blogs that make me go hmmm...

in the spirit of tagging, the thinking blogger has been passing on awards again for blogs that make us think and i'm quite flattered to say that i've been awarded one from dearest jade pegler at spectrescope.

last time i got tagged, i botched it 'cos i didn't really know many other bloggers, but now, my bookmarks list (i don't have de.licio.us) is fucking massive and i wanna give props to some of my crew. sound like a toss? yeah, i thought so too.. ha!

so, in my designer dress I'd like to announce the top 5 nominees for the thinking blogger are:



1. rob campbell from rob@cynic. opinionated and super intelligent sod. totally great guy. planning head honcho at cynic and loving partner to andy and george, the other cynic bigwigs. his blog is solely responsible for some serious thinking on my part and making some really great friends.

2. age conte from in my atmosphere. great (former) copywriter, currentabout to be former junior planner and saviour for SEE life differently. great blogger about a variety of life bits and pieces. all-round nice guy who is solely disproving the theory that they finish last.

3.andrew hovells from northern planner. another all-round nice guy who has fantastic insight about a range of stuff. he also suggests great recipes and is not afraid to sit down and have a nice cup of tea.

4.paul colman from life in the middle. yet another nice guy (although we've not met), planning type with the most deadpan sense of humour i've ever read. the variety of general and personal observations 'from the middle' has this blog high on my list of 'must check before i do anything else'.

5. ben terrett from noisy decent graphics. design god from The Design Conspiracy. Willingly suffers from the design disease and has a great eye for good form, great colour and fun stuff to do.

guys (and sadly for thinking women, these are all guys), if you're going to continue nominating, there are rules for nominating thinking blogs, so check them out before you blog your nominations.


and just so you know, there are loads of other boys and girls whose blogs make me think and if you aren't on this list, i promise that it's not because i don't love you. it's just that i had to choose 5 and, well, that means leaving people behind.

Some cultural comparisons and sweeping generalisations

***warning*** the following post contains rash generalisations and assumptions made on limited experience. things will change, i'm sure of it.


Regular readers will have read my post on Dubai. And while I obviously didn't completely nail cultural comparisons, I received so much insight into Emirati and Indian culture that it blew my mind. When I arrived in London, about 3 weeks ago, I tried to get the same level of insight. I tried to understand London and Londoners (as opposed to the English in general. I understand they’re different species), to get a handle on what I needed to ‘know’ as quickly as possible in order to ‘fit in’ and not make any awful social fuck-ups. I focused on the differences between us, hoping to overcome them and that just got me all tangled up in a psychological mess. Thankfully, last week, I let go of trying to figure it out all at once and as soon as I did that, it seems I’m settling in nicely.

The funny thing is that the cultural differences between Londoners and Australians are so subtle and the whole point is that they don’t really want to anyone to know the intimate intricacies of their eccentricities. I can kind of understand a little more now – thanks to reading DH Lawrence’s Kangaroo, actually. [English writer guy emigrates to Sydney and Wollongong in the 19th Century]

I don’t know whether this is the purpose of travel, but the longer I’m here, the more I totally love Australia and what I have there. Tarty, mouthy, rank Australians still give me the shits, but they did back home, so I haven’t become that wildly patriotic, but I have fallen in love with things about home that I didn’t expect to.

green is for garden waste, the litte red one for rubbish and the yellow one for recyclables.

For a start, I’m proud of how much Australians and Australia gives a fuck about the environment. London can’t seem to get basic home recycling in order, which, for a city of 12 million people, is fucking appalling! They waste electricity like nobody’s business and water wastage..holy crap! Not as bad as it was in Dubai, but still, pretty bloody shameful. And every Aussie I know here (which is quite a lot, considering I’ve basically come from a city of 180,000) is similarly appalled. We actually care about the environment and resources and we’re years ahead. I’m so proud of that!

I’ve also become incredibly proud of our lack of bureaucracy. While it may be misconstrued as a lack of order, fucking hell, we just get things done. And for the most part, we kick arse at customer service. You get your off days back home, where you hit a couple of rude bastards behind the desk, but here, oh boy, it’s a big deal if someone actually smiles at you when you hand over the cash! Yes, rash generalisation, because I’ve lucked out on a few gems recently, but when I first arrived here, boy was I shocked.



The other thing people seem to just ‘totally do’ here, which I’m so unimpressed with, is to hit the cocaine like it’s fucking candy. Most of the Australians I know here have been on it or are on it and it’s fucking filthy, really. I’ve never been anywhere where drug culture is just so cheap (in every sense of the word) and it’s pretty unattractive. I’m glad I don’t do the stuff and by the same token, I’m making sure I just let people do what they need to do. I’m surprised, for such a huge drug culture here that the support services or public service announcements aren’t more visible. Even the Australian government managed to bang together a totally shit campaign about party drugs.

On the good side, the other night I went to the Surrealist ball at the V&A Museum with a birdsnest in my hair, and what I totally loved about it was the people were there, dressed up, only mildly self-conscious, enjoying a museum/performance/cultural experience on a Friday night, without any hint of pretence or snobbery. That’s just what you do, it seems. Which is totally ace. Doing something to extend your mind or elevate your experience is seen as something positive, not something to be looked down upon, like it is in Australia. Little wonder that half our intelligentsia are in London.



And of course, you can’t compare cities with London without mentioning transport. London really needs to congratulate itself on the Underground. Not only is it efficient, but the design of the system, the map, the logo, everything is neat. OK, so some aspects of it may seem filthy compared to people having lived in cotton wool, but it’s fantastic. Even when there are delays on the circle line (which is practically all the time), it means that trains run every 5 minutes, rather than every 2. And if there are major delays on the system, you can get around it. If something fucks out on the systems back home, you’re screwed and waiting for at least 20/30/50 minutes for trains and/or replacement buses. I haven’t had a chance to research the design history of the Underground, but I really want to, because they’ve got the details down pat – even down to the hand rails on the Victoria line trains being Azure, the same colour as the line on the tube map. Fucking brilliant.



While a lot of that may sound like I’m whinging all the time, I’ve actually snapped out of my culture shock quite a bit, and these are only the glaringly obvious bits that still rub me up the wrong way. The fact of the matter is that I’m traveling. I’m actually engaging with seeing how other people live and I can’t understand those that don’t. It is a great way to have a complete opinion transplant and as an opinionate geek, I need that, regularly.


UPDATE: I am actually having a really good time here and living totally in each day and moment, just in case it sounded like i wasn't. While I may rant, it's very rare that I cannot find some good times to live - just in case you were concerned.

the wacky world of keywords and blog stats.

every couple of days i check out my blog counter stats, just to have a sticky beak and where people find me from. you wouldn't believe the search terms that people put in and end up coming to my blog.

i think it's fucking hilarious, but there's part of me that feels sorry for the poor fucks that open up she sees red and find a bunch of ramblings about art (mostly) instead of what google has told them they'd find.

here are some of my personal favourites:

• why is my cat's butt red
• steamy ladies
• woodstock bourbon tshirt designs
• wet ski jacket
• dogs fucking
• russian ladies of the night
• hilarious puns "Have you ever seen a" horse fly
• sexline numbers
• home saves and weapon cabinets
• UAE local chew gum brands

tell me about yours too!

rogier and the studio, jan and text, lauren and her pencils

when i was in the national gallery the other day, i popped into the northern renaissance room and had a brief peek at works by flemish kings jan van eyck and rogier van der weyden. several crazy ideas jumped out at me, possibly from spending too much time hanging out on the blogosphere, but i thought they were interesting to think about anyway.

Rogier Van Der WeydenThe Magdalen Reading, before 1438
thanks to the national gallery

rogier and the studio

my first reaction to the work of roger van der weyden was actually a word-association and i thought of ye olde adlads wieden & kennedy, wondering if dan wieden had any flemish background somewhere back there.
the works by 'the studio of rogier van der weyden' were amazing, filled with such precision and contrast and loveliness and i was thinking about how the whole 'studio' thing works and that it's a badge of honour to be part of a studio and that you can pick the work of a particular studio a mile off.
is the modern manifestation of a studio nowdays actually the advertising agency or the film set? a bunch of people working towards creating a look or idea of a leading director/art director and you can tell the work of them a mile away.

in the age of individual achievements and ego-based creative industries, sometimes i crave being able to work part of a creative team, without having to have my 'name' attached to it. as a balance, you know.


jan and text

als ich kan

while i couldn't really absorb much of the Portrait of a Man or Arnolfini Marriage by Jan Van Eyck (thanks to my time in front of Donatello), i did totally get into the text painted onto the frame of the former work. Painted to replicate engraved text, the As Well As I Can (Als Ich Kan) on top became a feature of the work. And when I peaked at the Arnolfini Portrait, I remembered the Jan Was 'Ere text "Johannes de Eyck fuit hic" elegantly snuck in on the back wall of the lovely drawing room, and i laughed my arse off at the cheekiness of it all.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about text/typography lately, for which i squarely blame ben terrett, and it occurred to me that van eyck might just have introduced text/type into painting very early on in the game.

the text in van eyck paintings is text for the sake of text, as an element of image code, as opposed to an explanation of the image, part of actual 'text' (ie.bible) or incorporated onto something in the image. this is quite an amazing realisation, text as image, right back in the 15th century. i always liked jan, but now i think i'm in love with the man.

could this be the person responsible for graffiti?

johannes de eyck fuit hic

lauren and her pencils

not nearly as revelatory or interesting, and only vaguely related to text or the studio, i thought i'd show you my new groovy pencils. they're not the best for really drawing with, but i was so impressed by what they're made from, i bought a couple. in black, and red of course.

my cute new pencils

how much, love?

Worth and value are such ephemeral things, but i could easily get sucked into this...

My blog is worth $13,548.96.
How much is your blog worth?

a gallery per day: monday

allright kids - i tried it this way, but blogging each day about galleries, doesn't leave much room for blogging about other stuff like the quirky things i'm learning about london, or the weird keywords that people google and end up here, or a supposition about the relationship between jan van eyck and text. and so on. so, this is the last time i'm doing a small one. next week we're back to the chunky digest of 'a gallery per day'. apologies to jade and others who prefer to absorb the info slowly.

the national gallery
sainsbury wing, room 53-56 - paintings 1200-1500

by now, if you've been reading for a while, you'll know that mondays is national gallery day and thursdays is tate modern day. for today's trip to the nat, i hung out in rooms 53 - 56, featuring altarpieces and gilted framed works from the italians up until the beginning of the 15th century and then the last room was the northern renaissance kids - Roger van Weyden and Jan van Eyck. more on jan and roger tomorrow (or the next day).

while i was floating around the italian works, i was transported back to my childhood and the stations of the cross that lined our primary school church. i don't even remember exactly what they looked like, but i remember looking at them all the time. probably while i was tuning out from the service. last year my colleage and i were asked about our childhood art education, as part of creative education research. i spoke about my more traditional visual upbringing in the catholic system - those stations of the cross, stained glassed windows, bible illustrations and mrs vromen, my super-supportive grade 1 teacher. years later, i graduated from a more traditional art school. my colleague, who went to a montessori primary school spoke of coloured forms and brightly coloured curtains specifically made for visual response and she graduated from a more progressive art school. interesting, no?


anyway, back to the sainsbury wing, i realised that i knew, for the most part, what was happening and what the story was in these old works, because i was taught the bible stories in the same way - through visual [as opposed to written] communication. my understanding of the importance of such work has deepened now. not just for pretty pictures, but for education. religious pictograms, if you like.



in one of the rooms, i stumbled upon a Donatello painted relief work, Virgin and Child with Saints and Musician Angels (c.1425-32) (above), and stood drawing that for a while, in awe of the way he created space and what an influence he had.

i credit Donatello with the renaissance. i think hanson & hanson (my first year art history text book) do too, but more people should, in my not-so-humble opinion. when the average joe hears the renaissance, he should think 'donatello' rather than 'michaelangelo', as without one, you wouldn't have the other. but then, donatello wasn't fucking a medici. some things never change.

back to Donatello, i gained a deeper understanding of the context of the period in relation to Dante and his divine comedy, even though they're a century apart from each other. however, donatello, a florentine, created works influenced by dante, a fellow florentine and through being surrounded by works from 13-14th C florence, i grasped a smidgin of the depth of the literary work - each level of hell, just that little bit clearer and more inspiring. this will crop up again later, i'm sure.

a gallery per day: sunday

the wallace collection

according to the google listing for the wallace collection website, it is "home to one of Europes finest collections of works of art, paintings, furniture, arms & armour and porcelain".
i only had a bit of time to check out a portion of the collection today and i've got plans to go back, but i agree and completely fell in love with the back state room. the dining and billiard rooms were impressive and i did love the walnut chair and mahogany writing desk in the billiard room, but it was in the back state room that i fell in love with the details.

the lush cerise wallpaper was classic french rococco style - rich, silk and patterned with just enough gawd to be austentatious, but enough restraint to show class. photography is verboten there, as i guess is taking an impression rubbing, so i just had to settle for a terrible drawing of it instead.

when i got around to the cabinets of blue painted porcelain pieces (probably in lapis lazuli), that was where i went all weak at the knees. the influence from persian ceramics was really prominent, and combined with french taste.... well, as the french couple nearby said "c'est magnifique!".

and speaking of that couple. i was standing in front of the cabinet, drawing, when they wanted to have a closer look and i stepped back to let the lady look. behind me was a chair and i instinctively rested on it, continuing to draw. a few minutes later, the guard came up to me and asked me to please get off the furniture as it's incredibly old and fragile!! oh my god, i had been just resting my arse on an 18th century rococco gilted chair, like it was a fucking armchair at home! i was mortified at my own stupidity and so embarassed. i wanted to go up to the guard and tell him "i'm not like the stupid american tourists in the place who ask if the person who owns this house is dead!" "i'm culturally and historically sensitive, really, i just moved to let someone pass and didn't think!"... but i just would have come off looking even more pathetic than i did.



i finished my drawing and left. too embarassed to even smile at the good-looking door guy. shit.

a gallery per day: saturday

richard serra, back to back
thanks to www.gagosian.com

gagosian gallery
richard serra, albert giacometti, cy twombly and lucio fontana - living, working, making

so, yesterday i went to coffee morning, a cute little institution here in london, and there i met a bunch of people i had never met before. anyway, i got talking to msblogkx, who works for create KX in supporting the creativity in the kings cross area and she encouraged me to check out any galleries in the area and let her know if i blogged about them. i decided to check which galleries were in the area as a plan to go there on monday. lo and behold, i discover that the Gagosian is in kings cross and that the show featuring Giacometti, Serra, Twombly and Fontana was closing today.

i jumped on the tube and when i got out at the station, it was like a ghost town. the FA Cup final had started and it was a nice easy trip down pentonville rd to the gallery.

for those who don't know, gagosian is a top-class commercial gallery, based mostly in new york, with 2 large galleries there and responsible for the careers of some of the world's most well-known artists. the gallery in kings cross is an impressive half a block long with 4 galleries, plus a viewing room (upstairs i presume). the walls are huge and whiter than white, lit by a combination of artificial lighting and huge skylights, giving the gallery a great neutral lighting system. the grey concrete floors and staff all dressed in black provides an austerity to the place which can be simultaneously intimidating and authoratitive and i'm glad that i don't phase easily otherwise i may have missed out on an awesome show.

the group show (if you can still call it that with the amount of heavyweights) was so well chosen. the mix of approaches and focus was perfect - all working in bronze, but giacometti's delicate and figurative works perfectly balanced serra's big, blocky industrial works. cy twombly's works were also on the delicate side, but he worked more with natural colours and found objects - long, lean and angular, which were lovingly opposed by fontana's soft blobs of bronze on the floor.

i stayed in the space for ages, drawing and admiring the works of sculptural kings. the next show at the gallery will be paintings by jeff koons and i'll be looking forward to checking that out. and if other spaces in kings cross are half as good as gagosian, they have a gold-mine on their hands!

shellac

shel·lac [shuh-lak] -lacked, -lack·ing.
–noun
1. lac (a resinous secretion of the lac insect deposited on trees) that has been purified and formed into thin sheets, used for making varnish.
2. a varnish (shellac varnish) made by dissolving this material in alcohol or a similar solvent.
3. a phonograph record made of a breakable material containing shellac, esp. one to be played at 78 r.p.m.: an LP that can hold nearly 10 times as much as the old shellac.
–verb (used with object)
4. to coat or treat with shellac.
5. Slang.
a. to defeat; trounce.
b. to thrash soundly.

last night i went and saw an amazing band, shellac, featuring an amazing man, steve albini and 5b is what they did. soundly.

if you're not into music reviews, then tune out now, 'cos i'm going to deviate from the path slightly and give you one. (especially 'cos i thrashed my body soundly and didn't get to a gallery today)

firstly, for those who don't know, or have had an unforgiveable memory loss, steve albini is like the willy wonka of music. he has concocted the most amazing sounds for the past 25 years, both from behind the desk and behind the axe. as a producer, he's most noteable for giving nirvana's in utero its sound, but he has also been responsible for a load of other (mostly punk/underground) bands' great albums. i personally love him for what he did with f-minus' last album, but don't hold that against me.

as a musician, he has been in the hugely influencial 80s band big black, the short-lived but influencial rapeman, and then shellac, who have been around now for 15 years! i felt incredibly old when i was reminded of that last night. if you're not into any underground american music from the 90s, then none of this will matter to you anyway, but it mattered to me.



the band are amazing and last night i realised that they not only sound incredibly different from a lot of other bands, but everything about them is against what usually happens in the music industry. albini's guitar has a hollow aluminium neck, he makes his own amps - you should see them, they're the most utilitarian looking things you'll ever see, but they're impressive!; they set up their own gear on stage; instead of idle banter between themselves or wanky directive at the audience between songs, they get the audience to ask them questions (but don't bother asking them if they're playing a particular song or it automatically comes of the list) or the drummer (todd trainer) gets out from behind the kit and does stand-up comedy, they don't sell merch and they only tour every 5 years.

yet they manage to completely sell out gigs and sustain themselves while having a good time. they're the quintessential anti-band and that's fucking admirable. any more anti and they wouldn't be playing instruments.

i didn't feel so great, so i ended up watching them from the back of the venue (not my preferred position), but they were so frenetic yet so completely focused and intense that i still felt involved and will remember seeing for years to come. as much for what they didn't do, as for what they did.

a gallery per day: thursday

Roy Lichtenstein, Whaam!, 1963
thanks to tate modern

what happened to wednesday's gallery? well, i lay in bed all day cultivating a cold. no gallery. oh well.

thursday
tate modern
UBS Drawings
States of Flux


After last week's awesome experience of Idea and Object, I was looking forward to this section. I thought it would have been a great investigation of the art up until the 60s, incorporating the conceptual art movement: Fluxus (of which i'm quite a fan). I was sadly mistaken. Overall, i felt like it was called States of Flux because they couldn't find a way to tie these pieces together coherently, so it was easy to label them as flux, which is kind of way off the mark.

Anyway, despite that feeling about the overall flow of the section, it was also a section full of excellent artworks. Seriously fantastic ones, like a couple of important Picasso cubist works with his partner in crime, Braques, The Kiss by Auguste Rodin (swoon!) and a couple of excellent Claes Oldenbergs.

The main image i went ga-ga over was Marcel Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (which would have been perfectly complemented by Bride Falling Down the Stairs - his awesome cubist work). The Bride Stripped Bare, a glass drawing of the mechanics of human relationships and male/female desire is an important conceptual work - more a diagramatic blueprint and narrative than a visually cohesive piece, but it paved the way for all kinds of amazing works based on idea. The work in the Tate is a sanctioned replica by none other than UK pop art king Richard Hamilton and very well done, although i do like the glass cracks and dust in the original.

I drew a horrendous drawing of it, all outta whack, so today, it's a picture nicked from Wikipedia instead.

Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, 1915-23,
replica Richard Hamilton, 1965-6

And just as a little tidbit, while I didn't quite go as loopy about it as I did the Marcel Duchamp, checking out Roy Lichtenstein's Whaam! pick, I suddenly got what i had read and heard in art history and theory about his work. He introduced the idea of craft into that which is normally taken for granted as mass-produced. He painted dot screen! I know, duh. Anyway, the penny dropped and I finally understood the flow on of success and understanding to Andy Warhol (who, by the way, doesn't make me weak at the knees, like he should).