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Culture Nature

Wasp nest super close-up

We finally had enough sun to make photography a bit easier. Here’s another wasp nest close-up. It’s striking how different the colours look on a sunnier day.

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Culture

Bashō big in school supplies

Matsuo Bashō is selling pencils. Sort of.

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Culture

Kandinsky at the Tate

‘Wassily Kandinsky’; what a great name. Tate Modern currently has an exhibition Kandinsky: The Path To Abstraction, which traces Kandinsky’s development from a painter of Fauvist/post-Impressionist type landscapes to a ‘pure’ abstract painter. It’s confined to the early part of his career, but then I wasn’t very familiar with his work beforehand, so I didn’t have much to compare it to.

The early works use sizzling colours and distorted perspective but are still obviously representational. This is Murnau – Kohlgruberstrasse:

That reproduction possibly makes the colours look even more sizzling than they actually are, but it gives you the idea. Then you get increasingly abstracted landscapes like Landscape With Factory Chimney:

Then you get paintings full of symbolism, which are abstracted but still have recognisable objects in them. In this painting, for example, it wasn’t all immediately obvious, but you can pick out, going anti-clockwise from the dog, a cannon, a row of men firing guns, a cloud with a lightning-bolt, two men waving blue sabres behind the smoke from another cannon, and a boat with a yellow sail carrying four figures, one of which is rowing. The painting is just called Improvisation 11; the titles stop being very useful at this point.

The process of increasing abstraction continues, but the paintings still have content. Certain motifs recur – men on horseback, boats, mountains, waves, cannons – even if they wouldn’t necessarily be recognisable to a viewer who was unfamiliar with Kandinsky’s work. Apparently he was keen on the idea that a new better, more spiritual age was approaching, so there’s a lot of Deluge and Apocalypse going on. For example, this is Composition VI, and in the context of Kandinsky’s work, it’s fairly clearly a deluge painting. The real thing is 10 foot across, so this really doesn’t do it justice:

By the end of the exhibition, Kandinsky had started to produce some of the completely abstract, more geometrical work which apparently was typical of the rest of his career. By this stage he is, as far as I can tell, no longer even using representation or meaning as a starting point for the work. This is Circles On Black:

The exhibition was enjoyable for exactly the reason suggested by the name – seeing the process by which he gave up representational painting. If you’ve been brought up with abstract art, it doesn’t seem like an inherently difficult idea, but obviously at the time, artists had to arrive at it through a process. It’s not just Kandinsky, of course; you can see different versions of the same process in Miro and Mondrian and so on. As so often in artistic and literary development, it feels like there’s a process of building up in complexity as the artist develops and explores new ideas and techniques, and then a stripping back down as they pick out what seems most important and create works which are simpler, sparer and more focussed.

I was unsure, looking at Kandinsky’s paintings, whether he always had in mind that the goal was a complete divorce from representation, but that he had to feel his way towards it, or if that was just the direction his work took him. I daresay an art historian might be able to tell me. Either way, it’s worth going to just to see all the colourful paintings. Kandinsky liked his blues cobalt, his pinks fuchsia and his yellows daffodil; no fannying around with indecisive colours like ochre and olive.

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Nature

Cool new snake…

found in Borneo.

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Other

Bookings, red cards and the sin bin

Having seen several matches at this World Cup mucked up by sendings off, I’m increasingly persuaded that it’s time to reform the yellow and red card system.

I just don’t think the progression of punishments is very well worked out. The free kick for minor fouls makes perfect sense. Sending a player off for genuinely dangerous play or blatant cheating also makes sense. The problem is with the yellow card.

On the one hand, it doesn’t have enough immediate impact on the game to be much of a deterrent. It’s marginally more effective in the World Cup, where you only need to be booked in two games to be suspended for the next match and all matches are important, but in league football bookings are a bit of theatre with minimal real significance.

But at the same time, the sudden stepping up of the punishment if you get two yellow cards seems catastrophically out of proportion. Two marginal bookings can force a team to play with ten men for much of the match. It also seems like what should be a personal punishment has a disproportionate effect on the rest of the team. That is, a team can receive seven bookings and have no-one sent off, or have someone sent off after just two. The impact on the likely result is unbalanced.

The alternative would be a five minute sin binning for each yellow card, however many of them you get, and the red card being reserved for straight sendings-off. Obviously, that would make a yellow much more serious than it is now, and the refs would need to learn not to be slightly more sparing with them; but they’d suddenly be a much more efective deterrent. Take shirt-pulling, for example. As much as I’m keen to eliminate it, sending someone off for doing it twice seems disproportionate. Having them miss ten minutes of the game seems quite reasonable. You could even have five minutes for a first booking and ten for a second, but actually I think that would be unnecessary.

Would it work better? I don’t know. It makes sense to me. It would be an interesting experiment, anyway.

Categories
Nature

Wasp nest

The plumbers found an old wasp nest in the attic. Wimbledon has had its usual effect on the weather, so the light isn’t great for photograpy, but during a break in the rain I tried taking a few pictures. The whole thing’s about 2 foot across. Here’s a close-up: