Marianne North: pioneering botanical artist
"Victorian artist Marianne North, one of the only women of her time to travel to places like the Seychelles Islands, Australia, and Chile, and who left behind a trail of impressive art and writing about her botanical discoveries, is not a household name. ...
In 1871, when a 40-year-old North set out after the death of her father to travel around the world and to paint as many of world's flora in oils as possible, she unwittingly found herself both ahead of and behind her times. In the art world, she was definitely not part of the avant-garde; in France, Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir had already started their Impressionist paintings, creating works that were worlds away from the status quo of a polished depiction of nature.
North went around the world twice, in fifteen years, traveling by train, boat, mule, and on foot, to every continent, except for Antarctica. In Brazil, where she spent 13 months, North painted lush landscapes and tropical flowers with tight brushstrokes and clean lines - a style that would soon be left behind with the revolutionary style of the Impressionists. North didn't perceive or paint her subjects in a particularly unique way, but she relayed every minute detail of a plant, flower, or landscape with breathtaking precision. Her paintings give you a straight, dispassionate look at an unfamiliar world."
(Alexia Nader, Garden Design)
Fig.1 Marianne North, New Zealand Flowers and Fruit, Date painted: early 1880s, Oil on board, 50.9 x 35.4 cm, Collection: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
When Is Now? The Historical Present in Creative Practice
Thursday 27th June 2013, 10:00am - 4:30pm, Waterside 2, The Watershed, Bristol, UK.
"This one-day symposium explores the historical present in creative practice. In a cultural climate that valorizes the 'now' what does it mean to occupy the present moment? Our aim is to examine the present tense of creative practice as itself historical as opposed to understanding it as the end point of a linear chronological line. The symposium is motivated by a desire to pay attention to the atmospheric 'thickness' of the present tense in art, media and design practices and to imagine what kinds of experience can be articulated when what Lauren Berlant calls the 'ongoingness' of life is slowed down and brought into visibility. The symposium includes papers on the historical present in relation to painting, sound, photography, film, digital media and video."
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Helena Almeida's Colourful cannibalism: consuming Yves Klein Blue
"For Study for Inner Improvement (1977), a sequence of photographs in which Almeida looks like she is eating blue paint. There is no question that the colour she is consuming is very similar to that of Yves Klein. She had in the past protested at Klein's use of women as objects in his artworks. At the time of making Study for Inner Improvement, the concept of anthropophagy (cultural cannibalism, the idea of consuming other cultures as a way of asserting independence) was a popular ideology. Almeida's chewing up of Klein's blue, a colour he had come to dominate, was a liberating act for women and artists everywhere."
(Jessica Lack, 7 October 2009, guardian.co.uk)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Chinoiserie at Lincolnshire's Belton House
"Hand painted C18th Chinese wallpaper at Belton in the Chinese Bedroom with a continuous scene of a garden party. Cornice, dado and other joinery painted to imitate bamboo."
(National Trust, UK)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Vorticists: a short-lived 20th century avant garde art movement
"The vorticists did not have many members; nor did the movement last long, because of unfortunate timing - it formed in 1914 as Europe hurtled towards war. By 1918 there was not much appetite for dogmatic groups such as theirs.
Nevertheless, the group holds an important place in 20th-century British art history.
'They were the first abstract modernist group in Britain,' said Stephens. 'It inevitably comes out of the revolution of cubism, but then, so does everything in the 20th century.'
They were part of a maelstrom of new, aggressive art 'ism' movements, not least the one practised by the Italian futurists, who were, in Lewis's eyes, the bad guys.
Stephens said: 'Unlike the futurists, who celebrate the energy of the machine and actual war as a purging force, the vorticists were engaged in more universal ideas of identity, time and movement in a philosophical sense.'"
(Mark Brown, 13 June 2011, The Guardian)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
