Elisabeth Taylor died last week. I came across these portraits in downtown Amsterdam somewhere. I doubt if these are genuine Warhol reproductions. Taylor looks like the Joker’s little sister with that thick smile on her face. And that’s not how I like to remember this diva of the silver screen. Rest in peace, Elisabeth.
Last weekend I visited Gallery Ron Mandos in Amsterdam to look at art by Jacco Olivier.
Jacco Olivier fuses painting and filmmaking by repeatedly reworking paintings in generous casual brush strokes and systematically photographing each development. The various stages are combined into projected animations. The resulting films are enigmatic and experiential – moving in and out of abstraction they reveal the traces and decisions made by the artist in the process of painting. While there is a clear and quite complex process involved in their creation, Olivier does not set a thematic agenda for the works, or for their relationship to one another. The films are instead imagined as windows onto converging, and often elegantly simple, moments of daily life – a bus journey, a swim in the ocean, or a walk through the woods. At this convergence of painting and cinema, however, lies an uneasy tension, a feeling that something is about to happen or has just happened that is unexpected and beyond our control. Source.
This year it’s the Melkweg’s 40th birthday. They have an exposition with a lot of posters from the first 15 years. This is just a small part of the wall covered with them.
I went to an early morning screening of the film Catfish at Cinecenter. The carpet in that theatre looks like these, hundreds of little Dali-eyes staring at your feet.
ABC, 4:00 pm
I think by this time they’ve changed the window display, but when I walked by the American Book Center a couple of weeks ago, this great caricature of Keith Richards made by Stanley Heinze was hanging in the window to promote the autobiography of this guitar playing legend. A book which I still haven’t read by the way 🙂
A self-portrait by artist Joep Buijs hanging in the window of his gallery. I find the picture quite striking, especially since the window reflects the city also. Sometimes the city will make you scream. On a bad day it’s busy, polluted, crowded with assholes and filled with psychopathic taxi drivers. This is of course also the case on good days, but one seems to notice the bad things less in those blissful moments.
My girlfriend paints in her spare time. This is a shot of her painter’s palette that looks to me like a very colourful moon-landscape. What do you see in it?
While waiting for Ger Apeldoorn last week, I took this picture of the sky. Sometimes basic things in life look like abstract paintings.
Comic book convention De Stripdagen Houten, 2:00 pm
This is the hand of comic book artist Fred de Heij who is making an illustration for one of his regular customers. One who had very specific demands regarding what he wanted to see in the drawing. Fred and I just made a short story together for his magazine ‘Pulpman‘. I wrote the story, he made the fabulous artwork for it.
Yesterday, Japanese animator Akinori Oishi was working on a mural at the KLIK! Amsterdam Animation Festival. During dinner we talked briefly about it and his work. He seemed like a very nice guy. I am curious if his artwork will be finished today.
