Posts in Category: Art History
Vancouver And Region | View on Canadian Art
Vancouver And Region | View on Canadian Art.
It’s been over one week since Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was arrested by the Chinese government at Beijing airport. He has not been heard from since and the government is accusing him of ‘economic crimes’.
Where is he? And why aren’t Canadians demanding to know?
Ai Weiwei is best known for his installation Sunflower Seeds, currently on view at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Each porcelain seed was made and hand painted by Chinese specialists working in Jingdezhen, emphasizing the labour that has gone into the project. As someone suggested to me recently, seeds are about potential growth. So you can imagine the impact of a hundred million seeds carpeting the Turbine Hall.
The House of Commons Heritage Collection
Fine Arts
Fine arts represent one of the most recognizable elements in the Heritage Collection. Official portraits, paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, murals, and frescoes all fall within this category. This part of the collection also includes some of the oldest heritage items on Parliament Hill, dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. Fortunately, most of these older pieces were saved when the original Parliament building was destroyed by fire in 1916.
Virtual Choir
Virtual Choir on TED
Not really Art History but still cool use of the medium.
I particularly like the quote “All my life I had seen in black and white and… now shocking technicolour. The single most transformative moment in my life.”
Be sure to click Keep reading…
For those unfamiliar with Mozart TURN UP the volume and press play:
While I have heard an amazing version of the Kyrie in la Madeleine in Paris
few years ago, for me this moment of revelation was Bach’s Toccata & Fugue in d minor.
Again TURN UP the volume and BASS, imagine yourself 18 years old, alone in France, and standing in the middle of the labyrinth in Chartre Cathedral when suddenly:
Press play:
The day before the world had exploded into Technicolour as I stood in front of my first Van Gogh.
It is also called an epiphany
…lane
JR TED talk
MUST READ/WATCH FOR ALL SINCE 45
The Ghost of a Flea (William Blake)
The Ghost of a Flea (William Blake) : Tate Britain
Also a good article at my favourite Art blog MADAME PICKWICK called Pulling the Beard of the King
Art Project
Explore museums from around the world, discover and view hundreds of artworks at incredible zoom levels, and even create and share your own collection of masterpieces.
Turner, Death on a Pale Horse
UNPLEASANTLY SANE & MYSTICALLY MAD | Madame Pickwick Art Blog
UNPLEASANTLY SANE & MYSTICALLY MAD | Madame Pickwick Art Blog.
“William Blake is an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement….the proor man fancies himself a great master, and has painted a few wretched pictures, some of which are intelligible allegory, others an attempt at sober character by caricature representation, and the whole “blotted and blurred”, and very badly drawn. These he calls an Exhibition, of which he has published a Catalogue, or rather farrago of nonsense, unintelligibleness, and egregious vanity, the wild effusions of a distempered brain. ” ( The Examiner, 1808 )
Long before our time, William Blake ( 1757-1827 ) believed that Christianity was a revolutionary faith and poetry a radical art, and that the poet’s duty was to speak for the slave, the captive, and the poor. Yesterday’s lunacy has a disconcerting way of becoming today’s wisdom; more than 200 years have passed since the unsigned review above appeared and in the meanwhile William Blake’s wild effusions have acquired an almost Biblical authority. Had he been a Catholic, he might have been canonized by now
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