I came across the Art Lebedev the other day, an anarchic Russian design collective with a nice anti-capitalist streak. Their logo is a bar code, and they find all sorts of ways of sneaking it in to places, which makes an interesting statement about commodification.
These and dozens of others are in their little online gallery here.
My sister Rose married her army man Stephen on saturday.
It all looks very formal here, but that’s not very representative of what was a really fun and very laid-back sort of day, complete with barbecue and pinatas, and torrential downpours. Fortunately the bouncy castle had a roof on.
Paul, Michael and I were ushering, which is a dignified name for standing around looking fancy and occasionally pointing in the general direction of the bathrooms.
Every last sunday of the month we do something a little bit different at Church on the Corner, and last night we hosted a photography exhibition. The photography club at International Students House displayed their work, and we had a lecture on ‘imaging truth’ and a prayer room upstairs. It looked great. The pictures are up for a week, so drop by and see them if you’re in the area.
I came across an artist I quite like the other day, Gerry Bergstein, from Boston. Let me show you a painting:
I love this mass of scribbles and shapes, looming and disintegrating at the same time. It’s monstrous and daunting, but it’s also held together with tape, and in the cracks and the holes there’s nothing but black space.
This is meant to be eight feet wide, so it loses something along the way – look closely at the bottom left corner and you will see this small figure.
The painting is called ‘What shall I paint today?’, and there is the painter, standing before this enormous mess, raising the empty canvas to the fragmented and sketchy vision that’s in his head. The idea is there, compelling, powerful, but until it’s realised it is a fragile, barely formed tangle. It could be blown away forever at the slightest distraction.
It’s a beautiful portrayal of the creative process, the gap between the conception of an idea and its delivery, that waiting time while our brains work out how to express what it is they have imagined. I love it, because I seem to spend most of my life in that gap.
You can see more of Mr Bergstein’s remarkable paintings here.
Jeremy Williams