Root of the Problem:
This blog features some of my work in addition to visual research and articles I am reading. There will also be an occasional project with my students to look at.
The following is commentary on the film by Beck and his biographer.
The Oscar® he won for Crac! allowed Frédéric Back to fulfil his dream of bringing Jean Giono's wonderful story The Man Who Planted Trees to the screen. In more distilled form, its environmental message and philosophy of life reflect the concerns already addressed by Back in his previous films. The seeds that the shepherd plants are the symbol of all our actions, good and bad, which have far-reaching consequences we can scarcely imagine. It is up to us to think and act in accordance with our hopes for the future, and, if possible, to leave behind us a world more beautiful and promising than the one we inherited.
Ghylaine and I went to Paris in October 1982 to meet Aline Giono at Gallimard, and Sylvie Giono-Durbet in Manosque. Nothing was decided at those first meetings. We could make the film, but with authorization for three screenings only. Fortunately, Provence was beautiful, despite the cold and rain. On the Montagne de Lure, we saw mules carrying tree trunks on their backs. At Giono’s farm, a solitary old shepherd was playing the accordion in his house in the rain. Down a winding road, we came upon magnificent rams with twisted horns leading a herd of sheep. The mountain peaks were spectacular and the sheepfolds, like works of art. But it was unmistakable—the barren region described in Giono’s story was now covered with trees and forests. All the shepherds Giono had condensed into the character of Elzéard Bouffier had accomplished something on the scale of his story! There were few shepherds left and it was only when we went back through the causses—the high limestone plateaus around Larzac—that we found the images of Provence we recognized from Giono. Captivated by Giono’s text, I only rarely managed to sketch out light, evocative images. A too realistic precision kept cropping up, and those drawings all ended up in the wastebasket. I wanted simply to accompany the text, with the images as a way to bring it to the screen and no more, since generosity that seeks no reward contains the secret to finding happiness. With Ghylaine’s encouragement and that of Hubert and Lina, the frames gradually accumulated. Claude Lapierre and Jean Robillard were tireless on the camera and did a superb job. We invited all our friends to screenings to give us their critiques—“before it was too late.” I sent notes to Normand Roger on sounds, birdsong and traditional music so he could design the sound using information that matched the reality of Provence.
Fortunately, that same year, Hubert and I did have another opportunity to go back to L.A. The Disney studios invited us to present The Man Who Planted Trees and meet some of their best-known in-house artists. We visited their studios with Charles Solomon, a writer and animated film critic, and other animator friends. An Oscar always gives a film tremendous leverage in terms of distribution. The Man Who Planted Trees had already won over many hearts to the cause of acting generously to save the forests, but now it had an extra boost! My films have become “classics,” studied in universities and animation schools for their technical, artistic and cultural content. That goes beyond anything I might have hoped for and still surprises me. It shows that politically engaged art is both possible and worthwhile. Long before me, Breugel, Goya and many other talented artists showed this to be true with all the power of their art.
Polypus levis Hoyle (male) - Port Gazelle, Keguelen
Opisthoteuthis medusoides + extensa
"In 1898, the steamship Valdivia left Hamburg for a nine month scientific voyage to the Atlantic, Indian and Great Southern oceans [map]. Known as the German Deep-Sea Expedition, the mission was led by Leipzig University Professor of Zoology, Carl Chun and investigated chemical, zoological and physical characteristics encountered in the oceans during the voyage." "Professor Chun contributed a book on cephalopods (with a corresponding illustration/photograph atlas) to a multi-volume work called 'Wissenschaftliche Ergebnisse der deutschen Tiefse eexpedition auf dem Dampfer Valdivia' (From the Depths of the World Sea: Descriptions of the German Deep Sea Expedition)."
From the intro to th BiliOdyssey blogspot.
Velodona togata (off Somalia)
The octopus (Greek Ὀκτάπους, 'eight-legs') is a cephalopod of the order Octopoda that inhabits many diverse regions of the ocean, especially coral reefs. The term may also refer to only those creatures in the genus Octopus. In the larger sense, there are 289 different octopus species, which is over one-third of the total number of known cephalopod species.
Octopuses are characterized by their eight arms (not tentacles), usually bearing suction cups. These arms are a type of muscular hydrostat. Unlike most other cephalopods, the majority of octopuses — those in the suborder most commonly known, Incirrina — have almost entirely soft bodies with no internal skeleton. They have neither a protective outer shell like the nautilus, nor any vestige of an internal shell or bones, like cuttlefish or squids. A beak, similar in shape to a parrot's beak, is the only hard part of their body. This enables them to squeeze through very narrow slits between underwater rocks, which is very helpful when they are fleeing from morays or other predatory fish. The octopuses in the less familiar Cirrina suborder have two fins and an internal shell, generally lessening their ability to squeeze into small spaces.
Octopuses have a relatively short life span, and some species live for as little as six months. Larger species, such as the North Pacific Giant Octopus, may live for up to five years under suitable circumstances. However, reproduction is a cause of death: males can only live for a few months after mating, and females die shortly after their eggs hatch. They neglect to eat during the (roughly) one month period spent taking care of their unhatched eggs, but they don't die of starvation. Endocrine secretions from the two optic glands are the cause of genetically-programmed death (and if these glands are surgically removed, the octopus may live many months beyond reproduction, until she finally starves).
Xie Zhiliu (Chinese, 1910–1997), Dwelling in the Mountains. Dated 1979. Hanging scroll; ink and color on paper.
Mastering the Art of Chinese Painting: Xie Zhiliu (1910–1997) February 6, 2010–August 1, 2010
Galleries for Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, 2nd floor, north wing This exhibition includes a selection of around one hundred and fifty works by Xie Zhiliu (pronounced "shay jer-leo"), one of modern China's leading traditional artists and a preeminent connoisseur of painting and calligraphy. The rare trove of material on view demonstrates how studying and copying earlier models were as much a part of Chinese artistic tradition as learning from nature. Drawn from a recent gift of sketches, calligraphic works, manuscripts, and seals presented to the Museum by the artist’s daughter, Sarah Shay, the installation commemorates the one-hundredth anniversary of Xie Zhiliu’s birth.
Xie Zhiliu received a traditional Chinese artistic education, which combined the two disciplines of copying the work of earlier masters and drawing directly from life. His finished paintings, like those of many other Chinese artists, appear to be freehand creations—the work of a master draftsman who handled his brush with a confidence borne of years of practice. However, unlike many artists, Xie preserved numerous copies and sketches he made throughout his career, not only building a unique record of his creative process but also revealing how a seemingly spontaneous composition could be preceded by one or more sketches and drafts. These preparatory works could also serve as templates, thus liberating Xie from the need to visualize a completed composition in advance and allowing him to concentrate instead on making each of his brushstrokes as dynamic and fluid as possible. Juxtaposing Xie’s preparatory sketches with images of earlier models and with his own finished works, this exhibition seeks to demonstrate not only how traditional Chinese masters developed their personal styles through a combination of careful imitation and creative adaptation but also how they often relied on preparatory drawings to practice their craft—in a manner not dissimilar to that of Western painters.
More About the Artist Xie Zhiliu was a native of Changzhou, a city with a strong tradition of bird-and-flower painting, a genre in which Xie excelled. Moving to Chongqing to escape the Japanese occupation in 1937, he became a close friend of a renowned painter Zhang Daqian (1899–1983), who introduced him to the Buddhist cave murals of the Silk Road oasis of Dunhuang. After the war, he became an advisor and preeminent connoisseur on painting and calligraphy for the Shanghai Museum as well as a professor of painting. Thanks to his access to the rich holdings of the museum, Xie expanded his style through the study of Tang, Song, and Yuan dynasty painting, a topic on which he published. Between 1983 and 1990 he led a team of scholars in evaluating the collections of China’s leading cultural institutions, which resulted in a twenty-four-volume illustrated index of more than seventy thousand paintings and calligraphies.
About the Installation The installation is organized thematically. The first two galleries, entitled "Tracing the Past," present Xie’s early studies of figures, narratives, and bird-and-flower paintings of the Song dynasty (960–1279). His sketches of Buddhist figures based on his study of the Dunhuang murals are also included here. The artist’s admiration for the master painter Chen Hongshou (1599–1652) and other bird-and-flower specialists is highlighted in the subsequent two galleries with a number of precise copies of these artists' paintings. How Xie also learned directly from nature is illustrated in the fifth gallery. Featured are a number of studies of flowers and fruit as well as two albums of landscape sketches, capturing naturalistic compositions defined largely by contour lines with little interior modeling. Also on view in this section is a pencil sketch of narcissus visualized from different angles that show how his lines were slowly formed with numerous adjustments and corrections. Xie’s appreciation for cursive calligraphy is the focus of the next section. A manuscript called Poems of Inner Mongolia (1961) as well as several copies including Select Characters from Huaisu’s Autobiography (1969) and Notes on Zhang Xu dated to the late 1960s document Xie’s conscientious study of ancient models in the Shanghai Museum collection. The section concludes with Five Poems (1990), reflecting the abiding influence of these earlier masters. The final gallery features Xie’s integration of naturalism and stylization in his late years. Among the works on view is a brightly colored album called Views of Yosemite National Park, California (1994), which the artist made with his wife, the painter Chen Peiqiu (b. 1923), in 1994. Complementing the installation is a display of some of the artist's seals, which constitute a valuable anthology of the seal carver's art by many of the leading practitioners of the late twentieth century. This group also highlights one of the most innovative and important forms of calligraphy to be practiced since the late Ming dynasty.
From:
Noncanonical East Meets the American West Xie Zhiliu's Yosemite images.
By Morgan Meis
In the last room of the exhibit, where something special happens. In 1994, Xie traveled to Yosemite National Park with his painter wife Chen Peiqiu. There, he produced a series of paintings that are a testimonial to cognitive dissonance. He paints the mountains and trees of Yosemite, but they look vaguely Chinese. The vegetation looks sparse, like in the drawings that accompany Chinese calligraphy. The stones of Yosemite rise up with the stalagmite abruptness we expect of Chinese art.
Stunning as the natural formations are, they've also been fully co-opted into human culture. Chinese artists, generation after generation, managed to create what they were looking at almost as much as they simply recorded it. They forced us, in their paintings and drawings, to pick out the landscape in particular ways, to value certain kinds of rocks and outcroppings more highly than others. Over the centuries, they became connoisseurs. Over the centuries, it became impossible to see that particular natural phenomenon through the eyes of anything but the tradition.
And that's what happened to Xie Zhiliu in Yosemite. He painted a Yosemite that simply doesn't exist, at least to those of us on the Western side of the globe. Actually, his Yosemite doesn't exist on the Eastern side, either. It exists only in Xie Zhiliu's head. His Chinese tradition was in a locked battle with a landscape he didn't recognize. Yosemite doesn't look like the mountains of China. The stone is different. The mountains came forth because of different geological forces. The foliage is made up of different species of tree and shrub. Reality doesn't show itself in Yosemite the same way it shows itself in Taishan Mountain. The paintings Xie Zhiliu made in Yosemite don't reconcile that confusion, they simply record it. One of the deepest ongoing philosophical and aesthetic problems is whether we have access to reality as it really is, or whether we always see our own version of it. In no ways can Xie Zhiliu's Yosemite paintings be said to solve this problem. They do reflect, however, what a wonderfully, productively, beautiful problem it is and, I suppose, ever shall be. • 29 April 2010
'Mastering the Art of Chinese Painting: Xie Zhiliu (1910–1997)' @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Xie Zhiliu (Chinese, 1910–1997), Celestial Maiden. Datable to 1942–43. Drawing mounted as a hanging scroll, ink and color on paper.
Chen Hongshou (Chinese, 1599–1652), Landscapes and Flowers. Late Ming–early Qing dynasty, first half of the 17th century. Twelve folding fans mounted as album leaves. Ink and color on gold paper.
Xie Zhiliu (Chinese, 1910–1997), Butterfly, Bamboo, Flowers, and Rock, after Chen Hongshou. Datable to the 1930s. Drawing; pencil and ink on tracing paper.
Xie Zhiliu (Chinese, 1910–1997), Bird on a Branch of Blossoming Plum, after Chen Hongshou. Datable to the 1930s. Drawing; ink and pencil on tracing paper.
Chen Hongshou (Chinese, 1599–1652) and Chen Zi (Chinese, 1634–1711), Figures, Flowers and Landscapes. Late Ming dynasty and early Qing dynasty, 17th–18th century, one leaf dated 1627. Album of eleven paintings; ink and color on silk.
Xie Zhiliu (Chinese, 1910–1997), Landscape in the Style of Liang Kai. Dated 1980. Hanging scroll; ink on paper
