THE IMAGE AS A BURDEN -MARLENE DUMAS

'Marlene Dumas is one of the most prominent painters working today. Her intense, psychologically charged works explore themes of sexuality, love, death and shame, often referencing art history, popular culture, politics and current affairs.
     ‘Secondhand images’, she has said, ‘can generate first-hand emotions.’ Dumas never paints directly from life, instead choosing to use pre-existing images for her source material. Her subjects are drawn from both public and personal references and include her daughter and herself, as well as recognisable faces such as Amy Winehouse, Naomi Campbell, Princess Diana, even Osama bin Laden. The results are often intimate and at times controversial, where politics become erotic and portraits become political. She plays with the imagination of her viewers, their preconceptions and fears. She cherishes the potency and physicality of painting and what it brings to the image.
    Born in 1953 in Cape Town, South Africa, Dumas moved to the Netherlands in 1976, where she came to prominence in the mid-1980s. This large-scale survey is the most significant exhibition of her work ever to be held in Europe, charting her career from early works, through seminal paintings to new works on paper.' ( Abbreviated and adapted from Tate Modern catalogue)

        I didn't know Marlene Dumas' work, but now exposed to it some of her paintings and images are incised in my psyche. Using colour to create mood and psychological impact, some are very disturbing, such as the child in The Painter, whose hands could have been dipped in human blood not paint. I loved the sad jazz note of Amy Winehouse's portrait so much I bought a print. If you don't know her work, this is another MUST SEE

Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden

Tate Modern: Exhibition

5 February – 10 May 2015

Adult £16.00 (without donation £14.50)
Concession £14.00 (without donation £12.70)
Help Tate by including the voluntary donation to enable Gift Aid
No booking fees with this exhibition
Under 12s go free (up to four per parent or guardian). Family tickets available by telephone or in the gallery.
Learn more about Dumas through related events

Please note: This exhibition includes some works with explicit content. Please contact us for further information.

  

MAN TO MAN -WMC LAST DAY TODAY!

Wales Millennium Centre presents a new version of  Man to Man. Today is the last day. IT's not an easy piece to engage with but it's a definite MUST SEE. It is the first full in-house production under the new artistic direction of Graeme Farrow. Translated and adapted by Alexandra Wood from Manfred Karge’s masterpiece ‘Jacke wie Hose’, the production  ' reimagines the one woman show as a visceral and virtuosic piece of physical theatre.'
       After her husband dies, Ella Gericke adopts his identity and continues working his job as a crane operator in order to survive in Nazi Germany. Compromising her own identity for survival, Ella is plunged into a new masculine world of beer, schnapps and poker; a claustrophobic lonely existence dominated by the fear of discovery and the changing face of authority in a volatile twentieth century Germany. In the opening speech, Ella, in the guise of her husband Max, shouts out of her window at the layabout youths on the street corners, “Work will set you free”, and the mantra from the gates of Auschwitz hangs over the entire production until the fall of the Berlin Wall.
    Margaret Ann Bain playing Ella switches from husband to wife and back again with alacrity and virtuosity, changing her accent from the hard consonants of a male Scotland to the softer tones of a female England. Sometimes the switches are so quick-fired that I found myself dizzy trying to keep up. To play yourself and your alter ego and remember your lines for 70 minutes is an amazing feat. 
      The design of set, lighting, video, sound and effects brought together by a team including Richard Kent, Andrzej Goulding, Rick Fisher and others is extraordinary for its ingenuity, atmosphere, mood, and adding layers of suggestion and meaning to this one woman show.

WMC   Weston Studio. Tonight 27 March 2015 at 8pm- box office 029 2063 6464   web site: www.wmc.org.uk

WRITERS IN THE PARK

We finished our first term yesterday. The feedback was very positive and we're hoping to continue in the Autumn. I wanted to set up a writing for well being group that could use the park and our beautiful environment for inspiration. I have been really impressed by the quality and freshness of the new writers' work. I feel humbled to be facilitating such hidden talent. It reinforces my belief in the power of creativity to inspire, explore and express what it is to be human. Each member has a thousand thousand stories to tell and write. The group provides a safe and friendly environment to be heard, to share and offer mutual support.
Now I need to get back to my own writing.

CONCENTRIC: GROUP EXHIBITION BY 6 WOMEN ARTISTS AT CARDIFF MADE

This is a 'must see' exhibition celebrating the diversity and quality of women's art in Wales today for International Women's Day 2015. Hung in the sparkly little gallery of Cardiff Made, 41 Lochaber St in Roath with its café, and shop selling local crafts and organic marmalades, the exhibition includes painting and drawing, installation and text by Jacqueline Alkema, Penny Hallas, Leona Jones, Kay Keogh, Lydia Spurrier-Dawes and Sheila Vyas.
      'Concentric is a coherent group of very individualistic entities, questioning, pushing boundaries, experimenting with making processes and subject matters, all playing with the notion of what and how it is to be a woman and a woman artist.'
         I  particularly liked the intricate and detailed mandalas of  Sheila Vyas, the disturbing imagery of Kay Keogh and the surrealism of Penny Hallas. I laughed out loud at Lydia Spurrier-Dawes, 'siblings' and then thought about it and found the knitted jumpers with long arms wrapped around their bodies like strait jackets, strangely disturbing. Leona Jones text is intriguing and funny. I loved her idea of using moving words in such a way that enables the viewer to visualise the scene.
          The Exhibition is only on until Saturday 21 st of March.  See www.cardiffmade.co.uk for further info.

PS The Portuguese custard natas are a must eat.

HOMEWORK DESK

 

I am polishing my old desk. She sits in our Edwardian hall.  Fifty-five years ago she sat in a chilled bedroom next to the maroon-quilted double bed I shared with my mother. I was about to go up to ‘big school’ with expensive uniform, a two-bus journey, nuns and homework. I would need some privacy away from our common room- the kitchen- a postage stamp of cooking smells, Players cigarettes, Old Holborn roll-up, a two bar electric fire,  black and white TV, Joey the green budgerigar and a younger brother.  

        The oak desk had a dark mahogany stain, a pull down top to write on, and inside small compartments for letters from pen pals, letters to be written and a tiny secret compartment for my diary. Three drawers below contained underwear, lambswool jumpers and mothballs. She had cost 5 shillings in a second-hand furniture shop in 1959. She was overlooked by a thin shelf of books that were my staple; What Katy Did?  What Katy Did Next? Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, The Bunty Annual, The Schoolfriend Annual and some volumes of an Oldham encyclopaedia published at a time when Britain ruled the waves and we had colonies. I don’t remember my parents reading anything other than the Daily Mirror. The desk was their gift and imagined passport to my academic success. I left school at 16 with three O’ levels and a job in the local library so I could keep my mother company at lunch times.

        After my father’s death we brought her here to our adult home and had her fashionably stripped. Each week I take my earth friendly furniture polish made from natural olive oil and buff up her good memories, see her oak grain deepen and shine. I am rubbing hard, harder, trying to erase her other memories.

 

JTD, 2015

HAIKU WORKSHOP SATURDAY MARCH 7 CANCELLED!

Although the workshop is cancelled you can still take part:

Haiku is a poetic form and type of poetry from the Japanese culture. Haiku combines form, content and language in a meaningful yet compact way. Haiku poets often write about nature, feelings and experiences. The most common form for Haiku is three short lines, usually containing 17 syllables; five syllables on the first and third lines and seven on the middle line.

Would you like to respond creatively to Rhys Daniel’s art work by writing your own haiku?  

On the post card provided in the exhibition, write the name of the painting, print your 3 line/17 syllable haiku, and give your contact details. Post the card in the box provided. 

Alternatively, you can look at http://ieuanrhysdaniel.tumblr.com and email us your haiku  at janetdaniel125@hotmail.com

The best haikus will be displayed during the exhibition.