Nudes, nudes, nudes …
I'VE ALWAYS envied photographers for the way girls will shed their gear just at the sight of a camera lens, while the rest of we fellows have to fight for it. Some photographers have made the study of the female physique an art form – just like any painter – and deservedly so.
One such is veteran Durban photographer Barry Comber, who has been pointing his lens at nude females for 40 years and more. Now he's taken it a step further, running the images through a computer to create evocative abstracts he calls fotografix.
Barry was a rugger bugger at school and also dedicated to art. He won rugby colours at DHS and got an A for art. Before matches he would paint or draw in the art department instead of warming up with the team.
After school he went in for photography and now he has fused that skill with his instinct for art. As he puts it: "Some of the images of the naked female form are more explicit than others but they are mostly understated abstracted symbols, created to intrigue the observer."
These understated abstracted symbols will be on display for a fortnight at the Artisan Gallery in Florida Road from October 2. The scrum of lovelies of yesteryear, eager to see for themselves just how abstracted - that is, unrecognisable – the images are is likely to be as intense as anything on the DHS rugby fields.
Starry night
ST CLEMENT'S, the weekly arts soiree, this week burst vividly back out of recess for a short spring season. Vividly because compere Pieter Scholtz was reading from the letters of Vincent van Gogh to his brother, Theo – letters in which he invokes in words the colours that so lit up his later post-impressionist work.
But you can't focus on Van Gogh's letters without a great sense of sadness at the contrast between the vibrancy and colour of his paintings and the drab melancholy of his actual existence in an asylum in France where painting was allowed and encouraged – though some of the inmates got a high by eating the lead-based paints.
Later, slides of his work were projected, to a soundtrack of Don McClean's lovely Starry Starry Night, dedicated to Van Gogh. But something went wrong with the soundtrack so the punters sang it themselves anyway, with great gusto.
This was induced mainly by the red wine – though I think some of them might have been eating paint.
Tiny turtles
STAFF at an aquarium in Birmingham, England, were astonished one morning to discover two tiny turtles of one of the most rare species in the world swimming in one of the tanks.
They had not realised one of their Roti Island snake-necked turtle females had laid eggs and hidden them in sand at the bottom of the tank.
The surprise appearance of the two brings the total captive population to just 250 worldwide, which is believed to be more than the population left in the wild.
The species is confined to a tiny area at a single small island, Roti, off Indonesia. It has been hunted almost to extinction for the pet trade.
A dreadful species is homo sapiens. If he's not hunting turtles to extinction for soup, he's hunting them to extinction for pets.
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Tailpiece
Last word
Sanity calms, but madness is more interesting.
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