May 2, 2016

John Cleese opens Silly Walks tunnel in Eindhoven

Filed under: Architecture,Art,General by Orangemaster @ 3:34 pm

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Hundreds of fans of British comedy legend John Cleese huddled in the cold today to greet the man who played a bowler hatted civil servant working for the The Ministry of Silly Walks. Handshakes and autographs were handed out by the 76-year-old actor, invited by Studio Giftig to officially open the renovated Dommel tunnel where graffiti artists have painted all kinds of references to the famous Monty Python sketch.

Cleese showed up in some sort of Australian slippers with no socks, having said that nobody would show up to such a ‘meaningless event’, but he was apparently surprised by all the fuss. Cleese didn’t perform any silly walks himself, also claiming he never was a fan of the sketch in question. Don’t let that rain on your parade and watch the full sketch.

(Link: www.ad.nl, Screenshot of YouTube sketch)

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April 16, 2016

Jan Toorop exhibition at Gemeentemuseum The Hague

Filed under: Art by Branko Collin @ 11:59 pm

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Van Gogh, Mondrian and Toorop: Gemeentemuseum in The Hague calls them the three most important Dutch artists of the late 1800s and early 1900s, and if you have only ever heard of the first two, now’s the time to rectify that.

Apart from mentioning his importance, Toorop is difficult to define. Koen Kleijn writes in Groene Amsterdammer that “the diversity of his work was so great, one could barely speak of a consistent artistic path.”

“If you first encountered the exhibition in The Hague, you could well believe that you were looking at the work of five or six different artists.” Toorop’s paintings and drawings ranged from realistic, engaged work to sunny paintings of flowery women in white dresses sipping tea; and from rich and colourful pointillist paintings to grave works full of symbolism. “This description could create the impression that these periods were all flings, fleeting and uncertain, but that’s not true. Toorop was phenomenally talented. Everything he did, he did splendidly.”

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The exhibition, curator Gerard van Wezel’s life’s work according to NRC, runs until 29 May.

(Images all crops; via Wikimedia Commons here, here and here)

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April 11, 2016

Football fans duking it out with graffiti

Filed under: Art,Sports by Orangemaster @ 12:48 pm

Fans of Rotterdam football club Feyenoord and fans of FC Utrecht are entangled in a graffiti competition that involves dissing each other using street art. This video shows Bokito eating an army of gnomes, and there’s a whole bunch of other graffiti on film that was spotted in and around Rotterdam.

Another work of graffiti has Feyenoord Ollie, a spherical grey elephant, covering gnomes in pooh, apparently a response to some graffiti in Utrecht where a big Ollie is being attacked by an army of gnomes.

Bokito the gorilla made world news some years ago after attacking a woman at a zoo in Rotterdam, which seems fitting. The gnomes from Utrecht are drawn by KBTR, which sounds like ‘kabouter’, the Dutch word for gnome, many of which can be seen in Utrecht and in other parts of the country.

We used a KBTR picture only because last time we used a Bokito picture, we were almost sued out of existence.

(Link: www.rijnmond.nl, Photo by Aarnoot, some rights reserved)

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March 2, 2016

Painstakingly made animation about Vincent Van Gogh

Filed under: Art,Film by Orangemaster @ 9:34 pm

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An animation film entitled ‘Loving Vincent’ directed by Polish director and painter Dorota Kobiela tells the story of the last days of Vincent Van Gogh’s life. Every frame of this 80-minute film features an entire painting, each made by about 100 painters in Gdańsk, Poland, which adds up to about 56,800 frames.

The team of painters are learning to paint in Van Gogh’s expressionist style for three months, and need to paint 12 paintings for each second of film, each of which takes two days. It would take one person about 9,600 days (26 years) to do this all on their own. The paintings are then photographed using PAWS technology (Painted Animated Work Stations) and are being produced by BreakThru Films that won an Oscar in 2006 for their short feature Peter and the Wolf.

‘Loving Vincent’ isn’t finished and painters are still busy learning until August. The idea is to release the film at the end of this year. Check out the trailer, you won’t regret it:

(Link: thecreatorsproject.vice.com, Image: extreme close-up of The Harvest via Van Gogh Museum)

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February 11, 2016

Stay in Van Gogh’s bedroom

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 3:13 pm

To celebrate an exhibition entitled Van Gogh’s Bedrooms at the Art Institute of Chicago, a bedroom that draws inspiration from three versions of Van Gogh’s The Bedroom, has been recreated. It centers around the artist’s chamber in Arles, France.

Visitors to the famed bedroom are in for an immersive experience—it’s as if they’re traveling back in time to the Yellow House. This contemporary reimagining is located outside of the museum’s campus in the River North neighborhood of Chicago, and it’s part of a larger apartment. If you’re interested in staying, follow the Art Institute of Chicago’s Facebook page for updates on booking. Van Gogh’s Bedrooms is on view through May 10 of this year.

(Link: www.mymodernmet.com)

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February 6, 2016

Van Gogh exhibition free for women in high heels

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 7:36 pm

A multimedia Van Gogh exhibition in Moscow is letting women with high heels in for free and giving 50% off to men named ‘Sergey’ inspired by a music video of the band Leningrad and their song ‘Exponat’, a fact most sources have failed to mentioned altogether. Shame on you all because the video is funny, although yes funnier if you understand Russian like I do. And it’s been viewed 34 million times and counting.

In an attempt to pick the right outfit for a date to a Van Gogh exhibition with an eligible older man, a woman realises what she really needs is a pair of Louboutin high heels. And that goes horribly wrong.

The video features modern Russian humour and has jokes about a very pretty yet insecure woman worried about everything, including her butt. Luckily her mom is there to help her fit into her skinny jeans. And that goes horribly wrong, too.

(Links: www.thestar.com, www.usnews.com)

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February 1, 2016

Do you know your seven sins? Test yourself with Hieronymus Bosch

Filed under: Art,History by Branko Collin @ 11:32 pm

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There was never a better time to get your Bosch on.

The Noordbrabants Museum in Den Bosch, the town that one of the Netherlands most famous mediaeval painters was named after, has a major exhibit of most of Hieronymus Bosch’ works coming up in less than two weeks.

The Guardian calls it “the impossible”, an exhibition of 20 of Bosch’s 25 surviving panels in a small, local museum. The exhibit will run from 13 February to 8 May 2016.

If you are unable to make it to the museum, the Bosch fever sweeping the country ensures you can engage with the great painter in several other ways. The local newspaper, Brabants Dagblad, has an online quiz that will let you spin the wheel to find out how much you really know about the seven deadly sins. The questions are in Dutch and cover topics as varied as Doutzen Kroes, Roy Donders, frikandels, Mike Tyson, Snow White, civil servants, Louis van Gaal, FIFA, the biggest hamburger in the world, plastic surgery and David Beckham.

The paper has five other games for you, each one based on a different painting by Bosch, which can be reached through the quiz’s main menu.

If Dutch isn’t your forte, broadcaster NTR lets you explore the triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. There are spoken versions of the interactive tour in Dutch, Dutch for children and English. If you just want to admire the painting, Wikimedia Commons has a huge photo of 30,000 × 17,000 pixels (223 megabytes). Should you print that file, you would need a wall of five metres wide and almost three metres high to display it.

(Illustration: screenshot of the Brabants Dagblad game, edited to convey the impression of spinning motion)

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December 22, 2015

Drop your old Lego into the sunroof of a car

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 3:28 pm

During a run through this year’s Amsterdam Light Festival, I came across the green BMW used to collect Lego for Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei, located in front of the FOAM museum, Amsterdam’s photography museum.

After Lego refused to sell him Lego for an upcoming exhibition, Ai created an international network of collection points. Since 4 November drop-offs of Lego bricks have been accepted though the sunroof of a BMW car located in front of the Foam building at Keizersgracht 609, Amsterdam. It looked quite empty, but then again filling up a car with Lego probably takes a while.

“On October 23rd, Ai Weiwei posted on Instagram: “In September Lego refused Ai Weiwei Studio’s request for a bulk order of Legos to create artwork to be shown at the National Gallery of Victoria [Australia] as ‘they cannot approve the use of Legos for political works’.”

(Link: www.foam.org, Photo of Lego by tiptoe, some rights reserved)

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December 9, 2015

Rijksmuseum to remove slurs from art descriptions

Filed under: Art,History by Orangemaster @ 12:59 pm
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The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has kicked off a project to remove hurtful ethnic designations in the descriptions of hundreds of thousands of objects and replace them with neutral terms. Why now? Because with the digitisation of the collection, more and more people aren’t too fond of the Rijksmuseum’s “traditional Eurocentric view” of the world, as the museum calls it. The Rijksmuseum also says that their staff is very positive about the changes, which has not led to any discussions, contrary to what often plays out in the Dutch media.

A Dutch word like ‘neger’, which ranges in meaning depending on context (‘negro’, ‘nigger’, ‘black man’, etc.), can be seen in thousands of artwork descriptions as ‘bosneger’, which isn’t too far from ‘jungle bunny’, but literally means ‘jungle/forest negro’. For example, a ‘black negro girl’ (why the tautology?) on a early 20th century photograph by Hendrik Doyer is now called ‘Surinamese girl’. The goal is to remove the emphasis on colour as the defining factor and it sounds good so far. Next to disappear will be all the slurs for tribes from around the world.

(Link: www.parool.nl, Photo: rijksmuseum.nl)

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November 5, 2015

Listen to the city through a trio of horns

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 7:33 pm

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An interactive installation called ‘Toon’ (‘Tone’) by Dutch artist Jeroen Bisscheroux at the Vincent van Gogh College in Assen, Drenthe, features three dark-red horns a person can sit in the middle of and listen to environmental sounds. They can hear sounds from three different locations, including nearby sports pitches, passers-by from the park, as well as the sounds of people leaving school. By having three horns pointed in different directions you get a mix, creating a veritable soundscape.

Bisscheroux has many different installations related to sound, one of which called ‘Oor’ (‘Ear’) that many people drive by on motorway A50 near Son en Beugel, Noord-Brabant.

(Link and photo: inhabitat.com)

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