V is for a visiting vixen with velocity in Vancouver. 🙂
Day 153: V is for Vendetta
I love films. Watching a truly good movie is like being carried to wonderland unharmed inside a tornado with a thousand paintings. Transformative, otherworldly, incredible, emotionally exhausting, part of your soul forever after. I’m sure you’ve seen films you feel this way about. V for Vendetta is definitely one of those for me, but of course they aren’t all blockbusters.
My brother-in-law, Jonathan Bland, is an amazing cinematographer of a rare ilk. His films are palpable, visually luscious, rich with images so breathtakingly beautiful they make me dizzy. He elevates film into an art form so separate from the dime-a-dozen lukewater comedy bombs and weak thrillers most people think of as movies. You can see some clips here. Maybe it’s because he’s so hands-on and fully immersed in every project he embarks upon. The art is better because you can feel his love for it in the end result.
One of Jon's still images from filming in Bombay
It’s how I feel about original artwork. It’s nice to buy a Kinkade print you like, sure. There may be 10,000 of them out there, and of course it’s just a machine-made copy of an image he may not have even executed entirely himself in the first place, but it’s still pretty. And that’s fine. But it’s so different to find a painting you love that someone labored over and created with their own two hands. To touch the paper bits they smoothed in and feel the layers of paint they brushed on and on and on. It’s special. It’s magical.
Never felt that way about a painting, you say? Well get your ass out there and find it! City Art Gallery in San Francisco is a great place to start. I’ll be showing there during the month of July and will be at the gallery for the opening the evening of Friday, June 2nd and all day Sunday, July 4th as the gallery sitter as well. If you’re in the area, swing on by and say hello!
Today’s piece is a mixed media painting on 8×10” canvas incorporating vintage ephemera with V words like vixen, velocity and visitor. A small map of Vancouver, BC and “Chapter V” from an old Nancy Drew book are mixed in there with the sewing patterns as well.
Marianne Bland's Art Blog 