Art appetizer

It's been a soggy Labour Day weekend here, chilly enough even for the lighting of a fire to warm our cockles last night.  Dadda Boo has been immersed in preparation for a summit next week, so things have been pretty low key around here, although his emergence from the office to concoct some fine wholesome soups has been much appreciated.

 

These images were taken of the view up through our skylight in the kitchen,  I love to watch the rain fall upon the glass, and the clouds passing, rather like that James Tyrell installation where you go into a darkened room to sit and gaze at a frame rectangle of sky above your head.

We did, however, manage a family trip to the Vancouver Art Gallery today, where we sidelined the masses milling through the Rembrandt/Vermeer exhibition, and scooted up to the Andreas Gursky retrospective exhibition.  Working on 'toddler time' (take whatever you can get), we shimmied through the exhibition, 'look its football players', 'look its a beach', in and out in less time than I used to take for my mooch around the exhibition bookshop (such luxuries a distant memory), but I feed on whatever small morsels I can get.  It's hard not to be impressed by Gursky's work, its 'awesome' in the truth sense of the word, rather than the sense in which its used around here, like when you give someone the right change. It's grand in vision and execution, and the pieces I've seen before have also been grand in scale. However, many of the images in the Vancouver show are reproduced on a much smaller scale than I had expected, which was quite refreshing (though entailed more small child carrying so the refreshment didn't quite reach my arms) and felt a bit more human to me.  I suppose I've felt his work to be quite macho with its grandness, and there is a strange sense of being alienated from the masses of people depicted in the images, we are so distant from them all.  

Picking out a couple of images from the exhibition, these ones seem like an interesting juxtaposition (mine, not the curators).  The first is from a rubbish dump in Mexico.   I'm struck with the beauty of the image and find myself in the exhibition trying to imagine the stink, it seems so aethesthetised to me.

The second shows a designer trainers store.  I wonder how many of the latter end up on the former?!