World Enough and Time

Lately I have been walking past Lansdowne Park on a pretty much daily basis. Locals here will know that, after decades of City Hall debate, Lansdowne Park is being rebuilt as a shopping mall, sports centre, and condos. Every day it's a little different. The last few days, it's been mostly trenches, with a lone tree stump near Bank Street.

They've put up a board fence along Holmwood Avenue, and the inhabitants of the neighbourhood have made it an opportunity for art. Today I saw this:



I asked myself: is that Scott Summers, or is that Matt Murdock?

Hmm.

An interesting story about art and life: The Highwaymen. Wikipedia article: The Highwaymen. Seems there are lots of websites about them.



Seems to me this reflects what happens all over the world, where scenery and tourists interconnect. Except that here it has a particularly interesting background of a very particular social history.

Day 8: Favourite artist

My favourite comic book artist of all time is the American artist Barry Windsor-Smith, whose work on Conan the Barbarian was breathtaking in its Pre-Raphaelite complexity and delicacy.



( My second favourite comic book artist... )

I went to see The Three Musketeers with Sheila and Ian.

There's something about that era... When I was four years old I was madly in love with a portrait of King Charles I as the Prince of Wales that was in the National Gallery. I loved going to the art gallery with my parents; they could look at any number of things, and there I was, transfixed by Charles I. I still love that painting.



I can't explain my passion for images of the early seventeenth century; the swashbuckling, the sense of intrigue. Though I enjoy reading about the history of the time, it isn't one I've ever particularly studies. And for all this movie is a live-action 3D cartoon full of airships and explosions, it captures whatever kernel it is that captures my love and imagination. It could have been made just for me.

( A few comments... )

I love archeological mysteries. And yet before today I never heard of the Plain of Jars in Laos.

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about it. How fascinating... I see now there are many sites, many with great photos, like this one from 7 Most Fascinating Asian Battle Sites (and this just after I'd been reading about Hiroshima!):



( There are good photos at... )

The 30 Days of Marvel meme:

( Day #7: Your favourite creature. )

A wonderful, wonderful day in Paris. We (me, Tasia and rosiespark) went to the Musee D'Orsay. Regardless of the art inside that building, the building itself is worth going to France to see: a huge old railway station transformed into an art gallery, surmounted by the most resplendent clock ever seen.

Now, whenever people talk about the Musee d'Orsay, they talk about Impressionists. Confession: I'm not too fond of the Impressionists. I heard a lot in my youth about how they did magnificent things with light, and how they were a breath of fresh air after the boring and stodgy art of the 19th century, but you know what? I prefer the 'boring and stodgy' romanticism, neo-classicism, and pre-Raphaelistes that were being produced at that time.

So I wasn't there for the Impressionists. Nor for the Gaughin, which was (almost) the first thing we saw. I've always been skeptical about Gaughin - wanted to like his art, never really did. Looked at a whole bunch of it together here, thought, "Eyeu, I hate this!" and decided I was allergic to Gaughin.

Not Van Gogh, who was the good friend of the Doctor and Amy and thereore worthy of admiration and love. I particularly liked the Church at Auvers (with or without the alien monster in the window) and the sequence about the doctor's garden and his daughter. Okay, I still don't really get Van Gogh in terms of thinking he's the best artist ever - give me Moebius, give me Caravaggio, give me Burne-Jones and Fra Filippo Lippi - but he had spirit. I love the painting of the couple asleep on a haystack.

I desperately wanted Bill Nighy to be there in a bow tie telling me how wonderful Van Gogh is.

We wandered, and found some magnificent stuff that I may find time to talk about later, and then... we found two works by Sir Edward Burne-Jones. I hadn't done my homework; didn't know they were there. The first was La roue de la fortune, (The Wheel of Fortune), and the second was a magnificent tapestry made for a banker, done through the William Morris Co., Adoration of the Magi.

I was in art heaven.

We then meant to have lunch elsewhere, but we saw the splendour of the restaurant at the Musee Orsay and decided to have their plat du jour, mostly because it included a dessert of Ile flottant such as Captain Jack Aubrey once had. Must find recipe.

Then we walked to the Rodin Museum, and browsed, and wandered the lovely gardens.

Then I went and visited baronjanus and ceruleancat and had a wonderful time. We wandered around the Chateau de Vincennes, and they were as delightful as I always imagined they would be.

Photos of the day:

1. After having breakfast and saying good-bye to Jo, we crossed the bridge to visit rosiespark. On the bridge, ( a piano. )

2. The restaurant at the Musee d'Orsay, where we had lunch. It is not permitted to take photos in the Musee d'Orsay, but the restaurant is ( fair game. )

3. Outside the Musee d'Orsay: ( Three Amazons and a Moose )

4. ( The Rodin Museum. )

5. ( A Rodin statue. )

6. ( Rodin's roses. )

7. ( A Rodin head. )

8. ( The Kiss. )

9. ( The Paris Metro. )

10. ( The Chateau de Vincennes: A Wedding and the X-Men. )

I love good comic book art, and from time to time, when opportunity and finances come together (even in the thinnest stretch of the concept), I have indulged in buying original comic book art - either an original page from a favourite comic, or sketches by a favourite artist.

I was taking about this recently with my friend Mark, in Toronto, who has the best comic book art collection I know. We were comparing and showing each other our treasures. He has some of the best art ever - including a Moebius piece I would give my left arm for all over again - but I have something he doesn't have: an original Frank Miller page, from his early Spider-Man work at Marvel. With one of the earliest appearances of Ben Urich.

Because I was discussing this with March at Fan Expo, I decided to look though my art collection again - it's been sitting in a box in my locker downstairs, ignored and (hopefully not) mouldering. I looked at the art, and thought how I've been wanting it on my walls for many years, but couldn't afford to get it framed. So I picked my two favourite pieces - the Frank Miller Spider-Man page, and a page by Charles Vess from issue #19 of The Sandman, and I took them to my local framing shop near the library in Ottawa South, and I paid the big bucks to get them properly mounted and framed. And I am thrilled by this.

Dan, the young man who took my order and helped me choose frames, probably wasn't even born when Frank Miller drew that Spider-Manpage in 1981, but he was suitably impressed - said he'd never seen original comic book pages before. I felt happy and privileged, that I own this wonderful thing.

I have other original comic book pages. Maybe some day I'll frame them, too. I'd like to frame some comic books themselves, like you see sometimes on television. (Like Peter's Red Lantern on the wall in Fringe.) Maybe IKEA would have frames more or less the right size? Comics are a little oddly shaped for framing.

More humbly, I took a beautiful sketch of ( Batman... ) that Tim Sale did for me, and framed it in a cheap Zeller's frame, and put it on my bedroom wall.

Where I think it looks like a million dollars, even though it's a very simple sketch - what a difference real talent makes: a few strokes of a pen, and Batman is alive on the paper.

The Young Avengers is a wonderful group of superheroes - a new generation of superheroes with initiative and drive, who want to follow in the footsteps of their heroes, the Avengers. I love their comic - specifically, I love the Jim Cheung art. And it has Wiccan and Hulkling, the cutest young gay couple in comics.

This story has Mark Brooks art instead of Cheung's - a poor substitute, but serviceable. The story by Paul Cornell is not intense, but it's got its charms. A group of powerful superhero teens decide to be Young Avengers, and want to join the group. They are, unfortunately, not too bright, and morally vacuous - in the course of the story, one of them murders his mother. "I've shown my commitment," he says. "I've been made by losing a parent to crime." Their leader is a goofy artist with a crush on the Green Goblin. No accounting for tastes.

A panel I liked: the magical girl, Enchantress, ( shows interest in Wiccan... )

Things get complicated when Norman Osborn and his Dark Avengers turn up. Daken appears in a few group shots, ugly and snarling - hey, he's playing Osborn's game to the hilt. He gets two brief but good moments: ( the first is when... )

And then, since the adult faux-Avengers couldn't defeat the kids, Osborn and his forces retreat, saying: "this never happened". Daken, unharmed, is half-carrying the wounded Bullseye. Daken/Bullseye shippers may bask in the moment.



The baddest dudes at Marvel, whipped by kids. Hah! I can only assume that Daken wasn't trying.

My search for KMR (thanks to flautopiccolo and calime) has succeeded, at last partially: I found KMR.img at eTrecos; which led me to the artist's own site.

Sadly, I read even less Japanese than Russian - but I do feel my quest has been successful!