Nordic Love Lately

Here's a few things I love lately from the Nordic North.

Trapped 

-Icelandic crime series where everyone is trapped in a small town because of a snowstorm with a murderer on the loose.

Monocle Arts Review Podcast: Helsinki

-3 exhibitions to see in Helsinki, Finland

  

  

  

Edvard Munch Woodcuts

- While everyone knows the 'Scream' you should get to know his woodcuts, exquisitely dark, melancholic & passionately beautiful.

{images found on pinterest, click for links; see more on my printmaking board)

 

 Henrik Vibskov

-Sculptural & Pattern Overload fashion 

{images found on pinterest, click for links)

 

Jesperpus

- Norwegian Adventure Cat who likes skiing, climbing everything, horseback riding, travelling, going on tv shows....

Art of Scandinavia 

-New series from Andrew Graham-Dixon (who did the Italy Unpacked & High Art of the Low Countries series' which I wrote about)

Husbands & Sons

{image from Royal Exchange Theatre}

Last week I saw 'Husbands & Sons' at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester and it was really great! Three of D. H Lawrence's plays about families in mining towns acted out simultaneously with beautiful production & great acting from Anne Marie Duff, Julia Ford, Philip McGinley & Joe Armstrong.

  

{images from Royal Exchange Theatre}

I'm now reading the three original plays which are available free in the Amazon Kindle store: I've just read 'The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd' & 'The Daughter-in-Law' and now starting 'A Collier's Friday Night' 

Podcast Love 2015

Here's a few of my fave podcasts I've been listening to lately:

     

The Voyager | A New Life in Europe: The Dhnie family | Lore

The Voyager is a city travel podcast featuring independent businesses, sights and culture in less traveled cities around the globe by Monocle magazine; If you want to try and understand a refugees journey from Syria to Germany this account of a family's journey is harrowing yet hopeful and Lore tells stories of folklore, ghouls, murders and unexplainable goings on.

      

The Tennis Podcast | Betty in the Sky with a Suitcase | Criminal

A must for a tennis fan to keep up to date with all in the tennis calendar with fun polls & interviews; A flight attendant's funny stories from collegaues & pilots and her own solo travels around the world (I created the image above as I love it so much- see here) and Criminal looking at interesting crime stories.

      

Mystery Show | Magic Lessons | Serial

The Mystery Show solves mostly small, stupid mysteries that don't need to be solved but you're glad they have been; Motivating creativity lessons with Elizabeth Gilbert and Serial's back for a second season, will it be any good? 

See my 2014 podcast love post most of which are still on my listening list.

What podcasts are you loving?

Betty in the Sky with a Suitcase Podcast

I love podcasts, I mainly listen to them while I'm walking places, working or tidying. So when I find a great new (to me at least, she's been doing it for ten years!) podcast that's endearing, shows humanity in many weird forms and makes me laugh, I want to shout about it!

Betty in the Sky with a Suitcase is that rare podcast full of laughter, fun, spontaneity, weirdness and surprises; filled with stories from Betty's job as a flight attendant and her love for solo travelling, animals, snorkeling, getting to know the locals and adventure.

Along with her own flight attendant stories she collects them from pilots, other flight attendants & people she meets on her travels. She's experienced so many amazing places including seeing lemurs in Madagascar, swimming with pigs & jellyfish, Easter Island, Tarsiers in Sulawesi, Indonesia and mud-larking in London to name a few; listening to the podcast it feels like I've been on an around the world trip myself!

I made this illustration because I love Betty & her podcast so much; it's Betty with her recorder surrounded by a few of her stories including lemurs, bees, a turtle enjoying the view, the beverage cart, naked passengers and sanitizing vodka.

Thanks Betty for letting us travel the world together with you & here's to the next ten years of podcasting!

Go here to Betty's website to listen & subscribe.

Autumn Art Seen

 

Art can transcend, take you to new places and new ways of thinking through looking, experiencing and being present. Here's a few exhibitions I've seen this autumn that have made me look & think again:-

Agnes Martin is one of my favourite artists ever since I found her at Uni, so I couldn't miss this retrospective at Tate Modern. It was quite simply mind affirming. So meditative and zen yet so powerful and determined, so true and authentic while mysterious and overwhelming. It was one of the most amazing exhibitions I've ever been to. It's so hard to tell from pictures what they are like, their presence is so great and their silence so loud. I really love her works on paper as well, I'm always drawn to paper works as they are so familiar, so relate-able, free and spontaneous.

 

My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind.' - Agnes Martin -

 

I didn't have much time on my short day trip to London but while heading for the train at Euston I popped into the Wellcome Collection to see Alice Anderson : Memory Movement Memory Objects

Which consisted of everday objects from a car to a guitar wrapped in copper thread mostly in blacked out spaces. This was strangely affecting and seeing how some objects had morphed and broken by the pressure of thread was beautiful, such power in such fragility.

I also saw Jackson Pollack: Blind Spots on at Tate Liverpool which was a bit small & mainly large black & white works. I loved his experiments on Japanese Paper and his melancholic energy.

While I was there I also saw the small Geta Bratescu exhibition full of sewn & paper collages, performance and drawing which allow her 'dedication to the drawn line' to dominate. I loved this quote of hers talking about drawing with her eyes closed: "without the 'freedom of the eye' the hand can better explore 'the freedom of its muscles"

I also managed to see the M + Sigg Chinese Art Collection...

and Cornelia Parker's Magna Carta Wikipedia Embroidery at the Whitworth Art Gallery, 

 

and the Beyond Limits Sculpture exhibition in the gardens of Chatsworth House. Including this Gormley sculpture placed in the most perfect rockery and geometric garden location for it. (Full post on this exhibition to come...)

What have you seen this autumn?

June Playlist: Galaxy

 

I often forget that we're all hurtling through space on a giant ball of rock surrounded by millions of other floating rocks, just a small speck in a vast expanse that is our galaxy in the humongous universe. Here's a lot of songs to remind you:-

See all my other playlists here

May Playlist: Eurovision

 

What do you think of when May comes around? why EUROVISION of course! and as the finals are not until 23rd May, I thought why not enjoy some favourites from the epic song contest this month in to get ready for the big night (or nights if you tune in to the semis). It's not just cheesy craziness (but that's what we love right?) there's also plenty of classic ballads and good songs too! (also did you see Eurovision's Greatest Hits with Graham Norton & Petra Mede? Bobbysocks!)

Thank You Europe!

(and Australia as they are competing this year for the contests 60th anniversary and not forgetting the rest of the world who tune in!)

Manchester Exhibitions

 

 Cornelia Parker

Here's a few thoughts on some Manchester exhibitions  I've seen recently:-

The Whitworth Art Gallery has always been a favourite gallery to go to, I also helped curate an exhibition there in 2007 for a University project- with a baffling over-the-top title 'The Uncertainty of Identity: The Biographies of Things'. So when they were closed for over a year for a £15million facelift I missed it. But while they haven't done much to the already existing galleries except add more windows onto the park, the new galleries and facilities look and feel fresh, light and innovative. It's just a shame it doesn't flow very well into the old part which looks dated, dark and dismal in comparison.

 

Cai Guo Qiang

The opening exhibitions are really worth seeing, I've already seen Cornelia Parker's 'Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View' before a few times at Tate Modern but I was really moved by her 'War Room' made from thousands of the empty sheets of perforated poppies that are made for remembrance day. My favourite was Cai Guo Qiang's huge gunpowder drawing and the accompanying video of him making it and his explosion happenings, a-m-a-z-i-n-g, it's fireworks as paintings, as installation in the air, watch some of them here. 

Thomas Schutte

 I also loved the Thomas Schutte exhibition of prints they were installed in kind of a maze and you could get right up to them and see them, the colours were gorgeous and the drawings spontaneous and deep; thoughts straight onto the page.

 

Making Monuments on Rapa Nui

There was an Easter Island exhibit on at the Manchester Museum where I walked straight past the monument on loan from the British Museum (which isn't much really than a lump of rock) and into the exhibition. I learned quite a lot, I didn't know they were tons and tons of them mostly congregated on the coastline and still in the quarry, or that University of Manchester has been part of some of the excavations over there. But they didn't use the space well, keeping everything close to the walls and not having the very statue from there in the exhibit but out in the noisy entrance high above you, not easily seen and not good.

 

Eastern Exchanges 

Ceramics, Furniture, Lacquer, Porcelain, there were so many beautiful Eastern objects in this exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery (shame about the wall colour).

 Emily Allchurch: In the Footsteps of a Master

Collaged digital photos of old works, this Valette work of Manchester was the best showing the differences in time. The Hiroshige copies were a bit soulless, I just wanted to see the original woodcuts not her lifeless virtual created interpretations of them.

Next I'm off to London for a few days to see Richard Diebenkorn, Sheila Hicks, Eric Ravilious and Marlene Dumas

April Playlist: Swedish Spring

 

After a long snowy cold winter there's finally some light (and hopefully heat) on the horizon. Putting the clocks forward here in the UK makes such a difference, having lighter longer evenings. And to fill those evenings you need some Springy Swedish Tunes. Sweden has produced so much amazing music here's some of my faves in my April Playlist. 

{see all my monthly playlists here)

March Playlist: Film & TV

 

The Oscars seems like ages ago now, and overall it was a bit rubbish, but the best thing about it was the song 'Glory' by John Legend & Common, (which won best original song), see the video again here. So this months playlist is all songs from Film & TV. Some amazingly powerful, some amazingly cheesy & hilarious but all invoke beautifully powerful inspirational emotions that can only be achieved through music & lyrics, whether it be humor, laughter, love, power, strength or even time travel, sung by Common or Angela Lansbury.

Do you recognise which Film/TV show some of them come from?
{Log in to Spotify here}

February Playlist: Winter Snow

We've had some deep deep snow for the past couple of weeks & while it starts out being amazingly beautiful and wonderous, pretty soon it's dirty snow, you're slipping and sliding over the pavements, you're fingers are cold all the time, you haven't got the right shoes....etc but there's some great songs to get you through it too, here's my 'Winter Snow' playlist:-



See my other playlists here.

January Playlist: Workout

 

I'm going to do a monthly playlist this year, here's the first, I'm just getting into running and I love Jillian Michaels' workouts so of course it had to be a workout playlist, with lots of 90's dance & classic cheese to get you moving!

Podcast Love

While waiting for the new episode of Serial to drop I thought I'd list a few of my fave podcasts I love to listen to:- A new series podcast dealing with one story over the course of 12+ episodes. This 'season' on Serial is dealing with a high school murder case from 1999, is he guilty? is he innoncent? who knows? as the creators are making it while we speak! Listen to:  The whole series - it's addictive!

There's so many amazing stories of different walks of life on 'This American Life' and all back episodes dating back to 1995 are online, hours of listening fun!   Listen to: This call may be recorded....to save your life Come back to Afghanistan

For fun, giggles, song wars, made up jokes, waffles & boggins there's always Adam & Joe, even though there's no more new Adam & Joe (please come back!) you can still listen to old episodes, yay!   Listen to: Denny Different (with special guest the Queen & Royal Wedding Song Wars!)

The New Yorker: Out Loud is great for small nuggets of cool stories, culture, news, art, music all taken from that weeks New Yorker magazine. Listen to: Hector Tobar on the Chilean Mine Disaster

Love quizzes, trivia, puzzles & puns? check out Ask Me Another, recorded live in front of a studio audience in Brooklyn & around the US, contestants take part in fun quizzes compered by the comedian Ophira Eisenberg, her musical sidekick Jonathan Coulton & puzzle guru Art Chung! Listen to: Trivia is the New Black

Love Graham's chat show? his podcast of his radio 2 show has mostly lesser-known guests but the same fun-talk & and get some great advice from Grill Graham! Listen to:  The latest few episodes...

I've always thought I could be good at running (yeah right!) I just have to get up from the couch. Well this NHS podcast 'Couch to 5K' might just help me do it, it tells you when to run, when to walk and builds up each week. {There's also an app so you can listen to your own music while running/walking!}

What are your fave podcasts?