A personal, curatorial & bilingual Blog about: Artistic Movements, my Art, Creativity, Innovation, Design, Leadership, Empowerment, Sustainability, Science, Jazz, Movies and other cool pursuits - Blog personal y curatorial bilingüe sobre: Movimentos Artísticos, mi Arte, Creatividad, Innovación, Diseño, Liderazgo, Empoderamiento, Sustentabilidad, Ciencia, Jazz, Películas y otros temas.
Como todos los años, desde el 18 hasta el 31 de diciembre se realiza mi ya tradicional Feria de Arte Navideña Solidaria. Este año a beneficio de Unicef. Presento unas 35 obras aproximadamente, a precios super accesibles y con importantes descuentos, listos para convertirse en un regalo muy original.
Esta época del año es un excelente momento para regalar, o regalarse, arte original. No solo los precios de las obras son muy razonables, y al mismo tiempo colaborás con la excelente obra que realiza Unicef en Argentina a quien se le dona un importante porcentaje de todo lo recaudado, sino que también estás regalando algo único, original, e irrepetible.
Regalar arte no solo es una muy buena inversión, si no que también es hacer algo especial por la gente que queremos. Y como regalo empresarial, tiene el valor agregado de ser un regalo que le recuerda de nosotros a quien lo recibe para siempre.
Entrá ya en http://arteferianavidad.wordpress.com/, fijate qué es lo que te gusta, escribime, preguntame, y atrevete a hacer un regalo muy especial para alguien muy especial.
Many people ask me why I have chosen to base my current series on the sounds of Jazz.
There are many reasons. On the one hand, I simply love that sound. It can be simple or complex, uplifting or romantic, funky or full of swing, cool or pacific, but it always manages to delve somewhere deep and lift me up to places I didn’t know before.
Another reason is that Jazz for me is simply another way of saying freedom. In jazz the score is just the excuse to show each musician’s luster and skills, as well as their love for sound that is rich, expressive and unique. Since its birth, this musical manifestation has been a part of all movements that wanted to articulate people’s liberty to express themselves.
And that is want I want to do on a canvas. I want to free myself to utter what is happening to me with the score, to allow me to be deceptively wild, to look for unorthodox ways of making you feel something different, and yet to allow you also the independence to see what I see in your own way, and in your own time and leisure.
There are many stories about the importance of Jazz in the fight for freedom. Not only musical but also as an expression of liberty of thought.
One of those well known stories involves the Benny Goodman Band and their first trip to the USSR in the 1950’s. Firstly, Mr. Goodman was incredibly surprised by the huge crowds which followed him in spite of one of the toughest environments for personal freedom in the second half of the XX Century.
Here was an American icon and his sound, allowed to play in Russia just as an excuse to show openness to the outside world, and at the same time people were not being allowed to listen to his kind of “foreign capitalist corrupt music”.
His second surprise was the fact that people came to him and kept telling him how they loved his work in terms of “we love CL7943 or CL8726”.
Goodman didn’t know what they were talking about. Until someone explained to him that because his works were prohibited by the government, people referred to them by their recording label number, as a way to avoid censorship and prohibition.
He thus found that, incredibly, there were very few people as knowledgeable of all Jazz music as the Russian fans.
That in a small way was both a declaration of another triumph of the people to free themselves from an overbearing government, but also it was another triumph for Jazz music, a sound which after WWII became the music of freedom.
I don’t know if I can say that my art will one day represent as much, but I know that my aim is to make it a clear expression of the lack of restrictions I feel as I put my art across, of ideas reworked into shapes and colors without boundaries, of joy and pain and thought all intertwined into vivid and abstract melodies.
I don’t always manage to do it, but rest assured that with my Visual Jazz I am always looking for new ways to convey that improvised musicality, that different sound that strikes as offbeat first, but which with time simply becomes… just so cool.
The concept of affordable art has been around for a while. In Argentina there are a couple of main exhibitions dedicated to the idea of bringing a new fresh public into the world of art and getting them to see the beauty, the enjoyment, and most of the times, the great investment that is collecting original art.
Art Sale is one of those two and I am very happy to be a part of it this year.
Located in the very posh Puerto Madero district of Buenos Aires, most exactly in the Madero Mystic River Boat, Art Sale 2012 will bring together some of Argentina’s best artists together with a growing number of emerging artists.
Last year the public took advantage of the prices and the whole event was almost sold out. Long cues of avid collectors and first time buyers flocked over the four days of the Fair and went home with great works at even greater prices. Not all the paintings shown are at “sale” prices, but every artist must present at least one painting at a very affordable price which means that there will be at least 80 paintings at fantastic prices during the event.
If you are in Buenos Aires or are planning to be here next week, I recommend you take a nice scenic walk along these old XIXth Century wharfs converted into a very trendy neighbourhood in the 1990’s and which, with the years, have blossomed into one of the most glamorous areas in town.
I will be there from August 1st (for the pre/sale for sponsors) and then from August 2nd when it opens to the public until the 5th, showing and selling my works. On Sunday 5th of August I will be painting live from 2pm until 8 pm, so anyone interested in having a nice coffee and seeing and talking about what my Visual Jazz is all about, will be most welcomed! I may even let you participate in the painting if you like! 🙂
And talking about the paintings, I haven’t decided exactly which paintings will be there, but here are 3 of the possible choices (sorry about the quality of the pics but I have not had a chance to get them properly photographed yet!).
If you are going to be in Buenos Aires over the next few days and you would like to receive a listing of my paintings at art sale with prices, just send me an email and I will be more than happy to send it to you.
I hope to see you there over the next few days, from Thursday 2nd to Sunday the 5th.
The first of the videos prepared to accompany my work in my exhibitions happening this year in London, starting with Parallax Chelsea in May 2012, and following closely in July with the Blue Period organized Exhibit in Chiswick.
It is a compilation of some of my best known work together with jazz songs, videos and performances which have inspired this highly colorful and movement filled Visual Jazz series.
Inspiration is a funny thing. It can happen at any time, for any reason, and take any form. But for this rain of inspiration to be succesful, it also must find a fertile ground and the seeds of creation somewhere within it.
This is basically what happened last week. Looking to generate the mood for my previous blog entry ( A jazzy and colorful Lisbon Spring), I got caught in the beauty of a live performance by Michel Legrand and Stephan Grappelli of “How high the Moon” , recorded in Concert in London more than 25 years ago. So much so that I chose that song to accompany my entry and my painting “Water in the Moon” (featured there and part of my Lisbon Exhibit), over Duke Ellington’s “Misty Moon”, which was the song which had inspired that work of mine some time ago.
The song got stuck in my head, and the more I played it, the more I felt that I had to explore on canvas all the things that tune made me feel.
And so was born “How high the Moon”, a 50cm x 50cm painting, mixed media on canvas (acrylic, printing and Indian inks, on canvas), from March 2012. This painting has a connection of sorts with another reacent painting of mine entitled “Toulouse” ( La ville rose) and it is showing a new development in the way I am expressing my art.
HOW HIGH THE MOON, Mixed media on canvas, 50cm x 50cm (2012) by Ignacio Alperin Bruvera
As I said before, this painting was inspired by a very particular rendition of a Morgan Lewis’ tune, but since it is already a part of my previous entry, I thought of accompanying this new piece by a different version of the same song.
So here are the great Lester Young and the revolutionary Miles Davis playing their own version of this classic, live in West Germany, in 1956! I hope you enjoy it.
Until the next storm of inspiration catches me unaware!
“It´s only a paper moon” is a classic song written in 1933 by Harold Arlen, with those wonderfully catchy lyrics by E. Y. Harburg and Billy Rose.
Incredibly enough, it had a pretty difficult birth, as the play for which it had been written bombed on Broadway. That should have been it, and the song should have been doomed to that big dumpster of anonimity in musical heaven.
But as it happens with so many great songs, it had to be redeemed by a keen eye and a great musical ear, and so it was that it became hugely popular on its own when it was picked up by two very classy acts like the magnificent Ella Fitzgerald, who recorded two wonderful versions, and none other than Nat King Cole and his Trio.
This painting is dedicated to this endearing song, particularly to Ella´s versions, and it is called “It´s just a canvas sky hanging over a muslin tree”, which is one of the lines in this very sweet tune.
Painted in 2012, mixed media on canvas, it is 80 cm x 60 cm, and it is hanging over my living room right now.
It’s whimsical, it is pure fantasy, it is nonsensical, but it is all true… if you just happen to believe in me… 🙂
"It´s only a canvas sky hanging over a muslin tree" (2012) by Ignacio Alperin Bruvera, 60cm x 80cm.
For all of you who may have never been there, or even worst, may not have heard of it before, Toulouse is a city in the Haute-Garonne department in southwestern France. It is a city in which I spent a lot of time when I was growing up as my brother was studying there, and so I would travel to this great area of France over the holidays, visit my family, and enjoy the city’s many charms and those of the surrounding country side.
It is a beautiful town. It lies on the banks of the River Garonne, 590 km (366 mi) away from Paris and half-way between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. With more that 1.1 million inhabitants the Toulouse metropolitan area is the fifth-largest in France, after Paris, Lyon, Marseille and Lille.
Toulouse is one of the bases of the European aerospace industry and its world renowned university is one of the oldest in Europe (founded in 1229) and the third-largest university campus of France after Paris and Lyon (thank you Wikipedia!).
Toulouse was the capital of the former province of Languedoc (provinces were abolished during the French Revolution). It is now the Chef-lieu of the Midi-Pyrénées region, the largest region in metropolitan France. It is also the Chef-lieu of the Haute-Garonne department.
This new painting, which will be shipping soon to Lisbon for my upcoming exhibition at Galeria Colorida during March 2012, is a small but heartfelt tribute to this lovely town often baptized as “la ville rose” because of its many red brick and pink buildings.
This work of mine received a great deal of inspiration as well from a gorgeous song by the great Ahmad Jamal, also entitled “Toulouse”, and which I am including below so you can listen to it while you look at this brand new painting. You may be able to see my painting then in a similar way to how I saw it as it emerged in my music filled mind. Or you can simply enjoy both the painting and the music!
IGNACIO ALPERIN: THE ART OF THINKING OUT LOUD / EL ARTE DE PENSAR EN VOZ ALTA 