Sheila will meet Morandi off to Bologna in a couple of weeks

Morandi was born in Bologna, Italy 1890.

In 1907 he went to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti.
The school, which based its traditions on 14th-century painting is where he taught himself to etch by studying books on Rembrandt.
The works of his formative years show him experimenting with a style related to Cézanne and to Cubism, with a brief digression into a Futurist style in 1914. In that same year, Morandi was appointed instructor of drawing for elementary schools in Bologna—a post he held until 1929. Today, there is a museum dedicated to the display of Morandi's work, including a reconstruction of his studio, in Bologna.
In 1915, he joined the army but suffered a breakdown and was indefinitely discharged. During the war, Morandi's still lifes became more reduced in their compositional elements and purer in form, revealing his admiration for both Cézanne and the Douanier Rousseau.
A Metaphysical painting (Pittura Metafisica) phase in Morandi's work lasted from 1918 to 1922. This was to be his last major stylistic shift; thereafter, he focused increasingly on subtle gradations of hue, tone, and objects arranged in a unifying atmospheric haze, establishing the direction his art was to take for the rest of his life.
Morandi showed in the Novecento Italiano exhibitions of 1926 and 1929, but was more specifically associated with the regionalist Strapaese group by the end of the decade, a fascist-influenced group emphasizing local cultural traditions. He was sympathetic to the Fascist party in the 1920s, although his friendships with anti-Fascist figures led authorities to arrest him briefly in 1943.
From 1930 to 1956, Morandi was a professor of etching at Accademia di Belle Arti. The 1948 Venice Biennale awarded him first prize for painting, he visited Paris for the first time in 1956, and in 1957 he won the grand prize in São Paulo's Biennale. He died in Bologna in 1964.

May have too many blogs to keep up with

I keep doing stupid things....I'd blame Art Skool but Im on Holiday....grrrr.
Why oh why did I opt for presentation...suppose only plus side is I don't have to hear it I pity everyone else and avoiding doing it allows me to update blogs.
This one.
One about Fish
N what to put in the cabinet of monkeys?
Yah too many blogs that's for sure.

Laaannndddaaannn

The art of revisiting the Swinging SixtiesBy Nick Hackworth, Evening Standard 22.11.06

Riflemaker becomes Indica: Sixties to the present

Riflemaker becomes Indica is an intelligent and entertaining show in which a young gallery in Soho pays homage to a legendary West End gallery of the Sixties. Indica pioneered experimental art in Britain and was one of London's Swinging Sixties hotspots. It was here that John Lennon met Yoko Ono and hip aristos hung out with assorted Beatles and Stones.
Asking whether the open-minded Sixties approach could be revived today, Riflemaker invited Indica's founders to curate a show, displaying art from their original exhibitions next to the work of young artists today.
The dialogue between the generations is fascinating. Conrad Shawcross's kinetic machine seems at home with the older blinking lights of Greek artist Takis's installation. Yoko Ono's conceptual work, comprising of an apple on a Perspex plinth with a label "Apple", looks rather more contemporary than young Aishleen Lester's forest of tall, elegant sculptures, which have a distinctly Sixties feel with their plastic-surfaces and pseudo-futuristic forms.
Pleasingly, neither old nor new triumphs here - it's all part of a similar and ongoing project. Every generation believes they invented sex, drugs, rock'n'roll and, it seems, paradigm-shattering art.
But best of all, the exhibition highlights the value of a real engagement with the past, placing the idea of progress in much-needed perspective. If you have the cultural memory of a goldfish, then everything seems new, even if it's the same thing you were sold last year in slightly different packaging.

Saw this and found stuff when spring clearing

Just lovely

John

McCracken (b. 1934, Berkeley, California) is an American artist.

He started his career creating bold, tight geometric compositions on Masonite or treated canvas. While still in school, his first exhibition at Nicholas Wilder's gallery in Los Angeles, California in 1965 was a critical success.

He was included in the seminal 1966 exhibit, "Primary Structures" at the Jewish Museum (New York) as part of the West Coast influence.

The new work he presented jumped off the wall in the form of objects that had been distilled down to their most basic form. McCracken calls his objects "blocks, slabs, columns, planks. Basic beautiful forms, neutral forms."

After his early paintings, a technique emerged on these physical forms of high gloss lacquer over fiberglass or polyester resin on plywood or wood substructure similar to techniques used in surfboard construction pervasive in his Southern California environment.

For him, color is also used as "material." Bold solid colours with their highly polished finish reflect the unique California light or mirror the observer in a way that takes the work into another dimension. Although many of his pieces stand solidly on or off a pedestal, it was his decision to lean the objects against the wall that gave him international recognition.
McCracken currently lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Off to Eigg to set fish free...or dispose of

For installation see other blog
Eigg Stuff...going to look for singing sands
Singing sand, whistling sand or barking sand is sand that produces sounds of either high or low frequency under pressure. The sound emission is usually triggered by wind passing over dunes or by walking on the sand. The sound is generated by shear stress.
Certain conditions have to come together to create singing sand:
The sand grains have to be round and between 0.1 and 0.5 mm in diameter
The sand has to contain silica
The sand needs to be a certain humidity
The most common frequency emitted seems to be close to 450 Hz.
Importantly, there are still scientific controversies on the details of the singing sand mechanism (see references). It has been proposed that the sound frequency is controlled by the shear rate. Others have suggested that the frequency of vibration is related to the thickness of the dry surface layer of sand. The sound waves bounce back and forth between the surface of the dune and the surface of the moist layer creating a resonance that increases the sound's volume.
Other sounds that can be emitted by sand have been described as "roaring" or "booming".
The particular note produced by the dune, between 60 and 105 Hertz, is controlled by the rate of collision in the shear band separating the avalanche from the static part of the dune. For spontaneous avalanches, the frequency is controlled by gravity and by the size of the sand grains.

Didier n Fishy

Pierre Vivant, Traffic Light tree 1995-98, painted steel & lights

Funded and produced by the Public Art Commissions Agency. On roundabout just beyond the Canary Wharf estate there are three trees, two are London planes; the third is a traffic light tree; Pierre Vivant's eternal tree replaced another London plane as it was dying. The arbitrary cycle of light changes are not supposed to mimic the seasonal rhythm of nature, but the restlessness of Canary Wharf. Born in Paris in 1952 Pierre Vivant has been commuting between his Oxford and Paris Studios since 1973 producing and exhibiting work on both sides of the Channel.
Canary Wharf’s little sister, originally an eight-acre quay but now extended by a further three acres to connect with Canary Wharf at its eastern end. Narrower than the other quays of the West India Docks, it formerly separated the Export and South Docks and was mostly filled with offices and stores rather than warehouses. There was a herring shed on the quayside from around 1840, but never any trade in herons or with a place of that name. In an early chapter of Docklands redevelopment Tarmac Properties drew up plans in 1981 for a mixed-use scheme that would cover the whole Heron Quays site, but only the first two phases were completed. These were high-tech cabins with monopitch aluminium-clad roofs and colourful enamel panelling. Although generally well received, the buildings were not of the scale and grandeur of neighbouring developments. Despite proposals to build an apartment complex, the rest of the quay remained empty for more than a decade, mainly owing to uncertainty in the property market. In 2001 the Canary Wharf Group bought the site from Tarmac and began work on the HQ project, also known as Canary Wharf South. The scheme consists of five office blocks, of which the three tallest are around 500 feet high. Tenants include Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers and Clifford Chance. Heron Quays station has been rebuilt beneath the HQ2 podium, with an underground link to the Jubilee Line station via a new shopping centre called Jubilee Place. The neighbouring Jubilee Park has a moderately pleasing water feature, shown below. The result of all the redevelopment is that, on the ground, the quay is no longer visually distinguishable from the rest of the Canary Wharf complex