Showing posts with label art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label art. Show all posts

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Hamburg, part II: street art

Continuing the visit to Hamburg that I started on the previous post.

One of the things that I really enjoyed in Hamburg was the huge quantity and quality of street art. From sculptures to wall painting. Vivid colors, alive images and emotional effects. What more can you ask from art?

The style, inspiration, technic of what one can find in the streets varies a lot, although some things do have some resemblance of style. I wonder if the two next pieces are from the same artist.

It's hard for me to name this as graffiti, a word that is mostly used to describe the badly done inscriptions on walls with no real insight, no deep meaning, no relevance, no art. So I prefer to name this as frescoes or paintings.

Of course I am probably completely wrong and those two paintings and they are made by two very different artists.

In one of the wall a Die Die My Darling in a possible (?) reference to the punk horror band The Misfits. It's also a great music so do enjoy it.

After seeing that the music was in my mind for quite a while…

In the end all this art form is even more temporary than the usual painting and sculptures. Most of it is done in old and abandon buildings and a city with the such dynamism as Hamburg will feel the pressure to replace those building with even more office blocks. With luck maybe the facade of those new building could integrate the art presented in the existing ones but somehow I don't believe that will happen.

Sometimes you can also find interesting advertising. Here we can see a real estate agency asking the people in the street if their house is too small, inviting them to jump into their web site in search for something new. Then the site is well layed out and easy to use (well... I'm using google translation to actually understand the site as my German is too basic for more than getting food and drinks at a bar).

I'll just end with two more frescoes that I enjoyed for different reasons.

The first one I think portraits Mahalasa, one of the eight avatars of Vishnu, that I find really nice because of the feelings when watching the painting. It bring a certain sense of harmony and relaxation that were most welcome by me. I had after all been walking for some three or four hours and resting, even just by imagining it, was well deserved.

Polytheist or even monotheist where the deity has several facets somehow feel more open to accept other people as they are. Or so it seams to me while I try to understand how can the three biggest religions that currently exist on this small planet fight so much when, to my understanding, they all have the same god as central piece of their dogma and diverge only on the messengers from that deity.

The other painting is a question: "Should I?".

It's up to us, as observers, to try and figure out what is the action that should or should not be taken and by doing so we project our own uncertainties into the drawing.

Now… Should you?

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

New boots but.. there's no water, only ice.

I finally have some proper boots for windsurfing in cold weather: Atan Mistral Hot boots. With 7mm of neoprene covered by a layer of latex I think it will be enough to keep my feet from freezing. I just tried them for a while (at home) and they feel comfortable and very warm. I can't wait to try them but for that I have to wait: the only change of getting in the water is to go in the North Sea, as the several lakes and inner seas of Netherlands are filled with ice, and I don't feel like going alone to the North Sea. With this cold temperatures if something goes wrong your doomed.

The water is at 2°C so, without proper protection, a person has a time of survival measured of about 90 minutes. A thick wetsuit (as the one I'm wearing in this post) should extend that time quite a bit.

I start to understand why so many Dutch painters like to include the sky in their creations. Be it Goyen, Willem van de Velde the Elder, or a more recent van Gogh, Wijnand Nuijen, Jan Vermeer or so many others it easy to look at the fight between light and clouds, sun and shadow, and appreciate it and then, locking at the paintings, recognize the skill and ability of the artists.

I am reading Neal Stephenson book The System of the World, the third volume of the The Baroque Cycle (8 books published in three rather thick volumes) where a big part of the action takes place in the Netherlands, England and France. It's nice to be close to this places and let my imagination run. I'm also getting to know the history of this part of Europe a lot better. It's not uncommon for me to pause reading to research some more information of historical events or persons. If only studying history in school had been as much fun...

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Creation and innovation should be free

How creation evolves: Edgar Allan Poe wrote a short story in 1842, "The Masque of the Red Death", then in 1964 Roger Cormen directs a movie based on the story. A gothic band, Theater of Tragedy, releases in 1996 the album Velvet Darkness They fear (great cover by the way) with the song "And When He Falleth", that you can hear in the video bellow, with a set of dialogs between Prince Prospero and Franscesca taken from the movie.

This way the work of E.A. Poe not only live in literature but in other form of art, through out the times.

Thus does society evolve, building and rebuilding.

I know... nothing related to windsurf but it's has been really a poor month of wind so one does what one can to keep busy and entertained.