A bit of art, because I really miss it right now. Looking forward to my mid-year break!

Picasso to Warhol: fourteen Modern Masters

16 June - 3 December 2012

The Art Gallery of Western Australia together with The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) will present six world-class exhibitions over three years. The exciting partnership will launch its first, large-scale exhibition entitled Picasso to Warhol: Fourteen Modern Masters in June 2012. The launch exhibition will feature over 100 modern art masterpieces by 14 of the most iconic artists of the 20th century.

Ranging from Picasso to Warhol, as suggested by the title, the exhibition will also include celebrated works by Henri Matisse, Constantin Brancusi, Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio De Chirico, Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, Louise Bourgeois, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock and Romare Bearden.

The five following exhibitions will draw from MoMA’s extensive collection and showcase a significant selection of works from each of MoMA’s curatorial departments including design and photography.

This dude leaves me dumbfounded.

It’s startling how much I can relate to this song.

(Source: Spotify)

James Brown - Think

alexthebeck:

The dead of winter puts me into a sensitive mood.  This piece was accepted to the 2012 Society of Illustrators student show.

Yeah, y’know me.

(Source: really-lame, via craigular--joe)

Gotye is the hot new talent you’re all looking for!

(He’s not new here in Australia, but certainly talented. One million times more talented and REAL than LDR.)

Into My Arms - Little Birdy

Polly Jean Harvey, the modern day poet.

This song is taken from PJ Harvey’s album, Let England Shake.

War is a subject both unwieldy and – at the moment – unfashionable. Anyone trying to write topical songs about today’s conflicts has to do it in the long shadow of the great 1960s protest anthems and then sell them to an apathetic public. Thank goodness, then, for PJ Harvey, who has stepped into this void and delivered another mighty album in a career loaded with them. The key to Let England Shake, it turns out, isn’t simply the volatile subject matter but the strength of the music as separate from the words and a feeling of levity and whimsy that helps along an otherwise bitter pill.

These songs are urgent and morose, certainly, but playful and odd too. There’s so much going on – in terms of production, instrumentation, lyrics, and Harvey’s unmoored voice – that one has to relish the chaos to process all these components. The opening title track sounds like an old girl group detoured into gloom, while ‘The Glorious Land’ works in a cavalry-calling trumpet blurt and ‘Written on the Forehead’ quietly floors us with a spooky sample from reggae legend Niney the Observer. What’s even more bizarre is that Harvey often sounds like she’s enjoying herself as she sings of drunken beatings, “Goddamn Europeans,” and “cruel, cruel nature.” Not stuck in protest mode, her voice runs all over the shop, from girlish to yearning to mournful.

But make no mistake: her lyrics are dark and scathing, and even in their off-kilter delivery and almost satirical edge, they broadcast Harvey’s dissatisfaction with her country. Hers is a voice of dissent, steeped both in world history (she mentions light horsemen and a specific battle site at Gallipoli) and the eternal relationship between citizen and country (“I live and die through England”). She references the past to help tackle our fraught present, echoing a line from ‘Summertime Blues’ to express an half-comical helplessness: “What if I take my problem to the United Nations?” All the while, she’s awash in harmonies, cryptic accompaniment, and waves of other textures.

Co-conspirators Mick Harvey (the former Bad Seed) and John Parish contribute generously, juggling all manner of instruments while Harvey flits between guitar, auto harp, and even sax, zither, and violin. After the strict uniformity of 2007’s White Chalk, she tries everything here. She also sounds a rousing cry of frustration, conjuring soldiers falling “like lumps of meat” on the single ‘The Words that Maketh Murder’ and resembling the troubled ghost of a folk singer on ‘On Battleship Hill’. “Death is now and now and now,” she intones on the uncommonly skeletal ‘All and Everyone’.

All of this makes for uneasy listening, of course. But it’s addictive at the same time, the denseness and ambition of the thing overloading our senses even as the core of each song feels as direct as a guided missile. As charismatic as it is stubborn and complex, this is just the kind of album people need to be making today, whatever the subject.

Doug Wallen, The Vine Music.

I’m no designer, but tonight I’ve just pretended. It’s supposed to be a happy little birdy. ^_^

1. Carlos Jorkareli

2. Christian Lee

3. Photographer unknown

4. Photographer unknown (Lauren Bacall)

5. Photographer unknown

6. Photographer unknown

7. Melissa B. Tubbs

8. “Sketchdude”

9. “Sketchdude”

10. Jeannie Phan

11. Jeannie Phan

Sigur Rós - I Gaer

The name “Sigur Rós” is Icelandic for “Victory Rose”. The band was named after Jónsi’s newborn sister, Sigurrós Elín.

Yesterday’s drawing. Pretty pleased with the proportions!