Dali House

Claude Monet was riding a train in early 1883 when he first saw Giverny, population 300. Now the train is gone, having served its purpose in delivering him here.

Monet bought a spacious farmhouse and by May had moved in with his companion Alice Hosched, his two sons and her six children. The property came with a vegetable garden and a hectare of fruit trees. He rented until 1890, when he bought the place and turned it into an Eden with strictly enforced rules for the flora bunda. It saved him walking out into the surrounding countryside (although somehow his neighbours’ haystacks proved irresistible).

Monet didn’t want anything overly organised, and as long as the flowers were in rows of complementary colours they could grow any way they wanted. When he bought the neighbouring property across the railway in 1893and freaked out the villagers by widening the little brook called the Ru (a tendril of the Seine) into a pond, the water garden it eventually became was all askew and curvy.

The inspiration came from his collection of Japanese prints, and he topped it off with a bamboo grove the now-famous arched bridge, caressed by weeping willows. Monet made sure his gardener cruised around the pond every morning and scrubbed the railway soot off the lily pads. They had to be ready to have their portraits painted at any time. See the rest.

“The USSF Jefferson, 1896 ajax class rig” by Larry Blamire

I was looking up something on Jules Verne the other day and, in yet another bolt of synchronicity, since I’m reading Thomas Pynchon’s steam- and crystal-driven “Against the Day” at the moment, I discovered the cult of steampunk. Never knew it existed. Completely out of the loop, once again.

There are even sub-genres to this kitsch-intensive sub-genre of science fiction: Melancholic and Nostalgic Steampunk. I hung up my studded dog-collar a long time ago and could never find any sense in thrash music, but there are obviously other things happening that are interesting. I really do have to get out more.

With Verne supplying some of the Victorian Era-Industrial Revolution artefacts, devotees have created a fantasy world where the future is mechanical, and preferably steam-driven, bells and whistles ready with the alarm.

The above (copyrighted) painting is by the deeply embedded Larry Blamire, who has a website full of this great creativity called Steam Wars. See the rest.

One autumn day in 1953 abstract art landed with a thump, like a heavy, unexpected snowfall, on what used to be called Toronto the Good. Splay-footed pedestrians passing Simpson’s mammoth department store at Queen and Yonge Streets were the eyewitnesses. They were used to the home-furnishings window displays and the fur-clad mannequins, but something had gone mightily askew here. The window was full of weird paintings, possibly from one one of those new-fangled UFOs everyone was talking about.

This decidedly non-gallery setting was where seven young Canadians vented the fever of the affliction that had overtaken New York.

The instigator was William Ronald, who did the artwork for Simpson’s ads and handled the window dressing at the store. His biggest challenge until then had been trying to outdo the displays at rival retail behemoth Eaton’s.

Ronald’s bold stroke got enough attention for him and the other six live wires involved in the plot that they — joined by four others and calling themselves Painters Eleven — got an exhibition the following February at the Roberts Gallery further down Yonge.

The Group of Seven had quietly blazed new paths in the woods, and with their adherents pretty much painted “every damn tree in the country”, as another top Canadian artist, Graham Coughtry, put it. Painters Eleven — Alexandra Luke, Harold Town, Oscar Cahén, Kazuo Nakamura, Jack Bush, Hortense Gordon, Walter Yarwood, Ray Mead, Tom Hodgson, Jock Macdonald and William Ronald — were chattering ice cutters noisily opening the Northwest Passage.

Ronald (1926-98) was born in Stratford, Ontario — a place that thinks it’s Shakespeare’s birthplace, complete with an Avon River — and, upon finishing studies at the Ontario College of Art, went to New York to study with Hans Hofmann. He got to go because he was a hockey player and won a $1,000 Canadian Amateur Hockey Association scholarship. Now that’s Canadiana.

In 1955 Painters Eleven had another show at the Roberts Gallery, and then Ronald moved to New York, where hi-so collector Countess Ingeborg de Beausac bought one of his paintings, and art dealer Samuel Kootz, who represented the prizefighters Kline, Rothko and de Kooning, as well as Hofmann, got interested, grabbed five more works, one of which ended up at the Guggenheim. Nice. Two years later the New York Times gave Ronald’s first American solo show a good write-up too.

“Kline complimented me on my work. I couldn’t believe it!” Ronald told a writer from ArtFocus magazine in 1997. “Rothko came to the Kootz Gallery later, when no one was there. He sat down and looked at one of my paintings for 20 minutes. I never spoke to him. I was shell-shocked!” See the rest.

Chris Burden has been accused of having a “mean streak of adolescent megalomania”, the curse of the macho “boys with toys”, always out to impress, if not frighten. I don’t understand the apprehension, though I can’t say I’ve seen much of Burden’s work.

But who couldn’t be thrilled with even the concept behind “Fist of Light”? The cheesy sketch above may be the closest his idea has come to realisation, but you can imagine clearly enough an insulated metal box big enough to walk into, lined with a thousand 500-watt quartz light bulbs, “theoretically enough light to make black appear white”. See the rest.

My newspaper has just sponsored the first Bangkok International Art Festival and it was, uh, pretty bad. Granted, times are awful dodgy in Thailand at the moment and Bangkok isn’t in the same league as the European capitals, but I yearn for the day I can see something like this in the streets here. (Although I do see really elephants trundling past from time to time, which is pretty amazing.) See the rest.