Welcome to my world

This semester I've been taking a course to become a Teacher's Assistant. Above is a sample of the sort of stuff we make -- I think the technical term for them is felt story-boards. It's quite a change from editing theses!

Hats Off to Burtynsky

Silver Lake Operations #1, Lake Lefroy,
Western Australia, 2007 © Edward Burtynsky

On Friday afternoon, my wife and I went mooching around Fremantle. The Maritime Museum and some FotoFreo exhibitions were our two chief destinations; neither disappointed.

A standout was the exhibition Australian Minescapes, by Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky.

To paraphrase Burtynsky, his work looks at how we (aka humans) modify natural landscapes to extract the raw materials we use to make the stuff of modern life -- i.e. cars, fridges, houses, factories and, probably, the seat you're sitting on. By natural landscapes, Burtynsky isn't on about the holes in the ground we plant veggies in; as the photo above shows, he's on about Grand-Canyon-like chasms--and shifting entire towns--to get minerals out of the ground.

Burtynsky's photos have a painterly quality, as though he's layered oils on a canvas; the thicker 'layers' are like nodules and ridges. I wanted to touch them. Yet, of course, this 3D-effect is an illusion: he is a photographer not a painter.

The scale of the photos is breathtaking, as though entire skies and pockets of Western Australian earth are stuffed into single photographs. In a triptych of the Super Pit mine in Kalgoorlie, each haulpack is about the size of half a thumb-drive.

If you're in Perth and can get to the Maritime Museum (where the exhibition is showing) before 4th June, do so. You'll be amazed.

More Egg Art

Miscellany

This week I've been reading some wierd and wonderful things at some ghastly hours of the morning. Here are a couple of tidbits I've found in my early morning trawlings:

Art (in How to Read a Painting, Patrick De Rynck (2004))

That the Old Masters (Europeans pre-1800) depicted many religious scenes. Derr, and? Well, I was struck by how graphic some of them are, how well they took me into the scene, and got me imagining what was going on in the hearts and minds of their subjects.

For example, Caravaggio's The Supper at Emmaus, in which Jesus is eating with two of his disciples after his resurrection. The disciples' alarm -- their master is alive! -- is palpable. The disciple to Jesus' left (James?) has outstretched arms, one of them almost touching the painting's border, and, so it seems, reaching out to the viewer.

The memento mori is also new to me. Two took my interest: the first, a skull on the desk of a wafer-thin Jerome, working away at his translations; the second, a highly distorted skull at the feet of two stately-looking men in Hans Holbein's 'The Ambassadors'. Rather than shamelessly paraphrasing, I'll quote De Rynck on this skull's significance:

When we position ourselves so that we can see the skull as a skull, the other, supposedly realistic objects are in turn distorted. The moral is that death is everywhere and always, but we do not recognize it. And wnen we do finally make out its shape, life in turn becomes twisted and blurred (ibid. p. 164).

More early morning trivia to come soon.

Botanical Art

What comes to mind when you hear the term "botanical art"?

If you're like me, it's birds, flowers, and staid images hanging on the dusty walls in the musty houses of the elderly.

Well, I'm happy to admit I'm wrong. My father-in-law has recently painted a series of close-ups of Australian native plants. They were partly inspired by a visit to the West last year: the prices that cashed-up West Aussies were paying caught his attention, I think.

Anyhow, I love them, and I hope you do too. There are others, and I can put you in touch with the artist if you'd like. Yes, this is a shameless plug.