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Saturday, 29 September 2012
Bricks and Paint
I saw this graffiti in Cambridge the other day and I thought it was some of the best street art that I've ever seen in England. Mostly all you see is tags, but this is really great.
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Wednesday, 19 September 2012
An Impression
I remember the first time I saw a Renoir – I mean really saw
one as opposed to glancing at one and moving on. I was probably about eleven at the time and I
remember standing in a gallery with the afternoon light slanting through the
windows looking up at this huge canvas and being transfixed. It was the painting In The Garden (Dans le
Jardin) and of a couple seated at a table holding hands with a backdrop of
leaves. I was completely swept up in the
romance.
Eight years on and I still love Renoir, so I went to the From Paris: A Taste For Impressionism exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. It showcased art from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts and included art by Manet, Degas, Monet, Sisley and Morisot, as well as Renoir and was arranged in a series of rooms by genre (still life, landscape etc.)
I know that Impressionism has been done and done and done again. I know that in every greetings card shop there's a Japanese Footbridge and in every dentists waiting room there are ballerinas by Degas. But that's because they are good. I apologise for my gross over simplification of the history of art, but pre-Impressionism art was often concerned with realism, symbolism or a story and a lot of work from the 20th and 21st Centuries is chiefly about concepts or form. For me, Impressionism is different. It's a feeling that you can't put into words, a moment of light on water.
The highlights for me were Monet's Geese in the Brook, which looked exactly how a country afternoon feels, Toulouse-Lautrec's Waiting and Thérèse Bérard, which captures all the dark eyed thoughtful innocence of the quintessential Renoir heroine. It doesn't seem to matter how many prints you see of French 19th Century art, it just doesn't seem to ruin it in the flesh. The exhibiton only has a few more days, but if you get the chance, go.
Eight years on and I still love Renoir, so I went to the From Paris: A Taste For Impressionism exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. It showcased art from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts and included art by Manet, Degas, Monet, Sisley and Morisot, as well as Renoir and was arranged in a series of rooms by genre (still life, landscape etc.)
I know that Impressionism has been done and done and done again. I know that in every greetings card shop there's a Japanese Footbridge and in every dentists waiting room there are ballerinas by Degas. But that's because they are good. I apologise for my gross over simplification of the history of art, but pre-Impressionism art was often concerned with realism, symbolism or a story and a lot of work from the 20th and 21st Centuries is chiefly about concepts or form. For me, Impressionism is different. It's a feeling that you can't put into words, a moment of light on water.
The highlights for me were Monet's Geese in the Brook, which looked exactly how a country afternoon feels, Toulouse-Lautrec's Waiting and Thérèse Bérard, which captures all the dark eyed thoughtful innocence of the quintessential Renoir heroine. It doesn't seem to matter how many prints you see of French 19th Century art, it just doesn't seem to ruin it in the flesh. The exhibiton only has a few more days, but if you get the chance, go.
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| Thérèse Bérard, Pierre-Auguste Renoir from all-art.org |
Wednesday, 12 September 2012
Urban Wisdom
Found this piece of inspirational graffiti on a park bench in Denmark. Who knew vandals could be so wise?
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| Copenhagen, 2012 |
Sunday, 9 September 2012
An Awesome Wave
A couple of months ago I got the opportunity to interview up
and coming indie quartet Alt-J whilst they were on tour supporting Wild Beasts. If you haven’t heard
of them, they’re well worth a listen.
Can you give me a brief history of the band?
Joe: We all met at Leeds University. I just started playing songs to Gwil, recorded it, set up a myspace and we thought that was it. But we realised we really liked playing with one another and eight months into that we started hooking up with Thom and Gus, and playing in our bedrooms.
Gus: And did that for a couple of years.
Joe: In the early stages we all were just keen to see what would happen with just us playing in a room, but then we started thinking we could play to people and see what they think. The first gig we did was in our house and no one really had any idea of what to expect from us and we impressed people. People said some really nice things and that gave us motivation to keep on going.
Alt-J is quite an unusual name, where is it from?
Gus: It's a keyboard command.
Joe: When you press Alt and J you get a delta symbol, but we didn't realise it was only something you could do with Macs, we thought it was PC users as well. We didn't realise we were pro Mac people. But yeah, it's just that. The short-cut to the symbol and the symbol is our name.
Gus: Delta means change in maths and it was a change in name. We were called Films before but there was another band called The Films. I think people read too much into the whole triangle thing though. It's just a name.
People have referred to you as folk or indie but it seems a bit more complicated than that. What would you define yourselves as?
Gus: We don't really like genres.
Joe: I think we just know what we like and do what we do and let other people figure it out, let the audience make the decision.
Gus: We didn't go let’s start an indie band, or let's start a folk band or let’s start a weird band, we just did the band. Any band whose sound you can describe too easily is not very good. You shouldn't be able to pin somebody down, just like that. Some artists you think “oh, it's just blues” but is it just blues? Or is it folk or country?
So how do you go about making music?
Joe: It changes, it depends on the song. Sometimes it’s a chord on a guitar that influences a melody or lyrics, or sometimes it a passage from a book, or a word, or a sentence. Sometime it's something someone says, and you write it down, thinking it's really nice. There's a song and there's a phrase “I'm going to bed into you like a cat beds into a bean bag” and that was something Thom was talking about - talking about a spider bedding into your brain. I thought it was a really nice, odd and fucking weird, but nice so I wrote it down.
What would you say your main influences were?
Joe: Well the people around me. Books and films and art, I suppose. You're not aware of your influences that much because you're bombarded with so many things that you absorb, it's hard to pinpoint them really.
Gus: I think that it’s influential to look at what some bands are doing. I mean to look at Wild Beasts for example, they have three albums and that's great. Each album just seems to gain more and more momentum and do bigger and bigger things for them. There not like a massive band, they're not playing Wembley six nights, but the furrow that they're ploughing is great and they're making music that they want to make.
Tell me about your new album.
Joe: It's coming out on 28th May and it's called 'An Awesome Wave'. We really enjoyed recording it, and I think that if people have enjoyed what they've heard so far they're going to really like the album. Hopefully.
Gus: I think it should be a pretty rich listening experience, hopefully. It hangs together well, it's not too eclectic that it doesn't work, but sometimes it's pretty varied.
Joe: We've thought about the structure and the overall narrative of how the album sounds. We're happy with it. I'm not saying we nailed it but we're happy with it. That's the main thing.
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| Photograph from insideout.topshop.com |
Can you give me a brief history of the band?
Joe: We all met at Leeds University. I just started playing songs to Gwil, recorded it, set up a myspace and we thought that was it. But we realised we really liked playing with one another and eight months into that we started hooking up with Thom and Gus, and playing in our bedrooms.
Gus: And did that for a couple of years.
Joe: In the early stages we all were just keen to see what would happen with just us playing in a room, but then we started thinking we could play to people and see what they think. The first gig we did was in our house and no one really had any idea of what to expect from us and we impressed people. People said some really nice things and that gave us motivation to keep on going.
Alt-J is quite an unusual name, where is it from?
Gus: It's a keyboard command.
Joe: When you press Alt and J you get a delta symbol, but we didn't realise it was only something you could do with Macs, we thought it was PC users as well. We didn't realise we were pro Mac people. But yeah, it's just that. The short-cut to the symbol and the symbol is our name.
Gus: Delta means change in maths and it was a change in name. We were called Films before but there was another band called The Films. I think people read too much into the whole triangle thing though. It's just a name.
People have referred to you as folk or indie but it seems a bit more complicated than that. What would you define yourselves as?
Gus: We don't really like genres.
Joe: I think we just know what we like and do what we do and let other people figure it out, let the audience make the decision.
Gus: We didn't go let’s start an indie band, or let's start a folk band or let’s start a weird band, we just did the band. Any band whose sound you can describe too easily is not very good. You shouldn't be able to pin somebody down, just like that. Some artists you think “oh, it's just blues” but is it just blues? Or is it folk or country?
So how do you go about making music?
Joe: It changes, it depends on the song. Sometimes it’s a chord on a guitar that influences a melody or lyrics, or sometimes it a passage from a book, or a word, or a sentence. Sometime it's something someone says, and you write it down, thinking it's really nice. There's a song and there's a phrase “I'm going to bed into you like a cat beds into a bean bag” and that was something Thom was talking about - talking about a spider bedding into your brain. I thought it was a really nice, odd and fucking weird, but nice so I wrote it down.
What would you say your main influences were?
Joe: Well the people around me. Books and films and art, I suppose. You're not aware of your influences that much because you're bombarded with so many things that you absorb, it's hard to pinpoint them really.
Gus: I think that it’s influential to look at what some bands are doing. I mean to look at Wild Beasts for example, they have three albums and that's great. Each album just seems to gain more and more momentum and do bigger and bigger things for them. There not like a massive band, they're not playing Wembley six nights, but the furrow that they're ploughing is great and they're making music that they want to make.
Tell me about your new album.
Joe: It's coming out on 28th May and it's called 'An Awesome Wave'. We really enjoyed recording it, and I think that if people have enjoyed what they've heard so far they're going to really like the album. Hopefully.
Gus: I think it should be a pretty rich listening experience, hopefully. It hangs together well, it's not too eclectic that it doesn't work, but sometimes it's pretty varied.
Joe: We've thought about the structure and the overall narrative of how the album sounds. We're happy with it. I'm not saying we nailed it but we're happy with it. That's the main thing.
Saturday, 8 September 2012
Dawn, Dusk and the Bits In-Between
I spent some time in Switzerland this summer. I was staying in a village in the mountains and I don't think I ever really got over how beautiful it was. Here are a few photos.
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