Films seen May 2017

1.Elizabeth I  DVD. Helen Mirren (Actor), Jeremy Irons (Actor), Tom Hooper (Director) 

An enjoyable portrayal of history though occasionally I believe we have fiction for AFAIK Elizabeth never went to meet her imprisoned cousin. Mirren is superb, Isaacs good. I found the armada was treated too briefly. Keeping down production costs.? Also the strength of Leicester's protestantism was downplayed. But a great film of a great queen. The second part was not so gripping. Was the queen so antagonistic to courtiers' contact with James Stuart. Dis she not recognise him as her heir?

2. The Scandalous Lady W Natalie Dormer (Actor), Shaun Evans (Actor), Sheree Folkson (Director) 

Well acted, especially by Natalie Dormer and her husband, an actor we now know better as the young Morse. He is a perverted voyeur who persuades his bride to have sex with his friends while he watches through the keyhole. The sex could have been portrayed with more subtlety and not so explicit. It turns out there were 27 lovers, all exposed in court where the husband secures a pyrrhic victory. After the court case the true story is condensed. As another reviewer says, the film lays on the feminist angle strongly. But it was an age when a wife and all she brought became a husband's property. It is an amazing story and a scandal for any age It is a pity that the lady did not tell he husband that the vow to obey did not encompass adultery.

3. Girl With A Pearl Earring [DVD] Scarlett Johansson (Actor), Colin Firth (Actor), Peter Webber (Director) 

Set in 17th century Delft it all looks very period realistic. Colin First was so well disguised as Vermeer that it took me a while to recognise him and the disguise of Tom Wilkinson as the lecherouds rich patron was so complete that I dod not twig it was him until the credits. An innocent servant is the eponymous girl. She suffers under a shrew of a mistress and her wicked little daughter. It is beautifully filmed but very slow and I was left wondering if there was any message

5. King Charles III [DVD] [2017]

It may be totally improbable fiction but I loved it. However I think this is a marmite item. My wife hated it so I expect opinion to be divided. Piggot-Smith's last role was great acting. Harry, Willian, Kate and Diana were good look alikes if not Camilla. The constitutional crisis could conceivably happen but I would not expect non-british viewers to understand that the king can only act on the advice of his ministers. The prime minister's examples of when the Queen had signed only out of duty not agreement could have better cited laws on abortion to homosexuality but to cite that would not be pc. The last monarch to refuse assent was Queen Anne. Willian IV did dismiss parliament but he went to the House of Lords to do so. I had better say no more as it would be a spoiler. Harry eventually giving up love for duty was a nice touch, a reversal of 1936. I thought Diana's ghost as duplicitous as she was in real life. Charles a troubled man less popular than his heir all seemed true to life. I loved the blank verse, truly Shakespearean. Finally the title is wrong. He will be George VII.

6. Quo Vadis [1951] Robert Taylor (Actor), Deborah Kerr (Actor), Mervyn LeRoy (Director) 

I believe this was the first film I ever saw in a cinema. I was six and taken by my father who was not normally a cinema goer. We went to see Quo Vadis for it has a strong Christian theme. The heroine is a Christian captive in the house of a now Christian retired Roman general. She is torn between her devotion to Jesus and her love for the returning victorious Roman army commander. The Christians are sympathetically portrayed. Peter's sermon is powerful. The one inaccuracy is Paul telling the pagan Commander to free his slaves. Paul did not tell even Christians that in the Bible. The martyrdom of the Christians following the incendiary emperor's false charges concerning the fire of Rome is hoffitic but they triumph in death. The bull fight is a high point and I wonder how the stunt was staged. Usinov is a brilliant mad Nero. The portrayal of his deaths not at all accurate. This was the first Holywood biblical epic and it is on a grand sale.

Books read in January 2010

1. Towards Islam by Alistair Duncan

Written in 1978 for Christians in contact with the Muslim world these four essays will also be informative for Muslims concerning festivals and art. A balanced non polemical presentation which I would only criticise for stating that the Koranic text has never been altered in 1400 years. This is not in line with modern textual criticism, a subject hidden from public view it seems. Also, not all Islamic art has been averse to the human form. I do not think the Mughals alone permitted it.

2. Escape from Islam by Hass Hirji Walji, Jaryl Strong

I have heard and read and even translated the testimonies of Muslims who have come to faith in Jesus Christ. This is among the best. The story is riveting. A Muslim family, in Uganda for nearly a century, experiences the horror of Amin's lawless brutality. Accepted as immigrants to America they are to their surprise welcomed by a Lutheran church with furnished housing, food and money. The author, a student, was attracted by the lives of Christians and when befriended by them wanted to convert them to Islam. Instead he was challenged by the truth of the gospel. He fought. Pushy Christians were no help but patient friends were and eventually he comes to faith with none of the dreams which are often part of Muslims' testimonies. My only slight criticism would be that there is no mention of repentance and baptism of Jesus as Lord. It is interesting the witness was through friendship and the corporate aspect of a para-church student group.

Once he told his family they threw him out. The carrot of the offer of pilgrimage to mecca did not succeed. Nor did a beating and attempted murder. He was tempted but stood firm and enjoyed a measure of family reconciliation. The gospel is clearly explained and the differences between the faiths. He centers that on Islam as a religion of legal observances while Christians know a personal relationship with the father through his Son and Spirit. A good book to give to a Muslim or a Christian seeking to understand witness to Muslims.

Portrait of Blair as PM unveiled

Click on title to see it.

BBC says,"The portrait was painted in Mr Blair's last months in office
A portrait of Tony Blair, painted in his final few months as prime minister, has been unveiled in Westminster.
Mr Blair sat for artist Phil Hale in the PM's official country residence at Chequers for the portrait, which will be hung in Portcullis House.
Mr Hale said Mr Blair had had "more pressing concerns than prettifying himself for a picture". In an e-mail he said he was "tired and distracted"."

Tony was no king, but his picture could be entitled, "Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown".

BBC's Passion

I watched about half an hour of the first episode. That was all I could take of such a wimpish Jesus. I remain convinced that the second commandment prohibits such images. The Gospel is to be preached, not acted. No-one can portray the God Man faithfully except by preaching Him. But there is a deafening silence from Christians and an even louder one from Muslims who are supposed to object to artistic representations of their prophets.

Art- christiansquoting.org.uk

Buy old masters. They fetch a better price than old mistresses. -- attributed to Lord Beaverbrook(1879-1964)

Abstract art? A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered. Al Capp

Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers -- and never succeeding. ~ Marc Chagall

The theory of the unmorality of art has established itself firmly in the strictly artistic classes. They are free to produce anything they like. They are free to write a _Paradise Lost_ in which Satan shall conquer God. They are free to write a _Divine Comedy_ in which heaven shall be under the floor of hell. And what have they done? Have they produced in their universality anything grander or more beautiful than the things uttered by the fierce Ghibelline Catholic, by the rigid Puritan schoolmaster? ... Milton does not merely beat them at his piety, he beats them at their own irreverence. In all their little books of verse you will not find a finer defiance of God than Satan's. Nor will you find the grandeur of paganism felt as that fiery Christian felt it who described Faranata lifting his head as in disdain of hell. --G. K. Chesterton, _Heretics_, 1905

..no nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even if it be only the faintest shadow -and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals ~ Kenneth Clark, The Nude

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere. G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) A: "Orthodoxy," 1908. A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul. -- Goethe (1749-1832)

Matisse's painting "Le Bateau" hung upside down in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, for forty-seven days before anyone noticed (October 18 to December 4, 1961). In that period 116,000 people had visited the gallery. --Jean Cocteau (1890-1963) _Past Tense: Diaries_, Volume 1 [1987]

Pablo Picasso resisted school stubbornly and seemed completely unable to learn to read or write. To other students grew used to seeing him come late with his pet pigeon -- and with the paintbrush he always carried as if it were an extension of his own body. -- Mildred & Victor Goertzel

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed. - David Hockney (1937 &endash; )

Painting consumes labour not disproportionate to its effect; but a fellow will hack half a year at a block of marble to make something in stone that hardly resembles a man. The value of statuary is owing to its difficulty. You would not value the finest head cut upon a carrot. -- Samuel Johnson (Boswell: Life of Johnson)

If God is and remains Sovereign, then art can work no enchantment except in keeping with the ordinances which God ordained for the beautiful, when He, as the Supreme Artist, called this world into existence. And further, if God is and remains Sovereign, then He also imparts these artistic gifts to whom He will, first even to Cain's, and not to Abel's posterity; not as if art were Cainitic, but in order that he who has sinned away the highest gifts, should at least, as Calvin so beautifully says, in the lesser gifts of art have some testimony of the Divine bounty."
Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1987), pp. 155-156.

All art worthy of the name is religious. -- Henri Matisse

Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers - and never succeeding. - Giancarlo Menotti (1911 &endash; )

Secondly, pictures of Christ are in principle a violation of the second commandment. A picture of Christ, if it serves any useful purpose, must evoke some thought or feeling respecting him and, in view of what he is, this thought or feeling will be worshipful. We cannot avoid making the picture a medium of worship. But since the materials for this medium of worship are not derived from the only revelation we possess respecting Jesus, namely, Scripture, the worship is constrained by a creation of the human mind that has no revelatory warrant. This is will worship. For the principle of the second commandment is hat we are to worship God only in ways prescribed and authorized by him. It is a grievous sin to have worship constrained by a human figment, and that is what a picture of the Saviour involves. -- John Murray

The world today doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do? ~ Pablo Picasso 1881-1973

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. -- Pablo Picasso

It doesn't make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.
Jackson Pollock (1912-1956)

Jack the Dripper --sobriquet of Pollock

The learned understand the theory of art, the unlearned its pleasure. -- Quintilian (35-90 A.D.) De Institutione Oratoria

If I am walking in an art gallery and see a beautiful painting, it may be good to praise the Lord, and to thank Him for that great gift. The thing is beautiful, and therefore a joy and spiritually rich . . . But more than likely it will not even occur to us, for we place the arts out of the context of life, making them something autonomous; or say that the gift is just 'natural,' so opposing nature to grace, forgetting that there is no 'nature' that is out of God's creation. No: let us give praise to God for every manifestation of His gifts.H.R. Rookmaaker, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1994), p. 244.

An art work has value as a creation because man is made in the image of God, and therefore man not only can love and think and feel emotion, but also has the capacity to create. Being in the image of the Creator, we are called upon to have creativity. In fact, it is part of the image of God to be creative, or to have creativity. We never find an animal, non-man, making a work of art. On the other hand, we never find men anywhere in the world or in any culture in the world who do not produce art. Creativity is a part of the distinction between man and non-man. All people are to some degree creative. Creativity is intrinsic to our „mannishness.
But we must be careful not to reverse this. Not everything that man makes is good intellectually or morally. So, while creativity is a good thing in itself, it does not mean that everything that comes out of man‚s creativity is good. For while man was made in the image of God, he is fallen. Furthermore, since men have various gifts and talents, everyone cannot create everything equally well. However, the main point is that creativity as creativity is a good thing as such.--F A Schaeffer

I am sick of shit masquerading as art. Brian Sewell on The Turner Prize, 1998, Evening Standard

Art is the signature of civilization.-Beverly Sills (1929-____): Interview - 1985

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
Tom Stoppard (1937-____) "Artist Descending a Staircase." The creation and sale of most art today is pure prostitution. The comparison is true in every detail. Real art can only rarely be created even by a real artist; like a child in a mother's womb, it is the ripened fruit of his prior life. False art, though, can be ceaselessly produced by craftsmen, according to the dictates of a market. Like a faithful wife who loves her husband, real art does not need any excess decoration; like a prostitute, false art demands to be decorated. True art comes out of an artist's urgent need to express the feelings that have formed inside him, just as a mother needs to give birth to her baby. False art answers only to profit. Real art brings new feelings into our life, as a woman brings a new person into the world. False art corrupts; it makes a person dissipated, distracts him, weakens his spiritual power. Everyone must understand this, in order that they shun the terrible proliferation of this dirty, dissipated type of art which is, on its face, prostitution.--Leo Tolstoy, "A Calendar of Wisdom"

One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever come to sit by it. Passers by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on the way.- Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) "Artists in Quotation," by Donna Ward La Cour, 1989.

To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano. James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903)

If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) "The Gentle Art of Making Enemies," "Propositions," 1890.

You shouldn't say it is not good. You should say you do not like it; and then, you know, you're perfectly safe.James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) In "Whistler Stories," by D. C. Seitz, 1913.

London's Olympic Logo

The world's most expensive graffito....and bad graffito at that. Ugh. In the interests of decency I will not say what I think it looks like.
Online petition - Change The London 2012 Logo

The Remnants of an Army

The Remnants of an Army, originally uploaded by maigemu.

Doctor William Brydon was an unknown assistant surgeon with the British East India Company in 1842, when he suddenly became one of the most famous figures of the early Victorian era and the subject of a much-reproduced painting. In January of 1842 a British and Indian force, following a two-month siege in Kabul and the killing of the British representative, began a withdrawal towards the Khyber Pass and Peshawar in British India. On January 6, 1842, some 16,500 British and Indian Sepoy troops, civilians, wives and children, and camp followers left Kabul. On January 13, Dr. Brydon rode, alone, up to the gates of Jalalabad.

The legend notwithstanding, Brydon was not actually the sole survivor of the 16,500, but he was the only European to make it all the way from Kabul to Jalalabad (about 90 miles through snow-covered passes and through hostile tribesmen). Other Indians and friendly Afghans also straggled through, and over 100 British officers, enlisted men, wives and children were taken captive or hostage and later released or exchanged. But the image of Brydon riding alone into Jalalabad, sole remnant of a column of 16,500, burned itself into Victorian memory, aided by a dramatic painting by the Victorian military artist Lady Butler (above), called "Remnant of an Army".
www.theestimate.com/public/100501_dossier.html

Doctor Brydon's Ride: Lady Butler's Remnant of an Army , my photo of the copy in Kabul Art Gallery. The original is in Tate Britain. www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999962&w...