Once, when we visited Florence, we saw this young woman absorbed in painting a copy of Boticelli’s Venus while throngs of tourists dashed by. Only a few stopped to watch. The artist is using soft dry pastels, a version of highly pigmented chalks. Find out more about pastels. Pastels are the closest you can get…
Manga—comics or graphic novels from Japan—touches everything. It considers nothing sacred. Such is the reality that hits me at the current exhibit we attended at the Centre Pompidou, France’s national museum of contemporary art, Bande dessinée, 1964 – 2024 (Comics 1964-2024). It isn’t just manga, either. From its acknowledged beginning in the counterculture (like Art…
Ah, the freedom of getting vaccinated against covid. I’m looking forward to museum-hopping again. Preferably in Paris, to me, the museum capital of the world. Many visitors to Paris scribble art-viewing into their itinerary. Not as often, though, I think as shopping and eating. But museums are great on a rainy day. Plenty of them…
A fire nearly destroyed the iconic Cathédrale Notre Dame in Paris—arguably the most famous gothic cathedral in the world. Current efforts to restore it have been hampered, like most of life nowadays, by a deadly virus. Now that we all have to stop and take many deep—hopefully cleansing—breaths, we have the luxury to wonder about…
Undulating forms are beautiful, sensuous, and seductive. You often find them in nature—in the curve of a woman’s body, the outline of a camel’s neck and hump, the motif on a sidewalk mosaic, etc. They appeal to an aesthetic sense in all of us. Artists have been aware of this appeal for a long time.…
Art is: A Tube of Paint. On first blush, this makes sense, at least when it comes to painting: Most paintings start with a canvas and a tube (or tubes) of paint. But, before Marcel Duchamp and, perhaps, Russian avant-garde painter Wassily Kandinsky—credited with producing the first abstract paintings—a painting also needed an idea and/or…
A curious intrigue surrounded Marcel Duchamp’s urinal aka Fountain by R. Mutt. The original urinal not only never graced the show it sought to get into. It had mysteriously disappeared. Where to and taken by whom? No one knew or would say. It is, in fact, this disappearance that bestowed on Fountain its notoriety and…
Artsy Rambler 