GET TO KNOW ME CHALLENGE | Hello I'm @shanibeer: October 9 2018

The challenge set by @anomadsoul has passed now, but I was nominated by @akipponn who said she would like to get to know me before we meet up at Steemfest. Here's @akipponn's post.

The original challenge proposed a compilation of ten posts, a sort of blogging resumé, but I've decided to break the challenge up over a couple of posts, each one with a theme. This time it's art.

It includes posts from two of the exhibitions I've visited this year and one about anarchist cinema. It was a long time before I learned how to let pictures - paintings - speak to me. I would go round galleries, gazing at every picture in turn dutifully. Now I go in and see what takes my fancy, which ones evoke an emotional response.

Sometimes I take photographs, but more often now, I jot down bits and pieces, a detail, or a motif, or write down how it makes me feel. I don't worry too much these days about seeing everything, it's more organic, more like starting a relationship, moving backwards and forwards, going back to the same pictures time and again, absorbing them.

The following post was about the Red Star over Russia exhibition at Tate Modern, which looked at art and design during and after the civil war from 1917 to 1922 and then up until the death of Stalin. Some of it was inspiring, inventive, funny (especially the women). Some of it was terrifying and tremendously sad, especially after the hope of the early years.

Revolutionary Art and Design

Source: Tate Gallery London
The Nightmare of Future Wars - Workers of the World - Unite!
Unknown Artist I liked the graphic style and, especially, the colours of this picture. It's one I'm using to develop some themes for textiles.

In between art exhibitions, I spent a bit of time researching anarchist cinema. I'd like to make a film or two myself: just some shorts maybe two or three minutes long. The following post is about a talk by James Newton at the New Anarchist Research Group.

Anarchist Cinema - "unruly, violent, disruptive and playful"

It attracted the working classes, immigrants and women, who were meeting together in the dark in often smelly (a combination of urine and bleach) and disreputable places, and who were noisy, rowdy and unruly. The cinema was a place to congregate, meet your friends, possibly members of the opposite sex and generally have fun. It was subversive and watching the film was only part of the experience. It was a place of class solidarity.

Wandering about on youtube, chasing Jean Vigo, I came across this video of Martin Scorsese talking about the importance of visual literacy.

Back to the exhibitions and Picasso who has been my obsession this summer. I've seen many of his works before, and studied him briefly as part of a drawing course, but this year I began to know him better - the charmer and the monster.

PICASSO 1932: LOVE | FAME | TRAGEDY First Thoughts

Detail of a still life (Bust, Dish and Palette) with allusions to classical painting.

A small detail from a rather plain picture, you might even walk quickly by seeking out the more garish or outlandish pictures, some mocking the world, some challenging it. But something about this painting catches you and you go back, drawn in by its apparent simplicity and undercurrent of strangeness. The fruit are the brightest thing in the painting. I had to go and buy some coloured pencils from the shop and try and draw them myself.

This year, on Steemit (or its many alter egos), I've begun to find my passion, my interest, my selfishness in my desire to look, to make, to express. Something about blogging, however far the words fall short of the experience, seems to refine my ideas and what I want to do with myself. It's taken a long time.

In the original challenge, you were obliged (it's The Rules) to nominate three other people. I say, if you would like to write about yourself and collect together some of your posts for other people to read: please do have a go. It's free :)

Moving Around Office, Walking