Brett Whiteley
I’ve been looking at this artist’s work again, and I must say I love the way he draws – sometimes! he has a bold, clean line when he wants, and it mixes with areas of tangled line that have been erased and sometimes picked out with ink or pencil. He’ll elongate and distort as the fancy takes him, like a cartoonist, Scarfe maybe.
A lot of his work is in dubious taste (I don’t mean porny, that’s fine as far as I’m concerned); for instance, the Christie drawings and paintings, based on the 10 Rillington Place murders, that he actually mixed with zoo drawings, for example “a Cheetah at Ten Rillington Place” – good painting, though.
I love some of his Lavender Bay verandah-scapes and the series of landscapes he did with an “S” shaped river included. he’s also notable for the number of different objects he stuck on his canvases; birds’ eggs (often in nests), birds, his own ginger hair on a self-portrait, coins, a brain, a duck-billed platypus (stuffed)…..
The boxing and cricket paintings reminded me of Francis Bacon, as did the Zoo paintings.
The Brits Who Built the Modern World (Rogers, Foster, Shuttleworth etc.) BBC4
TV progs about these; thought some of their stuff was brilliant, for example, the Pompidou Centre, for which they claimed there wasn’t even an overall drawing existing when they excavated the vast hole in the middle of Paris for the building – yeah, hippy architects, cool… They, well, Rogers anyway, claim to have been lefties in the 60’s, building workers’ recreation projects and the like. Now, however, they do prestige airports and such for the Chinese, which is much better in many ways, because they carry long-term projects through, being a dictatorship. Over here, you have to worry about democracy; governments, and hence plans changing, unions being a pain, people refusing to move…. The Chinese can guarantee you a cleared site for your shiny project, no problem. And they’re communists, Chinese gov. that is, so it’s all in the Peoples’ interest.
Good Men (Ismael Ferroukhi)
Great film (2011) set in WW2 Paris, concerning Algerians. It stars Tahoor Rahim, the young gangster in Audiard’s “A Prophet”, doing a similar turn; he’s a black marketeer and informer, naive, poorly educated, amoral (to start with), ducking and weaving, an eye to the main chance; slowly, he acquires a conscience and a loyalty to his compatriots. There’s something of Pontecorvo’s “Battle for Algiers” to it – I suppose it’s the similarity of Rahim’s character to that of Ali la Pointe, and their “journey” towards activism.
The music in the film is staggering; I had the volume low on the the first song and couldn’t hear the words – it sounded like a ballad done by the Watersons or Martin Carthy.
Burmese Days
Just finished the Orwell book and of course, now I’m going to have to read the lot again – Clergyman’s Daughter next. I thought it a much cruder portrayal than Passage to India, but of course, Orwell was an officer in the Burmese police while Forster was a visitor to India, so maybe Orwell’s first-hand knowledge of the Burmese and the ex-pats was superior. I thought the characters of Verrall, and Elizabeth were beautifully drawn. From reading the Crick biography, it appears that the incident in which Ellis attacks the students with his stick might have been suggested by a similar incident in which Orwell, or Blair, himself laid into a Burmese youth at a railway station.
RK Back – An old one, I’m afraid.
Blackpaint
07.03.14
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