Latest news with #Impressionists
The Guardian
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Lupe Fiasco on his new art project and looking at rap ‘in a deep academic way'
'What does it mean to record outside, not just rap outside like a cypher, but actually record outside with the intention of completing a full song completely written and inspired outdoors?' rapper Lupe Fiasco mused while discussing his latest project, Ghotiing (pronounced 'fishing'). 'What are the limitations and constraints? What do you have to prepare to go into that environment? Onlookers, insects, the weather, noise, any kind of distraction.' En plein air rapping, as Fiasco calls it – after the school of painting that was popularized by Impressionists like Monet and Renoir – involves going to a promising location and fishing for lyrics and beats. He has been fine-turning the practice ever since he came on as a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the 2022-23 academic year – ghotiing throughout MIT, in LA, and elsewhere, while also teaching it to his students. 'It's a practice that I've been using and playing with and working through for the past few years,' he said. Fiasco has just released the first project of this site-specific rapping via the MIT List Visual Arts Center's website. The nine-track effort (seven which are currently available) is a cohesive collection of music with a distinct jazz flavor that feels like a throwback to the Native Tongues era of hip-hop. For Fiasco, these tracks are an emanation of the environment that he fished them from. 'The goal is to have a certain level of ownership of the space by being completely aware of all the objects that are around it,' said Fiasco, 'and how these objects are affecting or influencing, consciously or unconsciously, your experiences.' To celebrate the release, Fiasco will be holding a concert on 2 May as a culmination of the Artfinity Festival. Sonically and lyrically, there's a certain kind of beguiling simplicity to these tracks, with lines that tend to be short and filled with internal rhymes. There's a sense that the Chicago rapper is more after sound than sense, as in the triplet, 'Filling up the staircase / Airspace tethered to the pear tastes / Electron share shape.' Elsewhere, Fiasco plays with the everydayness of the MIT campus, as when rapping about a giant steel sculpture made by Alexander Calder: 'Tourists on their summer trips give it OKs like the number six / Walk around alongside or up under it / Or ignore it / Like can't see the trees, cause the forests / Or adore it / And explore it.' As the rapper shared, the mundanity is very much the point. 'One of my key creative functions is decorating the mundane, finding the profound narratives or insights in the mundane,' he said. 'You can see that tradition from Kick, Push, which was about skateboarding. For me it was very mundane, it was a toy. It was like, make a song about this toy. I try to look for the things that people perceive to be mundane and unpack the profound things that are within it.' Ghotiing required Fiasco to solve the many technical challenges raised by site-specific recording. According to him, it could make for awkward moments to be channeling hip-hop inspiration in public environments where anyone might intervene. Being a veteran performer helped, as did putting on his 'ghotiing uniform' – usually an MIT jacket – to let people know he was up to something and to give space. Surprisingly, Fiasco said that being a celebrity didn't pose much of an issue for him. 'People don't really care,' he said. 'There's a certain kind of, 'Oh that's Lupe,' or 'That's Professor Lupe, he's a dope-ass dude.' That has its own kind of reputation. Sometimes people sneak out like, 'Yo, lemme get a selfie,' but for the most part, in terms of ghotiing, people don't really care.' As for creating beats, Fiasco enlisted AI for assistance – he primarily used Suno, a generative AI program founded in Cambridge, MA, that specializes in making music. 'You get people to make beats, and they'll probably make one beat for months. You can't really do that when you got the battery on your laptop running down and the sun's going down and it's getting cold.' Fiasco worked by putting the AI-generated beats through an editing process, going through dozens of generations of the same beat to get one that was of interest. Fiasco situated AI on a spectrum of the many different tools that musicians have created and adapted for themselves. 'It's like if the saxophone player made the saxophone – which is rare, but real,' he said. 'My students can write their own music production software, which is akin to someone like Havoc from Mobb Deep, right, who makes the beats and raps over his own beats. So I see that tradition as just as valid as going into the lab and making the AI that will sit and train the data.' Fiasco's intention to exhaust the potential of a particular place, as well as to embrace everything uncontrollable about recording outside in order to make his compositions more creative, brings to mind the French writing collective the Oulipo, or Workshop of Potential Literature. That group embraced constraint in writing as a means of inspiring creative freedom and would often work in situ as Fiasco does. It's a group that the rapper knows well, assigning their literature to students in the course he teaches at MIT, as well as making it a part of the entry exam to his Society of Spoken Art (SOSA) guild of rappers. 'One of the mandatory readings in my class is Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, one of the leaders of the Oulipo school,' he told me. 'And then also, one of the tests that people take to get into SOSA is A Void, the book that's written without the letter 'e'. So that same approach to heavily constrained writing is embedded in the process.' Ultimately, the Chicago rapper has big goals for his work with higher education. He wants to approach rap in a way akin to how linguists have approached the study of language, breaking it down into discrete chunks that can be analyzed, and putting it through formal rigor. One day, he'd love to see programs at prestigious universities make the sorts of things he's pioneering as part of a whole hip-hop curriculum. 'Maybe one day there will be a graduate program, and there's a hip-hop degree, and I'm teaching the rap portion of it. The hope is that rap gets put into a space where people can take it and run with it in a very deep academic way. Maybe eventually you can become a tenured professor in the rap department at MIT.'
Time Out
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
The best Hong Kong events in May 2025
The famous Musée d'Orsay and Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris have collaborated with the Hong Kong Museum of Art to present this special exhibition on two of the greatest masters of the Impressionist art movement: Paul Cézanne and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. This is the first large-scale exhibition of the two Impressionists in Hong Kong, showcasing 52 masterpieces on loan from France. See how the pair found innovative ways to reinvent the art of their time, how they viewed the world, and how they captured the rapidly changing times around them. Cézanne and Renoir were also longtime friends and likely influenced each other's works, as well as later becoming beacons of inspiration for later painters such as Spanish surrealist master Pablo Picasso. The Cézanne and Renoir exhibition will run from January 17 to May 7. Tickets are priced at $50, with concessions available. Note that the Hong Kong Museum of Art is closed on Thursdays as well as the first two days of Chinese New Year (January 29-30). View this post on Instagram A post shared by Time Out Hong Kong (@timeouthk)
India Today
25-04-2025
- India Today
The floating palace
FFloating moodily on Lake Lucerne, offering some of Switzerland's—and possibly even the world's—best views, The Mandarin Oriental is less accommodation and more a destination kind of vibe. This grande dame hotel spotlights the Belle poque era, and opened as the Palace Hotel Luzern back in 1906 (the hotel still retains the rooftop hoarding). MandarinOriental took over in 2019, and four years of massive renovations later, opened to guests in late 2022. Despite the extensive makeover, it retains much of the panache, glitz and old-world-glamour of its earlier avatar. Can you imagine a more sublime conflation than an epic setting, Swiss order and reliability and Asian hospitality, in the hallowed portals of luxury hospitality? The 88 rooms are lovely and well-appointed but the 48 luxury suites are spectacular, and some even open out to patios and balconies overlooking the lake, with views that the Impressionists would resurrect for. The facade of the hotel (Photo: Mandarin Oriental Palace, Lucerne) Food at the Colonnade looks and tastes like an enchanted forest come to life
The Independent
13-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
No one took greater imaginative leaps and risks than Turner – he's Britain's greatest artist
Anyone wanting to understand why Joseph Mallord William Turner is Britain's greatest artist need look no further than his extraordinary 1842 painting Snow Storm – Steam-Boat Off a Harbour's Mouth, on permanent show at Tate Britain. With its trail of red-tinged smoke streaming from the perilously listing ship, and surging sea captured in a spiralling vortex of paint marks that seem to pull us bodily into the tumult, this is a patently revolutionary painting. And it's one that embodies key tropes of national identity. There's the old chestnut, of course, about the British being an island race whose fortunes are inescapably bound up with the sea; and, even more significantly, there's our treasured sense of ourselves as a people who are keener than most to get physically out into nature. Not content to watch the storm from the safety of the spray-drenched harbour wall at Harwich on the Essex coast, the 66-year-old Turner claimed that he had persuaded the sailors to 'lash me to the mast to observe it for four hours'. We can picture Turner himself on the fragile craft, tethered sodden to the mast, sketchbook in hand, recording the terrifying pitching of the vessel from the viewer's imagined perspective. And on hearing that the painting had been written off by critics as mere 'soapsuds and whitewash', Turner responded bitterly, 'I wonder what they think the sea is like! I wish they'd been in it! I did not paint it to be understood, but to show what such a scene is like.' Turner is often referred to as a precursor and enabler of the Impressionists – as if an artist of his scale and ambition could be regarded as a mere adjunct to other people's achievements, however momentous. Yet the fact that he tends to be regarded even now as an artist who is somewhat between movements and moments is at least in part owing to his own personality. Described by contemporaries as enigmatic and highly eccentric, Turner feels like a certain kind of Englishman writ large: a chippy, lower-middle-class Londoner, who refused to give up his cockney accent despite receiving every possible establishment accolade. Born in Covent Garden on 23 April 1775, the son of a barber and wigmaker, yet brought up mainly in Brentford and Margate, Turner was a child prodigy. He enrolled at the Royal Academy – Britain's premier art school – at the age of 14 and sold his first painting in the Summer Exhibition at 15. Despite an intensely competitive nature and early acceptance as one of Britain's leading artists, Turner remained at a distance from the mainstream art world. He didn't write any major treatises, create any theories – except what can palpably be deduced from looking at his paintings – nor did he found or join any movements. Yet like all true Englishmen, Turner was obsessed with the weather. And what weather! From gigantic storms in the Alps to hyperreal early paintings of shipwrecks in which you can practically count the bubbles on the heaving mountains of foam, Turner's real subject isn't the structure of the land or even of the sea, but the atmospheric conditions through which they're perceived. Many of his later semi-abstract seascapes feel like visualisations of that great British cultural phenomenon, the shipping forecast, with forms dissolving into banks of vapour in which you can positively feel the build-up of atmospheric pressure. Indeed, a few scenes in Sussex's Petworth House and some intimate drawings aside, I can barely think of a single interior in Turner's entire oeuvre. The sheer gusty outdoorsiness of his art makes other artists' evocation of the 'sublime' – that quintessential Romantic-era sense of the awe-inspiring power of nature – feel painfully polite and literary. He often puts me in mind of the kind of old-school male who would rather be in a tent, or better still a camper-van, than a five-star hotel. The fact that Turner's art is generally in widescreen, with figures seen in the middle or far distance, might suggest a lack of interest in people or an inability to paint them. Yet he also produced a significant number of very personal drawings, set in bedrooms, clearly referring to his relationship with his housekeeper Sarah Danby, with whom he had two daughters; though they never married. The sense of Turner as an artist of vast distances is further complicated by minutely detailed watercolours of animals and birds, an exhibition of which opens at his former residence, Sandycombe Lodge in Twickenham, on 23 April to mark the 250th anniversary of his birth. While Turner and his slightly younger rival John Constable are often described as having elevated the landscape to the level of 'history painting' – grand narrative images, considered the highest of the academic genres – they were substantially responsible for blowing such fusty, antiquated distinctions out of the water: in Turner's case, literally. Where the typically saleable 18th-century landscape took an idealised, classically inspired approach to nature, inspired by the French 'father of landscape painting' Claude Lorrain – all golden evening light and tastefully positioned ruins – Constable painted his dad's Suffolk boatyard in overcast English daylight, to the consternation of critics. Turner, though he spent considerable amounts of time in Italy, always feels most himself on the stretch of English coast between Harwich and Margate, on the Thames and Stour estuaries, edging towards abstraction in close proximity to the local fishermen and sailors, for whom he had the greatest respect. Yet he didn't reject the great masters of the past. Far from it. Early in his career, he created dramatic sunset views that were direct responses to Claude, and designed to be viewed 'in conversation' with the great Frenchman's works, as he stipulated in a posthumous bequest to the National Gallery. During the 1830s, he produced a series of technically spectacular Italian landscapes, aimed at wealthy collectors, which blur the boundaries of the historical and contemporary, reality and dream, using multiple perspective points, mind-bending angles and truly hallucinatory colour. Ancient Rome: Agrippina Landing with the Ashes of Germanicus (1839), with its glowing citadel rising through a mass of hazy reflections, purports to recreate ancient Rome, though much in the scene is patently modern. And in case anyone failed to get the message that he was out to surpass anything attempted by Claude, one of his former idol's signature tropes, the umbrella pine, is prominently positioned throughout the series. While Turner was widely regarded as a prickly recluse, he was happy to grandstand when it suited him. His practice of completing his paintings on the gallery wall during 'varnishing day' at the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition (a still extant tradition whereby members can make small adjustments to their work prior to opening), came close to a form of proto-performance art. The resulting pre-publicity ensured large crowds gathered around his works when the show opened, but brought him into conflict with other artists, most notably with Constable, when large works by the two artists were hung side by side in 1831 and 1832. In the latter instance, Turner put a large red splotch in the middle of his relatively placid seascape Helvoetsluys to counter the impact of Constable's more imposing The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, causing the latter to remark, 'He has been here and fired a gun.' Such incidents contributed to a rivalry in their reputations that continues to this day. While Constable is undoubtedly a sublime artist, his vision was intensely localised, notably around Suffolk and Hampstead, as he would have been the first to admit. Turner was simply a much bigger and broader figure, who took far greater imaginative leaps and risks. His The Field of Waterloo (1818), with its nocturnal view of the jumbled corpses of French and British soldiers, is an anti-war painting created a good century before that idea came into general currency. The Slave Ship (1840), originally titled Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming On, is a horrific anti-slavery painting (though Turner has earned posthumous criticism for investing in a scheme involving enslaved plantation workers). Rain, Steam and Speed – the Great Western Railway (1844), with its locomotive hurtling towards the viewer across Maidenhead Railway Bridge, is perhaps the first incarnation of the 'industrial sublime', in which the wonders of nature merge with those of advanced technology – created decades before the Impressionists supposedly turned art on its head by embracing 'modern life'. Turner's relationship with Impressionism is in fact complicated. While leading Impressionists Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro spent much time studying Turner's paintings while in exile in London during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), Pissarro later claimed that Turner hadn't understood colour, because he had 'used black' (which doesn't reflect light). The French painter clearly hadn't seen late Turner works such as the transcendent Norham Castle, Sunrise (1845), in which the Northumberland castle and surrounding countryside dissolve into fields of shimmering colour, without employing one iota of black. Such works, never exhibited in the artist's lifetime, make it all too easy to empathise with Turner's famous last words, uttered as he was dying from cholera in 1851: 'The sun is God.' Britain's greatest artist may not have backed up his works with extensive written or verbal testimony, but he certainly understood the value of a good soundbite.
BBC News
23-02-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Lincoln: Well-known artist's work sold after death
A 10-day retrospective exhibition for an artist who died in 2024 has been a "fantastic success", according to one of his close Smith, who lived in Lincoln most of his life, had made no plans for the future of his paintings and his collection is being sold Smith taught graphic design at Lincoln College of Art and Design for 24 years and former students and colleagues gathered in the city to pay tribute to exhibition was at St Martin's Gallery on Hungate from 13 - 23 February. Mr Allen's painting style was influenced by the Impressionists and he loved to capture the Lincolnshire landscape and beach scenes at Cleethorpes, where he was artist was also known for his portraits. Mr Smith had a studio in Castle Square, where he invited people to sit for him. He would paint two copies of the portrait, and give one to the sitter for their Bowman, a friend and colleague, said that Mr Smith, who was 82, was a quiet man with a small circle of friends."He didn't shout about his talent, but he wasn't afraid to show his work and talk about his work. But he should have been known better than he is."Mr Bowman, the owner of the gallery, agreed to put on the retrospective exhibition of his work, which is being sold off by Allen Smith's added that many fond memories and humorous stories had been shared, a lot of his work had been sold, and it had been a wonderful 10 days and a great tribute to the to highlights from Lincolnshire on BBC Sounds, watch the latest episode of Look North or tell us about a story you think we should be covering here.
