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Arbie's Unoriginally Titled Book Blog

It's a blog! Mainly of book reviews.

Currently reading

Station Zero
Philip Reeve
Progress: 220/282 pages
The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition
Ursula K. Le Guin, Charles Vess
Progress: 749/997 pages
The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry
Robert Chandler
The Uncertain Land and Other Poems
Patrick O'Brian
Progress: 8/160 pages
The Heptameron (Penguin Classics)
Marguerite de Navarre
Progress: 152/544 pages
The Poems and Plays of John Masefield
John Masefield
Progress: 78/534 pages
Poems Selected
Emily Dickinson, Ted Hughes
Progress: 4/50 pages
Selected Poems
U A Fanthorpe
Progress: 18/160 pages
The Penguin Book of Scottish Verse
Mick Imlah, Robert Crawford
Hainish Novels & Stories, Vol. 2
Ursula K. Le Guin
Progress: 133/789 pages

Reading progress update: I've read 46 out of 320 pages.

Masters of Deception: Escher, DalĂ­ & the Artists of Optical Illusion - Al Seckel, Douglas R. Hofstadter

Giuseppe Arcimboldo: Technically superb and apparently very popular during his lifetime but very little of his work survived to the present. An obvious influence on Dali, along with Heironymous Bosch. Made paintings where assemblages of objects or animals form human portraits. He's not my cup of tea, nor why I bought the book, but he does set some sort of historical context for the 20th Century and contemporary art that follows. That said, according to the introduction it's a very limited context in that the type of art the book is principally about has antecedents in Western art back as far as the Romans...

 

Dali: Probably the first artist that hangs in major galleries that I took an interest in, years before I discovered Impressionism as an undergrad. Focuses on his figure-ground illusion type of painting and the anamorphic illusions. The figure-ground pictures, whilst endlessly fascinating for their detail and trickery, mostly don't form over-all images that are very appealing, aesthetically. The best one I've ever seen, The Metamorphosis of Narcissus (in the Tate Modern, London), which does appeal to me aesthetically, as well as combining subject matter and the type of illusion involved spectacularly, isn't reproduced. In fact none of the most famous paintings are here. In a way that's good; it brings new material to my attention. As for the anamorphic paintings, which appear to be one thing when viewed flat and another when viewed in a cylindrical mirror, I had not even heard of them before. Dali's diversity never ceases to amaze me; nor does his technical skill - never more impressive than in these anamorphic images.