NOWNESS Films (December 11, 2023) – Travelling to India’s northernmost point, at the western tip of the Himalayas, the Ladakh region stands in a remote corner of the planet, flanked by towering peaks.
Deeply entwined with its cultural heritage, the mountainous territory carries a historic tradition of craft metalwork – as a center for the production of hand-crafted ornaments, teapots and spiritual artefacts, destined for temples, and held in high regard by India’s king dynasties.
But the craft has entered a point of decline, continued by just a handful of artisanal metalworkers who fight for its preservation.…
VernissageTV (December 6, 2023) – The 18th edition of Design Miami/, curated by Curatorial Director, Maria Cristina Didero. This year’s program explores the theme of The Golden Age: Looking to the Future, celebrating a tomorrow of our own creation.
The Golden Age is a metaphorical concept shared across cultures through time and space, whether applied to utopian futures or idealized histories.
Often invoked as an imaginary, past time of prosperity, The Golden Age also epitomizes hope for the future, lighting the path towards our highest aspirations. As the curatorial theme for the 18th edition of Design Miami, The Golden Age: Looking to the Future will celebrate a tomorrow of our own creation.
In a time when human beings are challenged in unprecedented ways, The Golden Age could become a source of inspiration to imagine and shape a brighter future for human beings and our planet.
Deep Wild Journal 2023 – Writing from the Backcountry: On skis and snowshoes, by boot and boat, in open water or at the ends of ropes, by night or day, in all four seasons, in searing sun or drenching rain…the adventurer-writers whose work is featured in Deep Wild 2023 take us to all extremes.
Others come to us from a quiet place in the backcountry with their insights, observations, discoveries. Also featured in Deep Wild 2023 is full-color artwork by Tucson watercolorist Kat Manton-Jones and a portfolio of pen-and-ink drawings from the Colorado Plateau by Margaret Pettis.
Ursula (FALL 2023): The new issue feature Takesada Matsutani, 86, who has lived and worked in Paris since the late 1960s, but he came of age as an artist in Osaka, Japan, as a member of the avant-garde Gutai movement. He has long worked in highly experimental ways with printmaking and artist’s books.
LA Review of Books (Autumn 2023) – The latest issue features The Funny Thing About Misogyny; The New Scarcity Studies: On Two New Socioeconomic Histories and Endgame Emotions: The Melting of Time, the Mourning of the World…
THE FUNNY THING about misogyny is it’s structured like a joke. Not a very good joke—a groaner, a dad joke. Why are they called “women”? Because they’re a woe to men. Get it? Woman is a container for man; language engenders gender subordination. As Mike Myers recites on stage in his role as a moody slam poet in the thrillingly zany 1993 Hitchcockian send-up So I Married an Axe Murderer, “Woman! Whoa, man. Whoaaaaaa. Man!”
Scarcity: A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis by CARL WENNERLIND
WATER FALLS FROM the sky, literally. It is the most abundant chemical compound on Earth, and yet many people buy it in plastic bottles. Nestlé and other corporations source water cheaply and add labels that depict something other than heavy-industry and fossil-fuel derivatives, as though you’re drinking straight from a pristine spring. By bottling this natural resource and selling it as a commodity, Nestlé creates a form of scarcity.
Monocle Films (September 11, 2023) – Bavaria’s rich manufacturing heritage shows that there is more to the region than the Alps, sausages and beer. Monocle Films takes a tour behind the scenes of renowned art materials manufacturers Faber-Castell, Gmund Papier mill and Theresienthal glassmakers to explore how traditional ways of making have endured thanks to a legacy of familial entrepreneurship.
LA Review of Books (Summer 2023) – In this elemental issue of LARB Quarterly, no. 38: Earth, we found new ways of looking at the planet. Writers were free to take up the theme casually or catastrophically, studying the earth beneath their fingernails or the planet from hundreds of thousands of miles away. We imagined being sealed outside, dreaming of coming home.
ON AN UNUSUALLY rainy evening in Los Angeles this March, at the Thomas Mann House in Pacific Palisades, two investigative reporters from Germany gave a talk about a financial scandal known as “cum-ex.” Against the backdrop of a mid-century modern terrace, its polished cement looking dull and gray in the storm, the pair flashed through a series of slides about international tax embezzlement.
A relatively small drip of funds from the German cultural ministry sometimes supports talks like these in the name of Mann’s legacy. When the capital of German literary life was exiled to Los Angeles around the Second World War, the author built a home that now still hosts salons in the name of democratic cultural exchange.
THE YEAR WAS 1971, the place Łódź. Journalist Hanna Krall was interviewing a pioneering heart surgeon named Jan Moll. The good doctor, apparently unhappy with the outcome of previous interviews, told Krall that everything journalists ever wrote about medicine was nonsense. So, if she wanted to avoid doing the same, he strongly suggested she have her article vetted by a certain cardiologist, a Dr. Edelman, who, said Moll, would correct her mistakes. Krall agreed and arranged a meeting. She sat down with Marek Edelman in the Grand Hotel café, where it took 15 minutes for him to read through her article.
Country Life Magazine (June 10 , 2023) – Annie Tempest, the brains and hands behind Country Life’s beloved Tottering-by-Gently cartoon, shares her pictorial diary of a recent Empires of the Mediterranean cruise, aboard Viking’s ‘Sky’ ship, with us.
Piraeus 1.0 – We boarded Viking Sky at Piraeus port in Athens, so were in harbour over night. I began to notice the blueness and the ‘dome-i-ness’ of my surroundings. Acclimatising my eyes to the change in architecture from North Norfolk.
Still painting late into the night watching the the buildings turn into silhouettes and the blue mountains in the distance fade to smudges.
Koper, Slovenia – Tito Square in Koper has a strong Italian influence and even the language spoken here is part Italian and part Slovene. It was a capital city under the Venetian Republic. I couldn’t paint this journey without including a tourist photographing the magnificent architecture.
This was the sight that greeted us as we approached the Greek island of Santorini. Beautiful coloured buildings above what looked like cave entrances. The town sits on the top of what appears to be a giant rock and is reached by cable car, or donkey for the more intrepid.
ABC News In-depth (May 29, 2023) – On Easter Saturday, 95-year-old artist John Olsen made the final touches to four paintings and feeling unwell, laid down his paintbrush for the last time. A stroke had finally felled the old master.
On the day of his state funeral, Australian Story revisits the Olsens, a family forged by their father’s passion and drive for painting. As John became a darling of the art world in the 60s and 70s, his obsessive focus on dedication to his work often cast a long shadow on those around him.
Months after his death, the Vivid festival of light will pay tribute to John Olsen, projecting his art onto the “greatest blank canvas on earth” — the sails of the Sydney Opera House. His children, Tim and Louise Olsen, will be there to marvel at his achievements and celebrate the life that has shaped them.