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Sakura Hanami: Cherry Blossom Viewing

May 29, 2025 / terry / No comments

Sakura Hanami (桜花見, cherry blossom viewing), an age-old tradition in Japan, derived from the Chinese practice of enjoying wine and poetry beneath plum blossoms. In Japan cherry trees were more common and by the Heian period (794–1185) Japanese emperors held sakura hanami parties for the court. The custom soon spread to the samurai, and later to the common people. In the early 18^th Century, the shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune planted cherry trees in Asukayama park in the northern reaches of Tokyo, and opened up the park to its citizens. Nowadays thousands of people visit this and other parks to enjoy the blossoms, drink sake and feast on dumplings and cakes. In many places, temporary paper lanterns are hung to allow yozakura (夜桜, night sakura). Read more

Category: Art, History, Music, Painting, Poetry / Tags: Asukayama, Basho, Buson, haiku, Hiroshige, Hokusai, Japanese cherry, koto, Kunisada, Onitsura, Prunus serrulata, Santoka, Ukiyo-e, Yonishida, Yoshino

Robert Davidson: Serigraphs

May 24, 2025 / terry / 2 comments

Robert Davidson, one of Canada’s greatest artists, is one of the Haida people, whose ancestral territories are in the Haida Gwaii archipelago off the coast of British Columbia and the southern half of Prince of Wales Island in Alaska. His Haida name is G̲uud San Glans, which means “Eagle of the Dawn.” Davidson is a talented carver of argillite, jewelry and totem poles, a creator of striking masks, and a master of silkscreen printing (serigraphy).

Category: Architecture, Art, Ethics, History, Painting, Poetry, Sculpture / Tags: Bentwood Box, Bill Reid, Charles Edenshaw, cultural genocide, Haida Gwaii, Haida people, Masset, potlatch, Raven, Skidegate, Smallpox epidemic, Thunderbird, Totem Poles

Rembrandt: Self-Portraits

May 11, 2025 / terry / No comments

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606-1669) was one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age, that century following the establishment of the Dutch Republic free of Spanish rule. Among his many works were about 80 self-portraits – about 40 paintings, 30 etchings and 7 drawings – far more than any other painter before him. These works were created for several purposes: to provide examples of his art for prospective buyers, to work out techniques for visually representing emotions and ideas, and to record the passage of his own life. The illustration shows a small self-portrait from 1630, painted on copper: the discerning gaze.

Category: Art, History, Literature, Painting, psychology / Tags: Albrecht Durer, bankruptcy, Daniel Martin, Geertje Dircx, Giotto, Hendrikje Stoffels, Holbein, John Fowles, Kenwood House, Saskia van Uylenburgh, standard-bearers, Titian, Titus Rembrandt, tronies

Leading Ladies: Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, Ellen Terry

May 2, 2025 / terry / No comments

In the latter half of the 19^th Century three actresses ruled supreme in the hearts of theatre-goers: the French Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923), the Italian Eleonora Duse (1858-1924), and the English Ellen Terry (1847-1928). They played all parts: from the classics of Shakespeare and Racine, through the romantics such as Dumas and d’Annunzio, to the new naturalists such as Ibsen. They toured the world but acted only in their mother tongue. Their emotional intensity and stage presence communicated with their audiences even when their words were not understood. They were the first superstars: idolized by their public, celebrated by artists, and honored by poets.

Category: Art, Literature, Painting, Photography, Poetry / Tags: Alphonse Mucha, Anton Chekhov, Cleopatra, Eleonora Duse, Ellen Terry, Felix Nadar, Gabriele d'Annunzio, George Watts, Hamlet, Henrik Ibsen, Macbeth, Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, Phedre, Sarah Bernhardt

Mathis der Maler: the Isenheim Altarpiece

Apr 6, 2025 / terry / No comments

Very little is known about the life of Matthias Grünewald, a painter (German Maler) who worked in the early decades of the 16^th Century in Germany. He is renowned for the pictures he created between 1512 and 1516 for the altarpiece of the Monastery of Saint Anthony in Isenheim in southern Alsace. The face of Saint Sebastian in one of these paintings (above) is considered to be a self-portrait.

Category: Art, History, Medicine, Music, Painting, Religion, Sculpture / Tags: Albrecht von Brandenburg, Ergotism, German Peasant's War, Hospital Brothers of Saint Anthony, Isenheim, Martin Luther, Matthias Grünewald, Nicklaus Hagenauer, Otto Dix, Paul Hindemith, Saint Anthony the Great, Saint Anthony's Fire, Saint Paul, Unterlinden Museum, W. G Sebald, World War I

Paul Klee: Color and Music

Mar 16, 2025 / terry / No comments

The paintings of Paul Klee (1879-1940) gave us a new way to look at the world, allowing us to go beyond our immediate perceptions and see the underlying forms.

Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar.
Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.
(Klee, Creative Confession, 1920/2013, part I).

Color and music were the two great principles underlying his art. The tonal relations between colors and the rhythms of their spatial presentation combine to give us understanding. Many composers have sought to express Klee’s paintings in their music, to complement his colors with their notes. This essay presents some of these compositions. On the right is a portrait of Paul Klee by Hugo Erfurth in 1922

Category: Art, History, Music, Painting, Poetry / Tags: Bauhaus, Blauer Reiter, Cubism, Degenerate Art, Franz Marc, Fugue, Nazism, Orphism, Paul Verlaine, Polyphony, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Delaunay, Scleroderma, Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky

In Search of Form: The Sculpture of Henry Moore

Dec 11, 2024 / terry / 2 comments

Henry Moore (1898-1986), one of the greatest sculptors of the 20^th Century, created striking three-dimensional forms using many different techniques – carving, casting, modelling – and many different materials – stone, bronze, iron, wood, concrete, polystyrene. In the words of Herbert Read (1965, p 259)

He is a maker of images – or, as I prefer to call them because they have material existence – of icons, and he is impelled to make these icons by his sense of the forms that are vital to the life of mankind.

Each of Moore’s works was derived from nature, but Moore simplified and abstracted the experience to provide an emotional understanding rather than a sensory representation This essay comments on the nature of form and considers some of Moore’s works.

Category: Art, Painting, Philosophy, Photography, Sculpture / Tags: Adel Rock, Allegoryof the Cave, Aristotle, Art Gallery of Ontario, Barbara Hepworth, Four Causes, Geoffrey Farmer, Oval with Points, Plato, Reclining Figures, Standing Figure: Knife Edge, Theory of Forms

Some of the Evil of my Tale: Lawrence of Arabia

Nov 18, 2024 / terry / 3 comments

In late 1916, Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888-1935), a British intelligence officer stationed in Cairo, was assigned as a military liaison officer to the forces of Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi, the Sharif of Mecca, who, with his sons Ali, Abdullah and Faisal had initiated the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks in June 1916. Lawrence quickly adapted to the ways of his hosts and gained their trust. Under his leadership, the Arabs took the city of Aqaba in July 1917. This allowed the British to supply both their own army and the Arab rebels as they advanced on Jerusalem and Damascus. Lawrence led the Arabs as they disrupted the Hejaz Railway, and harried the Turkish army. His exploits were recorded on film and widely publicized by the American journalist Lowell Thomas, from whom came the epithet “Lawrence of Arabia.” Lawrence published a memoir of his experiences in 1927, Revolt in the Desert. A much more complete and introspective book on the Arab Revolt, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, was not formally published until after his death in 1935.

Category: Art, History, Literature, Painting, Philosophy, psychology, Religion / Tags: Aqaba, Arab Revolt, Asraq, Augustine, Burroughs motorcycle, Damascus, Deraa, Edmund Allenby, Faisal ibn Hussein, Hejaz, Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi, Iraq, Jerusalem, Jordan, Lowell Thomas, masochism, Mecca, Palestine, Paris Peace Conferences, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Syria, T. E. Lawrence

Vincent van Gogh in Saint-Rémy

Nov 4, 2024 / terry / No comments

In May 1889, following several psychotic episodes in Arles, Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) voluntarily admitted himself to the asylum at the monastery of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. He stayed there for just over a year. Despite several further episodes of severe depression and madness, van Gogh was incredibly prolific during this period, producing about 150 paintings, among them Starry Night.

Category: Art, Painting, Psychiatry, Religion / Tags: Arles, bipolar disorder, Cloisonnism, Emile Bernard, Expressionism, Glanum, Joanna Bonger, les Alpilles, Paul Gauguin, Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, Saint-Remy-de-Provence, Starry Night, Theo van Gogh

First Snow, Algoma

Sep 13, 2024 / terry / One comment

Alexander Young Jackson (1882-1974) studied art in France and Italy during the first years of the 20^th Century. He learned the techniques of the Impressionists but was also affected by Van Gogh and Cézanne. After painting for a while in Quebec, he moved from Montreal to Toronto in 1914, and became friends with James MacDonald (1873-1932), Lawren Harris (1885-1970) and Tom Thomson (1877-1917). This group of painters began to paint en plein air in the wilderness in Northern Ontario. Their paintings forged a new style of landscape painting that combined aspects of neo-impressionism, art deco, and expressionism. In 1915, Jackson enlisted in the Canadian army and was wounded in 1916. After convalescence he returned to active service as an official war artist from 1917 to 1919. In late 1919, he joined Harris, MacDonald and Frank Johnston (1888-1949) on a trip to the Algoma wilderness. Drawings and oil sketches from this trip provided the basis for his 1920 painting First Snow, Algoma. In 1920, Jackson became a founding member of the Group of Seven, an association of Canadian landscape artists, which lasted from 1920 to 1933.

Category: Art, History, Painting / Tags: A. Y. Jackson, Algoma Central Railway, Algonquin Park, Canadian War Artists, Frank Johnston, Group of Seven, J. E. H. MacDonald, Lawren Harris, Tom Thomson, World War I, Ypres

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