Esoterika

I was a little disapointed in Delirium. It was good, but at $20 it was overpriced. I enjoyed it, it was entertaining and colorful, but it wasn’t the ecstatic awe of Cirque at its best. That’s the trouble with sometimes attaining godlike perfection; people expect you to do it all the time... The format was more of a concert with acrobatic floorshow, rather than their norm of an encompassing theatrical production. They made good use of projecting imagery onto scrims and rear screens to envelop the performers in vivid phantasms. But it annoyed me that the director kept cutting to a diagonal shot which mostly just showed the audience and flattened the projections' illusion of depth; it would have been more effective to keep the camera in the center, focused on the stage. Another disappointment was that the film itself was not movie-quality; part of this was due to the scrim creating a haze over the stage, but even when that was pulled back, the picture was grainy, not crisp. Again, if you’re going to charge $20 for a movie, it needs to _look_ like a movie.

The show didn’t have as much of a unified style or overarching story as a normal Cirque production, though themes of time and mortality ran through it, and it had some of their typical elements, including an object (here a red ball) that is played with, exchanged, stolen, hidden, and revealed throughout the show; figures emerging through holes in the stage; quarrelsome and faintly sinister clowns speaking universal gibberish; and a bewildered and bedazzled everyman who at first floats above and eventually descends to join the frolic and fall in love. The music was mostly good, energetic and percussive, with a variety of styles and singers, remixing songs from other Cirque soundtracks (although the samba-disco remix of “Alegria” was just plain goofy). The costumes were patchy, some effective, some not; seemed like they lavished attention on selected principals but bought a lot of the rest of it off the rack. There was one extremely cool gauze coat with a Siberian-influenced motif I would really like a still of. I liked the psychedelic bit where a suspended singer’s giant parachute skirt was stretched across the stage to make another colorful projection screen, while silhouetted figures danced inside in a lively Brazilian number; then they stuck poles into the fabric to echo the shape of Cirque’s travelling tents. My favorite acts were the four-man balancing act, the male pole-balancer, and the contortionist hula hooper whose prismatic hoops enveloped her in delicious whirls of colored light. I also liked how they varied their standard suspended-from-fabric-streamers act into more inhuman, cocoon-like shapes. As ever, Cirque’s acrobats manage to be both alien and magnificently sensual.

In a nutshell, my main response to this was "pretty", whereas my usual response to Cirque shows is "buh"--exultant astonishment.

The trailer and gallery on this site nicely convey the visuals of the film. (The gallery contains some spoilers--to the extent that such a nonlinear plot can be spoiled). Makes me want to see it again...

http://www.thefallthemovie.com/

This is for ariadne3...Baron Brutus' caribou from Midwinter's. Cream cheese, apricot paste, currant eye and fewmets, powdered sugar snow, on shortbread base.

Rivetingly strange. I have never seen anything quite like this.

http://www.kirchersociety.org/blog/2006/05/29/ferrofluid-sculpture/

This is absolutely exquisite. Now that's the kind of tech gadget I can get excited about! Be sure to watch the video too...

http://www.datamancer.net/steampunklaptop/steampunklaptop.htm

Since discovering steampunk last year, I really want to start making/ modding some objects in this style. History, craftsmanship, scrounging, fantasy, and rogue whimsy all in one...what could be better!

Edit: Okay, check out the rest of the projects on datamancer's site, too! Ye gods, I am inspired to do some tweakery!

OMG WANT WANT WANT ALL THIS!!!!!!!!!

http://www.becausewecan.org/Office_interior_with_custom_desks

WOW. Thanks, scarywoman!

The last two weeks I've been feeling really blah and flat and tired and out of sorts, for no particular reason I can pin down. Maybe I was somewhat anemic, because I felt much better after consuming a large amount of steak and spinach Friday night. Then, fortunately, some pretty cool things happened this weekend, and now I'm feeling invigorated and hoping it will carry through.

The first cool thing was on Saturday, when being at work was a lot more fun than usual because we had a two hour Stop-in-Studio by Dan Chen. Stop-in-Studio is a series of free drop-in demos that happen at the store--local artists do their thing and talk about their process for whoever shows up. Dan Chen is a local artist who is among my favorite living artists anywhere. His work carries the sensibilities of his training in China--craftsmanship, lush colors, aesthetic subjects, meticulously observed and rendered detail--but infuses it with incredible life and dynamism. He is particularly good at animals--gorgeous but never prettified, they crackle off the page with power. He not only works in oil pastel and oil paints, but also does fantastic sculptures in clay and bronze. Saturday he demonstrated a more traditional style of Chinese painting than I had seen him do before, looser sumi-style brush painting with ink and Chinese watercolor.

Dan is one of those people who just has talent oozing out of every pore. He is also incredibly friendly, unpretentious, and laid-back. His response to the group of 50 people (an unusually high turnout for us) eagerly awaiting his presentation was, "Hi! What you wanna do? I'm easy. You want to see flowers? Okay." He whips out a pad of sumi paper, a brush, some ink, and a few tubes of paint and starts knocking off jaw-droppingly beautiful flowers. The audience was literally going "ooh! ahh!" every time he held up a finished sheet.

I have tried that type of brush painting. It looks easy--it ain't. There is no going back, no cover ups, and you have to work quickly on the soft unsized paper because the ink immediately bleeds. You have to have both a pre-formed intention and the confidence to work with speed and follow serendipity. Dan demonstrated that in spades. It's like that saying about baseball: pitching is simple, but not easy. Brush paintings are simple--three sharp black smears of ink to indicate a gnarled cherry branch, the brush twisted and dragged so that it marks unevenly to depict rough bark; quick touches of pink for flower petals, pressing harder where the color should be darkest, a few dots of yellow... simple. Not easy. Then he whips off a couple goldfish--a few streaks of filmy gray for fins and vibrant red caps floating on the white sheet. Breathtaking. Simple.

He also passed around a portfolio of some of his more formal Chinese-style paintings on silk. The silk is a gorgeous warm tan, either tussah or dyed to that color, which is stretched on a panel and sized with hide glue and alum. The design is outlined in ink--selectively; some areas of the picture are not outlined, so that they look softer and recede--and then rendered in many layers of chinese watercolor (hide glue-based and more opaque than western watercolor). White mixed into the colors makes layers really pop on the colored ground; glowing figures advance and recede on the flatness of the minimal background. The diffraction of the translucent silk creates an incredible luminosity of color that changes depending on the angle viewed. The pieces in the photos were astonishingly rich and detailed--especially a giant commission of peacocks (feathers intricately delineated) and wisteria (blossoms likewise)--with the mouthwatering color intensity and saturation of a Tiffany window: they are literally that rich, glowing, and detailed.

I found these pieces quite interesting in that on the surface, they looked quite traditionally Chinese in subject, materials, and execution. But then the more you look at them, the more complexity they take on, because the Chinese approach is infused with a Western sensibility of rendering--more dimensional, somehow, the figures popping off the flat background as if about to break free. In fact it is almost exactly like the work of Giuseppe Castiglione, a 17th c. Jesuit painter who went to live in the court of the Qianlong Emperor (his portrait of the Emperor is widely reproduced) and produced works in Chinese style and subject matter yet with the subtle infusion of western realism. Quite different from the other stuff I've seen Dan do, which is figural but more obviously modern.

It was interesting to hear him talk about working for a porcelain factory in China when he was younger, how they had to be able to hand-paint two perfectly parallel lines around a vase, how they went out and painted flowers from life--he would travel hours on the bus to study a specimen, or use a giant lotus leaf as a rain hat while he painted the lotus flower, then get down in the water to see how the flower looked from underneath. He said they would spend hours unloading kilns and then still be expected to perfectly steady their hands to paint. So few western artists get that kind of serious technical training in draftsmanship and observation; the discipline really shows in both his skill and his extremely prolific output.

Several people in the audience had studied this type of brush painting and were lapping up the technical details with an eager desperation I well recognize. One of them said to me later, "It's so hard to find this information, you have to hunt everywhere--I sure wish I'd been able to talk to him years ago--" I nodded in perfect understanding--having faced the same scarcity and hungry hunt over the years for information about medieval painting, pouncing upon anyone who might guide me.

I got some information for the store's paint buyer about the Chinese watercolors they are all using, which they currently have to order from SF or Seattle; it would be cool if we could carry those at the store--the fanatics in the audience were quite excited by the possibility--and I'd like to try them myself. It sounds like the type of paint used in Tibetan thangka painting as well (distemper, technically, as opposed to tempera).

The only slightly exasperating thing about Dan is that he's one of those artists who's such a natural that he's not always very good at explaining how he does what he does. "Well, you just take your brush, and you do this..." Uh huh. No, Dan, YOU do that; we do a blob. But that's okay. Just watching him work is inspiring enough... It was a total artgasm.

Absolutely one of the best things about my job is that I am getting to know a lot of the professional artists and art teachers in Eugene. I really value that--being able to chat, ask them questions, help them find stuff, and sometimes even turn them on to new materials and resources.

I wish I had a better example of Dan's work. The trout do not excite me as much as most of his subjects, but this is the only color pic of his I can find online:
http://imagecache2.allposters.com/images/pic/adc/10100364A~Trout-Gathering-Posters.jpg

And here is a line drawing of one of his peacocks, but it doesn't begin to convey the color version...
http://uobookstore.com/art/studios.cfm