Showing posts with label art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label art. Show all posts

Thursday 14 July 2016

Ceramic Masters of Icheon

This beautifully shot film of the working process of five Korean ceramics masters is just mesmerizing. The skill! The artistry! Ah. ❤ I could just watch it on loop...


Video by the American Museum of Ceramic Art
via My Modern Met

Friday 22 January 2016

{卷珠帘}

卷珠帘 {'Raise the pearl curtain'}, a beautiful traditional Chinese style song by young talented singer songwriter 霍尊 Huo Zun (also goes by Henry Huo) who came to fame on a Chinese singing talent contest a couple of years ago. The lyrics are written in old Chinese prose and describes a woman wistfully thinking of the person she loves as she sits by a window on a moonlit night.


I'm really loving the 古風 'gǔ fēng' ('style of the antiquity') and 中國風 'Zhōngguó fēng' ('Chinoiserie') art and music that can be found everywhere now by Chinese artists and musicians. Maybe it's just me getting older and that urge to look at your roots, but I'm rediscovering a great interest in all these traditional Chinese arts, the music, the dances, the clothing, the history and the folklore. Especially the 古風 aspect, which describes a style that conjures a Middle Kingdom of a time long ago, of myths and legends, when gods and spirits roamed, warlords clashed, heroes fought, and everything was that little bit more epic...

Friday 9 October 2015

A dance to The Unforgiven

Resurrected my ancient iPod touch this morning and was happily running through old playlists when the opening strings of the The Unforgiven as played by Apocalyptica came on. Aah I still get shivers from it.

I actually first heard this version on the inaugural Eurovision dance contest back in 2007 when the winning couple from Finland danced a Paso Doble to it. Their interpretation of the music and the beautifully balletic flow of their Paso were just magical. I loved the dance and the music.

(sidenote: what did we do before we could find everything on Youtube?!)

*Sigh*...isn't that just gorgeous?

I can't quite remember if it was from this that I looked up Apocalyptica or if it was after seeing the clip of Kseniya Simonova the sand artist's story telling, that moved the audience and judges on Ukraine's Got Talent to tears, which used music from Apocalyptica as well. I don't know what it is but I just love it when classical instruments are used to produce that rock/metal sound, I feel it adds a whole other level of awesome!

Monday 3 August 2015

So much to learn, so little time

You know, when I was younger, I used to wonder how I was ever going to be able to read all the books that had ever been written.

We have access now to so much information and knowledge via the internet, never mind 'fear of missing out', I think sometimes I have 'fear of not having enough time to find out and learn about it all'.

Reading about a random topic on Wiki that leads to a marathon onward link trail; finding that one picture or article or video on Facebook or Youtube or Pinterest that leads to discovering a new hobby, travel bucket list destination, singer, artist or just really interesting fact...anything! I love that.

I'd watched the odd video link posted by National Geographic before, but only recently realised that they were from a whole Short Film Showcase of videos from around the web. I'm working my way slowly through them - it's a great Sunday morning contemplation exercise. And I want to share the ones I love the most on the blog. One at a time, short little nuggets of thoughts and ideas. Hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

How about this beautifully mesmerising clip of the process of traditional hand egg painting in Bukovina, Romania, to kick things off? 


The Art of Egg Painting: Ciocanesti, Romania from Jungles in Paris on Vimeo

Ornamental eggs are a signature craft of Eastern Europe. The jeweled Fabergé versions once coveted by the Russian nobility are really just a high-end take on a humbler, older, and perhaps even more remarkable Easter tradition. See the full story.

Credits: Directed + Shot + Edited by: TITUS ARMAND NAPIRLICA

Thursday 12 February 2015

A beautifully expressive short ballet

I keep saying this, but I just love discovering a new piece of artwork or music and artist or singer through randomly clicking on a link somewhere. Today this video of Sergei Polunin dancing to Andrew Hozier's 'Take me to church' was trending and I clicked to see why.


Wowee! I had heard of Polunin before, I think probably from coverage for when he unexpectedly left the Royal Ballet, but I hadn't seen his work. On just this performance in the video - I think he really is incredible. The power in his leaps and turning jumps is just awesome, and I love that you can see his emotions through his movements and in his body, particularly his face and his hands, as he interprets the music.

I love dance and ballet in particular. I love the discipline and the form - the training gives ballet dancers that elegance and poise and those very particular shapes and extended lines that are really pleasing to look at. The thing is though, I'm not actually so keen on classical ballets. Yes, they're very pretty, but maybe they're too pretty. I always feel they're dancing with masks on because they can't show their effort on their faces. And it can't be messy - it has to be very neat, and precise. I feel that, dance, at its simplest, is expression. Expression is messy; it's visceral and spontaneous. So I love this way of ballet dancing. The movements are not completely tidy, in fact I feel they're quite unrestrained, in that he's not censoring himself - he's not just aiming for a picture perfect pose but to actually describe a feeling.  Yet, you can still see that he is technically brilliant because he can execute those difficult, powerful moves and look absolutely exquisite as he hits those lines.  And it feels very raw and emotive because he's showing effort and emotion on his face. What an astounding dancer. All the more impressive because I know a little of how difficult it is!

Saturday 19 July 2014

The Drowned Man

Way, way back in January, one of my friends treated me to an evening out to see immersive theatre company Punchdrunk and the National Theatre's most recent offering, The Drowned Man. It was like nothing I'd ever seen before. Seriously. It was mind-blowingly awesome. I loved it so much I couldn't stop recommending it and took my sister and her boyfriend, and my youngest sister all to see it to make sure they didn't miss it. My youngest sister liked it so much we went back to see it again, just a few weeks before it finished its run. If it hadn't wrapped, I suspect we might have gone again. Yes it really was that good, and no, that is by far not the most times people have been.



The Drowned Man is set in a 1960s Hollywood film studio, Temple Pictures. Inside the studio where stars and starlets chase their dreams, two lovers struggle to make ends meet. Tragedy strikes when infidelity, scheming and betrayal drive them apart, leading one of them into ever increasing delusion and paranoia until eventually it ends in a horrific death. Strangely, a similar story unfolds in parallel outside the gates of the studio among the people of the town. Even more mysteriously, something happened to Temple Studios itself, which we are told was shut down overnight for an unknown reason...

Do you know Punchdrunk? They made their name through pioneering large scale immersive theatre where audience members are free to roam and interact with the sets, the story and the characters.

I'd been to an open air promenade play before (based on Lords and Ladies, the Discworld book by Sir Terry Pratchett) which was staged in a park and where the audience followed the actors around the various scenes as the story unfolded. But we were still only watching in the background. Punchdrunk's productions are truly immersive. They convert huge disused buildings into unbelievably detailed sets and you are allowed to go wherever you want as the actors enact the story around you. There's no right or wrong way to go about it, you choose what you want to do and see. Though, 'seeing' doesn't describe the complete sensation, it's more 'experiencing'. You don't just watch as a passive audience, you have to work for it by choosing what to do. Very often you have to chase after the characters (up and down stairs, through narrow corridors, across forests and deserts...) as they go about their business. You can stand right next to the actors in a fight, sit at their desks, eavesdrop on intimate conversations, read a note they've read, look through cabinets, walk into their homes, riffle through their belongings... the amazing sets, the sounds, the smells, the music, the lighting, and the actors, all catapult you into the world that the story creates. It is as if you are watching from inside the story, beside the characters. It's like a live-action computer game. There are some rules though - all audience members have to wear a mask, talking is not allowed, and you are encouraged to explore on your own. A lot of it is practically in the dark, with only strategic lighting to guide you through the huge maze of rooms and sets. The more you search, the more secrets you uncover. And if you are very brave (and very lucky), you might find yourself rewarded with a special interaction.

For The Drowned Man, four floors of an old postal sorting warehouse was converted into Temple Studios and its town. The scale and detail of the sets were just incredible. To give you an idea of the sheer size, it played host to around 40 cast and 600 audience members at full capacity, with lots of space still left over. There was a working cinema inside. Yes really! You could have gotten lost in there. Each show ran for three hours but that was still not enough to see everything. You could easily have spent it just exploring the sets and rummaging through the details. And if you decided to follow the characters, there were multiple story lines happening simultaneously all over the four floors and it was impossible to follow everything. My friend and I missed a whole floor on the first visit and even after seeing it three times I hadn't followed every character.

The story itself is inspired by Woyzeck, a fractured, unfinished play by George Buchner, about a soldier who is driven crazy by his lover's affair and ends up killing her. It also draws on ideas from other works including short story The Sandman, and novels The Day of the Locust and Something Wicked This Way Comes. To quote Punchdrunk's own description, Temple Studios is a place where '...celluloid fantasy clings to desperate realism and certainty dissolves into a hallucinatory world' as we '..[follow] its protagonists along the precipice between illusion and reality.'

For me, it very much gave a sense of the dark underbelly of the Hollywood dream - voyeurism, exploitation, obsession and corruption. I loved the air of menace that ran through the whole story, the allusions to the malevolent and the supernatural that played with the mind and made everyone very jumpy. I loved how, as the audience, we wandered around this world in eerie white masks as if we were ghosts - we could see the characters but they couldn't see us (or could they...?). The freedom to roam everywhere and be so close to everything completely blurred the fourth wall and, in a crazily beautiful way, brought full circle the very idea of fantasy/reality that was being played out.

I also loved that each person's experience was completely unique to them - only I saw everything the way that I saw it, even though we were all watching the same thing. And because of the story-within-a-story, multiple layered nature of the game that we were playing, we could all be seeing a different layer of the story depending on how deeply we were looking for hidden clues and trying to unravel the secrets. Oh how things clicked into place when reading spoilers afterwards.

I can't wait to see more of Punchdrunk's work. I'd first become aware of them a few years ago when they turned railway arches at Waterloo station into the setting of an immersive play for the launch of a sci-fi horror game for one of the big consoles (found out too late, didn't see it T_T). Their Sleep No More, which has located the story of Macbeth inside a 1930s hotel, is currently running in New York. Will they bring that back over to the UK? Or will their next production be something completely new? I wait with bated breath! Here is Punchdrunk's founder, the genius that is Felix Barrett, to tell you a bit more:


PS. All the scenes you see in the trailers are from the actual sets that were on location.

Thursday 4 July 2013

Be the change



Gandhi street art via Street Art Urban

"We need to be the change we wish to see in the world."

~Mahatma Gandhi

Thursday 6 December 2012

Thursday ♥ - Queen Titania

For me, winter and Christmas make December rather magical. It makes me think of fairy tales, myths and folk stories.

Thursday 25 October 2012

ilovedoodle by Lim Heng Swee

I saw this incredibly funny image of an ice cream cone...emm...doing its business (!) on Pinterest and just had to find out who the artist was. After a search, I finally landed on Lim Heng Swee's ilovedoodle page.

Everyone poops by ilovedoodle


An illustrator/visual artist based in Kuala Lumpar, Malaysia, I love how his simple illustrations are so fun and whimsical, and sometimes also carry little messages of encouragement.

Good news is on the way by ilovedoodle

The Backpacker by ilovedoodle

Dande(Lions) by ilovedoodle

Try to see things from different angles by ilovedoodle

Dare to Dream by ilovedoodle

His little catchphrase is 'doodling a smile' and they certainly put a smile on my face. For lots more of his work, visit his website and follow his doodle everyday project. =D

Thursday 19 July 2012

Yoshimasa Tsuchiya

Shhhhh! Don't scare it away...


*whispers* Aren't these beautiful sculptures by Japanese artist Yoshimasa Tsuchiya just breath taking?


Kirins, unicorns, bakus and fawns of Japanese folklore look so life-like you half expect them to start moving...


With slender limbs and delicate features, they have an ethereal beauty befitting of such mythical beings.


And yet, you sense there is something slightly wild and dangerous too.


What makes them even more amazing to me is that they are formed and carved out of solid blocks of wood!






It would be so wonderful to see these in an exhibition, I could spend hours daydreaming...


You can see more in his online portfolio.

Thursday 12 July 2012

Thursday ♥ - knitting sheep

I love black and white drawings (traditional or digital) - the use of shades, negative space and of course, the devil is in the details!