Other artists Archives - Page 11 of 30

by Marja-Leena

Sagrada Família in danger

I still remember well my art school days and the many hours of Art History classes, viewing thousands of slides of art and architecture, sometimes sleepily but often excited. The courses were taken by students of art, architecture and interior design. Architecture has always interested me and Antoni Gaudi’s fantastic creations fascinated me. I still have only seen them in pictures.

La Sagrada Família, a basilica in Barcelona, Spain is one of those incredible projects. The building is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Still unfinished after 40 years, it is now in danger of being destroyed by the construction of a tunnel for a high speed train going underneath!

I find it incredibly shocking and disheartening to hear about developers destroying art works. I think of the vast area of incredible aborigine rock art of the Burrup peninsula in Australia currently threatened by gas developers as another example.

There’s a campaign to stop the construction and even a YouTube film of what the potential disaster may look like.

Thanks to Viides Rooli (in Finnish) for the link.

October 31, 2007 in Culture, History, Other artists by Marja-Leena 9 Comments »

by Marja-Leena

Robert Young

Robert Young: Sampler – Enhanced multiple plate intaglio, linocut, woodcut
Printed for Artist’s for Kids

We had the great pleasure of having Robert Young, one of BC’s most respected senior artists, visit as a guest speaker in the Art Institute, Printmaking*** at Capilano University yesterday. He spoke first about his early years with dry humour, occasionally making various literary references to reveal the yearning, a desire “to run away” as he kept saying, which eventually led him to become an artist. He proudly wore his 40-year-old ink-stained printmaker’s apron and displayed his custom-made set of engraving tools and a few prints, one of them shown above. A slide presentation of his works followed. Very stunning and inspiring. Most of these works can be viewed at the site of the Atelier Gallery** in Vancouver, which represents him.

I can’t begin to find the right words to summarize Young’s life and work but thankfully, others have written about his work eloquently. For Artist’s for Kids, Robin Laurence wrote in part:

Although Robert Young is best known as a painter, his early art training was in printmaking, and it is a discipline he revisits periodically. In 1962, after completing a bachelor’s degree in art history at the University of British Columbia, Young left his native Vancouver, taking himself off to England, to the City and Guilds of London School of Art, where he studied etching, engraving and drypoint. He returned to Vancouver in 1964, studied graphic arts at the Vancouver School of Art, then set off again for London in 1966. It was during this second sojourn there, lasting a full decade (he returned permanently to Vancouver in 1976), that he began to paint, finding inspiration in a number of sources, including art history, photography, and the mass media.

and…

Known for his intricate drawing, painting and printmaking, his work has a strong intellectual appeal and an impeccable sense of craft. For more than 45 years he has pursued a bold personal image synthesizing the environment with his strong philosophical and spiritual beliefs. He also shared his love of art and art history with students at U.B.C. for 16 years as Associate Professor in the faculty of Fine Arts.

In an excellent article in the Straight, Christopher Brayshaw wrote:

Between these extremes of illusionism and blunt facticity lies the work of Vancouver artist Robert Young, whose inventive paintings, drawings, and mixed-media collages defy easy categorization. Though he taught for years at UBC, Young is the antithesis of an academic artist, and is now, at almost 70, in the happy position of not really having any followers.

This is something that Young spoke about, the desire to not follow current movements or schools, or the call of curators or critics, but to follow his own path.

UPDATE Feb.28th, 2013: **The Atelier Gallery link no longer works and has been removed. This long time gallery has closed. Meanwhile, some of Robert Young’s work may be viewed at the Winchester Galleries.

***UPDATE Jan.3, 2014: In May 2013 this program (along with others) was eliminated. Link removed. To read about the Art Institute as it used to be, please visit this older post about it.

October 11, 2007 in Art Institute (Printmaking), Other artists by Marja-Leena 8 Comments »

by Marja-Leena

Robert Jackson exhibition

Approaching Wholeness

I’m so pleased to announce that friend and fellow artist Robert Jackson will be having what sounds like an exciting opening of his exhibition called ‘Approaching Wholeness’. Here’s his invitation in his own words:

The show opens with an introduction by my wife Neslihan this Thursday October 4th, 2007 with the reception starting around 4:00 pm until 8 pm. The show runs until October 18th, at the Capilano College Studio Art Gallery in North Vancouver. Easy to find, just take exit 22 near the Second Narrows Bridge. (Download campus map, pdf)

There will be canvas prints of images taken of what happens when some very accomplished and serious artists just play for there own amusement in a sandbox with toys.

Another series of images of various artists wearing masks that they chose from many that I have made.

There will be some gorgeous toy images from a magical private toy museum, taken on our recent trip to Turkey. We had “a big fat Turkish wedding” in September there.

Really the show is about me learning to unmask myself and learn to play again and mostly about finding love, inside and out. I am always surprised that this finding the inner playful true self isn’t usually taught at art school. So many miracles have happened to me, 10 times more love from Neslihan and her family than I ever dreamed was possible.

Please come and share this unbearable lightness of being with us on Thursday at 4pm.

Untitled

RJLadyofTheLamp
Lady of the Lamp

Tractor Boy

Robert’s Artist’s Statement (pdf) is well worth a read!
All works shown here are mixed media digital prints on canvas.
Sizes about 22 x 34 inches.
Copyright Robert Jackson, used with his permission.
Note: Gallery hours are 8:30am – 4:30pm, Monday to Friday.

October 2, 2007 in Art Exhibitions, Digital printmaking, Other artists by Marja-Leena 9 Comments »

by Marja-Leena

Marianna Schmidt

Exhibition Catalogue Cover: MARIANNA SCHMIDT, When You Are Silent, It Speaks 1991, mixed media on paper (38.5 cm x 28.2 cm). Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Belgium

I have a bad habit of visiting exhibitions at the end of their run but my excuse this time was that I learned about these very late. Over the summer there were three concurrent exhibitions of work by Marianna Schmidt around the Greater Vancouver region, but by the time I knew about them, only one was still up. As a printmaker, I would have loved to have seen her prints at the Burnaby Art Gallery. However, I was very pleased to have seen a large body of Schmidt’s mixed media works at the Evergreen Cultural Centre in Coquitlam (a suburb of Vancouver) on its last day and last hour!

Her work went through many styles but for me her most powerful and moving works are those that remind me of the German Expressionists.

I met Marianna Schmidt many years ago when she was a visiting artist at our studio. Her personality and her prints made a strong impression on me that I’ve not forgotten. I always wanted to learn more about her life and work so I was eager to buy the excellent exhibition catalogue, written by Robin Laurence, Darrin J. Martens, Bill Jeffries and Ellen van Eijnsbergen – and have already started to read it. The inside fold has a perfect summary for those who don’t know this artist:

Marianna Schmidt (1918 – 2005), who lived and worked in Vancouver, British Columbia from the mid-1950’s until her death in May 2005, was an accomplished and idiosyncratic modernist. Hungarian by birth, she fled her country as a refugee in 1944, and spent years in displace persons’ camps on Austria, Germany and England before eventually migrating to Canada. Not surprisingly, the most persistent feelings in her art are those of loneliness, alienation and painful dislocation. Whether depicted in prints, drawings, paintings or collages, her twisted, distorted and fragmented figures are often stranded against featureless grounds, huddles in inhospitable rooms or suspended above place maps and generic landscapes. The crisis they evoke is both universal and particular.
Still, humour, irony, pathos, celebration, and a keen interest in the human circus also find expression in Marianna Schmidt’s art. This publication is the first posthumous attempt to honour her entire career and to place it within the context of her life and times.

Links:
the Evergreen Cultural Centre page and Photo Gallery
Review by Ann Rosenberg with more photos of work
Carnaval Photos and Paintings at SFU
Article in the Straight
Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK) in Ghent, Belgium which has a large collection of Marianna Schmidt’s works, loaned for this exhibition

September 18, 2007 in Art Exhibitions, Books, Other artists by Marja-Leena Comments Off on Marianna Schmidt

by Marja-Leena

creative license vs. copyright law

An interesting story at Alliance for Arts and Culture:

Vancouver artist collides with Olympic and Paralympics copyright act
Vancouver artist, Kimberly Baker, learned first hand the extent of Bill C-47 — the Olympic and Paralympic Marks Act — after producing artwork for a graduation exhibition at the Emily Carr Institute. Ms. Baker’s work, the Transit Shelter Project, includes photos of a person in a sleeping bag with “Vancouver 2010” written beneath. She learned the work indeed collides with the recently enacted bill in what appears to be a trademark infringement issue. She has detailed her experience in an article for Common Ground.

Click here to read the article.

To read the bill, visit this Government of Canada website and click on C-47.

August 17, 2007 in Being an Artist, Concepts, Other artists by Marja-Leena Comments Off on creative license vs. copyright law

by Marja-Leena

77 Million Paintings

Saturday evening, yesterday, felt like a fall evening, so dark so early with rain thundering on the skylights. Desiring some cocooning, we set up our favourite game of Liverpool Rummy on the table, with hot cups of gen-mai cha (roasted rice green tea) beside us, and the laptop playing Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings for the first time.

I mentioned this piece by prolific electronic music and video artist Brian Eno many months ago, and was lent the DVD and book some time ago, but only now made the time to view it. The program is installed on the computer from the DVD in order to utilize the computer’s unique capacity as a generating processor to produce original visual compounds out of a large quantity of hand-painted elements.

Our gazes were mesmerized by the slow transformations of the images set to the gentle electronic music, very meditative and calming as we played our game. I think we would have found it too slow to watch with full attention, though I believe there is a way to speed it up. From time to time I read out loud some passages from the accompanying little book. First came the introduction by Nick Robertson Painting by Numbers. It’s too long to quote, but it’s about how each viewing is unique, never the same for each viewer. Some excerpts:

The audio is processed in a similar way, containing layers of sound, ensuring you never hear exactly the same thing twice, even if running 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year. The title “77 Million Paintings” reflects the possible permutations of the piece.
The original in art is no longer solely bound up in the physical object, but rather in the way the piece lives and grows. It is moving in time and each moment is an original. As a fluid fusion of traditional painting techniques and computer coding, this is truly painting by numbers.

My Light Years, Brian Eno’s own story of how this work came about from his explorations into light as an artist’s medium makes for interesting reading along with the printed images, which I’m still slowly savouring my way through. There’s also a DVD with an interview of Eno that I look forward to viewing.

This is very inspiring! I wish I had the skill and the equipment to set up my own generating software so that I could use my own artwork to create something like this! I know some other artists are doing this kind of work nowadays, hmmm….

Eno has had many museum shows of his projects including this one. Recently when checking out a few Second Life blogs, I learned that Brian Eno also had an opening tour of his multi-installation/collaboration of 77 Million Paintings with them. This is all very new and a bit incomprehensible for me at the moment.
(Image from 77 Million Paintings)

July 22, 2007 in Music, Other artists by Marja-Leena 4 Comments »

by Marja-Leena

colours of music

Can music have colour? David Hockney thought so, as filmmaker Maryte Kavaliauskas shows in her profile for PBS’s American Masters, David Hockney: The Colors of Music.

Hockney designed sets for perfomances of some of the world’s great operas for more than 30 years, surreal backdrops of “purple forests, spacey blues, giant blocks and mad silhouettes.” Kavaliauskas’ film features excerpts from operas by Mozart, Stravinsky, Ravel and Puccini, and the result is a mesmerizing, occasionally dizzying scherzo of sound and colour.

Ironically, Hockney suffered from gradual but steadily deteriorating hearing loss late in life – a decline documented in the program. “I have always said how a hearing loss makes you aware of space, visually,” Hockney says in the film. “I became aware of that…I am aware.” And how. David Hockney: The Colors of Music is a feast for the eyes. (PBS – 10 p.m.)
– Alex Strachan, The Vancouver Sun, Page C6 (print only), July 18, 2007. (Links added by me.)

A TV program on my favourite subjects, visual art and opera, and a famous artist as well!

I read the above in our paper this morning and was happy to note that the program is available on one of our basic cable channels (unlike another art program). I rarely watch TV because I don’t often know when something really good is on. I detest skimming through pages of tiny uninformative print in the TV listings for over a hundred channels, most of which we don’t receive. So, I’m pleased when I see something like this written up to alert me. I’ll be watching it this evening, and hopefully will update later on as to what I think of it. Some readers may have seen this film already as it is a couple of years old. If not, check your local PBS listings (Canada and US).

Meanwhile, there are interesting links at David Hockney: The Colors of Music website for more information, such as about the people involved like Lithuanian born Maryte Kavaliauskas and the lovely photos of stage sets (above is the performance still from Die Frau Ohne Schatten.) This production reminds me a little of Visual Music.

UPDATE July 19th 10:00 am: I enjoyed the film very much and I’m glad I taped it to view again. It was very interesting to listen to Hockney talk about the challenges of working in a new area that is very 3D instead of his usual 2D and working with light, and how stage design is a collaboration with compromises. I loved the snippets of music and dress rehearsals, such as Erik Satie’s Parade. Hockney says music is heightened poetry and heightened experience. His comments on slowly going deaf were enlightening; he doesn’t like background music, only foreground music – when you just listen to it! Amazing how many times I nodded in agreement. Oh, there’s more but you will just have to see it for yourself!

July 18, 2007 in Films, Music, Other artists by Marja-Leena 7 Comments »

by Marja-Leena

Tina Schliessler

Vancouver artist and a friend, Tina Schliessler, has her series Living Portraits on exhibition at the Seymour Art Gallery in North Vancouver. I was very happy to attend her opening the other evening (Tuesday) and see her exciting new work. Here’s the short statement in the Vancouver Sun’s arts Calendar:

The local photographer uses a motor drive on her still camera to capture multiple images of her subject. She hand paints each photograph and then, using a computer video program, melds the images together – animating the portraits to bring them to life again.

Beautiful portraits of her children, family and friends, using a fascinating process and framing! Congratulations, Tina!

If you are in the area, you may see her work at the Seymour Art Gallery, in beautiful Deep Cove, daily 10 to 5 until August 5th. Two of the portraits can also be viewed at Tina’s website (still under development I think).

July 12, 2007 in Art Exhibitions, Other artists by Marja-Leena 2 Comments »

by Marja-Leena

my favourite sculpture

First I saw Ossip Zadkine’s De Poeet, then Tuumailua’s challenge to bloggers to post their favourite sculptures.

So here’s my choice of current favourite, especially one located in Vancouver: Magdalena Abakanowicz’ Vancouver Ancestors, posted a year ago. I’m wondering if it’s still there, if the city purchased it after the Biennial. The website mentions the auction but not the final results. I really hope it’s still there…

What is your favourite sculpture?

July 3, 2007 in Blogging, Other artists by Marja-Leena 14 Comments »

by Marja-Leena

Power of Art series

Picasso’s Guernica

This looks to be very exciting: Simon Schama’s The Power of Art series is beginning tonight on PBS TV in North America.

The power of the greatest art is the power to shake us into revelation and rip us from our default mode of seeing. After an encounter with that force, we don’t look at a face, a colour, a sky, a body, in quite the same way again. We get fitted with new sight: in-sight. Visions of beauty or a rush of intense pleasure are part of that process, but so too may be shock, pain, desire, pity, even revulsion. That kind of art seems to have rewired our senses. We apprehend the world differently.

Art that aims that high – whether by the hand of Caravaggio, Van Gogh or Picasso – was not made without trouble and strife. Of course there has been plenty of great art created in serenity, but the popular idea that some masterpieces were made under acute stress with the artist struggling for the integrity of the conception and its realisation is not a “romantic myth” at all. A glance at how some of the most transforming works got made by human hands is an encounter with “moments of commotion”.

It’s those hot spots in which great risks were taken that The Power of Art brings you. Instead of trying to reproduce the un-reproducible feeling you have when you are face to face with those works in the hush of the gallery or a church, the series (and the book) drops you instead into those difficult places and unforgiving dramas when the artists managed, against the odds, to astound.

– from the BBC site for Schama’s The Power of Art. It was shown in the UK last fall.

Artists featured in the series are Van Gogh, Picasso, Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner and Rothko. More at this PBS page, and here are some short video previews.

Check your local schedules, please. I am really hoping that the Vancouver print TV schedule is correct that the first two parts will be aired at 9 and 10 pm tonight, coming from Seattle, as I’ve been getting conflicting information online. I’ll program the VCR in any case.

Thanks for the alerts from Art Biz Blog and Art for a Change.

UPDATE 9:00pm. Dang! It’s not on here. Looking at the PBS site again, I think it’s offered only on digital stations at this time. I’ll have to keep my eyes out for when and if it appears on plain cable. I’d love to hear from readers who do see this program.

June 18, 2007 in Being an Artist, Films, Other artists by Marja-Leena 10 Comments »

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Sagrada Família in danger

Robert Young

Robert Jackson exhibition

Marianna Schmidt

creative license vs. copyright law

77 Million Paintings

colours of music

Tina Schliessler

my favourite sculpture

Power of Art series

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