MirrorMask...

At last I saw MirrorMask, a movie by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. Both terrific people, both amazing creators. I was impressed by a great deal of it, especially Stephanie Leonidas as Helena. And of course the visual ambience - very like Sandman, even to the point of the story being about a dream. It's about a lot of things - hope, regret, questing, and so on - and it's about the relationship between shape and ideas. I liked the motif of Helena looking into her bedroom from her own art, which became windows.

It is light on story and dialogue compared to mood and colour. Not an intellectual script, but an evocative one.

Anthony Van Dyck

After a conversation with monsieureden about Anthony Van Dyck, portait artist of the early 17th century, I got a video-tape from the library about him and his art. He is possibly one of the first artists whose work I ever knew, after Ernest Shepherd. When I was four or five, my parents used to take me to the National Gallery of Canada and leave me staring enraptured at a Van Dyck portrait of Charles I.

But I knew little about the artist, except that he painted a lot of portraits. The thing that interested me most was this self-portrait which Van Dyck had painted at the age of 14, calling it "Portrait of an Old Man". Speculating on his reason... on his character... was fun.

Then I started to read Anthony Van Dyck: A Life by Robin Blake but I stopped - I wanted more about the man, less about his artistic technique. Did he really have so little personal life? For all he liked to dress well, act like an aristocrat, and make his studio the centre of social fashion, there seems to have been nothing in his life that wasn't a mirror of what he saw - not much there but his magnificent art.

Maybe I just need another biography.