La Grand-mère D'Olympia

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) - The Grand Odalisque, 1814

The faculty of the imagination is both the rudder and the bridle of the senses.

Simone de Beauvior

It is not sufficient that what one paints should be made visible. It must be made tangible.

Georges Braque

Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one's sensations.

Paul Cezanne

The aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh. The effect that they make in space is as bound up with them as might be their colour or smell . . . Therefore the painter must be as concerned with the air surrounding his subject as with the subject itself.

Lucian Freud

Born of the sensibility, art sows and creates life in its turn.

Remy de Goncourt

Body experience . . . is the centre of creation. I rarely draw what I see. I draw what I feel in my body.

Barbara Hepworth

The senses are our bridge between the incomprehensible and the comprehensible.

August Macke

I want to reach that state of condensation of sensations which constitutes a picture.

Henri Matisse

All the arts are based on the senses. What they do for the person who practices them, and also the persons interested in them, is make that particular sense more active and more acute.

Henry Moore

Nothing exists in the intellect that has not first gone through the senses.

Plutarch

The Week In Review

Films:

Roma, città aperta (Rome, Open City), 1945 - d. Roberto Rosselini
Paisà (Paisan), 1946 - d. Roberto Rosselini
Germania, anno zero (Germany Year Zero), 1947 - d. Roberto Rosselini
Crumb, 1994 - d. Terry Zwigoff
Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist, 1997 - d. Kirby Dick
In the Realms of the Unreal, 2004 - d. Jessica Yu
The Edge of Heaven (Auf der anderen Seite), 2007 - d. Fatih Akin

Television:

Entourage: Series 1-3

Books:

Baudelaire by Claude Pichois

Articles & Chapters:

Salon Rhetoric by P. ten-Doesschate Chu
City vs. Country: The Rural Image in French Painting from Millet to Gauguin by R. Herbert
To Create a Living Art: Rethinking Courbet's Landscape Painting by Mary Morton
Pre-Raphaelite Realism: Landscape and the Human Model by Elisabeth Prettejohn
Courbet and Popular Imagery: An Essay on Realism and Naivete by M. Shapiro
Rejecting Nothing, Selecting Nothing by A. Staley
The Topographical Aesthetic in French Tourism and Landscape by Greg M. Thomas

Exhibitions:

Fiona Hall: Force Field - Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney)

Music:

String Quartets - Benjamin Britten
String Quartets - Michael Nyman
Third (2008) - Portishead
String Quartets - Michael Tippett

Make 'Em Smile

Cindy Sherman - Untitled # 412 (2003)


"In her most recent work,...[Cindy] Sherman has created a group of images of clowns that were initially inspired by an article of clothing - pyjamas with fur-like buttons - which she had purchased at a yard sale a decade earlier. Sherman has commented that she wanted to make new characters that were 'intense, with a nasty side or an ugly side, but also with a real pathos about [them] - and [clowns] have an underlying sense of sadness while they're trying to cheer people up. Clowns are sad, but they're also psychotically, hysterically happy.' In light of Sherman's career-long interest in artifice and masquerade, this subject mirrors her self- transformation through costumes, make-up, wigs and prosthetics. What is strikingly similar between Sherman's creative process and the way clowns create personas is the hermetic approach they take: like the artist in her work, 'a clown is their [sic] own writer, director, costumer, make-up artist, and prop-man.'"

From Cindy Sherman - (exhibition catalogue with text) by Rochelle Steiner and Lorrie Moore