Unesco says Ban Haitian Art

From News24, word the Unesco is requesting a temporary ban on the sale of Haitian art, part of an effort to prevent looting.

"Unesco director general Irina Bokova has asked international forces in Haiti to ensure the security of museums and other buildings containing artefacts, a statement said.

'It is important to prevent treasure hunters from rifling through the rubble of the numerous cultural landmarks that collapsed in the earthquake,' said the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation.

Bokova was also taking steps to encourage the art market and museum professionals to verify the origin of cultural property up for sale, especially on the internet."

Rethink Creativity

Chris Serravalle won a contest for a scholarship advertisement with this stop motion, pop up book video, and it's absolutely delightful. Not to mention, all good tips for better ideas.

Aftermath: Haitian Art

Lately I happened to have been reading about Haitian Art, which gives me a familiarity when I read about the destruction the earthquake caused the nation's art treasures, in particular the Centre d'Art in Port-au-Prince. It was the beginning of many artists, such as Hector Hippolyte, and the means by which many artists gained worldwide recognition.


As with most of the city, the Centre d'Art has been largely destroyed. However, it pains me to see these matters discussed as widely as they are being discussed. It's too soon. While many artworks have not survived, neither have some artists, a representative subset of a much larger population. Column inches and relief efforts should be directed toward the people. I hope help goes to where it is needed most.

New York Times Nostalgia

My parent's brought down the Sunday New York Times with them and flipping through it, especially the Arts and Leisure section, is pure joy. I read my news online here, except for the occasional local paper, and on the whole I don't think I miss anything.

I'm not even a die-hard print only kind of person, but it is a tactical pleasure to have the Arts section in my hands again. To be able to flip through it scanning the headlines. The type in neat ordered rows and the grainy color images punching it all up. I realized it is not merely the act of holding the paper instead of the computer that I like so much--I actually read differently.

I carefully pick and choose everything I read on the internet. This goes from blogs to news, so when I scan the NYT Arts section I only read what I think would be interesting after a 15 second consideration. Apparently that does not include much of what is in this Sunday edition, and perhaps to my detriment. It all looks quite interesting when I have a hard copy in front of me. Maybe if left to my own choices, it's easier to focus in rather than branch out --not a great quality for learning more about the world around me.

Or maybe this is just nostalgia run riot speaking.

St. Maarten Airport

My parents have landed for the week. And yes, this really is how close incoming planes come. People gather at a bar and beach at the end of the runway strip to watch the planes land and take off.


They do this despite the serious warning on the signs of "extreme bodily harm and/or death."


Luckily the whole family survived.

If good knitting meant macabre...

Lump of Meat on a Stool, 1999

then we would have a winner.

Yesterday Beautiful Decay featured interesting work from a Swedish artist that I can't seem to dig up much information on. Leif Holmstrand’s creates crocheted and knitted sculptures and performance pieces that at their best combine simplicity and clear color with a darker underlying significance.

Cover for Matthew Barneys Cremaster Cycle, 2006

Prams, 2006

No Arms, No Legs, 1999-2004

Joie de vivre & Matisse

The Dance, 1909, Henri Matisse


I'm in an inexplicably good mood this morning. These dancers of Matisse came to mind. While I have seen the work at MoMA, I never took especial notice of it. I'm not sure why my mind landed on this, but it is indeed a joyful work. And the colors!

If you're in need of a color surge to wake you up, may I recommend googling images of Matisse?

Top or Bottom?

Here was my thought while driving yesterday: there are two kinds of creative people. Those who visualize the ideal and then try to create something that resembles their ideal as completely as possible, and those who take bits and pieces of reality as starting blocks and see what they can create from that.



Top Down People....

Those who visualize the ideal might create a reasoned-out guideline to how the work should be organized. They know what they want, but not necessarily how to create it. Theirs is a world of symmetry and order with a rational mind at work behind it trying to approximate the perfection they imagined. They can be dissatisfied when their creation isn't perfect according to their pre-determined ideal.



Bottom Up People...


are realists, in a sense. They work from the bottom up, with pieces of reality whether it be an overheard sentence, the look in someone's eye, or an old car part. They imagine the potential of that thing in connection with this other thing. Their world is forever in pieces that they are trying to put together, which can be chaotic but also full of endless possibilities.


That's not to say people can't behave either way at different times, but I definitely lean toward the latter. What do you think? Does the top down/ bottom up distinction make sense to you? Are you a top or a bottom?

Wilfredo Lam's The Jungle

The Jungle, 1943

At least the name was familiar. Reading a survey on Caribbean art that I found at the public library, Wilfredo Lam came up at least half a dozen times before I even got to the section on Afro-Cubanism. The Jungle, above, is the most famous example of his work and displays the merging of European painting tradition in its Cubist perspective yet the masked figures amidst the sugarcane and bamboo also reflect the painter's inclusion of his African heritage and culture.

It should be noted that The Jungle was not intended to represent Afro-Cuban traditions literally--the masks are African-inspired rather than relating directly to his experience in Cuba. It is, in fact, a critique. His intention was to describe a spiritual state, most particularly that of an Afro-Cuban culture that had been reduced to absurdity by panning to tourist trade.



"I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country, but by thoroughly expressing the negro spirit, the beauty of the plastic art of the blacks. In this way I could act as a Trojan horse that would spew forth hallucinating figures with the power to surprise, to disturb the dreams of the exploiters."- Wilfredo Lam


La Silla, 1943
Lam was born in Cuba to a Chinese father and a half Congolese, half Cuban mulatto mother. After studying in Cuba, he moved to Madrid and then Paris to continue his training. He became friends with Picasso and his circle and was influenced by them. He later traveled through the Caribbean with Andre Breton, another influential person in the Caribbean arts scene of the time.

When he returned to Havana in 1941, Lam became newly aware of Afro-Cuban traditions, which he felt were being lost and made picturesque for tourists. He wished to free Cuba from cultural subjugation and to rediscover its African heritage. Many great artists of the 20th century combined radical style with "primitive" arts. Lam did so by synthesizing the Surrealist and Cubist forms to express the iconography of Afro-Cubanism. Authenticity was perhaps more created than discovered in his work. A successful artist internationally who supported his ingenuous roots, he died in Paris in 1982. He remains widely influential in Cuba and throughout the Caribbean.

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Open Water Diver

I am an Open Water Diver, at least according to PADI. That means I passed my written exams and did 4 dives. On the last one, I wasn't sure I was going to make it back to the surface. I figured I would have a heart attack after seeing a barracuda as long as I am.



Other island hazards:



You can only assume the mechanic of this grounded beer plane was also responsible for attaching these windshield wipers.

Scuba Diving Today!

Today I step out of the classroom and into the water.


Or, rather, I step away from the e-learning Open Water Diver course on my computer and into the pool to practice. Then I have lunch, a nice boat ride, and I hop into a much deeper ocean and hope I don't sink. And that the sharks don't get me. Depending on the dive schedules, I should be a PADI- certified open water diver come Tuesday.

It's a swim in the right direction.*




*Sorry, I couldn't help myself.

Avatar

Nope, not the movie (which I am eager to see 3-D), but Beijing artist Cao Fei. She has some perceptive comments on how people behave in virtual realities like Second Life or her project, RMB City. The more time I spend online, the more I think of it as a virtual reality for myself. My blog is my virtual home. If that makes the picture in the sidebar my avatar, I must find a photo where my hands don't take up the whole picture.

Art:21 is a documentary series on contemporary visual artists, and this clip comes from season 5, fantasy episode. A part of PBS, the site allows you to watch their content online, but unfortunately season 5 isn't up yet.

Livre d'Matisse

"I do not distinguish between the construction of a book and that of a painting and I always proceed from the simple to the complex." -Henri Matisse, 1946

Le Cygne
Livre d'artiste, or Artist's Book, were common at the turn of the 20th c. in France, and Henri Matisse produced more than a dozen illustrated books in his lifetime. Lucky folks in Atlanta will be able to see some of Matisse's most successful book illustrations on display at the Museum of Art at Oglethorpe University from January 17 until May 9. This exhibition looks lovely, and I enjoy the convergence of the simple lines of the lithographs and the poetry.

Matisse especially loved poetry, and he produced dozens of drawings and etchings to illustrate the work of French poets Stephane Mallarme and Pierre Ronsard that are on view. Initially he created a 30 lithograph portfolio in 1941, but seven years later Matisse had transformed it into a 128 page volume entitled Florilege des Amours de Ronsard. Matisse's drawings accompany the lyric poetry with flowers, nudes, dancers, and music.

I wasn't familiar with this part of Matisse's ouerve, and in looking for more information, found the artist had also illustrated James Joyce's Ulysses and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal!, which leads me down another path of exploration...

Florilege des Amours de Ronsard

Hector Hippolyte

Henry Christophe

Hippolyte's paintings and life are in many ways indicative of primitive Haitian art. They combine voodoo and Christian symbols, and are noted for creating an iconography for laos, or spirits, of the voodoo tradition. As a third generation priest, Hippolyte (1894-1948) worked in his community and eked out a living painting houses. Then DeWitt Peters, an American from the Centre d'Art in Porte au Prince, saw a pair of doors with intricate floral patterns that he had painted on a bar. He tracked Hippolyte down and asked him to come work in the city.

Papa Zaca

Hippolyte immediately accepted. He believed it was his destiny to become a painter, and he had been waiting for it to unfold. He moved to a cottage outside Port au Prince in 1945. His work was an immediate commercial success and made it big internationally when it was collected and shown by French surrealist Andre Breton. Hippolyte thus also represents the highly commercialized side of "naive" or primitive Haitian artists which has continued to this day. Hippolyte was highly prolific for the next 3 years, until he suddenly died. It is reported to have been a heart attack, although some think the division between his voodoo duties and his artistic ones overwhelmed him as he began painting more and more.

Saint Francis and Christ Child

Above is Hippolyte's painting of Saint Francis, and below is his depiction of Mistress Erzulie, the voodoo spirit of courtesy. In depicting both the Christian and voodoo persona, Hippolyte treats the subject in the same manner. The focus is on the strong central figure surrounded by a lush, brightly colored natural world. It's fascinating learning about his life and his art, especially how voodoo influenced his art, but there are few online resources. More information about his life and his works here.

Maitresse Erzulie

Natural Connections

Bush, Cole Bay, Anguilla

Maelstorm, 2009, Roxy Paine

Assemblage in shape of teepee, Anguila

Metropolitan 139, 1961, Jean Tinguely

Rainbow over the valley, St. Maarten

Hell Yes, 2001, Ugo Rondinone

Also, I did not get a picture of this, but coming back on the ferry from Anguilla I saw a sky just this color blue over the distant hills of Saint Maarten, and a single star had the same electrifying effect that this moon does.

The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897, Henri Rousseau


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Outside the Vangaurdia: Fidelio Ponce de Leon

Figuras

My trip to the library afforded me, among other treasures of the non- supernatural romance variety, a book on Caribbean art. In reading about the Cuban vangaurdia of the 1930s, I learned about a movement that was trying to define Cuban-ness and espoused the forms of Modernism. Ironically, these post-colonial activists espoused Gauguin's Primitivism as much as Cubism or Futurism. One prominent artist of the time stood apart from this. Fidelio Ponce de Leon focused on depicting a somber, internal world rather than making socio-political statements or studying European schools.

Ninos

The artist lead a bohemian life, disappearing for years at a time to travel around the countryside. Few fixed details are known. Originally born Alfredo Fuentes Pons in 1895, he entered the San Alejandro Academy in Havana to receive drawing classes when he was about 20. He is said to have had a vivid imagination and created his own name. Unlike fellow vangaurdia artists, he never travelled to Europe to study. Instead, he disappeared on foot into the countryside where he worked his way through the land. Ponce de Leon came back an alcoholic with tuberculosis in 1930. Despite these circumstances, his work was shown in Havana and he began to receive critical attention. In 1943, he began rambling again and six years later he died of tuberculosis.

Five Women

This mysterious outsider is sometimes considered the most authentic Cuban artist of his time because of his lack of interest in European styles. However, he did travel to Russia and Mexico, and listed influences such as Modigliani and El Greco. As you can tell from these images, Ponce de Leon was obsessed with the color white, which he used to call "pintura nacarada," nacarada meaning mother of pearl color. He enjoyed Kandinsky's words that white acts like "a deep and absolute silence full of possibilities."

Why Milton Makes Writers Look Bad

One on my favorite poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay, would sit and create sonnets in her head, not writing them down until each line was perfect. Milton, as we all learned in school, was blind and he said Paradise Lost to an amanuensis as he composed it. He claimed that a divine spirit inspired him at night and in the morning he would recite new verses. Both of these authors knew what they wanted to say before committing to print. I envy them.


I seem to be working out the novel as I go. My story hasn't changed since the first draft, but they way I want to tell it has. I'm in the midst of tedious editing as I change the chronology and presentation of events. The thing that bothers me is that I can't really write in an inspired way for long stretches. It's more like solving, or rather creating, a puzzle at this point. So I write a bit, think a bit, switch a scene or delete something, and read over it. It's a series of stops and starts.

Of course, when I was in the middle of the first draft, you wouldn't have heard me going on about "inspired long stretches." Those tended to only come after a fair amount of hard work, but looking back it seems like halcyon days. Now it also seems best to work everything out in your head first. Think of all the time and typing I could have saved. Maybe if my novel were 14 lines I could do that, but I certainly couldn't come anywhere close to Milton. The bastard.

Reading Material

Beach reading is a class of reading unto itself. I've always enjoyed a gripping, easy novel. I discovered Stieg Larsson while I was here. However, having been here 3 weeks I can assure you I've read all of the good gripping stories and have moved on to second tier, wild, and badly written books. Tsar, above, falls into that category as do all the books that were left in our new apartment. So it is with great excitement that I announce today is library day! I am going to the public library in Phillipsburg to get a library card. Perhaps that doesn't sound incredibly festive to you, but get a load of what was next on my list:


Dead After Dark contains four supernatural romance stories. The first one is about a woman hunting a werewolf, only to find herself hunted by the werewolf, only to find herself in love with the werewolf. I didn't read on to see what the other stories were about.

I do have my trusty copy of The Oxford Book of English Verse with me, but it's not exactly beach reading nor is it sturdy enough for the beach. So yes, it's off to the library for me!

Swinburne and the Sound of the Sea

Swinburne at 23 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Poor Algy. His long, sonorous verse gets left on the bookshelf to collect dust these days in favor of, oh, basically anything else. Algernon Charles Swinburne's rhymes are soft, full of imagery and classical references, and they build slowly to a swell. They are altogether too pretty and delicate for modern verse. Not to mention, what exactly is his point? The old accusation of him valuing sound over sense raises its head like a sea monster, a chimera.

Swinburne might be the opposite of modern tastes, which expect poetry's essence to be distilled, rhyming inconsequential, with a maximum of meaning packed in a minimum of syllables. Those qualities are not in Swinburne's verse. His poems works differently upon one, in a hypnotic way, as he gradually layers image over sound over meaning so gently and repetitively you hardly know how you have been lulled into such a trance. T.S. Eliot considers Swinburne acutely in this excerpt from The Sacred Wood, where he considers the poet's diffuseness his genius as well as his flaw.

Ever since I've been here in St. Maarten, the sound of the ocean has been in my ears day in and night out. It's what had me turning to Swinburne's verse after forgetting it for years (that, and the fact that I am dismally low on reading material). His poetry sounds like the waves, and according to Wikipedia the poet did as well:

"Swinburne accompanied Bell Scott and his guests, probably including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, on a trip to Tynemouth. Scott writes in his memoirs that as they walked by the sea, Swinburne declaimed the as yet unpublished 'Hymn to Proserpine' and 'Laus Veneris' in his strange intonation, while the waves 'were running the whole length of the long level sands towards Cullercoats and sounding like far-off acclamations'."

Henry Clarke, from Selected Poems of Swinburne

Swinburne was by all accounts a strange character, arguably the first English Decadent and influenced by both de Sade and the l'art pour l'art movement. He has been accused of every sin under the sun, although some doubt the truth of the accusations. (Oscar Wilde said of Swinburne that he was "a braggart in matters of vice, who had done everything he could to convince his fellow citizens of his homosexuality and bestiality without being in the slightest degree a homosexual or a bestializer.") A small man, with bright red hair and an exceedingly nervous temperment, Swinburne indulged himself until he collapsed and on the brink of death was taken under strict care, from which he never left in his remaining years.

If you read aloud his tribute to Baudelaire upon the his death, you can hear the soft and diffuse sound that rules his versification:

Shall I strew on thee rose or rue or laurel,
Brother, on this that was the veil of thee?
Or quiet sea-flower moulded by the sea,
Or simplest growth of meadow-sweet or sorrel,
Such as the summer-sleepy Dryads weave,
Waked up by snow-soft sudden rains at eve?
Or wilt thou rather, as on earth before,
Half-faded fiery blossoms, pale with heat
And full of bitter summer, but more sweet
To thee than gleanings of a northern shore
Trod by no tropic feet?

II
For always thee the fervid languid glories
Allured of heavier suns in mightier skies;
Thine ears knew all the wandering watery sighs
Where the sea sobs round Lesbian promontories,
The barren kiss of piteous wave to wave
That knows not where is that Leucadian grave
Which hides too deep the supreme head of song.
Ah, salt and sterile as her kisses were,
The wild sea winds her and the green gulfs bear
Hither and thither, and vex and work her wrong,
Blind gods that cannot spare.

Rest here.

The Book is the Art

A great collection of art book images over at BibliOdyssey is inspiring. Pulled from the Art Institute of Chicago's Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection, the archive is searchable by medium, binding, or category. The example below is a Wizard of Oz pop up book. I never did do the pop up book I had wanted to, but some of the books in this collection are reviving that desire.


The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Robert Sabuda

Island Time and Farm Animals

I can't think of any predictions or expectations, ambitions or dreams for the upcoming year. I feel numbed from reading the innumerable, estimable 2010 articles. Partly it's being on this island and feeling removed from the world, and even from time. I got to the boardwalk in Phillipsburg on New Year's Eve just in time to see the fireworks at midnight. My friends and I got drinks and walked over to the beach. We waited. Someone had 4 minutes until midnight, the other two had 2 minutes. 2 minutes went by and nothing happened. Then another 2 went by and nothing happened. Nobody around us seemed concerned, and nobody was counting down. Then a rocket went spiraling up in the air. "Happy New Year!" I cried, figuring somebody had to call it. "Happy New Year" my friends said. Here even 2010 is on island time.


For New Year's day, we had a big, fortifying breakfast and went to the beach. The weather was idyllic and I had some supremely Caribbean-themed light reading. Walking back to the car at the end of the day, we saw a baby donkey. It was just standing there, nibbling grass then walking down into the sand. While the island boasts more farm animals than I ever saw growing up in Georgia, a donkey roaming the beach was a whole new thing! We started to take photos when it's perturbed owner appeared. He called to it and tried to grab its harness, but the donkey gaily trotted away through families of prone French tourists. All the beach-goers were startled, and the owner walked fast to herd (eventually) the donkey into the parking lot and away from the beach. It was very funny and very strange. It's hard to think seriously about life when you're laughing at donkeys.


So I'm on island time, distracted and amused by a new place, and, to top it off, hot. It's very difficult to think when you are hot. While watching the long fireworks show, I felt that I really didn't care about doing too much--that I was quite happy with things just as they are. I'm like a fat cat being scratched and purring. It's a little ridiculous, and it certainly won't last, but I am utterly relaxed. In fact, I might just take a mid-morning cat nap.