Pigcasso

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pigcasso_with_painting.jpg

The first nonhuman artist to be given her own art exhibition was a female pig rescued from a South African slaughterhouse in 2016. When her keeper, Joanne Lefson, noticed that the pig ate everything in her stall except some paintbrushes, she taught her to hold a brush in her mouth and apply paint to an easel, and Lefson could sell the resulting works to raise funds for the sanctuary.

Pigcasso’s works have been exhibited in the Netherlands, Germany, the United Kingdom, and China. In 2021 German collector Peter Esser paid £20,000 for her painting Wild and Free, a record price for an artwork created by an animal. Altogether the pig’s sales have raised more than $1 million. She died in March 2024, one day before Jane Goodall could arrive to meet her.

| Art · Oddities

Plan A

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ste01945.jpg

The Greek architect Dinocrates proposed carving Mount Athos into a colossal man who held a city in one hand and with the other poured a river into the sea.

Alexander the Great rejected the proposal because (among other things!) it would have required importing grain by ship rather than growing it near the city.

| Art · History

The Final Touch

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:William_Holman_Hunt_-_The_Finding_of_the_Saviour_in_the_Temple_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

When old Green, the frame-maker, had finished the frame for Holman Hunt’s The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, Hunt went to see it and told him it was quite satisfactory. ‘Ah,’ said Green, ‘but you’ll see the picture will set it off amazingly.’

— Henry Holiday, Reminiscences of My Life, 1914

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Busy

Franz Liszt’s 1851 étude “La Campanella” is one of the most technically demanding pieces ever written for piano.

In bar 102, below, the left hand has to jump 35 half-steps, nearly three octaves, in the space of a sixteenth note.

That’s about 46 centimeters.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_Campanella2.png

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Companion

carnielo tenax vitae

Rinaldo Carnielo’s sculpture Tenax Vitae stands in the Galleria Rinaldo Carnielo in Florence.

After meeting the sculptor in 1893, Helen Zimmern observed that “for him, the shadow of death pervades all existence,” but “he cares not one jot whether his statues find purchasers so long as he himself is satisfied with the results.”

| Art · Death

Point to Point

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caledonian_Road_tube_station_-_Labyrinth_228_-_geograph.org.uk_-_5938044.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Nearly every station in the London Underground contains an enamel plaque depicting a labyrinth. The collection were installed in 2013 by artist Mark Wallinger to mark the system’s 150th anniversary. Each of the 270 black and white designs is unique to its location, and all of them are posted in publicly accessible locations, so visitors can examine them directly, tracing the path with a finger. They’re numbered according to the route taken by the contestants in a 2009 Guinness World Records challenge to visit all stations in the system in the fastest time.

A list of all 270 labyrinths is here.

| Art

Relative

When E flat made its entrée into the drawing-room, C and G considered it a third person.

‘It’s a dominant,’ thought A flat, while E natural cried out, ‘I recognize it: it’s my leading tone.’

… But the same holds here as in music where the chord of G sharp has not the same meaning, depending on whether you reach it by way of the sharps or of the flats, and does not sound the same as that of A flat to the sensitive ear, though composed of the same notes.

— André Gide, journal, January 14, 1912

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