Bateman

Bateman heads to Russia for his first big European show

By: Victoria Ahear

TORONTO -- Famed wildlife artist Robert Bateman is preparing for his first major European exhibition, a four-gallery tour in Russia that will highlight his passion for protecting nature.

"I presume it's a feather in my cap," Bateman, 79, said in a telephone interview from his home in Salt Spring Island, B.C.

"Although I have been in a few art museums in Canada, often art museums in Canada turn up their nose at wildlife art so it's nice to be hanging under the same roof, for example, as Kandinsky."

Robert Bateman in Russia will open at the Russian Museum's main building, Mikhailovsky Palace, in St. Petersburg on Oct. 8 and run there until Nov. 30.

It will then move on to the Tula Museum of Art, the Ivanovo Regional Art Museum and then Tsarytsyno Park, Bread House in Moscow, ending in August 2010.

Featured are 50 canvasses gleaned from private owners, institutions and Bateman's personal collection.

All of his major environmental pieces are in the show, including one he considers to be his most "hard-hitting": An underwater scene of a dead Pacific white-sided dolphin and albatross caught in a driftnet.

"My message is that we seem to think that nature is a free lunch, and there is no free lunch," he said of that particular painting, which has a real driftnet mounted on its front.

Also in the show are paintings depicting polar bears, bald eagles, an oil spill and one "that's giving a kick in the teeth to big logging, which of course is not sustainable the way we've been going," he said.

Bateman has also created a few new works as an homage to Russia's outdoor life, including one depicting a brown bear, that country's national symbol.

"I've got a very large -- I think mine is a Kodiak Alaskan -- brown bear emerging from the foot of a waterfall, where he's obviously been fishing for salmon," said Bateman. "He's sort of coming out of the mist and about to walk past you and then at the last minute he turns and gives you a dirty look."

Overall, the show is "mostly about the wonder and beauty of nature," he said.

"That's what my whole life has been dedicated to -- showing how wonderful and varied nature is."

The show was made possible by Michael Yanney, former chairman of the board for the Joslyn Fine Art Museum in Omaha, Neb., where Bateman has had a major show.

Bateman plans to fly to Russia on Oct. 4 and stay for a few days with his wife, Birgit. Canada's ambassador to Russia, Ralph Lysyshyn, plans to attend the opening, as will Yanney.

-- The Canadian Press

She never took her eyes off me

The Weary Blues, by Langston Hughes (1923)

This is awesome-- came across it randomly when I was looking for some writing by Langston Hughes.

Hughes was the great African-American writer who was a leading figure of the "Harlem Renaissance" of the 1920's, and who (as you'll hear here) introduced the daily common speech of African-American people into "high" art-- Along with people like Zora Neale Hurston, he recognized that the daily speech of black Americans was an art form in and of itself--a musical, cadenced, expressive speech that lent itself well to music and poetry and that could be represented as it was, without having to be changed to fit into traditional, mostly Eurocentric models of literature. Along with a big handful of other artists, musicians, writers, thinkers, etc, he was part of the first introduction of black American art forms to the larger world, and part of their acceptance as "high" art.

This poem, and the video too, is fantastic.

Here's the tag that goes with it on YouTube:
One of 21 video poems in Four Seasons Productions upcoming Moving Poetry Series - Three innovative new films - RANT * RAVE * RIFF. The Weary Blues was written by Langston Hughes in 1923 and recited in our film by author and Harvard Professor Dr. Allen Dwight Callahan.

To learn more about this provocative new series, how to purchase directly from our online store or on Amazon.com and for the full transcripts of our films poems, visit our website at www.4spFilm.com.

Social Ontology

There is a discussion on what society actually is.

The debate between agency and structure is largely centred on a discussion of how things impact individuals and how individuals make the world, yet there generally exists little in relation to what this mysterious substance that impacts us may actually be.

There is a range, an ultimate range that defines what is ontologically possible, that being the is and is not, or material and amaterial (in a materialist sense), or material and ideal (in an idealist sense), or what I see as all material, mixing in proportion to become what we experience, what we see, and what in many instances is what we do not see.

The dialectic is well recognised, and this is the pulse to freedom.

One by one, the guests arrive

Dim Whoretons "you'll cream your jeans sugar!!!" Book#27-Vol.2

it's been a while since i've posted something here;

how 'bout some donut shop social commentary!?

enjoy! ps. for what it's worth; there is no denying

that i fall victim to purchasing their product

from time to time. ;)

"Many Mozambican citizens fought, not one side or the other, not the governments or the militaries, but violence itself...

People there told me that to take up arms against one side or the other was to play into the very hands they fought against. They would then be reproducing the same violent politics that oppressed them. Even the militaries they fought against won if they took up arms: for they followed the model of power those militaries had set into motion. Violence would continue to define their lives. To truly defeat someone, they said, is not to act by the oppressor's rules, but to institute another set of rules altogether."