On the new Ontario Family Day, the weather was mild but wild and the National Gallery, usually closed on Mondays, opened its doors so that people could at least come in to see the special Fafard exhibition (if not their permanent collection), so in we went. As I mentioned in two recent blog posts, I have already seen this show, but Chris hadn't; I was interested to see how he'd respond to it.
What he particularly seemed to like was a work of art I didn't mention before: the horse Joe Fafard created for the MacLaren Against the Grain Fafard Field Project. We looked at it by means of a short documentary film, for which you can find the trailer here. Recommended!
The Field Horse stood 1,920 feet by 1,100 feet, 2700 hands high. Drawn on a canvas of winter wheat, canola, alfalfa, soybeans and corn ... shaped by nature and by a community of artists and farmers.
This is a modern version of the more permanent horses created out of chalk on British hillsides during the last 3000 years or so. Those people were fond of horses too, it seems.
1 comment:
One interesting part of the exhibition was the lack of growth the artist appears to have experienced over his career. The works were laid out room-by-room largely in chronological order and several of the art works created in the last few years could easily have appeared in the first room. There was only one work, a statue of woman and dog in the final room, that shewed significant growth. That was a much more mature (and interesting) work of art but seemed, at least from this exhibit, to have been an anomaly rather than an artistic growth.
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