Paul Villinski

I have just discovered a kindred spirit - another artist (there are a few of us out there) who uses found objects to create beauty, but particularly lost gloves!! A whole part of my upcoming exhibition involves lost gloves from the streets of Berlin (and Paris and Antwerp). So, I am overjoyed to read of this wonderful artist from New York and his visions of beauty made from the debris around us - beer cans become butterflies, lost gloves become wings and other things... His whole website is worth exploring but I've linked straight to the work that made my heart sing!

http://www.paulvillinski.com/artwork/glove.html

Philippe Petit & Jean-Michel Folon

Today I saw the film Man on Wire about the tightrope walker Philippe Petit. It was an incredibly moving, inspiring (and recently became Academy Award winning) documentary about this immensely creative man's fearless determination to live his dreams and to stay true to his passion. Of course this kind of determination doesn't happen without great sacrifices and the doco shows this in some very sensitive interviews with old friends of his...




I first learnt about Philippe Petit many years ago as a teenager thanks to my father having an art gallery. One of the artists he showed was the famous Belgian Jean-Michel Folon, who was a very successful artist of works on paper at the time my father showed him, and a true poet and humane man. I remember falling completely in love with his naïve, whimsical, dreamy style of drawing man in his urban environment and the dreams that go on in his head...

One silk-screened poster, in an exhibition my father had of Folon's work, featured a tiny man holding a beam walking on a line suspended between two buildings. I was too young in 1974 to recall the historic, audacious feat of Philippe Petit's walking between the almost complete Twin Towers of New York City, but the image on the poster stayed with me and captured something in my imagination! And then a while later I asked my father about it and he told me of his fellow compatriot, Frenchman Philippe Petit... So it was my absolute joy today to learn more about this figure I remember cutting out and pasting in my journal as a teenager and not really understanding at that stage.

for visuals from Jean-Michel Folon:
http://www.fondationfolon.be/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0D1K25kqxw

more on Philippe Petit:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/21/garden/21petit.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Annie Leibovitz in Berlin

I'm a day late to post this... I met yesterday, for a few seconds, one of my big heros of the photography world, Annie Leibovitz, as she signed my copy of her new book At Work, at the wonderful BücherBogen bookshop in Savignyplatz. She's in town for the opening of her great show "A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005" at C/O here in Berlin. I saw this same show in Paris and it's really wonderful and definitely warrants another visit.

Sophie Calle

Today I went on an "Artist Date" (anyone who's read and worked through Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way will know what I'm talking about - and yes, this woman deserves her own post!!) and took myself to the Sophie Calle exhibition here at the private gallery Arndt & Partner, in the fashionable gallery district at Zimmerstraße 90-91, near Checkpoint Charlie.

For this exhibition called "Où? Quand?" she worked with a clairvoyant to give her guidance as to where she should go and when, and then checked in with her along the way for further instruction... and there were signs that they used to 'confirm' they were on the right path... I'm fascinated by the processes Sophie Calle uses to let chance and "random parallel synchronicity" (kind of stolen from the beautiful film The Science of Sleep) come into play... She's quite a cheeky, daring and sometimes controversial woman!

http://www.likeyou.com/en/node/8614

Ursula Bogner

What is it with the Ursulas and music? A little while ago I discovered this fascinating story of a German pharmacist, wife and mother, Ursula Bogner, making rather avant-garde experimental electronic music in her purpose-made room, which I found very inspiring! You can hear little snippets of her music on this site. I secretly (well not anymore) love her look too, in a frumpy cool way!

http://www.faitiche.de/catalog1_en.html

All Handmade Gallery

This beautiful little gallery for ceramics, textiles and painting/prints is located in my home town Sydney, up the road from where I worked for many years in Bronte, one of Sydney's gorgeous innercity beach suburbs!

I particularly love the ceramics available there, and used to love popping up the road on my lunchbreak to check out the latest exhibition... The wonderfully happy thing to me is that it's still there, going strong after many years.

http://www.allhandmadegallery.com/

Pip Culbert

I'm a huge fan of artist Pip Culbert's work. Basically anything that involves clothing, textiles or fabric moves me in the heart and I am instantly drawn in. I discovered this English-born artist at Gitte Weise Gallery when it was in Sydney (it's now in Berlin - see also my Maria Kontis post), and I bought one of her pockets... She cuts away all the interior fabric of clothing, tents, bags, flags etc, to reveal the structure in the seams. I look forward to her show at the end of the year here in Berlin, so Gitte tells me!