My niece is in town and today we decided to spend the early afternoon in the Gerhard Richter exhibition in the Neue National Galerie. The only problem was that everyone and their uncle's second cousin twice removed is visiting the exhibition and, even though we got there pretty early, there was still a long wait. Both impatient by nature, we decided to go around the corner to the Gemäldegalerie instead.
The Gemäldegalerie has amazing paintings by many an old masters but, like all great museums, what makes it extra special are the museum rooms themselves.
High ceilings, lots of natural light, walls covered in beautiful cloth and these gorgeous wooden sitting areas for the awestruck or simply tired gallery goers.
As we wandered through the rooms, my niece and I marveled out the amazing way the painters depicted light and cloth, movement and depth, a masterful skill that is, sadly, largely lost.
I took lots of photographs for the Art Fragment series in my shop Augenblickphoto. I'll be printing some of the ones I like the best (not pictured here so stay tuned) to see if I want to work with them or not.
All in all, most definitely not a bad way to spend the first day of Spring in Berlin, 2012. ;)
Jasper and I went to the Walton Ford exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof yesterday and now he is definitely one of our favorite artists. For those of your who have never heard of him, he is an artist who does large scale animal watercolors in the style of Audubon (he even paints on spots of what looks like mildew onto many of the paintings which I thought was a nice touch.) Whereas a lot of animal illustration and paintings (especially watercolors) can end up being a little too much on the cute side, his work is really powerful and often pretty violent as is, indeed, the animal world.
But what I love most of all is that, no matter how surreal or gruesome the paintings may be, each one is based on a real anecdotes from natural history texts and documents or sometimes from a poem or short story.
This one, for example, is based on a quote about the aggressive Starling, a species non-native to the United States that was brought there by a man who wanted to establish colonies of all the birds ever mentioned in Shakespeare.
Or this one, from a diary of a man who saw a buffalo on the great plains put up a fight to the bitter end when attacked by a pack of white wolves. Or this one about a 19th century fight between two tigers and a lion in the Tower of London.
Or this one, based on the description of Sir Richard Burton's (the Naturalist, not the actor) favorite monkey which he fed on a high chair next to his seat at the dining room table.
Walking around the room looking at these painting was an eerie, almost magical experience. No one was talking. Even our footsteps seemed to echo, like we were in some old cathedral filled with the various body parts and bones of different saints. The paintings were based on true stories, but like stories themselves, they had also risen the level of metaphor. Jasper and I bought several prints we plan to have framed for our bedroom. If you are in Berlin, you should definitely go and see the exhibition, but hurry. It ends on May 24th.
For an interesting peek into his studio, take a look at this little video:
So, I thought about calling this blog post "Dead Girls and Bondage", but then I realized what kind of readers I would attract and how terribly disappointed they would be.... I've been suffering from a vicious bout of insomnia these days. Not that this is anything new. It always takes me a while to fall asleep and I've had insomniac phases on occasion all of my adult life. Torturous, yes, but I've been trying to make the best of it by getting some creative work done instead of sleeping. Not that this actually HELPS me go to sleep. Anyone who does not chronically suffer from insomnia may believe the advice "Drink a cup of hot herbal tea and all will be fine", but it is a big fat lie....The only thing that helps sometimes is reading (but DEFINITELY not t.v. or the internet!!)or changing where you are sleeping, i.e. go lie down on the couch for a while. The problem usually is you have zero desire to do these things. All you want is to sleep and it's the one thing you absolutely can't do....
Anyway, as I said I'm doing the lemonade from lemons approach and working on a lot of new art and jewelry and even some hand-altered clothing. I've been buying vintage photographs on ebay on and off for the past six weeks or so.
Whenever they come in the mail I often find myself deciding to keep them for my collection rather than using them for anything (I've been collecting vintage photographs for over ten years.) Every once in a while, however, I do get one that inspires me. Last night it was the one pictured at the beginning of this post.
A young girl, her dark hair braided, a somewhat pensive look on her face, her hands in her lap. I got out my sewing materials and sat down at the dining room table but then suddenly realized I wasn't interested in stitching the picture. I started thinking about the girl. What hid behind her serious expression? I imagined her, a good girl always doing as she is told, but secretly wishing to run off and join the circus. She wouldn't want to be a trapeze artist is a glittering costume or to ride white horses. She would dream of being an escape artist.
I have to admit this idea may have been planted in my head by Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay which I read about a month ago. One of the main characters trains to be an Houdini style escape artist when he is a boy in Prague. He practices cracking locks and hiding picks inside his cheek. Later, in New York, he creates a sucessful comic book with his cousin called The Escapist. Of course, the idea and longing for escaping is also symbolic in the book (the character is an Eastern European Jew at the beginning of Hitler's tyranny)the stories of escapism and the obsession people have brought to the art really stuck with me.
I started thinking about chains. I put some gold ribbon around her like some bonds that she was dreaming of escaping from. I added some vintage snack skin copper chain (perhaps a snake handler would be another of her dream jobs...)and black lacquer chain to the side.
My husband came and took a look at the photograph sometime before I had done much work on it. "I wonder what they meant by that," he said. He had read the back of the picture which read 28.5.1940- Im Gedanken an Eure Annelie (In Memory of your Annelie.) "It sounds to me like the girl must have died."
It seemed strange, almost spooky, to me to be working on a picture of a girl who died in childhood in 1940. She would be in her 70s now, so of course she could still be living. To know that she probably passed away so long ago made me wonder if I should stop the project. But then again, the show must go on....
As a last touch I added a black glass pendant to her neck. I imagined it was from her beloved uncle Horace, the only adult who understands her. It is a symbol to her to never stop dreaming. When I showed the finished work to my husband he said, "Hmm...Very bondage-like." Not what I had intended, but I can see what he means...
I just thought I'd post some of my husband's photographs on this wet, dreay late Sunday afternoon. A lawyer by day, he is also an aspiring photographer. I may add some of the photographs to my shop Schaufenster just to see what happens. If any sell, then I told him I will take him out for a nice dinner!
So when I first saw this antique postcard for sale I noticed a few interesting things:
1. It is postmarked Baden Baden, May 28th, 1901 making it 108 years old.
2. The stamp is from Bavaria which was still its own separate kingdom at the time.
3. It still has the original greetings written in pencil, though they are in the old script and not really readable for "modern" eyes.
4. The writer also traced over the old woman's eyes in pencil, something you can see when you hold it against the light. Still, as intriguing as these aspects might be, I felt the postcard was lacking something. The illustration of the old woman and young girl is sweet bur it is gray as is the writing, giving the postcard an overall drab feeling. I knew I wanted to do something with it but the question was what? Both sides of the card were equally important so I didn't want to glue it onto something or stitch it up. I decided to simply wait. A while ago I bought this packet of vintage stamps at Karstadt on Hermannplatz. Karstadt is a German department store, but unlike the department stores I know in the U.S. it also has a huge grocery store in the basement, a large sewing department with cloth and supplies and a hobby section with stamps among many other things. Not sure what I would do with them either, I found a lot of the stamps really beautiful (a pack of 100)so I went ahead and bought them.
Karstadt is a chain, but the one on Hermannplatz is rather special in that it is in the notorious neighborhood of Neukoelln. Neukoelln is considered the "ghetto" of Berlin. The very mention of its name is enough to strike fear in the hearts of more suburban, middle-class Berliners. I lived in Neukoelln for years in a total of five different apartments. Though it is admittedly trashy at times, it is also wonderfully multi-cultural and totally safe, at least if you are a white girl like me (most of the problems are between Turkish and Arab boys duking it out...)
Besides, there are great apartments to have there totally dirt cheap. Here are some pictures of the last apartment I had there until I "upgraded" to Kreuzberg (the one before it had ovens where I burned coal for heat. "Kick ass!" I thought and "How very 19th century!" That is, until I realized how much dust they make....) A cute little studio with central heating for 300 Euros. It was on Weserstrasse, right around the block from the infamous Ruetli Schule, a remedial high school where the teachers and principle wrote a letter to the city of Berlin a couple of years ago stating that it would be better to close the school down because all of pupils were hopelessly unteachable. Anyway, when I told people I lived there they told me I was crazy.
But I liked it. The area is really close to Kreuzberg and has a true urban grittiness to it. By far the coolest area in Neukoelln, and I'm a girl who knows that neighborhood....The ironic thing: Weserstrasse is now THE next big thing. The area even has a new name, Kreuzkoelln. I was there around a year ago and it is now lined with lots of hipster, underground bars and cafes and even a sushi restaurant. The whole two years I lived there there was nothing but Eckkneipen (old men pubs)and the cool but very small and by no means hip Crossanterie. Sigh. Genetrification, where were you when I needed you most?
Anyway, to get back to the original story of this post, the other night I was playing around with the afore-mentioned stamps, placing them in these gilded paper frames I bought at an art supply store. Though raised hardcore protestant, I've always been a bit of a sucker for the Virgin Mary. Therefore, not too surprising that I framed her and baby Jesus from a stamp from Fiji showing a painting of the visit from the three wise men. I then took another stamp (Canadian from 1970)of children with worshipful looks on their faces and framed that. After positioning them on the antique postcard on a bit of a lark, I somehow liked it. I glued them to the front and put a gilded frame over the Bavarian stamp on the back and- voila!- the collage Three Wise Stamps was born. I did feel a bit bad defacing something so old, but life's simply too short to not have fun.....
Yep, I'm at it again with the photo stitching. I liked one of them so much that I just had to frame it and keep it for myself. It is now hanging in my kitchen.
I've been busy stitching photos again. Here's another that will soon be part of some new work or another. It's part of a photograph of the gorgeous art deco Anzeiger building in Hannover, Germany. I took the picture four years ago, when I had a job going around to various cities in Germany and teaching English to the train service employees in order to prepare them for the world cup. The teaching itself was rather tedious, but I got to take around 11 different trips where my hotel and train was covered and the work itself was pretty well paid. One of the places I went several times was Hannover. I'm sorry if any locals read this post, but Hannover just isn't an exciting place. Located in the middle of Germany, there just isn't much about it that is especially interesting. The court house and the lake behind it are pretty and there is a villa district which might be nice to walk through. And, of course, the Anzeiger building is really beautiful. But the city itself is simply boring. There is not even a local accent or dialect (something they are proud of in Hannover)but I think it really says something about the place. Hannover is a city without a face is what my husband says.
Still, one of the times I went there to work it was really inspiring. It must have been in late November or maybe early December. A storm was brewing throughout the day, but somehow the rain never started. Instead there was just this incredible light shining through these dark, gray clouds; truly dramatic and electric. After class I walked around for hours taking pictures. When I got back to my hotel room, my feet sore from all the walking, I took a series of self-portraits called, appropriately enough, 10 Self-Portraits in a Hotel Room in Hannover. Later, I fashioned them together into a book. Hmm....Maybe I should stitch some of them....;) These days, I'm having an obsession with needle and thread. Whatcha gonna do?
My niece is in town and today we decided to spend the early afternoon in the Gerhard Richter exhibition in the Neue National Galerie. The only problem was that everyone and their uncle's second cousin twice removed is visiting the exhibition and, even though we got there pretty early, there was still a long wait. Both impatient by nature, we decided to go around the corner to the Gemäldegalerie instead.
High ceilings, lots of natural light, walls covered in beautiful cloth and these gorgeous wooden sitting areas for the awestruck or simply tired gallery goers.
As we wandered through the rooms, my niece and I marveled out the amazing way the painters depicted light and cloth, movement and depth, a masterful skill that is, sadly, largely lost.
I took lots of photographs for the Art Fragment series in my shop Augenblickphoto. I'll be printing some of the ones I like the best (not pictured here so stay tuned) to see if I want to work with them or not.
All in all, most definitely not a bad way to spend the first day of Spring in Berlin, 2012. ;)
