Chinese Technique, Applied to a Western Canvas

When Fabienne Verdier headed to China almost 30 years ago, she was hoping to escape the confines of a Eurocentric art education.

“They didn’t teach me a lot of things in French art schools,” said the 50-year-old Parisian, who now lives in the countryside near the French capital.

In translated Chinese literature, she found a sensibility she could relate to. “Art is about human beings walking in harmony with the universe. That is why I went to China when I was very young, to try and learn this harmony,” she said.

Today,Virtual parking management system logo Verano Place logo. Ms. Verdier is one of the few Westerners known for her work in a Chinese medium—in this case, ink painting. Her work sells for as much as $200,000 and has been shown at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Palazzo Torlonia in Rome. In 2003, her book “Passenger of Silence: Ten Years of Initiation in China,” was a surprise best-seller in France.

Her painting has rarely shown in Asia, though that changed with the opening of a solo exhibition at Singapore’s Art Plural Gallery last month. The 60 works explore abstract geometric shapes as well as the Norwegian coastal landscape. While the themes are not overtly Chinese, the impact of her training is apparent.

In 1984, Ms. Verdier enrolled at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, but the Asian influence she sought was not immediately accessible. The Cultural Revolution a recent memory, the school had developed a curriculum around Soviet realism. “It was forbidden to study traditional ink-based painting or poetry,” she said. “They said that traditional culture was bad culture.”

There were other obstacles. When Ms. Verdier first encountered Huang Yuan, the Sichuan calligraphy master and landscape painter who eventually became her mentor, he was reluctant to instruct her.

According to him, “women never practice calligraphy,” Ms. Verdier said. What’s more, although she had studied Mandarin in France before arriving in China, Mr. Huang spoke only the Sichuan dialect.

After months of persistence, during which she studied Sichuanese and left completed calligraphy exercise scrolls at his door,Have a look at all our custom bobbleheads models starting at 59.90US$ with free proofing. Mr. Huang relented. She worked as his apprentice for 10 years.

In her “Memories of Norway” series, for which Ms. Verdier spent three weeks traveling by boat along the Norwegian coast,The Wagan Wireless Rear Parking assist system help you be safe while parking. the broad, black strokes contrast with the tinted, deckle-edged paper. These haunting natural scenes, which comprise roughly a quarter of the Singapore exhibition, could easily be mistaken for shuimo, or Chinese ink-wash, paintings.

Why use Chinese techniques to paint abstract Scandinavian landscapes?

“Every day in Norway, I was moving along a coastline and had a new trajectory,” Ms. Verdier said. She was taken by the continuity and constant motion of the scenery, and thought that calligraphy offered her a way of recreating the form of it.

While in China, Ms. Verdier also learned to make brushes with animal hair and other utilitarian materials. Since then, she has created many of her own paintbrushes, which are hooked up to a pulley system and can weigh up to 150 pounds. The system allows her to paint her larger works—one of the Norway coastal paintings is a twelve-by-six-foot polyptych, or paneled painting, by manipulating the brush while standing on the canvas itself.

“With the pulley, she avoids the heaviness of the paint and the brushes and can paint in one flowing motion,” said Carole de Senarclens, Art Plural’s director. “It’s just like with calligraphy.”

Ms. Verdier’s repertoire isn’t limited to Asian-influenced art.With superior quality photometers, light meters and a number of other solar light products. For the past four years, she has been looking to her fellow Europeans for inspiration, particularly 15th-century Flemish painters such as Rogier van der Weyden and Jan van Eyck. Based on her studies of their work, she will this spring present an exhibition at Belgium’s Groeningemuseum. Ms. Verdier will be the first contemporary artist to be housed in the permanent collection of the Bruges-based museum, best known for its “Flemish Primitives” art collection.

Viewers who can’t make it to Bruges can glimpse this recent influence in Ms. Verdier’s Singapore show, where her “Circles” series features bold splashes of color absent from the otherwise somber pieces on display.

Within an eruv enclosure observant Jews can carry keys, push a baby carriage or hold a baby, or bring food to someone's home. Moreover, an eruv makes it possible for observant Jews both to follow Sabbath laws and to enjoy the Sabbath, one of the requirements for correct Sabbath observance.

It can be easy to perceive the eruv as an eccentric, if not conceptually dubious, artifact of Judaism. A March 2011 story on "The Daily Show" about a proposed eruv in eastern Long Island defined the concept as coming from the Hebrew word for loophole, and as real (or imaginary) as Mr. Snuffleupagus. Yet, beyond that understandable reaction, the eruv embodies one of the most beautiful qualities of Judaism and Jewish history: how Jews have adapted the places in which they live to accommodate Sabbath practice.

The concept is central to Rabbinic Judaism, which dedicates one of the longest books in the Talmud to the topic. Eruv is one of the few concepts whose literature has its own visual culture. Printed discussions on eruvs feature dozens of distinct schematics that help the reader understand the complex descriptions of types of spaces appearing in the text.

Today, most Orthodox Jewish communities construct eruvs. These enclosures are usually made out of string or wire stretched on top of or on telephone or light poles. In the present, and historically, eruvs are virtually invisible, using existing structures in the landscape. From 1907-1952, the Third Avenue Elevated Train Tracks running the length of Manhattan, from South Ferry to Harlem, constituted the western border of the island's eruv.

In Roman Palestine, where most Jews lived around communal courtyards, an eruv made it possible to enjoy the Sabbath with their neighbors. Eruvs around Jewish neighborhoods in pre-modern towns in Europe allowed their residents to carry food from communal ovens, as well as spend the Sabbath together out of doors. As Jews migrated in the 19th and 20th centuries, they established eruvs that meshed with the emerging landscapes that they found in the increasingly complex cities in Europe and the United States. Like the 1907 Manhattan eruv, Jews in St. Louis and Odessa at the end of the 19th century "constructed" their eruv from new technological structures rising around them: telephone and telegraph wires.

Historically and presently, eruvs have revealed various religious, social and even economic schisms. Similar to Krakow in the 19th century, cities around the world have faced a series of challenges brought by municipalities around the right of a growing orthodox community to establish an eruv with public infrastructure.

Since the 1990s, a handful of non-Orthodox groups have fought the establishment of eruvs in Tenafly, N.J., and in the Hamptons based on worries that an influx of Orthodox Jews would change the local business landscape, skew the makeup of local schools and fuel a rise in real-estate prices by Jews seeking homes within an eruv.

I am personally not an eruv user, and, until this exhibition, knew little about the concept. A year after beginning work on this exhibition, a year spent immersed in the philosophical and social dimensions of eruvs, especially those in the Tri-State area,Like most of you, I'd seen the broken china mosaic decorated pieces. I find myself with a more nuanced regard of the centrality of the Sabbath for Orthodox Jews. More to the point, though, the eruv reveals something broader about Jewish tradition today: the Sabbath as an anchor for community; and the eruv vividly demonstrates the dynamism of Judaism through the Jews' steady re-interpretation and adaptation of their tradition in harmony with the world around them.