2023

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Leonora Carrington again, this time in Paris

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Three years ago, I posted about a trip to Madrid to hear Händel's Solomon  with Ann Hallenberg and Miah Persson , taking in the big local art fair, ARCO, and a big exhibition of Leonora Carrington's work, while I was there. I actually imagined, without looking for more accurate information, that the Paris exhibition, at the Musée du Luxembourg , would be the one I saw in Madrid, now travelling to France. It wasn't. This was a much smaller show. But, though I don't have an ounce of magic or spirituality or alchemy in me, I love Leonora Carrington's work - she's probably the only artist labelled 'surrealist' I like so much. So any Laura Carrington event is an important one to me, and along I went, on a hot and sunny spring day. I've nothing more to say about it, other than that, though small, it otherwise didn't disappoint. Here, I'm just posting a few of my photos, including one of a piece by Remedios Varo, and another of one by Max Ernst, wi...
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Paris art fairs 2025 - 3: any other art...

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Having posted some photos, with brief comments, from Art Basel Paris and Paris Internationale , I simply forgot I'd meant to add a third article about Paris's 2025 October events, this time covering any other art that had struck me since I came back from Greece. In other words, this particular post, now that I've remembered to write it, isn't limited exclusively to the fairs; it's intended to tie up loose ends. The reason I came back to Paris when I did, mid-October, was not only to catch the art fairs, but first of all, to go to a concert in Brussels, written up on my other, opera blog . We had some time to kill before the event, time enough to visit the John Baldessari exhibition at the Bozar, i.e. the very building the concert was due to take place in. It's uncanny how, when in the presence of really good art, you just know it. I liked it a lot. Back in Paris, the first fair I went to was actually neither Art Basel nor Paris Internationale, but Asia Now. Thi...
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Learning Farsi / Persian online

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About a year ago now, during the first French lockdown (March to May 2020), with time on my hands and no interruptions or distractions, I decided to see if I could find decent materials online to learn conversational Persian. I'd had the same sort of idea about 10 to 15 years ago, when I decided that, holidaying in Greece every summer, I really ought to speak some Greek. But back then, for Greek, I couldn't find anything modern or really conversational, just old-fashioned courses with lots of grammar and the assumption that everything should be written in the Greek alphabet, not transliterated. I was therefore pretty amazed at the quantity and especially the quality of what's now on offer online, free or at little cost, for conversational Persian. Two complementary courses At beginner level, I used two main courses in parallel: the Iran Heritage Foundation's Persian Language Online , and the website Chai and Conversation .  The Iran Heritage course is centred on three ...
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