Link: IMPOSSIBLE

This has also inspired me to do another photo blog of Polaroid pictures. I love the fact that even if you just finished taking a picture it looks like you took it in the 70s. The instant nostalgia makes for a great picture.

Video = Youtube

Video = Youtube

Video = Dailymotion

The Dining Room in the Country

This is The Dining Room in the Country by Pierre Bonnard, which was painted in 1913 in the French country side. It is the interior of his house ‘Ma Roulette’. At this time in his life Bonnard was very inspired by his wife, Maria Boursin, and painted many domestic scene’s with her in them. He was born in Fontenay-aux-Roses, Hauts-de-Seine, France on October 3, 1867. He had a happy youth and Studied Law under the influence of his father, and practiced art on the side. After a brief stunt as a barrister, Bonnard left law and pursued his love, art at the École des Beaux-Arts. After failing to win the Rome Prize Competition in 1888, he left the school for the less formal Académie Julian. There he met Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier, Paul Ranson, Édouard Vuillard, and Ker Xavier Roussel. They soon banned together in 1890 and formed an artistic brotherhood called ‘Les Nabis’. Bonnard was known as “the Japonizing Nabi,” for his use of flat, liner, and playful style in a kind of freehand style. While his friends at the time took on the concept, “that a painting, before being a battle horse, a nude, or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors which have been arranged in a given order,” Bonnard’s visual humor and sly mocking made him stand out from the rest of the group. A good example of his paintings at this time are Woman with Rabbit (1891) and the Croquet Game (1892). In1891 Bonnard began to exhibit at the Salon des Indépendants, where he met Toulouse-Lautrec, and at the galleries of Le Barc de Boutteville, a dealer who represented the Nabis as a group. Bonnard’s first one-man show was held at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in 1896. In addition to easel paintings, Bonnard executed decorative screens, posters (France Champagne, 1889-1890; La Revue-blanche, 1894; L’Estampe et l’affiche, 1896), book illustrations (Marie by Nansen, 1897-1899; Verlaine’s Parallèlement, 1900; Daphnis and Chloe, 1902;Renard’s Histoires naturelles, 1904), lithographs (notably the set Quelques aspects de la vie de Paris,1895), sculpture, and stage sets.

After 1900, Bonnard developed a lighter palette and somewhat developed a hand closely linked to the Impressionists. While his hand became looser, he still hung on to the idea of the flat surface, and his mixture of the two styles produced a more abstract hand than the impressionist, due to his use of color blocking. After 1910, Bonnard began making frequent trips to the southern part of France where he purchased Le Cannet in 1925, the year he married his wife who had been his model and companion since 1895. Here in the country side by the sea, his paintings flourished and stayed true to their structure and exploitation of the decorative possibilities of the picture plane. Soon after his marriage he visited the United States and served as a member of the jury of the Carnegie International Competition in 1926. His late works are freer in expression and more luminous than ever. During World War II he lived in Le Cannet, and there he died on Jan. 23, 1947.

There is no real “story” behind this image more than during his time in the french country side, Bonnard enjoyed painting domestic scenes with his wife. His house ‘Ma Roulette’ is featured and the interior of the dining room is present. In this painting, Bonnard has combined animate and inanimate objects, somewhat combing a still life with a portrait and somewhat landscape. There is the table and plates on the right and his wife, a cat, and some tree on the left. To add a symbolist subjectivity to the piece, Bonnard painted not from observation, but from memory. While he may have used his memory for this painting, Bonnard did experiment with photography and Kodak film later on in his life. This painting is on canvas and is 64 ¾” X 81″. It is currently in The Minneapolis Institute of Arts in Minnesota, US. The idea of painting the country side and subjects of everyday life is something true to the impressionist nature in Bonnard.

With this in mind I found this interesting article in Time : Books Vs. Movies, By Richard Corliss. In the article he argued the debate over a few movies based on books. His arguments were plausible, but I must, as a true Harry Potter fan, say that the movies are absolutely horrid compared to the books. My favorite of his arguments was in his reasoning behind why us book lovers always hate the movie…

That’s because readers of a novel have already made their own perfect movie version. They have visualized it, fleshed out the locations and set the pace as they either zipped through the book or scrupulously savored every word. Often they have even cast it.

So think of a movie that you love, was the book was better?

Article : TIME

Bradbury’s response is as fiery and written as well as his works. His description of the atrocity that was a collection of short stories to me sums up how disgusting it is to censor art:

“Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito – out! Every simile that would have made a sub-moron’s mouth twitch – gone! Any aside that explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer – lost!

While Bradbury goes more into the destruction of written works, this idea of censorship and “editing” relates to every kind of art. When something is censored, you have essentially taken away a piece of the work, cut away a limb that the artist intentionally placed there. While in the end the intention and reflection from any art is saved to the individual audience, if they are not given the entire puzzle how is the artist expected to get their point, meaning, or message across? I hope this helps open your bubble a bit or inspires someone to look into something outside their comfort zone.

Article : Bradbury