It is warm today! Finally it’s spring? It must be spring – it’s nearly the end of April, you know. It is too cold!
Today I’d like to introduce works of Jasper, a Dutch painter. He is a giant who has two lovely children.
20. Jasper Hagenaar
Above: about 150cm×150cm, oil on canvas
Below: about 20cm×35cm, oil on canvas
Open Atelier Report #19 is on Gal Kinan, who just came back from her home country, Israel. She is my smoking friend.
19. Gal Kinan
Gal makes installations and gives performance in them. This time she divided her space into two: one for the installation and the other for the performance (No photo of her performance, sorry!). The installation was in a dark studio with a brick wall. There was a monitor showing imperfect letters of alphabet, and in front of it, there were robots which make clumsy movement with a rasping noise. Just like the letters of alphabet, they give an impression of imperfectness. What she is trying to present is a world of fantasy, but deliberately an imperfect one.
Today’s report is on Marijn van Kreij, a Dutch painter. Marijn uses a big piece of paper-like canvas, without a stretcher. Using a fine brush and a thin permeable ink, he fills the canvas with lines. He not only likes to uses images from internet, but he is also trying to create a space like it.
18. Marijn van Kreij
Finally Gal is back. I don’t have to take Lula for walk any more. Whether you like a dog or a cat for your company is not just about which animal you prefer; it depends on whether you are a morning person or a night person, as well as on whether you can take time for them. Plus allergy problem. Lula is really lovely, and I enjoyed taking a walk with her, but I think I prefer living with a cat.
Another nice thing about living in Gal’s apartment was having a TV. I enjoyed watching the Champion’s League.
As Gal is away to her home in Israel for two weeks, I am now looking after her dog Lula. (Mix of Schnauzer and Afghan Hound; from behind, she looks like a gorilla). I walk her three times a day: an hour in the mourning, half an hour in the evening and another half an hour before going to bed.
It is hard to drug me out of bed in the morning to walk her (besides I will be a cat-lover for life), but she makes me notice different things – for instance, Lula’s way of ‘mapping’ the ground. It is as though her step is guided by an invisible web. She is probably mapping the ground by smell; but the way I see the ground is whether it is grass or concrete, or layers of fallen leaves. As Lula follows completely different line of information, it makes me wonder how she perceives the world. Does she see the smell of a particular dog in a particular colour? Does the strong smell appear in a vivid colour?
I try to imagine what Lula sees and what I fail to see; close to the ground, there surely exists another layer of the world
I have been preparing for two exhibitions: for my solo exhibition and for an internal Open Atelier (twice a year, the participants open their studios to show how their works are proceeding). On Sunday, there was an opening party of my solo exhibition, and on Monday, an internal Open Atelier took place. I am finally done with both of them.
www.grusenmeyerart.be
I don’t mean to boast, but both were good shows. Last night, contented and relieved, I watched the DVD of Brokeback Mountain, which my friend sent me on reading my diary.
The final scene takes place in Ennis’s trailer house that is scarcely furnished. He opens the closet and we see Ennis’s and Jack’s shirt hung on top of each other. They had blood stains on the same spot. We see Ennis’s face reflected on a small mirror inside the closet. He takes the shirts and embraces them. When he closes the closet, we see a picture of a mountain where they spent their best time together. The whole sequence was very picturesque; each image is related but is yet separate.
