A few days ago my blog broke the three million mark - it has received 3206890 views so far. Over the last fifteen years I have enjoyed keeping this diary: recording some of the things I have done, the galleries I have visited, the wonderful art I have looked at, and reminiscences on my travels. It gives me enormous pleasure keeping this personal diary. The fact that people want to read it is an extra bonus. I would like to thank everyone who has read or commented on my blog.
These are the top ten posts:
I have written a few posts on this phenomenon, as I tend to make a record of the event every time I witness it. I always see it when we are in Greece and it tends to occur in January or February. I am always awed when I see one and immediately go to the terrace to have a closer look. From the comments I have received, from all over the world, many people feel the same, their reactions ranging from fear because they have never seen anything like this before, to amazement.
This phenomenon occurs when the crescent moon travels straight down the horizon. For a fuller scientific explanation go to the highlighted post in the previous paragraph or here
2. Gordon Baldwin - Objects for a Landscape, 2
A comprehensive exhibition of Gordon Baldwin's ceramics. Ken, I and our friends Avril and Mervyn travelled to York to see this exhibition. Just loved it.
Back in 2012, I wrote: 'It is the combination of sculpture with painting that make Baldwin's ceramics so innovative and unique. He broke entirely with the Leach tradition that form was all that mattered and has created ceramic sculptures which he still calls vessels and in so doing has challented what is seen as 'art' and what is seen as 'craft'.
The fundamentals of his art: the relationship between inner and outer space; the economy of the form reminiscent of Cycladic art; the depths of the glazed clay achieved by often using various pigments; the economy of the lines on the surface of the forms which tend to follow the vessel's dips and swells; a preference for organic rather than geometric forms that are rounded rather than angular.
To see more of this post you can go here
3. David Hockney - A bigger picture
I saw this exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, in 2012. This is part of what I wrote about Hockney:
'We see the influence of the Impressionists and Po-Impressionists on Hockney's latest work: not just the unapologetic prettiness of their paintings, or their celebration of the beauty of nature, but also the vivid colours employed the the Fauve painters. The biggest influence however, is Monet, not just because of the immediacy of his technique in working out of doors, but also in his use of serial imagery: returning in different weather conditions and in different times of the day to the same motifs, as well as in the enveloping scale of his late panoramic paintings of the water lilies in the ponds of his home at Givenchy.
But even though Hockney is in dialogue with the French Impressionist and the Fauve paintings, the subject, by contrast, is very English. There has been criticism that some of his most exuberant colours are not to be found under a pale Yorkshire winter sun. This is however in line with the Impressionist colour theory which allowed Monet's haystacks to contain vivid hues of purple and red in order to capture prismatic effects of reflected light.
4. Diego Riviera - Murals for the Museum of Modern Art
We saw this exhibition in 2012 in New York. The post has got the fourth highest views in my blog partly due to the fact that it was used by New York teachers as part of a year 8 scheme of lessons on Mexico and the Mexican Revolution. This gave me great pleasure and for the two years that the scheme was running it was really exciting seeing groups of 30 students logging on to my blog to do their research and homework.
In 2012 I wrote:
'There was no 'Occupy Wall Street' movement when MoMA started planning an exhibition to commemorate the 80th anniversity of its Diego Rivera retrospective. They were also not to know that Occupy Wall Street would be evicted the week that the exhibition opened, and yet what appropriate timing! Today, as then, the gap between the 1% and the 99% is getting bigger and the fat cats are getting fatter.
The first Rivera exhibition at MoMA was their second one-person show (Matisse being the first), just as the horrors of the Great Depression were sinking in. The show consisted of eight 'portable' frescoes. The museum organiser wanted New Yorkers to get a taste of the revolutionary murals that were springing up all over Mexico at the time. Mexico muralism emerged in the 1920s in the wake of a bloody 10-year old revolution that brought a Marxist-led government to power.
Public buildings were adorned with murals that taught socialist ideals and celebrated Mexico's pre-colonial indigenous culture. Rivera's exhibition broke attendance records even with an admission of 35 cents during the Great Depression. People went mad for it and the show outsold Matisse by far.
The power of those frescoes was not just the fact that they were an integral part of the nationalist, radical Mexican revolution but also because they coincided with the establishment of the first workers' state in the Soviet Union and the fact that Rivera aligned himself with Trotsky and opposed Stalinism.
The paradox was that Rivera's social realism (secular, revolutionary responses to church frescoes) was an art for the people which he executed while enjoying the patronage of the most successful bankers of his time. Five of the frescoes were copies of murals that Rivera had made in Mexico: Sugar Cane, Liberation of the Peon, Agrarian Leader Zapata, The Uprising, Indian Warrior. The other three Rivera did during the uproar that followed the opening and were added during the six-month run of the show. The last and most ambitious is Frozen Assets which caused a second even bigger uproar.
'Sherrie Levine, the appropriation artist par excellence, shocked the art world in 1979 with her After Walker Evans photographs. Evans photographed the Burroughs, a family of sharecroppers in the Depression era and his photographs were published in a book that became the quitessential record of the rural American poor. In 1979 Levine re-photographed Evans' photographs and without any manipulation of the images she presented them in an exhibition of her work.
Her work is within the tradition of reconstruction, in revealing power structures and ideological imperatives in any given cultural situation, and more specifically, questioning traditional ideas of originality and authorship...
She also challenges our notions of authorship, of the paternal rights assigned to the author by law and because she has appropriated the work of only male artists, she is also seen as a feminist hijacking patriarchal authority. As Craig Owens has stated, 'Levine's disrespect for paternal authority suggests that her activity is less of appropriation and one of expropriation' she expropriates the appropriators'.
This is part of what I wrote:
Her preferred subject was herself from the first time she picked up a camera as a teenager. The fact that her main subject was her own body would logically place her work within the genre of self-portraiture, but she transforms it into a far more complicated and ambiguous undertaking. Not only is she both subject and author in her works, but she also alludes to a representation of self within the pictures, particularly through her use of mirrors and portraits.
'Woodman's self-portraits demonstrate an awareness that the genre is as much concerned with how representation is effected as it is with offering supposedly profound truths about the artist who effects that representation'. (Chris Townsend).
We saw this exhibition at the John Martin gallery in London in 2014. It was my first introduction to Caple's work and ever since, I have not missed a single exhibition of his at the gallery. John Caple is completely self-taught. His family have farmed and quarried in Mendip in Somerset since the 18th century.
This is part of what I wrote:
This is part of what I wrote in the post:
Ash, sand, gold leaf, broken ceramics, diamonds, straw and wood are some of the materials that Kiefer uses. Bark-like layers of pigment and shellac protrude from the canvas like relief sculpture. A lot of Kiefer's paintings are monochromatic with impasto surfaces to which organic matter, including sunflower stalks and bundles of straw as well as metal objects such as books made out of lead are included. He sometimes leaves his paintings out in the wind and the rain, or bathes them in acid in order to achieve their battered, time-worn surfaces.
This is an exhibition which is foremost about memory. Kiefer has resurrected the horrors of the 20th century in a shocking and explicit way and is determined not to allow us to forget. History is at the centre of this exhibition and even though parts of it are very beautiful, there is horror there too. Ash is one of the predominant materials that he has used - ash reminiscent of the hightmare of the Holocaust, not just ash of bricks and mortar but also ash of human flesh. Death ash. You cannot escape it'.
We saw this exhibition at the Albertina in Vienna in 2016. This is part of what I wrote in the post:
Kiefer has been integrating woodcuts into his complex works since the 70s. Each artwork is unique: the individual woodcuts are all printed by hand. Mostly combined with acrylic oil, shellac and - in the most recent works - charcoal, they amalgamate into monumental compositions. The subject matter of the earlier works largely finds its point of departure in Germany, with its history, mythologies and cultural episodes condensed into complex innovative visual statements. From the mid-90s onward, the artist devoted himself to new themes, telling the story of limits that have been overcome, including the limitations imposed on human beings. In the most recent woodcuts, Kiefer revisits his earlier subject of the forest.
'I finished Ali Smith's novel Autumn a few weeks ago. I was totally engrossed with this novel that explores what time is, and how we experience it. Pauline Boty, a founding figure in British pop art, recurs through the novel, as a symbol of all those who are 'Ignored. Lost. Rediscovered years later. Then ignored. Lost. Rediscovered again years later. Then ignored. Lost. Rediscovered ad infinitum'.
Boty described Pop as a 'nostalgia for now' and used its visual language to give form to the yearnings and pleasures of the female pop 'fan'. A friend recalls how she set out 'to re-establish the kind of woman one could be', and refused to relinquish either her serious intent as an artist or her right to a proactive sexual identity. She was also a political radical and had a prophetic grasp of gender politics. A critique of the workings of mass culture and of gender inequality runs throughout her woik. She brought a gendered awareness to events like the Cuba criss, the Profumo Affair, American race riots and the assassination of J.F. Kennedy.
