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The Swimming Pool
The Swimming Pool This pool owes its alienating effect to the fact that it’s actually only a baby pool with hardly 10 cm of water on a transparent floor under which people can walk by. It is a work of art by Leandro Erlich in the Museum of Contemporary Art at Kanazawa. I used the photo…
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Gimcracks and knickknacks
Gimcracks and knickknacks or: a girl’s paradise An entire shop full of trinkets against a background of pink wall cloth and a tiger-like stripe pattern on the floor: a truly mouth-watering temptation! In Dutch we have the nice word ‘snuisterijen’ for this kind of trinkets, containing the two vowel sounds ‘ui’ and ‘ij’ that non-native speakers…
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Under the Sony roof
Under the Sony roof Why this photo appeals to me: The proportions and the arrangement of the light and dark areas within the frame create a powerful, graphic image. The straight lines and their angles, in contrast to the curved shape of the roof, create a pleasing sense of tension. The fact that the dark…
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Moloch horridus
Moloch horridus This ‘grotesque Australian reptile’ – in the words of my Oxford Dictionary – is popularly called thorny devil or thorny dragon. I think its official name – Moloch horridus – sounds more horrid than the popular one. Here’s what I read in my friend Jane’s reptile book: “the Moloch horridus is the sole member of…
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Desert art
Desert art Drawings in the sand through the interplay of wind and sturdy desert grass. Using the grass-stalks as a compass, the wind has drawn circles around each plant. At first they must have been very faint, but after days and days of strong wind from different directions they are now clearly visible, engraved in…
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Kata Tjuta
Kata Tjuta or: What’s in a name? Looking from the red planet Mars at the red continent Australia on planet Earth we may be able to see, with the best available telescope, an image like you’ll find here (please click), on a picture made by NASA. From that far we perceive a group of heavily eroded bulges…
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My Red Homeland
My Red Homeland It’s not easy to write sense about art. I tried my best in last week’s post regarding another work by Anish Kapoor, but I’ll take it a bit more easy this time and quote some lines from the booklet that was distributed at the exhibition in Sydney in 2013. “My Red Homeland is a…
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Please do not touch
Please do not touch Anish Kapoor calls this work of his “Laboratory for a New Model of the Universe – 2006”. This sounds intriguing, maybe a bit over the top, although maybe with a touch of humour too. Who will tell us? Anyhow, it is what it is: an acrylic bloc of 123x134x132.7 cm, with…
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Before sunset
Before sunset A catamaran is blocking my view of the sun, which is about to set over the Indian Ocean. But the very last rays of sunlight manage to penetrate beneath the boat’s raised floor, creating a faint reflection on the gently lapping waves. Similarly, but differently, in the photo below the rays of the…
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A girl of character
A girl of character Cleaning, cooking, fetching water, looking after the children, feeding and milking the cow or buffalo, gathering firewood: all this and much more is women’s work in many traditional societies.This young woman from Kumaon is carrying a tree home, which she may even have chopped down herself with an axe, as in…
καιρός remembered
… the right moment, position chosen, shoot …
