To all my readers and all my family and friends and to everyone who just chances on this blog!
And my new year's resolution is:
Try and write more posts! (Notice I said 'try')
Thursday
An interesting snippet from New York Times
Many of the new art hotels are springing up in the Boulevard Montparnasse area on the Left Bank. During the 1920s, you might have found Picasso drinking at the Café Select, Ferdinand Leger painting in the La Ruche studio complex or Man Ray holing up at the Hôtel Istria. Today, the small lanes around Place Pablo Picasso — famous for Rodin’s statue of Balzac — hide newfangled art havens like the Hôtel des Académies et des Arts.
Its pedigree is impressive. According to Henry Mona, the hotel’s director, the building once housed the studio of the celebrated Japanese painter Tsuguharu Foujita, a friend and colleague of Picasso and Man Ray, and the street was at one time home to Modigliani.
Paying tribute to the spirit of the avant-garde, the hotel hired the French urban artist Jérôme Mesnager, who has gained fame for painting his signature “white bodies” — sinewy humanoid forms — on city walls from Togo to Tokyo, including the Great Wall of China and Red Square in Moscow.
Mr. Mesnager has installed the spectral creatures in each of the boutique hotel’s 20 rooms, on the building’s facade, in the courtyard, on the wall of the lobby (chock full of books about Montparnasse’s artistic heyday) and even the elevator shaft (visible through a glass wall in the elevator).
“They’re the hotel’s permanent guests,” Mr. Mona joked.
Its pedigree is impressive. According to Henry Mona, the hotel’s director, the building once housed the studio of the celebrated Japanese painter Tsuguharu Foujita, a friend and colleague of Picasso and Man Ray, and the street was at one time home to Modigliani.
Paying tribute to the spirit of the avant-garde, the hotel hired the French urban artist Jérôme Mesnager, who has gained fame for painting his signature “white bodies” — sinewy humanoid forms — on city walls from Togo to Tokyo, including the Great Wall of China and Red Square in Moscow.
Mr. Mesnager has installed the spectral creatures in each of the boutique hotel’s 20 rooms, on the building’s facade, in the courtyard, on the wall of the lobby (chock full of books about Montparnasse’s artistic heyday) and even the elevator shaft (visible through a glass wall in the elevator).
“They’re the hotel’s permanent guests,” Mr. Mona joked.
(from New York Times, Dec 18 2009)
Nemo's new work in Belleville
This month saw a most exciting happening: a new Nemo fresco created by the artist on the wall of a 7-storey apartment block at 146 Rue de Menilmontant, looking over the Menilmontant-Oberkampf crossroads. It features all his most loved elements: the man in the black raincoat with his suitcase, the red balloon(inspired of course by Lamorisse's film of the same name), a kite, and a rocket which Nemo says is inspired by the amazing adventure-in-waiting that are the first commercial rocket flights(Virgin Galactic's ones, I suppose!)
Beautiful, airy, dreamy and charming as ever, this is a fresco that already takes its place amongst Nemo's great works, and inspires local inhabitants.
There's a piece about it here in the local paper Belleville Magazine:
The Banksy/Robbo feud
Everyone's talking about this story:
Thing is, I'm not sure what I think of it--I mean, it was pretty rude of Banksy to paint over Robbo's art but on the other hand what the whole thing ended up creating was a really really cool bit of art(once Robbo had his final word on it!) and also of wit, it really made art feel alive and not something static and hushed like it was in a museum or something. So I veer between thinking, cool, it's really exciting stuff, to thinking, hey, you shouldn't ever do that to someone else's art and not quite making up my mind.
Anyway what's great is it's got everyone not only in london but all over the world(at least people who are interested in the subject!) talking about street art, what it is, what it means, how different it is from gallery art etc. And I think that can only be a good thing.
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