magic eye

I used to love magic art pictures when they first came out. It took me forever to see a picture in them at first, but once I'd figured out the trick of it, it became easy. How about you?

Edit: Now that April Fools Day is over, I'm adding a real magic eye picture. Hey I never actually said those were magic eye pics! :)

2 things challenge: partial/whole

This is my first entry for the 2 Things Challenge. Each week there's a different theme and you can represent the words artistically as you choose.

This week the theme is partial/whole. These two photos were taken in the Melbourne Airport. I had some time to kill before my flight, so I wandered a while with my camera. I think this floor mosaic captured the theme (the tiny irregular tiles each a part of the whole) and I love the colours, too.

This last one isn't a great photo, but I thought people might like to get a sense of what the whole mosaic looks like.

all my friends in los angeles should expect an email

From Neil Gaiman's blog comes the news that the illustrator I find most intriguing in the world, Dave McKean, is not only having an exhibition at the The Merry Karnowsky Gallery (July 19 - August 16), but also will be at the opening on the 19th of July. Which is open to the public. Of which I am a member. Except that I live 12,325 km (7658 miles) away.

AAAAAARGH!

If I was rich I'd be on a plane next week to LA. (Though in fairness if I was rich I would have been visiting jojo, Tetchan and Ai in LA every six months for the last five years. And a bunch of other people in a bunch of other places.) But anyway...if anyone in or near LA happens to read this, do try and get along to this thing.

Dave McKean is not like any artist you've ever seen before.

One of my (previously) secret goals in life is to write a book for which Dave McKean would want to do the cover. Actually I'm writing the book now. Getting Dave to read it might be more difficult. Perhaps after it wins a Hugo. (Hey what's the point of having goals if they aren't lofty?)

good art?

I was interested to read JB's post on recently seeing Van Gogh's art. It made me think about how I interact with art and how long it's been since I took the time to go to the art gallery or view an exhibition of new artists. I need to change that.

Anyway, here's the comment I posted. By the time I finished, it felt like a blog post:

I often get those Walkman-style guides to the art when I see an exhibition. They give real insight into the piece, the artist and what they tried to convey, and sometimes the reasons that piece of art is considered significant or 'good art'. I don't always agree with their conclusions, but sometimes I've genuinely learned to appreciate the painting or artist.

For me personally, good art (or the art I respond to most on an visual or emotional level) is all about the way they use light.

My favourite painting is a small Rembrandt called 'Strawberries'. I had seen a postcard of the painting and liked it, but when I actually saw it at an exhibition I found myself standing in front of it for about fifteen minutes. Though definitely painted and not looking photographically real, it looked like you could have just plucked the strawberries from the painting and eaten them and they would have tasted wonderful. It was like actual strawberries would have looked at the painting and recognised it as how they might look if they went to heaven. That probably sounds a bit silly, but that simple painting of strawberries really captivated me. I wish I could have posted a picture of it, but I can't seem to find it on the web. If I can find my postcard version I'll scan it.

I guess there's some merit in considering what makes good art, but in the end art is always a personal experience, and if we love, or understand, or are moved by, some piece of art considered unworthy by experts, who cares?

What does 'good art' mean to you?

artwatch

Anna Osk is one of a few photographers whose work I like to keep track of. She's generally good, but every once in a while she creates something that is really striking. This picture is called Spaceball and was the latest piece to make me look twice...and then a third time.

i realise this is a bit snotty on my part

...but sometimes I wonder how people write (and say) stuff like this with a straight face:

This site was established in November of 2006 by Virginia L. Beach, better known in the Pagan Community as Reverend Ocean - a Wiccan High Priestess and ordained Pagan Clergy from the Midwest of the USA.

I know I couldn't listen to someone introduce themselves this way without snorting. Much as I adore Marion Zimmer Bradley books, I often laughed out loud while reading her novels where some of the central characters were Celtic priestesses. Of course that kind of connection and obsession with nature and ritual made more sense in the historical context, but there is something about the way some modern pagans (particularly Wiccans) take themselves so seriously that makes me roll my eyes. Maybe I'm just not sufficiently in touch with the Goddess...

On a side note, this woman is deaf and that makes me wonder if she chants/incants in sign language or in voice. Both maybe. It's not like it matters, but it made me curious.

She does have this very cool picture on her site. It's like they caught the dryad inside the tree on camera while she was busy being glorious and didn't see them. And yes I realise there's a good chance it's photoshopped, but don't spoil the magic. ;)

five days in melbourne

Okay, so Melbourne was mostly great, but it had its downside. You'll see what I mean as I go along. People-wise I spent the first three days staying with a friend and her husband, and spending my time with them and a close friend of theirs who lives in Melbourne. We also saw a lot of my friend's daughter, who moved to Melbourne about six months ago.

First night in I saw Miss Saigon. It's a powerful story, and the production was wonderful, particularly the staging (the sets were great and at one point you would have sworn that a real helicopter landed on the stage and then took off again). I have to admit though that the score was kind of average. The one exception was a really stirring song at the beginning of the second act called "Bui Doi". It's a song about the Amerasian children fathered by GIs during the Vietnam war, children who went on to be pariahs in their own society once the US withdrew. The whole time the song was sung they showed images of these children, including some from the child camps they were put into after the war. Here's a youtube link to the song. Here are the lyrics.

The next day we had lunch at Fifteen, the restaurant that Jamie Oliver set up in Melbourne to offer a career opportunity to troubled youth. The first batch of trainees were part of a television series that showed their personal journeys to become chefs and the setting up of the restaurant itself. Of course there were a few who wasted their opportunity, but I was so impressed with most of them and the way they really turned their lives around that I wanted to visit the restaurant if the chance came. Thirty percent of the profits go back into the foundation to train other young people, too. I like the combination of a casual atmosphere with silver service level dining, and the food was SO GOOD! ( I had the Roasted Berkshire pork with fennel seed and rosemary, Mt Zero lentils, baby chard, crème fraiche and pan juices. Chocolate nemesis (yes Nemesis, apparently there's a dessert named after you) with pistachio biscotti and blood plum. Mmm.)

Later that night we hit the Pink concert. She is so powerful, so bold. Most of the songs were from her latest album, I'm Not Dead, which I like a lot. Unfortunately the concert indirectly led to me having an argument with one of my best friends over Pink's song, "Stupid Girls". She was basically defending the girls the song describes(here's an excellent explanation of the song if you're interested), saying that if all they care about was partying and shopping and being a size 0, that that was their right. I tried for a solid hour to explain that the song is not targeting them individually so much as the superficial culture they represent, and that while it certainly is their right to live as they choose, I'm allowed (and Pink's allowed) to have an opinion about it, especially if I feel their lifestyle is negatively affecting girls who think they are supposed to emulate it. There's nothing wrong with calling something stupid if it IS, especially when that something is influential. I think the most frustrating part was when she argued that "they can't be totally stupid if they're making that kind of money". I hated the fact that I needed to explain to this wonderful friend, right in the middle of a discussion about superficiality, that money alone was hardly a worthy marker of success. There was a time when she wouldn't have needed someone else to tell her that.

And of course having been friends for over twenty years we moved on by the next morning and had brunch at a lovely Italian cafe called Brunnelli's: chicken and asparagus crepe with a Caesar side salad. They also make confections and nougat and ornate cake for big Italian celebrations. It was worth going there just to look around. Restaurants featured heavily in our trip. Fifteen, Brunnelli's, a place on the beach called The Stokehouse, plus a little Thai restaurant and a couple of cafes. I mean just because our hotel room had a kitchen with a microwave didn't mean we were going to cook. And in fairness if you're going to check out restaurants, Melbourne is the place to do it. There's good reason that Jamie Oliver picked Melbourne. Each year there'll be new trainees and he needed a strong restaurant and cafe culture that will provide jobs for them once they've done their year at Fifteen.

Now of course I couldn't be in Melbourne for the tail end of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival without catching at least one show, so we went to see Adam Hills' current show, Joymonger. It was great, so upbeat and positive (hence the name) and very funny. We were in the front row and he talks a LOT with audience people, so I was trying to keep a low profile, haha. We did have a chat with him afterwards. Nice guy. He talked a little in the show about having an artificial right leg, a little bit of trivia about him that I hadn't known. He shared a story about getting his licence renewed...a little adventure in bureaucracy that resulted in his driver's licence now being printed with the licence condition: "Must wear artificial right foot." He said he showed it to an Irish friend once, who gave him a sly smile and said, "Ah, but it doesn't say where." :)

A couple of other photos from the trip ~ a quirky shop name and some fun street art I happened upon.

The other activity I spent a lot of time on in Sydney was called "avoiding shopping". Don't get me wrong. I did some shopping. I bought a pair of black jeans, I browsed the bookstore, I checked out some homeware stores and I tried samples of Aesop's mandarin-scented hand balm (pricey, but oh so good). And then I was all shopped out. So while my friend went to ten more stores, I saw a movie. The next night we met an old friend I hadn't seen for years, so when they decided they wanted to check out every designer brand store that was open late at the casino complex, I couldn't duck out and do something else. I'm not into the brand label thing. In fact I'm next door to being anti-brand after seeing how it drives many women and girls in Japan. But there I was, for two hours straight, trawling Guess and Gucci and whoever else with them. So you can imagine my glee (not) the next day when she announced that the thing they most wanted to use their last day for was to visit DFO (designer factory outlet). I told them to meet me when they were done, at the Starbucks where I would be reading my book (ironically, The Devil Wears Prada). Good book by the way.

I had two days in Melbourne after they flew home, which were so relaxing. I wandered around St Kilda, sat by the ocean and slipped in another lunch at Fifteen (Grilled Margaret River porterhouse steak with rosemary potatoes, large leaf rocket and eggplant funghetto). I visited a family who recently moved to Melbourne and had a surprisingly lighthearted visit with a friend of my mum's who found out a few months ago that she has an inoperable cancer. She's retired and is using her time now to visit her children and grandchildren. I left them feeling very peaceful and reassured.

And that was Melbourne.

unsettling art

Fight Club is one of my favourite films. This is NOT because it's a nice film. It's not. What it is though is very thought-provoking. It presents a harsh reality and a lot of ugliness, but not in a useless way that is just about shocking people or pushing the limits of what has been acceptable before. Instead it presents a lot of ideas about uncomfortable or dysfunctional aspects of our culture.

The Fight Club DVD includes an interview Edward Norton gave at a Yale film society night where they showed the movie. In answer to a question about the themes of the film and particularly the violence depicted, Norton said (and I'm paraphrasing a little just to make it more brief) that while some films (and other art forms) are purely for entertainment, it is also the responsibility of filmmakers (and other artists) to explore and expose what is dysfunctional or unhealthy in our culture and present it in a way that provokes discussion on those things. He finds it meaningful to do projects that wrestle around with things that make people uncomfortable and that remain morally ambivalent on those things, so that people do not walk away from the theatre feeling comfortable in having been told what they were to have made of the material. He wants a generation who have had their value systems largely informed by advertising culture to talk and argue and think for themselves how they feel about issues like the displacement of male roles in society or how external things like your home furnishings can offer spiritual calm or be seen as defining your personality, or how attractive the negative or nihilistic can be until you reach a point where you see that what was supposed to free you has a natural limit after which it traps you instead.

I've posted on Fight Club before. What brought it to mind today is that I've been watching the first series of The Boondocks. I always liked the comic strip, but the animated series is disturbing. It's blunt and pulls absolutely no punches in its depiction of American society, African American culture and the interaction of African Americans with white America. I was talking to a friend about how I liked Huey and his politics, but that the show often made me cringe. She said something important about it - that the show is specifically designed to make the viewer uncomfortable. Interesting, and it made me mull over again what Norton had said about art and dysfunction. You're not supposed to like what you see. You're supposed to think about what you see. I hate the way black culture is depicted. I see that culture on TV, but it doesn't really fit my reality of the black people I personally know. But that doesn't mean it isn't real. Gang culture exists, drug culture is real, there really are ghettos where people struggle to stay in school and afford decent child care and stay alive. Rappers really are worshipped and the violence they very publically bring with them when they become famous really does make violence look glamourous to the kids who listen to them. And it's still true in a lot of places that a black man doesn't have to do very much in order to be arrested.

Boondocks is kind of an ugly show, but so are the realities it portrays. And we should be talking about those things. So in spite of the cringe factor, especially given how the word 'nigga' gets tossed around like it's okay fifty times an episode, I think I'm going to watch through to the end, not in order to get more comfortable with it. Just the opposite.