Leon Botha: When Art goes beyond what you see

Updated: Leon Botha died from complications of progeria on 5 June 2011. My post about it here. South Africa: enough about football (BLK JKS, Amadou & Mariam and Angélique Kidjo live from Soweto) let’s talk about Art. A few days ago, as I was starting to write my new blog post about the 1980s, I visited the website of South African group Die ... More

Pierre Soulages: black like you never saw it before



I have always loved the black color, much to the despair of my family and friends who thought I may probably have some sort of psychological problem (a teenager wearing black is always so suspicious…). But I liked the color very much and still do (I am still wearing black but now it raises much less suspicion). When I was young, I never really cared ... More

Annie Leibovitz, Susan Sontag, Sarajevo and Keith Haring

I unfortunately didn’t have much time left to hang around lately but there are some exhibitions I couldn’t miss. “Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005“, a major retrospective of Leibovitz’s work, was definitely one of these. Last September, I spent an entire afternoon at the Maison Européenne de la ... More

Frank Gehry, Oscar Niemeyer and Richard Meier in Paris

The trio is not physically in Paris right now but what they built is. Many architects, more or less famous, worked in Paris and gave the city ones of its finest and amazing buildings (and I am not talking about Baron Haussmann here). Gehry, Niemeyer and Meier are world wide known architects, and they are still involved in diverse projects at the four ... More

Charley Harper: wildlife like you’ll never see it again



The purpose of this blog is to share with you, dearly readers, what (or who) inspires me, and Charley Harper‘s two-dimensional style illustrations definitely do. During a house moving, while rummaging through some ‘bric-a-brac’ stuff, I found an old magazine I kept only because an illustration of Charley Harper. It was a ladybug and ... More

From sgraffiti to graffiti, from Cauchie to Seen

I was first impressed by graffiti, then by sgraffiti. A pun that sums up my first approach with decorative Art. Graffiti Art is now worldwide known but it’s in the mid-1980s I had my first graffiti experience. I remember French artists like Lokiss or Bando, it was a great era even if graffiti were then only regarded like vandalism; at the same time, ... More