quare id faciam?

Let earth receive her King!

Georges de la Tour, The Adoration of the Shepherds, c. 1645
 

posted by paul bowman @ 5:00 AM 4 comments

Interrogative

"Now we're totally, like, past that into some new sort of twisted form of constant irony."
 
(via Daniel Silliman, via Gideon Strauss)

posted by paul bowman @ 8:30 PM 0 comments

Insight

Provocative penultimate paragraph from Algis Valiunas's Weekly Standard essay for the Rembrandt year (via Arts & Letters):

Although the current academic industry is out to make the chief interest of Rembrandt's painting "the way he applies his paint" (in the words of one fashionable art historian), the ordinary cultivated viewer can always hope to find in him the traditional artistic virtue inherent in the word vision: a species of wisdom, connected in representational art with insight into human, inhuman, and divine nature, as acquired by the most attentive observation, a working knowledge of great literary texts, and some sharp-elbowed acquaintance with philosophizing.

posted by paul bowman @ 9:00 PM 2 comments

Drawing

Still not drawing very frequently in recent weeks, but continuing to feel plenty of motivation to pull back into habits & frames of mind in which being someone who draws is a continual preoccupation. (As, it seems, is Mrs Irani, as you'll recognize if you've been checking in on her lately.)
 
The human skull study is the exercise to stay attached to and, at the same time, push off from – that's my strong feeling. Pictured, a little one done a few days ago (while sick & confined to my room, between extended bouts of sneezing & filling trash with Kleenex). There's enormous satisfaction in finding my way to the skull studies again, in feeling myself pulled to the particular stimulus & focus they represent. I don't have time here for the discussion I feel the subject deserves, unfortunately. I hope to come back to it before long.
 
One thing I suppose I ought not to leave altogether unsaid is that this sort of exercise doesn't in the least reflect, for me, interest in death symbology, the gruesome, the macabre, or even the merely bizarre. I've never been wired that way. No strong taste for ghouls, 'crypt-keepers', slasher flicks, goth punk, or the venerable gothic romance. I hope I can avoid leading anyone who looks in here to think otherwise.
 
I've added a page of old sketchbook skull studies in the gallery pages inaugurated a couple of months ago, and will probably put up more before long. There's a good deal there to rebuild habits on, if I can get myself together to take advantage of it.

posted by paul bowman @ 12:00 AM 2 comments

Have him your way

Geez, guys ... uh, and girls!

posted by paul bowman @ 9:49 AM 9 comments

News

I note tonight that the BBC's main news page is running at the moment, well above the 'fold', a headline announcing a study that reveals the world's condom manufacturers make the things generally too big to be suitable for the male population of India. Accompanying the link, a photo of a handful of glistening pale yellow samples, close up. Not surprisingly, this headline also tops the site's list of the day's most-read articles.
 
A few years ago, I clearly recall, they ran a similar front-pager on a study that revealed the same unfortunate fact with regard to the condom-using demographic of Germany.
 
Well, whatever keeps people paying attention, eh? I can't help picturing an editorial board of pimply fourteen-year-olds snorting into their hands as they spin about in designer chairs around a smart London conference room.
 
I hardly ever actually read the articles at the BBC site anymore. It's long since I felt I could expect consistently serious or fair accounts of major stories there. Now I really should find a better place to get a glance at what's making the frigging international headlines.
 
(Trouble is, I really like the BBC site layout.)
 
Later:  So – fed up, for the time being I've changed the bookmark that was 'bbc' to 'r' for Reuters, who have a somewhat improved page set-up since the last time I looked (months ago).
 
Reuters runs the condom headline somewhat below the fold, at least, and in their off-beat category – and it's only reached number two on their 'most read' list. Well ... it's a step.

posted by paul bowman @ 7:30 PM 0 comments

Old and new in the Forbidden City

November's Metropolis includes a thoughtful article (subscribers only – but email me if you'd like to view) on some of the story behind reconstruction of Jianfu Palace Garden, a subcomplex of Beijing's Gugong, the 178-acre Forbidden City or Palace – well-known today as a tourism destination. The original Jianfu, 'nine ornate structures arranged in an intricate maze of walkways, courtyards, and gardens', was built for imperial pleasure in 1740 and burned down amid the instability of the early Republic of China in 1923. The reconstruction, begun in 2000, is a project of the People's Republic initiated and made possible by a non-profit arm of Hang Lung Group, a Honk Kong-based developer.
 
The head of the Hang Lung organization, China Heritage Fund, is American-educated Happy Harun, and a primary architect on the project, interestingly, is a friend of hers brought up in both Chinese and U.S. settings, New York-based Calvin Tsao. It's Tsao's perspective that makes the Metropolis article particularly interesting reading, for me. Some weight is given to his articulation of the project's attempt at a rapprochement "between ... Modernist sensibility and ... respect for the culture of ... ancestral land, between interpretive impulses and the need to preserve" in the building of a new Jianfu that's part finely crafted replica in profuse, densely colorful imperial splendor and part contemporary architecture, also finely, even apparently traditionally, crafted but emphatically simple in detail and muted in color. The division is straightforward: exteriors are 'restored' and interiors 'new'. It should be noted that in spite of the author's attention to the thought given to this effort to reveal old by way of new, new in old, though, it's the gorgeous authenticity-driven replicated exteriors that get by far the best photo treatment – an easy editorial preference to understand, perhaps. I can't help wishing Tsao's restrained interiors, which in places, at least, seem to have their own constructional beauty, were allowed more page in order to illustrate the ideas the article particularly seems to turn on.
 
The marriage of contemporary and traditional apparently resulted in considerable part from budgetary necessity; to build palace buildings at a consistent level of restoration craftsmanship inside and out would have been financially extravagant, and perhaps, for securing proper materials and labor, simply impossible. One aspect of Tsao's insight, though, seems to have been to recognize another kind of necessity in the intertwining of old and new, old in new, as a reflection in culture of human transiency and time-dependency. "Tsao cites the Italians’ success in inserting modern interiors into ancient buildings as a model for preservation. 'Rather than severing themselves from their history, they know what is temporal and what to preserve,' he says." But what's significant is that this knowing "what to preserve" doesn't seem to be for him a matter of being able to argue some return on investment with regard either to the building's 'museum-piece' aspect or to its 'public structure' aspect, but rather a matter of building's part in formation of societal consciousness and identity. "'It's important to sift through the details of historic architecture to understand what part of its DNA you want to take with you,' he says. 'And that DNA is not about swooping roofs or gilded columns, it's about human interaction.'" Here, I think, is an architect's viewpoint worth some dwelling on.

A two-paragraph summary of the Jianfu project from Architectural Record is here.

There's more on Happy Harun's role, with additional detail on the restoration process, here.

Something of an overview of current Forbidden City restoration can be had here.

posted by paul bowman @ 1:14 AM 2 comments