Mojn

§ April 10th, 2010 § Filed under Saturday Art Blogging, movies § 1 Comment

Typically I will look at artwork for Saturday Morning Art Blogging, but today, I’m going to tell you about a movie. First of all, movies can be art, and that’s my link for the purpose of including it in my blogging. Last night, the boyfriend and I went to the Mayan Theater here in Denver to see Terribly Happy, also known as Frygtelig lykkelig, the Danish submission for the 2009 Oscars.

This isn’t my typical type of movie. I didn’t watch the trailer beforehand, and there is a chance that, had I done that, I might not have wanted to go see the film. But, I heard about it briefly on the radio, with the summary “a dark film about the lengths people will go to fit in.”

And that is what it was, but it was also so much much more. Terribly Happy is visually enticing, and beautifully filmed. The shots contrast between bleak open Danish landscapes, full of water, mud and flat grey skies, to tight busy shots of interactions between people, to repeated shots of the visual expressions of the cast of characters. The landscape and the town are desolate, but the minds of the people are active, and in everyone’s business. Nothing goes unnoticed in this small town in South Jutland, Denmark. Far away from Copenhagen, the smallest difference is marked as a glaring fault of those who don’t belong.

After I was asleep last night, still thinking about the movie, I sat bolt-upright in bed and smacked my boyfriend – “The bog! The bog! It’s a symbol! It’s a metaphor!!” In the movie, the bog is the location of vigilante justice, the site of the secrets that are buried in the psyche of the town. At the bog, people and animals get sucked in, and disappear. Likewise, in this small town, the quiet madness of the characters sucks people in, and they either fall into a struggle with trying to maintain their personal truth, or completely losing their minds into the play of endless bleak days.

At times, as a viewer, I was thoroughly irritated with some of the characters for their fatal flaws and obvious bad decision making, and yet – the tension and anxiety throughout the film makes you wonder just what exactly is going on…and at the end, a surprising puppetmaster arises. Who is really pulling the strings?

I highly recommend this film if it is playing near you. It’s a worthwhile hour and 40 minutes. And yes, it’s in Danish, with subtitles.

Finished reading another book today

§ April 5th, 2010 § Filed under books § No Comments

The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time by Judith Shulevitz

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Fabulous. An amazing blend of political, economic, religious and historical thought, suitable for the theist and the atheist, as an exploration into the way the modern world looks at time, inclusion, and separation. Though Shulevitz is a Jewish author, and writing from a Jewish perspective, this is not a “Jewish Book”, rather it is a book about societies past and present. It is about the tensions between puritanical views and 24/7 modernism. It is even about personal exploration, doubt and tension with the past, faith and god. I give it five stars, wishing I could give it more.

The Sabbath World is well written, easy to understand without being simplistic, and has a cadence that allows room for contemplation of the ideas Shulevitz is presenting and considering. Like many people, I bought this book after hearing the interview on Fresh Air, and I think I may have been expecting a bit more memoir and a bit less historical and journalistic approach, but Shulevitz is a researcher, a journalist, and that comes through in the book.

I highly, highly recommend reading this, getting other people to read it, and discussing it with them.

View all my reviews >>

Too Cold

§ April 3rd, 2010 § Filed under Saturday Art Blogging § No Comments

Too Cold I have always loved Joan Mitchell’s work.

From the Joan Mitchell Foundation‘s website:

Joan Mitchell was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1925 and died in a Paris suburb in 1992. Her expatriate years began in the late 1950s and continued uninterrupted until her passing in Vetheuil, France. She occupied a celebrated stature in the generation that succeeded Pollock and Rothko. She declined the theoreticism of her European counterparts, and remained throughout her career the empirical American, personally accountable for her memories and emotions. Her work is characterized in many developments from the 1950s to the early 90s shortly prior to her passing. She usually worked on multiple panels or large scale canvases – striving to attract a natural rather than constructed rhythm from the composition, a rhythm emanating from the expansiveness of the gesture or from the unrestrained use of color and the pervasive luminosity. The titles of her last paintings suggest the abstract valleys and empirical ‘fields’ of her beloved French countryside.

In speaking of Mitchell, others tell us of her physical materiality – how she exudes the visual sentiments of nature – the objectivity of her painting, devoid of anecdote or theater and in her own words “to convey the feeling of the dying sunflower.” Joan Mitchell as an abstract expressionist composes with long curvilinear strokes or broad stains of color, contrasting warm and cool, often on unprimed canvases. Her perceptions enrich her work with a fascinating sense of the unfinished. Joan Mitchell demonstrated in painting just as in life, anything can happen.

Isn’t that an amazing narrative? Beyond that though, it’s a challenge to find much about Mitchell. I first encountered her work in Detroit as a student at Wayne State University. The husband of my art history professor was one of Mitchell’s students in Paris, so we got to hear a bit about the hard woman, driven to paint, drink and swear. The commitment to art. The giant canvases and the light filled studio.To me, it sounded like heaven, and her paintings enthralled me just as much as the mythology.

I have to admit I haven’t done quite enough study on Mitchell as a person or a painter, other than to say that I adore her work, so this week’s blog post will be about how I feel about Mitchell’s paintings. Obviously, I love them. I’ve had a lot of interaction with them through books and screen, but not nearly enough in person, something I hope to remedy as time passes.

In my undergraduate painting course with Mary Connelly, we had an assignment where each student was given a 1″ square cut out of an art magazine, and told to recreate a painting based on that square. I immediately knew my square was from a Joan Mitchell painting, and worked to develop the layers, drips and patterns inspired by the small piece I was working with. It was the best work I did in that class, because I felt such a connection to the piece, and to the ideals that I saw – a second generation abstract expressionist, a woman, a name in her own right. Despite her immense talent, however, she never reached the stature that many of her male contemporaries did, which I think comes out in her work. Despite her primary inspiration being landscapes, these are not pastoral paintings. They’re violent, abrasive, aggressive, heavily textured and dramatic.

There’s a lot to learn about Mitchell and her work, and a lot to appreciate that isn’t necessarily known. You can buy a book that really delves into her work and the environment she was creating in, and I do recommend it if you have any interest at all in Abstract Expressionism. If you’re not familiar with her work, I highly encourage browsing the web, getting a book, and just spending time thinking about what you’re looking at in her paintings.

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