At the beginning of the 18th century, five thousand opium chests a year were entering China; by 1838, that number had reached forty thousand. The fact that the import and use of opium was illegal in China meant it had to be bought with silver. The huge profits made from its sale gave rise to a whole network of criminality connected with the drug. Official corruption associated with opium was widespread. The Hong merchants (intermediates with special permission to trade with foreigners) were involved, Mandarins were paid not to interfere, and even the Imperial Army took part in smuggling. Opium addiction had penetrated the very institutions set up to hold the Empire together.

Extracted from The Opium War.

Besides the Canadian Mounties and the maple leaf, what could be more iconic of Canada than Niagara Falls? So it is fitting that the first photograph of Canada is of the Niagara Falls. And it is!

This image of Niagara Falls was discovered twelve years ago in a box at Newcastle University in England. The box, marked “Daguerrotypes,” had been languishing on a shelf in Special Collections since 1926, when it was given to the library by descendants of British industrialist Hugh Lee Pattinson. Then a student of the early form of photography just perfected by Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, Pattinson was in Canada on a business trip when he stopped at the Falls to practice his technique. It took more than twenty minutes for the scene to afx on the silver-coated copper plate inside his camera (widely believed to be the small figure seen to the lower left); afterward, he would envelop the plate in warm mercury fumes, slowly drawing the image to the surface. It must have been thrilling, but no more so than when, a century and half later, historians learned what had been unearthed at Newcastle: the frst photograph ever taken in Canada. (Walrus)

Michele Marieschi (1710-1743) was an Italian landscape painter who painted veduta (vistas) mostly in Venice. One of his patrons was noted collector,Field Marshal Count Johann Matthias von der Schulenburg (1661-1747), who bought at least two canvases from the painter for 50 and 55 gold sequins respectively. This is one it, called “The Courtyard of the Doge’s Palace, Venice, with the Giant’s Staircase, Saint Mark’s Basilica beyond”:

It’s amazing to know that, even in the 18th century, perspective artwork are so precisely drawn and painted. The level of detail is truly astounding!

In the past few days, I have been playing around with colour for a project and experimenting with its inherent emotive qualities. It still never ceases to amaze me how much expression the entire spectrum of colours can produce. In doing this project, I was reminded of a painter whose work I encountered a few years ago - Mark Grotjahn’s butterfly paintings.

Drawing influence from both modernist abstraction and pop culture, Mark Grotjahn’s paintings are intimate seductions, slipping between hard-edged design and emotive expression. Using perspective as a skewed logic, Grotjahn’s canvases often incorporate two vanishing points in close proximity; from a doubled ‘centre’ Untitled (Green Butterfly) radiates bands of golden hues, each creating a deception of space. Applied in thick impasto, their sleek forms dissolve into terrains of concentrated brushwork giving an effect of physical solidity. With each triangle drafted in a single opaque layer, the canvas’s texture and traces of under-painting create subtly shifting tones, flirting between the illusive and the concrete.

Mark Grotjahn’s Untitled evokes a sense of the metaphysical. Set atop an effused abstracted ground, his forms stretch and recede in the convoluted logic of linear perspective. Executed in coloured pencil, the optical illusion of adjoining rainbow-toned lines becomes compounded as a feat of concentration. Each band painstakingly filled by the artist’s hand, Grotjahn’s geometric form is delineated by the embossed traces of his endeavour, imprinting his personal gestures within an emblem of perfection.

Using natural phenomenon as a starting point for abstraction, Grotjahn’s paintings straddle the polarities of artifice and nature. His efferent composition conveys a sensation of sublime weightless energy through simplified form. Similarly, his process and title reference the romantic vision of blooming jacaranda flowers: revealing only a hint of green under-painting, his canvas explodes in a torrent of purple hue. Transferring the experience of observation to an intrigue of creative possibility, Grotjahn harnesses the mysticism of nature through aesthetic formality. (Saatchi Gallery)

Massproductions develops high quality, tactile furniture in a modernist spirit. The two experienced designers, Englishman Chris Martin and Swede Magnus Eleback, formed Massproductions, after ten years working side by side as consultant for the furniture industry. With their accumulated knowledge from these years, they took the next step by producing and marketing their own collections of furniture using new and simple nethods for developing products, By taking away the filers normally associated with a producer, they can make products that would otherwise get stuck somewhere in the development process.

And from what I can see of their collections, their work is absolutely beautiful. Here are some of the images from the Tio collection:

AVANT CAR GUARD are a Johannesburg-based three member visual art collective, exhibiting and authoring as a singular artist. They are comprised of Zander Blom, Jan-Henri Booyens and Michael MacGarry, all individual artists in their own right. They have produced three publications on their work, titled Volume I, Volume II and Volume III respectively, and have exhibited at a national and international level for several years, with their production being based on a conceptual, self-reflexive and satirical approach to the art world – it’s markets, practitioners as well as the process of creating itself. This is manifest across multidisciplinary means; through photography, sculpture, performance, multiples, installation and painting.

The following is from Volume III, consisting of large-scale paintings, editioned photographic works, editioned prints as well as a limited edition publication. This exhibition continues AVANT CAR GUARD’s satirical caricature of both the local contemporary art world, its personalities, mechanics and processes, as well as the South African political landscape, coupled with a wry sense of humor and a lyrical aesthetic. (What If the World)

Wonderful paintings by Esther Pearl Watson:

I am not very well-traveled. Even though one of my to-do items is to travel to as many places around the world as possible, I am simply not able to do so at this point in my life. As such, I turn to photography. With the rise of Google Earth, Flickr and Photosynth has enabled me to ‘travel’ and ‘experience’ different cultures, environments and landscapes. The latter, in particular, really capture my interest. One of my revered landscape photographers is Olaf Otto Becker. His work is fantastic, as can be seen in this series on the landscapes of Iceland and Greenland:

“After I took a lot of landscape photographs in Germany over a long period of time in an effort to understand my own surroundings, I was looking for a landscape where only few human beings lived. I was interested in a wild, unspoiled landscape. I was interested in a place where the landscape developed on its own. A place where the landscape was built and formed by water, wind, erosion, and only marginally by human beings using the wild land for their purposes. I wanted to explore landscape. I wanted to understand something about landscape.”

“When I arrived in Iceland for the first time, I was deeply impressed by the Nordic light. You can find similar light conditions in Germany as well, but only for a few minutes in the morning or in the evening. In Iceland, the light was mostly perfect the whole day, especially at night. The colors were largely subdued with subtle nuances, nearly black and white at first glance, but astonishingly colorful at second glance. These conditions enabled me to work with color like a painter. If I wanted to focus on green, grey white or blue, I was able to show it in thousands of nuances.”

“I always ask myself what I essentially see, right there, right then. I try to understand what I see. I look for something that speaks by itself without captions. I try to let the landscape speak. I am not interested in things I have already seen. I try to look at something as though my eyes had opened for the first time and I try to understand what I see.”

“When I was young, I painted for many years. I intended to study painting at an art school. When I was 19, I had what you might call a crisis with respect to my painting, and I decided to stop painting forever. Suddenly, I was sure that it would not make sense to study art with the intention of becoming an artist. I decided to study communication design. The wish to express what I am interested in remained, so I started to take photography seriously. Initially, I took landscape photographs of my immediate surroundings with the intent to explore and understand them. I never had the desire to earn money with my photographs. I used the camera as a tool to understand the world around me.”

“The difference to painting was that a photograph has more to do with reality and I was interested in understanding my reality. I was often in doubt as to what reality meant. By means of taking photographs, I captured something that everybody could verify. In my series titled Broken Line I also recorded the GPS data of the location where I took the shot. Everybody is invited to have a look. Reality is sometimes astonishing, but what you see today will be changed tomorrow. So a photograph can help to understand the change.”

Text sourced from Jörg Colberg’s interview with Olaf.

Although I have never tried my hands in sculpture before and do not know the tools and processes involved to make a piece come alive, ancient sculptures never cease to amaze me. The level of detail and expression, coupled with a unforgiving medium, achieved with only simple tools, is simply mind-boggling. The ‘Undo’ function I have come to rely on so much is certainly nowhere to be found!

Venetian Renaissance sculptor Tullio Lombardo (c. 1455–1532) crafted close-up treatments of secular subjects designed for an audience that could respond to their elusive, haunting character in an intimate setting. A type of sculpture never seen before, these portrait-like busts in exceptionally high relief represented figural types descended from ancient Greek and Roman art, given immediacy by their Renaissance hairstyles and costume details. They seem to belong simultaneously to two worlds: classical antiquity, as imagined in the 15th century, and contemporary Renaissance Venice.

Two of his most famous pieces are the so-called “Bacchus and Ariadne”, pictured above, and “The Couple”, pictured below. The sensuously smooth flesh of these ideally beautiful young men and women, portrayed partially nude, contrasts with intricate detail carving in costume elements and in hair that surges with movement. Their restless expressions, with parted lips and wide-open eyes that seem to gaze into the distance, suggest states of reverie, anxiety, or yearning. They depart dramatically from conventions of late 15th-century Venetian portraiture, typically formal, reserved, and confined almost exclusively to painting. (Art Daily).

Even though I like to think that I have an eye for abstract minimalism, I feel completely dwarfed in comparison to artists who painstakingly formulate their work to take on a deceivingly simple and straightforward aesthetic. Andy Collins is one such artist.

Andy Collins’s paintings are lusciously synthetic. Cold and glossy, his large pastel canvases are suffocating vacuums of glamour. Working from fashion photos, Collins’s abstracted forms are derived from the overlooked in-between spaces of supermodel spreads. Folds in fabric, creases in elbows, knees and armpits become a pattern of fetishised contemplation. Their contours are retraced and suggested forms are embellished, creating ethereal motifs that are both organic and electrifying. Collins’s process is one of almost perverse fixation. Taking several months to complete a painting, he painstakingly constructs his airless forms entirely by hand, leaving no trace of brushwork.

Reducing recognisable forms to their barest essentials, Andy Collins’s [work] is neither abstract nor figurative; but rather hosts a supernatural quality of inbetween-ness, an embodiment of aura and retention. Collins uses this subliminality as a departure point for mystical experience. Fixating on the suggested contours of forms, he slips between these cracks, physically exploring the workings of his image from inside-out; caressing its creases, savouring the possibilities of their imagined space. Through his intensive process of painting, Collins addresses the links between physicality and memory, the frailties of perception lifts into an expansive field of wonder and entrancement.

Andy Collins develops his forms from the sensuous suggestion of magazine layouts: tracing the gaps created by necklines, folded knees and flirtatious ripples in fabric. His paintings reproduce the sexual frisson of glimpsing up a skirt, the electric fixation of imagining what lies beneath. Through his intensive painting process, Collins’s titillating forms melt into mesmerising abstractions. Contemplation of negative space takes metaphysical form, a knowledge gained not only from seeing, but experiencing silky textures and promising depths. Through the physicality of making, Collins’s figurative subjects are expressed in abstract fields, as synthetic and emotionally distant as his sources. (Saatchi Gallery)