Some new elements in painting

Trying something new with the background. Also, a looser touch with the "falling" accents.

Gerhard Richter Retrospective at Tate Modern



We had the good fortune to see the Gerhard Richter retrospective at The Tate Modern. It was doubly good since we had seen a show of similar scale at MOMA a few years ago. Richter is certainly the most highly regarded painter living today. His work cuts a broad swath, but I don't view it as ground breaking as were many artists from the early and mid-20th century. He is famed for being one of the first German artists to acknowledge and deal with the elephant in the corner, the collective Nazi history. His painting Uncle Rudi brought this home with a bang in 1965. This piece is typical of the period in which Richter did large realistic black and white paintings based on photographs, in which the edges of forms are smudged. This has a haunting effect. By contrast, he did a large body of abstract conceptual work that dealt with monochromatic color, sorry, of little interest to me. He later did a series of realistic paintings based on German terrorist groups, leaving ambiguous commentary to the viewer. In the realistic department, Richter did several color portraits, usually with the subject's face away from the viewer. The Reader is a great example of these insightful works. He is today most well known for large abstract oil paintings made with squeegees, that are...just plain gorgeous. I have watched a person walk into a gallery room, see one of these works, and drop their jaw. Maybe that was me. The internet is chock full of images from all of his periods of work, so give a look next time you are surfing!

The Have-Nots by Katherina Hacker

Katherina Hacker's The Have-nots is dense with ideas and sharp insights, about....property reparation in Germany, the FDR and the GDR, loss and memory, the Iraq war, domestic violence, love, and sexuality. Yes, it's not a light read and takes a bit of effort, but is worth it. It is well written and structured, with good character development. The Have-nots won the German Book Award in 2006 for best novel. It is published by Europa Editions, a great press for contemporary European novels.

Danish Director Susanne Bier

I've been on a Danish film kick for the past year. Recently I did a Susanne Bier mini-fest: In a Better World, 2010; After the Wedding, 2006; and Brothers, 2004, the original of this title, by the way. She's a great director who doesn't flinch. She works with lots of big social and cultural issues without preaching, and usually finds the edge of the envelope. She's able to book great actors: Mads Mikkelson, Ulrich Thomsen and Mikael Persbrandt. Two of the best were young teens in In a Better World, Markus Rygaard & William Johke Nielson, from whom she coaxed great work. These films also have good cinematography, plot, and pacing. They're all intense. Check them out!

Getting my hand back into it

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

I waited far too long to read this novel, which is a function of my long to-read list! Junot Diaz's writing is a wild ride. He tells a multi-generational story of a Dominican Republic family living under a fuku, or curse, and they are. If the term "multi-generational" is a turn-off, as it is to me, please take another look at this book. It is set in contemporary Patterson, NJ in an ex-pat DR community, and in the DR over many years. There is a lot of detailed history, both in the story and in in footnotes, of the brutal dictator, Trujillo. All of this is told in a crazy, hip lexicon. Oscar of the title is an over weight nerd finding his way in life and in this crazy family.

Michael Ward-Bergman in Santa Fe

Michael Ward-Bergman did a phenomenal accordian performance at a home in Santa Fe of folk music from around the world. Michael studied piano at the Berklee College of Music, the best jazz school on the planet, and this was evident in his performance. He also used folk percussion instruments, at times with a stereo tape loop that produced extraordinary results! He is in the middle of a 365 day tour, in which he plays a minimum of 35 minutes of music in a concert each day in a wide range of venues, including prisons and hospitals. Part of this journey is to accumulate more folk music of every variety. Michael also plays in concert halls, such as SF Chamber Music Festival's recent performance of Golijov's song cycle Ayre with Dawn Upshaw.