Apollo and Daphne

Bernini's Apollo and Daphne at the Villa Borghese

It's a beautiful Spring. Perhaps we should all get chased through the forest and pray to be turned into trees?

I still contend that Daphne gets the better end of the "tree-woman" (see my Huldra's post) stick in art history, and this statue testifies to that. Bernini tells the myth of Daphne being turned into a tree to escape the God Apollo beautifully, and I remember when I saw it in person at 15 being awestruck by the movement and softness of the sculpture. It is still one of my favorites.

Huldras

The Huldra, Thomas Dodd. Available for sale at Redbubble.

The myth is that you follow the Huldra into the forest. Then once the beautiful and enticing Huldra turns away from you, you see that her back is like an oak tree with a hollow spot and that she has an animal's tail.

These are the more chaste images of her I could find--I leave it to you to make your own Google search. There is certainly a dearth of huldra representation. In terms of tree women, Daphne definitely gets more artistic attention.

Huldra by Maria Friberg Berntsson. Here.

Huldra [with red-hatted gnomes!]

Amy Talluto at Black and White Gallery

White Pine, Oil on Canvas

I popped into Amy Talluto's show Huldra at Black and White Gallery this weekend, and her forest landscapes had me back to reminiscing about the trees, particularly the white birches, of Sweden. Not that there were any white birches in the show--rather the artist caught the light and the density of the forest while adding something evocative and mysterious. Perhaps a little like the childhood wonder I felt being alone in a forest where trolls might lurk among the mushrooms. In an odd coincidence, the title of the show comes from an old Swedish tale--a Huldra being a witch who lures men deep into the forest

Huldra, Oil on Canvas

Her surfaces alternate between being dense with intricate color, like the trunk of this tree appearing like the inside of oyster shells, and light-filled space like green background beyond.

Burn, 2006

Up at Black and Gallery through May 15 (and especially the bigger paintings like the one below appear much better there than in this small reproduction).

Sunset, Oil on canvas

I Want a Time Machine

Time Machine XLIX, Jason Brammer

WIKIPEDIA: Although time travel has been a common plot device in fiction since the 19th century, and one-way travel into the future is arguably possible given the phenomenon of time dilation based on velocity in the theory of special relativity (exemplified by the twin paradox), as well as gravitational time dilation in the theory of general relativity, it is currently unknown whether the laws of physics would allow backwards time travel.

Time Machine Model

Last night I watched the classic 1960 film The Time Machine, where a Victorian Englishman travels far into the future based on the novel by H.G. Wells. Travelling into the future is a concept suggested in many ancient myths and folk tales, often with the person returning to find his family old or gone. Travelling into the future is also possible according to our law of physics--for example, if I were to ride a beam of light to the sun and back, I would arrive in the future. 

Time Machine XXIX, Jason Brammer

Travelling to the past is a different beast. It is not known whether the laws of physics would allow it, and it has only occurred in literature relatively recently in the 18th and 19th century. Time travel to the future doesn't seem to be in vogue in the popular imagination--or perhaps just my imagination. If anything, I assume time travel is to the past when I think of it, and Jason Brammer's time machines certainly look like they would travel to the past (although the artist's website doesn't make any claims as to whether the pieces work). Which way would you go?


(However I would also be overjoyed to have a plain and simple travel machine, per below.)

Today's Forecast

Autumn Moon over Lake Dongting

The silhouettes of the buildings are different, but somehow this unidentified 15th c. Korean artist caught the misty weather we are having perfectly.

More on this work here.

Ai Weiwei

As you might have heard, China accused Ai Weiwei, artist of Olympic "bird's nest" stadium fame and other internationally-known projects, of economic crimes and has held him in police custody since April 7. This happened right after I saw a fantastic PBS documentary on the artist, Who's Afriad of Ai Weiwei, available here, which gives some nice background on the Chinese government's treatment of the artist.

There have been protests across the world, and this weekend NYC joined in with 1,000 Chairs for Ai Weiwei. It has been suggested that the Chinese government wanted to send the message that no one is immune to the "rule of law"--or the government's censorship--but let us hope that is not so.

Carl Larsson's Idyllic Spring

Spring

I've just returned from a quick visit to Sweden (my grandmother's 90th birthday). The snow there has melted, and spring has just started to peak out from under the dead leaves. Carl Larsson's images are representative of some of the idyllic Swedish days, full of light, that are just starting. 

Breakfast under the Big Birch Tree

Similar to Norman Rockwell in America, Larsson's focus was on the home and happy families, and encapsulate the best and most charming aspects of Swedish life at the turn of the century. Also like Rockwell, advances in technology allowed his work to spread and become popularly known. Larsson's watercolors could be reproduced easily through new printing techniques, just as Rockwell's illustrations were spread on the cover of magazines. Having only spent the warmer months there, my memories of Sweden are just as idyllic.

Flowers on the Windowsill

Take a tour of Carl Larsson's well-preserved and beautifully decorated home here. 

Cycladic Heads: What the Nose Knows

Cycladic Head, Mindy Shapiro at Armory 2011

Is the title referring to the the Bronze Age civilization on the Cyclades islands in the southern Aegean Sea, or the present day inhabitants? The painted acrylic scales covering the wood statue were hand cut and performs marvels of gently undulating texture.

Detail, Cycladic Head

 The Metropolitan has its own Clycadic head, most definitely of the Bronze age- 2700 BC to be precise.

Head from the figure of a woman, Metropolitan Museum of Art

There are traces of pigment on the sculpture that suggest the surface was originally colored in with more facial features. Typically the nose the only individual feature sculpted, lending it a noticable prominence today.

Look What Happened to the Art Market

"Without Wall Street many forms of books, incunables, high spots of modern literature, are already unobtainable by the average collector or even fairly well-to-do collectors. Think Great Gatsby at over a $100k...Look what happened in the art market, where paintings that used to cost thousands are now hundreds of thousands, and paintings that used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars are now millions of dollars.... 

If Wall Street gets hold of books and turns them into high priced investment widgets, then look out. No one will be able to afford them any more and some of the joy of collecting will be gone."

This quote from The Man who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession came from a book dealer upon hearing that book collections were being characterized in Worth magazine as good investments. It certainly hard to imagine people like to Vogels collecting in todays market, which bounced back from the financial crisis without losing much of the gains it has made over the past 20 years.

Does the rare book market share the same future? If so, I'd better scrounge up my first editions. It's interesting that this book dealer, who would profit for this more than the average collector potentially, doesn't like the idea of pricing people out of their collecting hobby. The dealers arguably benefit more than the collectors or artists, because many collectors are priced out and because fewer contemporary artists make the cut for the higher prices being paid at auction. But on the other hand, perhaps it is a sign of the health of the art market than it can command such record high prices.

By the way, the book itself is proving quite enjoyable. It's the true story of a book thief who stole rare books and hoarded them in the modest apartment he shared with his father, not unlike the art thief of my novel who steals to create his own personal collection that he keeps at his mother's house.

Edward Hopper on New York

Automat

Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time up at the Whitney traces the development of realism in American art between 1900 and 1940, with a focus on developments in urban and rural life that occurred during this period and the museum's extensive holdings of Hopper. I had been quite looking forward to it, and left with a rather threadbare, uninspired impression. Perhaps because of the wider nature of the exhibition, I didn't really get the feel and understanding of Hopper's work that I would have liked (except perhaps that it stood head and shoulders over the contemporaries of his that were on view). I liked Hopper, and perhaps understood more about him, a bit better after this video:

New York Window

Scenes like the one above, simple and relatable, showed the artist at his best. The one above left me with the feeling I often get in the old tenements buildings of how little has changed for people living in them. The isolation of the figures in his cityscapes and the lamp lit night scenes are so ascetically bare and realistic that they remove themselves from sentimentality.

New York Room

New York Office

New York Movie

Nighthawks