Ana the Imp (Free subscription) | yesterday
I love the work of Frida Kahlo, my favourite modern painter by far. I really only discovered her properly a couple of years ago when I visited Mexico City, where I went to visit the Blue House where she was born, now a museum; the place where she lived as an artist, worked as an artist and died as an artist; the place she shared for a time with Diego Rivera, Mexico’s other modern icon. I love...
Suck It Up (Free subscription) | yesterday
The first thing I do on Sunday morning besides drink coffee is read the New York Times Book Review . This week I got Stephen King's On Writing from the library and began reading it last night. A real mashup of happy and sad and poigant and pithy. I laughed out loud at his hijinx with the high school newspaper, because it reminded me so much of my younger self. The book review featured King's new novel,...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 07/11/2009
This long-awaited novel recalls a dangerous era for artists. By Maya Jaggi Barbara Kingsolver's first novel in nine years takes a huge risk in venturing into copiously charted territory. It moves from the muralists and surrealists of the 1930s in the aftermath of the Mexican revolution to the McCarthyite witch-hunt of artists in the late 40s and 50s. Yet in crossing and recrossing the US-Mexican border,...
New York Times (Free subscription) | 06/11/2009
This novel, about a boy’s consequential bonds with Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky, is a call to conscience and connection.
Conversational Reading (Free subscription) | 05/11/2009
Odd. The Lacuna is no Barbara Kingoslver I know: Barbara Kingsolver provides a foil to this tendency with The Lacuna, all the more remarkable, it's fair to say, given the position reserved for it on best-seller lists. The novel's own artifactualness is never in question, since, to highlight the deceptive ways we both perceive and receive history, Kingsolver has dreamed up a series of private journals,...
Daily Painters International Art Gallery (Free subscription) | 05/11/2009
Frida Kahlo 9 x 12 inches Oil Painting Connoisseur Wine Masters Series SOLD 10 minutes after posting Thanks MS from Canada I was so blown away by Frida's life story that I was compelled too paint her. However, portraits are really not my cup, especially in miniature of tea so I think my impression of her is close. She was very difficult to paint as she has many masculine features, a huge uni -brow...
The Millions (A Blog About Books) (Free subscription) | 03/11/2009
Today arrives Barbara Kingsolver’s latest, Lacuna, “an epic journey from the Mexico City of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover.” Also out are a couple more of those nifty “Olive Editions” from HarperCollins, this time of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 [...]
Artdaily (Free subscription) | 03/11/2009
CORNING, NY.- The Corning Museum of Glass last week unveiled its annual Rakow Commission: Rey del Cenote, by Panamanian artist Isabel De Obaldía. The distinctive sand-cast sculpture by De Obaldía draws on ancient and tribal art. The title of her commission refers to the crocodile as the king of the cenote, which is a deep natural well. In ancient times, sacrifices to the gods often took...
NewWest.Net Boulder (Free subscription) | 01/11/2009
The Lacuna By Barbara Kingsolver HarperCollins, 464 pages, $26.99 Barbara Kingsolver worked her way up to becoming one of America's Current Top Novelists the old-fashioned way, beginning by writing smaller, tightly-focused novels with some autobiographical elements, earning a loyal readership through word-of-mouth and independent bookseller raves in her former home base of the Southwest, then expanding...
Art Weekly (Free subscription) | 01/11/2009
10x8 oil on canvas The photographer Alfred Stieglitz (husband of Georgia O'Keefe ) is famous for promoting American Abstraction in his galleries 291 and An American Place and for his photographs of clouds, which he named Equivalents . Music: A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs (also called Clouds in Ten Movements ) walks the line of representation and abstraction. Photography, often used to document,...
Geek+Nerd (Free subscription) | 30/10/2009
Matt returned in the wee hours of this morning from a business trip to Mexico - lucky ducky! He came home with gifts for the house. First, he sweetly says, "I saw this, and I instantly thought of you." Aww, what a schmoopie! A beautiful 3-D shadowbox with Frida Kahlo When I was in high school, I did a major project on Diego Rivera, and thusly became interested in Frida Kahlo. I love the movie...
Music Book Reviews (Free subscription) | 30/10/2009
Sounds of the Modern Nation: Music, Culture, and Ideas in Post-Revolutionary Mexico. By Alejandro L. Madrid. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, November 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-1592136940, $54.50. 224 pages. Review by Russell Cobb, University of Alberta The work of twentieth-century Mexican painters looms large beyond the borders of Mexico. Indeed, many of the images we associate with Mexican identity...
Isak (Free subscription) | 28/10/2009
Next week, Barbara Kingsolver's first novel in nine years will be published: The Lacuna, which follows an American boy who grows up in Mexico, works for Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, meets Leon Trotsky, witnesses social revolution in two countries, and becomes a celebrated writer who is caught up in "a McCarthy-foreshadowing scandal fomented and distorted by rabid media," according to The...
Luxurylaunches.com (Free subscription) | 28/10/2009
If you are a fountain pen collector, the limited edition Diego Rivera fountain pen from Montblanc is a must have for you. The exquisite pen promises to become the crown jewel of your collection. The beautiful pen pays tribute to Mexican artist Diego Rivera and charms its buyer with its beautiful design and style. The pen oozes the Montblanc style and craftsmanship and is anything but tacky. The barrel...
The Stage (Free subscription) | 26/10/2009
Oval, London: It is the Day of the Dead in Mexico and the artist Frida Kahlo dresses her home with traditional, decorated Mexican skulls as she remembers the people and events that shaped her life. Humberto Robles one-woman show paints a deeply personal portrait of the great Mexican artist. Robles' skilful writing avoids the clich�©s of simply listing major events...
Videos