Review Show, Mark Kermode on Film 24, even dear old Graham Norton had all three stars on his couch. Despite the hype, which can sometimes put Alice off, we really wanted to see it, and in the event it was well worth it.

It had all the expected running, jumping, chasing and shooting one expects; plus a more interesting plot than the last two, so that was good enough for me to thoroughly enjoy myself.

Alice is a bit more precise in her critical approach. She reckoned Daniel Craig has proved himself as probably the best Bond ever; Judi Dench did full justice to a more complex part for M, and Havier (oops!) Javier Bardem was a chillingly nasty villain, fully matching his role in No Country for Old Men. We also had a new Q in Ben Whishaw, who (handing Bond a tiny lighter-sized radio transmitter) uttered the priceless line, "Were you expecting an exploding pen? We don’t really go in for that any more." I suspect Alice rather took to him.

Moreover, it looked absolutely super, especially the unique title sequence (now on YouTube.) Alice, now, is pretty pernickety when it comes to cinematography, and this got her full approval. So, it's five stars from us both.

And our third recommendation

Ginger And Rosa, directed by Sally Potter (of Orlando fame) is about two best friends, born on the same day. Their growing up together is skillfully established in a series of quick and emotive scenarios. As teenagers in the "swinging" London of the 1960s they come face to face with the Cold War nuclear threat, as well as encountering sex, love and some complex family and friendship relationship problems. The parents and other adults exhibit all shades of sixties' opinions and bohemian craziness. The script and direction are excellent. The acting is first class all round.
See this review, and this one too.

Alice herself is of the same generation as the girls, and remembers well the terror she felt during the Cuban Missile Crisis - the fear of total human annihilation, just like Rosa. But even if you didn't live through it, the film is worth seeing just to get a feel of what it was like. It's also a very good film indeed.

Going to the Cinema

This photo is irrelevant really, but the gate (of the Central Public Library) is rather splendid, so I wanted to include it. This means Alice has to be allowed a little rant about how wonderful the library sytem is. Oh, all right. She says you can go online, search for a book, and if it's in any of the city's 30 branches, you can reserve it and when it's free they'll send it to your local one to collect! And no charge. Pretty smooth - OK?

Actually we were going across the road to the (not so inspiring) entrance of the Scottish National Library, to see an exhibition about Scotland at the cinema. They had Scottified (so what else can I call it?) some famous film quotes to publicise it.

There was lots of stuff: old posters; movie mags; an antique cine camera (a bit like this one); lantern slides of ads; and screens showing clips from old silent films and early talkies.

There's a good video about it all by Summerhall, and an interesting review at beautybombshells with details and pictures. Exactly why the word "bombshells" in this contex? You may indeed ask. Alice Googled and Googled away, eventually found a picture here, which can't be right, and a more suggestively helpful definition at an online Dictionary.

You humans do love to make a word work hard. I hope you pay them more, like Humpty Dumpty.

NEXT TIME we'll tell you about films we've been seeing - plus some we're really looking forward to.