to move up and down
‘Good deed’ by rogue restoration pensioner ruins 19th-century Spanish fresco
Ecce Homo (Behold the Man) was a prized Spanish fresco — the pride of the Sanctuary of Mercy Church in Borja, near Zaragoza, where it has delighted parishioners for more than 100 years.
But after a botched restoration attempt by a well-meaning DIY pensioner, Elias Garcia Martinez’s 19th-century masterpiece looks more like a child’s finger-painting.
The unauthorized alterations were made by a Spanish woman in her 80s who had apparently grown upset over the worsening state of the painting. (Centro de estudios Borjanos)
In the new book Domestic Picasso, Eric Rosser simultaneously salutes and gives the middle finger to one of the greatest artists of all time, both honouring Pablo Picasso’s contribution to culture and reminding readers of the man’s notoriously misogynistic views.
Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera are coming to Toronto
This fall, the Art Gallery of Ontario will be presenting a collection of works by the iconic painters in Frida & Diego: Passion, Politics and Paintings. The exhibit will focus and highlight Kahlo and Rivera’s lives, their politics and relationship to society, and how their passionate views influenced their art.
Brush with greatness
What if A.Y. Jackson’s Nellie Lake was an actual place?
And what if they packed up their two kids, Nina and Michael, and actually went there? Would they be able to find the same view A.Y. Jackson rendered on canvas in 1933?
“We looked at a map of Killarney and saw a Nellie Lake, and we didn’t know if the two would line up to be the same place,” Sue says. “So we decided to go camping there. I remember climbing up a ridge, picking wild blueberries.
“We just kept climbing. There is a dead tree in the painting. The tree had fallen down. But we found it.”
To confirm that they had, they took several photographs and compared them with A.Y. Jackson’s masterpiece. And they matched.
“We thought, this is great fun,” Jim says.
The Waddingtons have been scouring the Northern Ontario bush in search of Group of Seven painting sites ever since.
![Heather Graham: Coming into focusLook. Take a step back. Lean in. This is the dance artist Heather Graham watches people do at her shows, waiting until the moment when — there. Everything comes together for them and they can see the face rising out of the painting, like a ghostly polaroid or a woman projected on the canvas.The subjects of Graham’s large-scale paintings aren’t always clear at first, but with movement and patience, each canvas of dark smudges becomes a face looking back at the viewer.“If you stand there long enough, it all comes into focus,” Graham says of her work, on display now at the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington in Ontario. “It’s almost like [the painting] pulls you in, because you have to kind of just stay there and say, ‘I know what this is. It’s a ghost.’”](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lptx3eZlnE1qze0z6o1_500.jpg)
Heather Graham: Coming into focus
Look. Take a step back. Lean in. This is the dance artist Heather Graham watches people do at her shows, waiting until the moment when — there. Everything comes together for them and they can see the face rising out of the painting, like a ghostly polaroid or a woman projected on the canvas.
The subjects of Graham’s large-scale paintings aren’t always clear at first, but with movement and patience, each canvas of dark smudges becomes a face looking back at the viewer.
“If you stand there long enough, it all comes into focus,” Graham says of her work, on display now at the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington in Ontario. “It’s almost like [the painting] pulls you in, because you have to kind of just stay there and say, ‘I know what this is. It’s a ghost.’”
Aboriginal Arts Challenge winners let their work speak for itself
The winners of this year’s Aboriginal Arts Challenge have a few, perhaps surprising, things in common. First, neither of them grew up in communities that prioritized the arts, and secondly, they both took a contemporary approach to their winning pieces.
Joseph Tisiga, 26, won in the 19-29 age category for his painting With Friends, his reimagining of the day his mother was taken from her family. Taylor Thom, 17, won the 14-18 age category for her pencil drawing Soar Again, a metaphor about the stagnation she sees in the aboriginal community.
Thom, who grew up in Gift Lake, Alta., spent a month working on her winning drawing and says it represents the continued burden of residential schools, but also the hope that the community can continue moving forward. It’s the first time she has won anything like this, and she said she was just expecting a “thanks for participating” certificate in the mail, not the $2,000 first prize.
His friends as fiends: Otto Dix’s grotesque portraits of loved ones reflect the difficulty of readjusting to life after the First World War. Rouge Cabaret continues to Jan. 2 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art
