An artist needs a good canvas...or stones

The right stones must be scoped out, found legally or thieved from gardens without fences or neighbours who have been annoying the crap out of me for the last 40 years.  I do have outdoor paint and 2 turtles, 4 gnomes, a frog and a pot waiting for a coat of said paint. Patient they are, 6 years of waiting but soon, soon.

It's time for some intellectual dignity on this blog.

Columbian artist Fernando Botero (19 April, 1932) has an unique style of sculpting and painting.

How I would love this cat at the entrance of Parliament House, the idiot's door, you know the ones we stupidly voted for.  Every time a person tried to enter, bright laser eyes would shine and a voice would say "IQ undetermined. Common sense negligible. Pass politician".

 His rotund subjects are easily recognized as by Botero.  I've always wanted to be an artist's model especially if the artist looked like Leo DeCaprio which Botero doesn't but he painted big and my portrait does me justice.  No wonder I have crushed bones in my feet.  I saved your eyesight by leaving out the lavish nudes of myself, not just paintings but sculptures, all plus size.  The man had talent.

Oh yes, that would have been my kid, all curiosity.

I only said dignity, I didn't say tasteful.

He's got big feet though, so much for that old wife's tale.

The art of theft.

I've been reading a book about art theft and very interesting it is. So many paintings gone and so few recovered but I'm not talking about Napoleon's scroungers or Hitler's henchmen, ordinary thieves.

One surprising fact was that very few women are art thieves or we're clever enough not to be caught.

Another is that rarely is a painting stolen to order these days unless it's a specific grouping of subjects.

The news of a theft of a valuable piece of art give the organised art thieves world wide publicity regarding its monetary value.  The paintings are then used as collateral to buy drugs, guns or whatever they want. Some ransoms are still paid by insurance companies but many disappear and are never seen again.  And it's not only paintings.

Jonathon Tokeley-Parry had a neat antiquities smuggling racket going for him in the early 1990s.  He bought artifacts and after dipping them in clear plastic, he painted them to look like cheap gaudy tourist souveniers. Custom officials on the lookout for the real deal didn't catch on.  Tokeley-Parry transported many artifacts including a $1.2 million sculptured head of the Egyptian pharoah Amenhotep 111.  He created a provenance for his stolen goods in the form of the non-existent Thomas Alcock Collection.

His attention to detail included aged labels made by copying old pharmaceutical labels onto rough paper, baking them and finishing the ageing process by daubing them with teabags.

He was eventually caught and tried in England, copping a 3 year sentence.  The Egyptian authorities weren't as lenient, they sentenced him to 15 years hard labour, to be served if he ever set foot in their country again.

Henry Moore's bronze "Reclining Figure" weighed in at 2.7 tons.  On December 15, 2005, a team of thieves driving an old style Austin mini cooper followed by a stolen flatbed truck with a crane, hoisted the 11 foot long sculpture on board and left.  Estimated value in 2006 was 5.2 million dollars.  

In 1997, Gustave Klimt's "Portrait of a woman" was taken from the Galleria Ricci Oddi, Piacenze, Italy.

The gallery was closed for renovation so guards assumed the 60 by 55 cm painting had been put in storage.

The thief had simply climbed onto the roof, opened a skylight and used a fishing line to hook the painting off the wall.  He left the frame on the roof. 

Art theft is a lot harder to pull off these days, from Galleries that is, private homes, small museums or churches are still vulnerable. Remember that next time you can't see a painting for the bullet proof glass or the alarm sensor that goes off if you go 1 cm over an invisible line and don't pick your nose, the cameras are everywhere.  But as values increase stealing art is still worth the risk even if Auction houses have computer listings of everything known to be missing.  Of course war is a great cover for theft, loot from the Iraq war is still surfacing.

One last interesting fact.  The Mona Lisa only became popular after Vincenzo Peruggia lifted it from the Louvre in 1911.  Until the painting was found two years later in Florence, crowds came in greater numbers to stare at the empty space on the wall.

Well, I never!



You know you get to a certain age and think there's not much you don't know about life and stuff in general until you come across an article about flower frogs and don't take much notice until up comes a photograph.  Well, blow me down with a feather, so that's what those holey, spikey doovers that go in the bottom of vases to hold the flowers steady are called.  So I went looking for a few more images and they're in every shape, size, ceramic, glass and metal and some are frogs and some aren't.

I know all you flower people would probably know this but I'm of the silk flower brigade because they only fade not die.  I do have an English original flower frog in the original holder and original stand from the l930s. It's made of glass designed to look like tortoiseshell when the light shines through and was given to me by a friend who had a daughter-in-law 100% worse than mine.  She knew she would throw it out so I was to be its keeper and I still am.  I will always keep it as she was only given 3 weddings gifts and two she entrusted to me.

Flower frog, It really makes it live.



Kristina Logan "The Dot Queen"

She loves her dotted glass beads, dotting with a shaped glass rod instead of glass stringers so that she can be precise. After each dot is placed she starts melting them at the same rate before adding the next layer and finally adding transparent dots on top of the opaque dots. The surface tension squeezes the dots into diamonds and squares according to how tightly spaced the original dots and transparent glass were placed.

But she doesn't just use the beads for necklaces, in her hands they can become anything. The Amber tea pot is 16.5 x 16.5 x 9.5 cm and is one of a series.

And don't the dotty beads look gorgeous as candlesticks. You can see here the surface dotted beads and the worked dots under transparent glass.

The large green bead in the 3rd row down is her famous cactus bead. Every dot of glass positioned equally across the surface. I couldn't scan the photograph of her work bench but I was happy to see I'm not the only person who works in a 2 foot square space in the middle of a room full of equipment.

The best for last

Janis Miltenberger makes divine glass objects. This chair called 'Softly Held' is 34 inches high x 9 inches length x 9 inches width. Nearly 3 feet of intricate glass making and I love the flowers.

This chair is called "Sweet Discovery" and is 37 inches high x 9.5 inches in length and 9.5 inches in width. The image below is a detail from the top of the glass chair.

I do love these candlesticks though, it is the birds again.

As much as I like the candle sticks, I have to go for her drinking glasses. Not that I'd ever drink from them, I'd be terrified to even pick them up. They are gorgeous.

For more of her work click on and drool.

One cannot have too much glass!

James Minson is an Australian artist and he created the cloud mobile above. It took a lot out of him physically. At a gallery show in 2008, the mobile which hangs on a stainless steel umbrella,
was hung on a cable not able to take the weight and it crashed to the floor. At the same gallery, he had a blue chandelier which a very tall man walked straight into, crash. The perils of being a glass artist.

So now we have the silver cloud mobile with what, I presume, are glass raindrops.

But this has to be my favourite, a jelly fish chandelier. When I win the big Lotto and I have my house on the cliff overlooking Bass Strait, with the giant windows, I will have jelly fish chandeliers in every room. James also makes perfume bottles but nothing went to my heart like this chandelier.

I have a new book

The Penland Book of Glass is fabulous, several glassworkers show masterclasses in pictures. I've always been fascinated by glass and how it is made but glass as art is a whole other discipline.
The little birds here are by Shane Fero and I couldn't have enough of these in my house. The one above is called 'a conversation about eggs'.

Deceptively simple looking but such work goes into each little bird. Even the legs are put on in two pieces, the first before the joint is hollow then the pieces down to the feet are solid and the feet are arranged and melt glassed to the leg.

He's cute and has personality. The body is gently rolled in powdered glass, heated then rolled in another colour to give a graduated shading.

I like his little beady yellow and black eye

But this one is my absolute favourite. Shane Fero named him the "Rings of Saturn" bird and if you've seen photos of Saturn from the orbiting Cassini spacecraft, he couldn't have named him better.

Another artist showcasing his work is Vittorio Constantini, who not only works the most amazing fish but lifelike insects but I've fallen in love with his fish.

There was recycling in them olden days

This is a magnificent portrait of the actress Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth painted by John Singer Sargeant. The photograph below is a sepia image of the actress in the same dress taken in 1888. Ellen Terry was famed for her portrayal of Shakespearean heroines and was mobbed by fans wherever she went.

The dress has just been restored at a cost of 50,000 pounds and that glittering shimmering gown was covered in irridescent green beetle wings, 1000 of them. No beetles were harmed in the making of the dress as the wings are naturally shed as part of their life cycle. The conservators collected the beetle wings that had fallen off the dress and had others donated to them.

"One of Mrs. Nettleship’s greatest triumphs was my Lady Macbeth dress…The picture of me is nearly finished, and I think it is magnificent. The green and blue of the dress is splendid, and the expression as Lady Macbeth holds the crown over her head is quite wonderful . . ." wrote Ellen in her diary in 1888.

The dress is 120 years old and the majority of the work was strengthening the fabric after the wear and tear of those years. Two years to raise the funds necessary and over 1,300 hours to repair and to bring it back to its former glory. The work was carried out by expert Zensie Tinker and her team and the dress will now be on display, along with items from Ellen's dressing room, at Smallhythe Place in Kent, a house dedicated to theatre history and stage costumes.

This fashionable dress from the British Museum is also decorated in the same beetle wings so Ellen's frock wasn't a once off.

JEWELLS OR CAKE OR JEWELLS OR CAKE, CHOICES CHOICES CHOICES

I don't know how Antoine managed to stay hidden at the back of the pastry window but that's the way I look when I see a shop full of goodies. I also get that look when I'm contemplating the fridge door, also covered in goodies. Thanks to Annie O'Dyne for the link.

FRIZIONS

Peter Wasilewski studies the magnetic properties of meteorites and rock from the moon and Earth. He's also an artist who creates images called Frizions, using polarised light and ice.
He takes a petri dish of ice in the process of freezing and sandwiches it between two polarising filters. As white light passes through the first filter it polarises, causing the rays to vibrate in the same plane.


Ice crystals split light into two rays which travel at different velocities through the ice in a phenomenon known as birefringence. When the rays are recombined at the second polarising filter there is a phase difference causing the interference needed to create these colours.

The colours are determined by the thickness and lattice structure of the ice. Varying the thickness will produce a variety of patterns.

Although water ice can be found throughout the solar system, the lattice structures vary due to the differing temperatures and pressures of their formation.

Only the ice found on Earth has the correct structure to produce a frizion.

See here for more of Wasilewski's images.

THIS IS A TOLLIDAY

I love the ships, love the minerals, love the shape, love the little hoists going up from the harbour quay on both sides of the rock mountain.

CASTLE LIZZADRO

Another of William Tolliday's masterpieces. He created this castle in 1984 as a memorial to James "Chris" Lizzadro, a grandson of the founder of the Lizzadro Museum of Lapidary Art .

On a large slab of Brazilian agate, the 18ct gold castle rises from specimens of amethyst, malachite, azurite and vanadium. His signature diamonds are set as windows. The sculpture in in the museum rotates slowly to music and at the push of a button, the sound of preparations for battle are heard.

WILLIAM TOLLIDAY, MASTER GOLDSMITH

This is William Tolliday working on one of his fairytale castles. He was born in 1915 and worked his entire career at Garrard & Co., London. In the late 1960s he began creating his fairytale castle of gold, sitting in, on and around the most beautiful mineral specimens.
He said he inspired by the look of the Houses of Parliament and the buildings of Venice with the golden light of sunset behind them.
He first paints a water colour of his design then selects a foundation mineral base to suit the 18ct golden towers and bridges he constructs piece by tiny piece. He blended red, yellow, soft white and oxidised white gold to develop depth and perspective.
The reflective properties of the minderals change the light of the gold as the towers are added and soldered into place.
He used diamonds for windows which gave a life-like flash in the high towers.
Everything is in miniature ith amazing detail from the flags flying on the turrets, the rigging on the ships or the tiny trees hidden in the crystals.
He signed each piece with his name as a fine sprinkling of gold dust.
As it takes, on average, 12 months to execute the planned sculpture, only three or four are completed each year from the first water colour sketch.
Below is the first version of Neuschwanstein Castle, Bavaria, made in 1969. It's crafted of 18ct and 22ct red, yellow and white gold. The courtyard is made of the mineral barite. The natural rock base is formed of tourmaline and lepidolite minerals. Several of the turret windows of the three towers are set with baguette diamonds. It measure 6 5/8 inches by 5 1/4 inches in width.
It has no flat base and the gold battlements seem to perch precariously on top of the specimen instead of blending into the rocks.

This 1980s version of the Royal Castle Neuschswantein has the golden towers fully part of the amethyst geode on which it sits. Once again, there are diamond insets in the windows and the agate base balances the whole structure. Nestled inside the geode are tiny golden fir trees.

The whole sculpture is 23 cms tall.