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Hoogspanningslijnen / 340 KV trace

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Is art? Yes perhaps it is ….. It is landscape architecture at the largest scale possible.

We noticed from early May the steady progress of the Trace of the high voltage lines between Nieuwe wetering and Rijpwetering. We can follow this progress, because we sail frequently the Ringvaart which is crossed by this Trace of high voltage lines. It is part of the new ring of voltage lines between the largest cities in the Netherlands. They stand like large sculptures in a landscape and are very impressive. Height is on average 55 meters, and they surely can not be missed. You see them from a large distance and they alter the landscape in a unlikely way.

The Netherlands has a long history with these immense masts in the landscape and this was recognized by Arij de Bode who made a beautiful publication on just these large masts which look like large sculptures. The book contains great photography by the best in dutch landscape photography and is available at www.ftn-books.com

hoogspanning

 

 

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Giorgio di Chirico (1888-1978)… surrealist?

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Di Chirico was the founder the scuola metafisica art movement, which profoundly influenced the surrealists. But was he a surrealist or more a classic baroque painter  who by chance composed his compositions in surreal surroundings and there fore looked like a surreal painter. Any way he was considered by many surrealists to be an example for them and for sure one can see influences of di Chirico in the early paintings by Dali. Empty land and cityscapes with an occasional figure in them.

Di Chiricos pictures are different and most famous for the eerie mood and strange artificiality of the cityscapes he painted in the 1910s. Their great achievement lies in the fact that he treats the scenes not as conventional cityscapes – as perspectives on places full of movement and everyday incident – but rather as the kinds of haunted streets we might encounter in dreams. They are backdrops for pregnant symbols or even, at times, for collections of objects that resemble still lifes. De Chirico’s innovative approach to these pictures – an approach rather like that of a theatrical set designer – has encouraged critics to describe them as “dream writings.” They are, in other words, disordered collections of symbols. And this points to their difference from the so-called “dream images” of later Surrealists such as Salvador Dalí, which appear to want to capture the contents of a dream with a camera. www.ftn-books.com

 

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Museum Belvedere on a rainy day and found Gerrit Benner

 

Gerrit Benner…. his native country is Friesland in the Netherlands. Benner has become famous for use of bold colors in an abstract setting but somehow he managed to combine these colors into landscapes .  I had the chance to take some photographs from very close up and noticed, when seen on a distance of only a few inches, that it is pure abstraction. Further away you can see skies and meadows and the abstraction becomes a landscape. Benner is a master in combining these brushstrokes and blend them into a (little) recognizable subject.

Museum Belvedere is worth a visit. Not only because of its collection, but also for its location. A dark, low museum building within a landscape of water , meadows and skies….. a little bit like a Benner landscape.

 

wilfried

www.ftn-books.com has ao the following titles available: