▲Visual Arts▼

"F-111 points to what the artist has described as “the collusion between the Vietnam death machine, consumerism, the media, and advertising.” Rosenquist has often cited a keen interest in the phenomenon of peripheral vision as a driving force behind his decision to make a room-scaled painting. Whatever our eye focuses on at any given moment is necessarily influenced by information at the outermost perimeters of our field of vision, which in turn plays a profound, yet often subconscious, role in our sensory perception. For Rosenquist, who first experimented with this concept while making F-111 and continued to do so throughout his career, Claude Monet's Water Lilies was a touchstone." http://www.moma.org/explore... - Adriano from Bookmarklet

"The rarest of the rare: Sherman as Sherman in limbo. The artist pulling back the curtains, allowing a glimpse of her in transit to the further shores of self. Hair in Baggie, no makeup. Blank slate; bare stare; ulterior motives; a snake-in-the-grass assassin. \\ Sherman’s pictures are like Zen ­koans. Rather than being about understanding, they’re about coming to grips with the state of mind that produces them. She has a luminous way of breathing life into things that cannot be ­described. Giving herself over to her own processes, Sherman opens up thought and makes pictures that subtly withdraw from definition, dislodging meaning, undermining ideology, becoming what I’d call radically passive." http://nymag.com/fashion... - Adriano from Bookmarklet

"Despite stylistic differences, each artist is connected by the common goal of depicting what Francis Bacon described as “the mystery of appearance within the mystery of making.”" - Adriano from Bookmarklet

If you liked the Silvio Dante character in The Sopranos, and the film Fargo, you will really enjoy this black comedy with a Norwegian accent. \\ "After he testifies against a Mafia boss, ex-gangster Frank Tagliano enters the witness protection program and asks to be sent to [Lillehammer, Norway (1994 Winter Olympics)]. Despite the peaceful surroundings, it's not long before Frank strays from the straight and narrow." \\ "The first season premiered on Norwegian NRK1 on 25 January 2012 with a record audience of 998,000 viewers, and premiered on the Netflix stream http://movies.netflix.com/Movie... in the United States, Latin America and Canada on February 6, 2012. It will air on BBC4 in the UK. A second season has already been commissioned." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Adriano from Bookmarklet

Van Zandt interviewed: http://youtu.be/2O6MoG7geJU - Adriano

"The series depicts two low-brow card players in Aix-en-Provence. The peasants idealize an old world culture, nostalgic even to the middle-aged artist when he painted from his family’s country estate in the 1890s. At the time, Cézanne was working alone, and his isolation reflects in the sparing surfaces and minimal compositions of the varying card scenes. Only the subtlest of changes differentiate one painting from the next: most notably, the cards themselves change as the games progress, while the faces and suggestively sluggish interactions do not." - Adriano from Bookmarklet

Director and choreographer: Pina Bausch (also playing the first figure). This important piece was featured in the recent Wim Wenders' film "Pina." \\ Cast: Malou Airaudo, Domenique Mercy, Jan Minarik, Nazareth Panadero, Jean Laurent Sasportes. \\ "Her parents owned a café attached to a small hotel. The little girl learned to amuse herself sitting quietly under the café tables watching the customers or entertaining them with impromptu dances. Early on her parents sent Pina to ballet classes, where, she recalled in an interview, "I loved to dance because I was scared to speak. When I was moving I could feel."" see Choreographer whose seminal work gave an unsettling view of the human condition, http://www.independent.co.uk/news... - Adriano from Bookmarklet

"The 6ft long artwork has become the most expensive British sculpture ever sold after being snapped up for £19.1million, more than three times the highest estimate. It easily surpassed the previous record, set by Damien Hirst’s The Golden Calf which sold for £10.3million in 2008." - Adriano from Bookmarklet

I saw the largest public Henry Moore collection just week ago in AGO - Ontario's art gallery in Toronto. Simply amazing... - Amira

"The drawings of butterflies done by Vladimir Nabokov were intended for “family use.” He made these on title pages of various editions of his works as a gift to his wife and son and sometimes to other relatives. In Brian Boyd’s words, “in these highly personal and affectionately playful drawings the scientific accuracy Nabokov needed in thousands of illustrations of the specimens he studied under the microscope was no longer relevant, and his imagination could take flight. In the butterflies Nabokov devised and labeled for Vera he mingles fact and fancy even more sportively than in his fiction.” None of these drawings portray real butterflies, both the images and the names he assigns to them are his invention." - Adriano

Love these! - Kelli H. from Android

Image retouched and color-corrected (click on it to enlarge). One of my favorite rooms in the world :-) - Adriano

"The cycle of water lily paintings on the ground floor is utterly unforgettable. This museum is a beautiful example of the environment and presentation of the piece adding substantially to the experience of viewing a great work of art. I've rarely felt as emotionally overwhelmed by a piece of art as I did when sitting on one of the benches and staring at the huge panoramic murals." http://www.quora.com/Paris... \\ The most beautiful gallery captured as wide-angle photo: http://www.punctumsaliens.ch/habitat... - Adriano

"The below aerial picture of a cloud-shrouded Dubai by Wijnand Van Till, a Dutch citizen living in Dubai, won the first prize in a National Geographic photography contest Oct 26, 2011 in Amsterdam ahead of 20,000 other entries." - Adriano from Bookmarklet

"Kelly has been experimenting with painted relief since 1949 after he moved to Paris and was influenced by Constantin Brancusi‘s simplified sculptural forms. Kelly adamantly creates all his work himself without the aid of studio hands, although he admits at 88 that he may need help if his health fails. In the meantime, he constantly sketches his ideas, and finds inspiration in even the subtlest everyday shapes. As dealer Matthew Marks told the NYT, “A shape for a painting could come from the shadow a leaf casts on a branch. He’ll draw it over and over again and use it in a painting, a print, a sculpture.”" - Adriano from Bookmarklet

"Anabelle Kienle argues, with Van Gogh's many letters as evidence, that the greatest Dutch painter since Rembrandt managed to survive, in part, by employing a kind of self-hypnosis, sessions of superhuman focus that helped Van Gogh put down the fires in his head. He brings a landscape right up to the viewer's toes, painting with painstaking detail the bark of trees, the twists of vines, the striving thistle. His landscape style was in part inspired by the high horizon lines of Japanese art, which Van Gogh deeply admired. The exhibit brings together a sampling of Japanese prints to provide counterpoint." - Adriano from Bookmarklet

I love Van Gogh's work. - Kelli H.

That one is rarely seen, even in the Dutch and French museums. Also couples seldom appear in Van Gogh's work. Interestingly, there's no clear path in view. - Adriano

"Warhol’s assistant Ronnie Cutrone said: Andy had a burning desire to do abstract art… and I said, “you’re Andy Warhol; you should paint something that is something, but it’s not… you should paint shadows. You love shadows anyway. They’re all in your work”… I had 150 shadow photographs on contact sheets twelve days later. We picked some of them out and then he asked me to mix the colors for them." - Adriano

"Thomas Edison is responsible for some of the most significant, and is even credited as the inventor of the movie industry itself. But besides his visionary take on technology, he also had a keen eye for what audiences wanted. It comes as no surprise that Edison is also responsible for the very first on-screen kiss in cinema, featuring Canadian actress May Irwin. A mere 23 seconds in length, it was filmed in his Black Maria studio in New Jersey in 1896, at a time when public kissing was greatly frowned upon by Victorian society." http://www.brainpickings.org/index... - Adriano from Bookmarklet

nice :-) - Maitani

There are three rules: 1) Write and direct original screenplays, 2) make them with the most modern technology available, and 3) self-finance them. \\ "Every time I made a film, I always knew what I thought the theme was, the core, in one word. In “The Godfather,” it was succession. In “The Conversation,” it was privacy. In “Apocalypse,” it was morality. A screenplay has to be like a haiku. It has to be very concise and very clear, minimal. You’re going to listen to the actors because they have great ideas. You’re going to listen to the photographer because he will have a great idea. You can make the decision that you feel is best, but listen to everyone, because cinema is collaboration." - Adriano from Bookmarklet

"Ai uses China’s most common mode of transportation to create a spiraling, labyrinthine space for viewers to walk through in his gigantic installation, Forever Bicycles. Winding through the stacked bikes, the lines and shapes of the spokes, tires, and handlebars become more important than the bicycles themselves: the bicycle’s functionality has been replaced with its form. The 1,000 bicycles seem to move as the viewer walks among them, illustrating China’s shifting social environment." - Adriano from Bookmarklet

"Sigmund Freud contemplates a bust of himself, sculpted for his 75th birthday by Oscar Nemon." - Adriano from Bookmarklet

"The arrows have eaten into the tense, fragrant, youthful flesh and are about to consume his body from within with flames of supreme agony and ecstasy. But there is no flowing blood, nor yet the host of arrows seen in other pictures of Sebastian’s martyrdom. Instead, two lone arrows cast their tranquil and graceful shadows upon the smoothness of his skin, like the shadows of a bough falling upon a marble stairway." —from Confessions of a Mask (1958) by Yukio Mishima. - Adriano from Bookmarklet

"Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614) was an Italian painter, born in Bologna, the daughter of the painter Prospero Fontana, who was a prominent painter of the School of Bologna at the time and served as her teacher. Antonietta Gonsalus was a woman who suffered from hepatoerythropoietic porphyria; a disease characterized by severe facial hypertrichosis (excessive hair growth)." - Adriano from Bookmarklet

"The painting, a version of Titian’s Venetian Annunciation, a blurred impression of the original, represents a comment on the fact that it was "impossible to paint like Titian today, and that the ‘beautiful culture’ of Old Master painting was irretrievable." In an interview (with Michele Leight, in the City Review), Richter had explained, disarmingly, that he had copied the painting from a postcard, "simply because I liked it so much and thought I’d like to have that for myself. To start with I only meant to make a copy, so that I could have a beautiful painting at home and with it a piece of that period, all that potential beauty and sublimity."" http://timescolumns.typepad.com/stothar... - Adriano from Bookmarklet

"The Louvre is facing accusations that it overcleaned a masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci, leaving it with a brightness that the Renaissance master never intended. Two of France's top art experts have voiced their protest by resigning from the Paris museum's advisory committee responsible for its "restoration." Such was their concern for the 500-year-old painting that Ségolène Bergeon Langle and Jean-Pierre Cuzin – eminent former specialists in conservation and painting respectively at the Louvre – could no longer associate themselves with its treatment." - Adriano from Bookmarklet