Box #2
Box #2
drypoint
38 x 26.5 cm.
by Marja-Leena
by Marja-Leena horoscope
“Going on a big journey means more to you than anything else right now. Don’t be too concerned with the spoils you could take home at the end of the day. Take time to appreciate what is simple and elegant. Clear your mind.”
I found this horoscope for Aquarius (that’s me) on May 19, 2002 in the daily newspaper that I was reading at the Vancouver airport while waiting to board a flight to Helsinki via Copenhagen. It was the start of an exciting trip for I was on my way to install an exhibition of my prints in Pohjanmaan Museum in Vaasa, Finland. (Read about that in a very early post.)
This horoscope was so very accurate and appropriate that I tucked it into my little travel diary with a frisson of synchronicity. I came across it just now when I went to find a certain forgotten name in that diary. Horoscopes, to me, are just amusements – rarely accurate and often aimed at young singles looking for a romantic partner. THIS one was a brilliant exception, don’t you think?
by Marja-Leena more printmaking blogs
Wow, this is why I love blogging! It is fascinating hearing from people around the world, that I’d never meet otherwise, whether they send an email through this blog or post a comment directly. And I’m particularly excited to meet some more printmaker-bloggers, and so soon after the last finds!
Yesterday I received this great email from Julio Rodriguez (hyperlinks mine):
Hello Marja-Leena, enjoyed your blog page very much, specially looking at the Veils Suite series, the images are very appealling, congratulations on all your work. I am a member on a printmaking discussion group called Baren and we just opened up our own blog BarenForum Group Weblog for printmaking. Our group concentrates on woodblock/relief but anyone is welcome to participate and comment. I have made it possible so that all our members (300+ !!!) can author on the blog so we will be using it as a group blog…already many are uploading their latest print work…I welcome your feedback…thanks…Julio
And here’s more after I wrote back for a bit more information about Baren:
This is our 7th year and we have over 300+ members across the net….there are no dues or fees for membership, we hold quarterly exchanges (which can be viewed online) with alternating theme/open cirteria and have an online encyclopedia of how-to printmaking books available for browsing (or free downloads). The group was founded by printmaker David Bull ( English born, raised in Canada but working out of his studio in Tokyo for the last 20 years doing traditional style Japanese printmaking.). Baren is an international community of printmakers and has held many group exhibitions including galleries in Japan, USA, Ireland, Israel, Canada, Bulgaria and Uganda.
The group has remained a nice mix of newbies, amateurs and professionals working together to promote woodblock/relief printmaking. This link will take you to a map I did two years ago which shows where our members come from….it’s not up to date but you can click on the little people and get some background info on each artist.
The blog has several artists already posting interesting works and information. Note the links to several printmakers’ own blogs as well as the forum pages which have a great deal of reading – I will be busy!
Thank you, Julio, for writing and a very warm welcome to you and all the BarenForum bloggers! Happy printing and happy blogging!
by Marja-Leena Canada Day
Happy 138th Birthday Canada!
In honour of the day, the Canadian and inestimable mirabilis has posted a wonderful link to the origins of “O Canada”. Calixa Lavallée composed it in 1880 in Quebec City. It remained a French only anthem for some 20 years before it was performed in English Canada in 1901. Several translations later, Stanley Weir’s was published in 1908. It wasn’t until 1980 that it was officially made Canada’s official anthem! I remember singing it as a child in school, along with “God Save the Queen”, so I suppose it was an “unofficial” national anthem for many years.
There are more Canadian links from the other inestimable Canadian wood s lot. He’s also posted some wonderful Lauren Harris paintings!
More…
Oh, and a happy new month, too! My youngest daughter, when she was little, would always cheerfully call this out with the turn of a calendar page. Tonight she is off to the fireworks with her boyfriend.
by Marja-Leena Land of the Saame
Photo by Pekka Antikainen, in “Land of the Saame”
As my dear readers know, I’m fascinated by the northern indigenous cultures, in particular the Saami people of northern Europe who are a branch of the Finno-Ugric family. Some time ago I came across a Finnish photography website Leuku.fi that includes a book by Pekka Antikainen: Saamenmaa or Land of the Saame. It is viewable as a PDF (7.9 MB). It’s full of gorgeous yet honest photographs and stories of the land and the people, with text in both Finnish and English.
He writes,
It was in 1982, as an enthusiastic student of photography,
that I made my first photographical expedition to Lapland.
The imposing scenery of Enontekiö made a great impression
on me, but it was in the village of Raittijärvi that I realised
something that eventually led me to produce this book on
the Land of the Saame, although I could not have imagined
then that it would take me a whole twenty years to complete.
I highly recommend a read and look for an understanding and appreciation for this unique part of the world through the eyes of this empathetic observer.
(Oh, and it is available to purchase for 34 Euro, just click on the lower image and an email window opens. No, I have nothing to do with it, but just noticed that this page has no English for non-Finnish buyers.)
by Marja-Leena Spiral Jetty revisited
Spiral Jetty began to submerge earlier this spring, as represented in this May 18, 2005, photo. Image: Mark Milligan at Geotimes.
Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty was a subject of a post I wrote in August of last year. Today Modern Art Note’s Tyler Green says his mind is full of earth art after revisiting the Smithson exhibit at the Whitney. This has inspired him to post what he wrote last fall about his visit to the Jetty and how awe-inspiring that was. It’s eloquent and it will make you want to see it as it much as it’s made me, again, so do go and read it.
But, Geotimes reports:
For the last 36 years, weather cycles have dictated when Smithson’s sculpture would make an appearance. “The jetty has a cyclical presence: being submerged under water, re-emerging encrusted in salt, weathering back to rock and then being submerged again,” says Michael Govan, director and president of the Dia Art Foundation. “Its recurring/disappearing act beneath the Salt Lake only adds to its allure.” And now, following a 1999 drought that allowed the jetty to reappear three years ago, the spiral may be going back into hiding.
Further Links:
Official Robert Smithson site
More photos, video, links
by Marja-Leena art and social conscience
Otto Dix. The War II/2: Shock Troop Advancing under Gas Attack. (1924).
Etching, aquatint and drypoint from MoMA Collection.
(May not be in Neue Gallery exhibition)
Artist-blogger Mark Vallen writes about “arts and culture, with an emphasis on socially conscious works” on his blog Art for a Change. I admire and appreciate his voice and empathize with the social issues he emphasizes. The last three posts have also been very meaningful to me as a printmaker.
Last week he wrote about the sudden closing of Self Help Graphics, an East Los Angeles’ institution dedicated to Chicano art, printmaking and grassroots community arts. This was followed by a post about the ensuing protests and his involvement in trying to encourage dialogue to keep it open. I hope a positive and happy ending will be found for the artists dependent on this institution.
Today’s post is about an exhibition of antiwar prints by two German Expressionist artists: “WAR/HELL: Master Prints by Otto Dix and Max Beckmann”, a collection of etchings and lithographs now showing through September, 2005, at the Neue Galerie in New York City. Vallen writes: If it all sounds terribly familiar, it should. Dix and Beckman not only succeeded in exposing the ugly realities of war in a way that hadn’t been done since Goya’s print series, The Disasters of War – they also effectively created artworks that stepped outside of their timeframe and place of national origin. Please read the entire post and visit the Gallery’s site to see the (unfortunately) few images. I found the gallery’s mission statement very interesting too.
I’ve been fortunate in seeing some of each artists’ work in Germany and elsewhere, and have always felt their work disturbing, with a very strong gut reaction of horror every time – definitely in the class of Goya’s Disasters of War and Picasso’s Guernica.
by Marja-Leena Box #3
Box #3
drypoint
38 x 28.5 cm.
by Marja-Leena visual music
Wassily Kandinsky: Painting with White Border 1913
This description in Thursday’s Arts Journal really captured my imagination:
Art in Musical Terms – There is a relationship, but does one describe the other? The notion was to take the novelty of abstract art, so radical before World War I that it could hardly be imagined, and justify it by comparison to music. If a Beethoven string quartet could be understood and admired on its own terms, without imagining that it painted a sonic picture of the world, visual art should have the same freedom to escape from rendering reality. The notes and timbres and structures of music could be compared to the colors and textures and forms of a painting; a talented artist could assemble them into a visual “composition” every bit as affecting, meaningful and praiseworthy as anything that goes on in a fancy concert hall.
The quote is from a review by Blake Gopnik in Washington Post of the new exhibition Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900 is at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. The presentation brings together the work of forty artists and an array of media, including painting, photography, film, light projection, computer graphics, and immersive environments. Some of the artists represented are Man Ray, Paul Klee, Georgia O’Keeffe and Wassily Kandinsky.
Thinking About Art also has a review, by artist-blogger Kathleen Shafer. A commenter there provided a link to the Hirshhorn’s interactive website – worth a look for us unfortunates who cannot make it to Washington to see this.
By the way, Kandinsky is one of my favourite painters, a feeling reinforced by seeing the largest collection of his works anywhere along with the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) group at Lenbachhaus in Munich in 2000.
by Marja-Leena Box #4
Box #4
etching & drypoint
23 x 15 cm.