Mayank Chhaya Daily

Giovanni Antonio Canal, Better Known As Canaletto

 

As Sotheby's prepares to auction works by Bernardo Bellotto and his uncle Canaletto, I republish a piece I wrote about the latter, aka Giovanni Antonio Canal (17 or 18 October 1697 – 19 April 1768). I wrote this piece on October 6, 2013. The remarkable video above, which brings alive their genius, brought back the memories of that piece.

 

In my continuing occasional series on discovering master painters, today I chanced upon Giovanni Antonio Canal (17 or 18 October 1697 – 19 April 1768), better known as Canaletto.

As Sotheby’s of London prepares to auction Canaletto’s depiction of two of Venice’s most familiar landmarks, St. Mark’s Square and the Rialto Bridge (painted in 1738-1739), I thought I would pay a visit to the Google Art Project and check out more of his works. There is a rich choice but I have settled for this one titled 'London: The Thames from Somerset House Terrace towards Westminster”. Canaletto came to London in 1764 and stayed for nine years.

As is always the case, there is more artistic genius in any corner of a truly masterful painter’s single work than what many so-called painters manage in an entire lifetime. One of the most important requirements of an “outdoor painter”, which Canaletto was, is the ability to capture the light. Canaletto had a supreme command over that detail.

I have sliced down various corners to illustrate my point. Look at the painting as a whole in the top frame. (Excuse the smallness). The light you see in the sky, what falls on the Thames waters and what bounces off the ground in the extreme left corner are so very different and yet so seamless. In the top frame you see an Englishman with his dog as one of the many figures. As you zoom in you see the man’s apparent imperiousness or haughtiness of demeanor. He seems the type who should have been preparing to be in India as part of the East India Company, ready to plunder. Of course, this painting predates the company by six years since it began making its presence felt in 1757. I digress.

Look at the difference between the direct light and the kind diffused by the embankment wall. What falls on top of the wall and what slants are also so subtly different.

Patience and attention to detail are two of the most important attributes of a great painter. You see that again and again in the works of master painters. Those attributes show in the way he captures the imposing St. Paul’s Cathedral with lesser buildings in front. I have given you a tighter view of the cathedral to make my point. Look at how precise the proportions, angles and play of light are. Even the colors of each buildings are so meticulously executed.

Speaking of attention to detail and patience, look at the boats and boatmen and their passengers. One of the defining features of Canaletto’s works was that you could feel the movements of everyday life. The two Venetian works going under Sotheby’s hammer in December have the same sense of movement. There are things happening in every corner. Look at the two frames below to feel the movement aboard those boats as well in the Thames waters.

The perspective and the orientation of each boats are also so brilliantly executed. This is the work of a visual genius who misses out on nothing while painting.

Finally, detail of a very different kind. The building in the frame below is partially hidden behind these lovely trees. Canaletto does not take the easy way out by simply obscuring them but bothers to paint the white windows even behind the foliage in precise alignment.

I am not qualified to offer an art appreciation class but am merely sharing my unbridled joy every time I discover such breathtaking works.

Mailbox 6

Mailbox 6 by MC

What began as a sketch of a mailbox against the backdrop of a fiery sun using markers has become the one below. These are rather small. At some point soon I intend making a regular canvas out of it.

You exist because I exist

Bench--MC

હું ખરે તું ખરો

હું વિના તું નહી

હું રે હઈશ ત્યાંહ લગી

તું રે હઈશે

હું જતે તું ગયો

અનિર્વાચી રહ્યો

હું વિના કેહ તને

કોણ કેહશે?

--નરસિંહ મેહતા

मैं हूँ तो तुम हो

मैं नहीं तो तुम नहीं

जब तक मैं रहूँगा

तब तक तुम रहोगे

मैं गया तो तुम गए

अनिर्वचनीय रहे

बिना मेरे तुम्हे

कौन कहेगा?

--नरसिंह मेहता

You exist because I exist

You cease when I cease

You remain

Until I remain

When I cease

You will too

And will remain ineffable

Who will describe you

Without me?

--Narsinh Mehta

Climate change and jihadi recruitment

Journalist Peter Schwartzstein (@PSchwartzstein) has a remarkable story in the National Geographic about how climate change and water shortages drove Iraqi men into the eager arms of ISIS. It is stories such as this that separate serious, credible journalism from the puffed up drivel that one sees all around and that gets “Likes” by those who wouldn’t bother to read anything.

“Circling like vultures among the stalls of the town’s fertilizer market in Iraq’s northern Salahaddin governorate, they’d arrow in on the most shabbily dressed farmers, and tempt them with promises of easy riches,” Schwartzstein writes. Those “circling like vultures” would be the bearded men of ISIS.

With farming communities being devoured by the grim consequences of climate change and farms turned into dusty wastelands in Iraq’s hinterland, ISIS found a fertile recruiting ground with the promise of cheap but immediately needed gifts.

“Across rural Iraq and Syria, farmers, officials, and village elders tell similar stories of desperate farmhands swapping backhoes for assault rifles. Already battered by decades of shoddy environmental policies, which had hobbled agriculture and impoverished its dependents, these men were in no state to navigate the extra challenges of climate change. And so when ISIS came along, propelled in large part by sectarian grievances and religious fanaticism, many of the most environmentally damaged Sunni Arab villages quickly emerged as some of the deep-pocketed jihadists’ foremost recruiting grounds,” Schwartzstein writes.

The tragic thing about the devastating human cost of climate change is that it knows no borders. This could happen anywhere in the world because climate change is everywhere in the world. This is a slow, creeping existential crisis which now stares us square in our face. I have frequently written about how Nature has no particular vested interest in the survival sentient life. It does what it does in response to changing conditions. It is not noble by any stretch of the imagination.

There is a reason why even the hard-boiled military minds of the Pentagon recognize climate change as one of the primary national security threats. It is upending millions of people, many of them feeling vulnerable enough to fall prey to the bogus promise of a bountiful afterlife where virgins feed you juicy grapes.

It is heartening to know that there are still journalists like Schwartzstein who do what any serious journalist ought to away from the incestuous world of establishment journalism.

Waiting for Ross 128 to move into our galactic neighborhood

An artist’s impression of Ross 128 and Ross 128 b. (Image: European Southern Observatory).

For me, perhaps the most interesting aspect of the discovery a temperate Earth-sized exoplanet 11 light years away from us is that that particular star system is moving towards us.

According to a press release by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), whose planet-hunting HARP instrument found the exoplanet, the red dwarf star Ross 128 and the system around it are coming closer to us. “Although it is currently 11 light-years from Earth, Ross 128 is moving towards us and is expected to become our nearest stellar neighbor in just 79 000 years — a blink of the eye in cosmic terms. Ross 128 b will by then take the crown from Proxima b and become the closest exoplanet to Earth!”

To me that sounds fast. Let me explain why. I hope my calculation is accurate. Eleven light years add up to a distance of 66 trillion miles or over 100 trillion kilometers. (A light year is 6 trillion miles or about 9.4 trillion kilometers.). For the Ross system to become our closest neighbor it has to be less than four light years away from us because that is the distance of the current closest star Proxima and its exoplanet Proxima b.

That would mean it has to cover at least over 42 trillion miles or 63 trillion kilometers in 79,000 years. When you consider that a red dwarf, notwithstanding that it is a dwarf, and its orbiting planets, including the exoplanet Ross 128 b, and other bodies are quite large, it is an impressive speed. For such a massive system to charge towards us to cover 42 trillion miles in 79,000 years is fast.

That is what I thought until I received an email response from Xavier Bonfils of Institut de Planétologie et d'Astrophysique de Grenoble – Université Grenoble-Alpes/CNRS, Grenoble, France, who is the lead author of the discovery paper. I propose to carry an interview with him in a couple of days but in responding to my calculations about the speed at which Ross 128 is moving towards us, Bonfils wrote, “The velocity of the star is ~31km/s toward us. It is not an uncommon velocity (some go to more than 100-200 km/s).” So there you have it from someone who is an actual scientist. That is still fast.

Roughly in the time I wrote this post—about six minutes—Ross 128 came closer to us by 11160 kilometers or 6975 miles. The dizzyingly kinetic nature of everything, from the smallest particles to the biggest bodies, is intrinsic to our universe. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is immobile even though we do not discern such rapid movement.

Some of them even read Proust

Let’s do with this (sort of) limerick of mine for today with my painting as the backdrop. It is all me.

It is the kind of day that makes no sense; like everyday I suppose.

Some serious posthumous swag this

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), Laboureur dans un champ, painted in Saint Rémy, early September 1889. 19⅞ x 25½ in (50.3 x 64.9 cm). Sold for $81,312,500 in the Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale on 13 November 2017 at Christie’s in New York

I was thinking of Vincent van Gogh yesterday while looking at this remarkable painting by him; particularly of his state of mind in an asylum Saint Rémy as he painted it from the window of his room. It was done less than a year before he killed himself on July 29, 1890. He was penurious and unstable, having sold just one painting in his entire career that produced more than 900 works. This 1889 piece was one of those 900 plus.

Yesterday at an auction by Christie’s in New York, ‘Laboureur dans un champ’ fetched an astonishing $81,312,500, which was just marginally less than the record price for a van Gogh. According to Christie’s, “The record price for a work by Van Gogh still stands at $82,500,000, which was paid for Portrait du Dr. Gachet  (1890) at Christie’s in May 1990.”

Here is a painter in the grip of delusional frenzies inside his asylum room producing this arresting work with such characteristic flourish. By the time he created this, van Gogh was obviously at the peak of his preternaturally gifted talent. Can there be a more powerful example of some serious posthumous swag for a genius artist than bidders scrambling to acquire one of his last works for over $81 million 128 years after he killed himself?

The auction yielded $479,320,250, which means a fifth of which came from one van Gogh alone.

There was another blockbuster, Fernand Léger’s Contraste de formes, which fetched $70,062,500. His previous record was in 2012 when a work of his sold for $39,241,000.

Fernand Léger (1881-1955), Contraste de formes, 1913. 36⅜ x 28⅞ in (92.4 x 73.2 cm). Sold for $70,062,500 in the Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale on 13 November 2017 at Christie’s in New York.

China and Quadrilateral alliance

If I were Xi Jinping of China I would watch the emergence of the Quadrilateral alliance between the United States, Japan, India and Australia with a measure of smug satisfaction mixed with some wariness. That the the world’s three most powerful economies plus Australia have to join hands to contain China is a rather candid acknowledgement of Beijing’s success globally.

Whether the success of the Chinese economic model engendered with a single-party authoritarianism is healthy is a different matter altogether. But on the limited question of how China’s global rise is pushing powerful democracies to pool their collective weight I am sure it is a heady feeling for the leadership in Beijing.

Reports say that the leaders of America, India, Japan and Australia met individually as part of this Quadrilateral alliance on the sidelines of the anniversary ASEAM summit in Manila. Xi ought to have been watchful about the alliance even though one has not heard much from Beijing by way of reaction.

New Delhi will have to weigh its options rather carefully while becoming part of the alliance because unlike the other three, it shares a long border with China and its fortunes are inextricably linked with its giant neighbor. When push comes to shove it will be India that will feel both the push and shove of China to the maximum. There is also the matter of China’s overpowering presence in India’s immediate neighborhood of Pakistan.

While on the face of it the Quadrilateral alliance may seem to revolve around global stability in the face of China’s dramatic rise, it is clearly necessitated by the individual national interests of the four involved. As democracies they do share some broad common objectives but their national interests are very different. As America seems to vacate the global space, particularly in Asia under the Trump administration, there is a need for a counter to China. At times one thinks that it may be too late to create that counter because China is already enjoying considerable sway within Asia and beyond.

Add to that the new vision that China has laid out for itself for the next 30 years. By 2035, it intends to become a global innovation leader and by 2050 an overarching world leader. If America remains mired in its narrow-minded policies and vision for the next eight years ubder President Trump, it is entirely conceivable that Beijing would have traveled a great distance along the road to become what it promises to become.

That Beijing offers a political or cultural guilt-free alternative to those countries it wants to bring under its influence is a powerful attraction unlike America’s well-known penchant to reshape societies fundamentally in its own vision.

In this shifting dynamic, I am not sure if India has a cohesive idea of self that is both distinct from and achievable with China’s rise. Traditionally, India has never sought to exercise geopolitical influence over the rest of the world. Its unarticulated and unplanned consequence has always been soft, almost unquantifiable power as manifest in offshoots such as yoga and spirituality. I seriously doubt if the world can get by just on those.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ by Mayank Chhaya

I have no stake at all in whether the fictional but much celebrated ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ is now an actual café or not but I get drawn to it via my visual obsessions. The hook for me to do these two quick digital paintings was the color of the robin blue eggs. That is the signature color of the famed jeweler Tiffany & Co. in New York.

I have walked past the famous Fifth Avenue/57th St address many times during my visits to the city but never entered it because, you know, one has no money. Reading about the opening of the actual café called the Blue Box Café and its attendant blue prompted me to do these two works.

As things stand now, there is even less prospect of my either shopping at the jeweler or eating breakfast Tiffany’s. In the absence of either it is cheaper to create these two images.

That’s all for Sunday. It is not as if you pay me to read this blog.

The Cabin

The Cabin—Mayank Chhaya

There is no plan when I paint. I just do. Most frequently, one starts off with some random brushstrokes to see where it might lead to. The painting here titled ‘The Cabin’ had no reason to have happened. It just did. If there is any evocative or intriguing feature at all to any work of mine, it is generally not by design; it is by default.

For instance, the figure in the window was not quite deliberate. The yellow glow emanating from the cabin in the woods prompted me to put a silhouetted figure to give it some mystery. One could not really tell whether the figure is male or female although in my mind it is a young woman.

The woman appears to have seen something in the woods but she is not quite sure what it is. Well, as it turns out it was me painting.

The concrete effect is a bit of a manipulation although I am sure I could paint this very picture on a blank piece of rough concrete.

P.S.: It has been a while since I did some serious news writing in the blog. That is a conscious choice. There is certain news ennui these days.