Arts news

• Last of the desert cowboys: Zoe Childerley captures the tough life of California cattle rancher Billy Mitchell

  20-02-2016 23:42
  
  Billy Mitchell has spent his life farming the arid Mojave desert, continuously searching for water to slake the thirst of his 140 cattle. The photographer Zoe Childerley discovers what drives him on in his seventies – and hears of his struggle to convince his four daughters to carry on a 150-year tradition
  
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• Gustave Le Gray's Seascapes rendered clouds with a virtuosity that defeated all but the greatest landscape painters

  20-02-2016 23:38
  
  The series was the culmination of Le Gray's career, and was created between 1856 and 1858 on the shores of Brittany, Normandy and the Mediterranean
  
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• Farewell Bruce Lacey, multifaceted artist who was one of a kind

  20-02-2016 21:08
  
  The comedian, inventor and visionary described by Jeremy Deller as ‘Dr Dee reimagined by the Goons’ is dead at 88“Oddball comedian, actor, painter and sculptor, bricolage inventor of robots and automata, post-hippy shaman, errant guru to travelling bands of new age travellers, and who knows what else,” is how the Guardian critic Adrian Searle once described Bruce Lacey, who came to prominence in the late 1950s. Related: The Bruce Lacey Experience - reviewRelated: What bec
  
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• The Vivarini family: lesser-known protagonists of Venetian Renaissance painting

  20-02-2016 09:01
  
  The first major survey dedicated to all three artists of the Vivarini family opens at Palazzo Sarcinelli in the Veneto region today, 20 February. The trio from Murano included Antonio (around 1420-84), his younger brother Bartolomeo (around 1432-91) and Antonio's son Alvise (around 1445-1505). The Vivarini: the Splendour of Art between Gothic and Renaissance, which is organised by Civita Tre Venezie, brings together more than 30 works. Bartolomeo’s Madonna with Child and Saints (1465) fro
  
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• Umberto Eco, 84

  20-02-2016 06:47 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “As a semiotician, Mr. Eco sought to interpret cultures through their signs and symbols … and published more than 20 nonfiction books on these subjects while teaching at the University of Bologna … But rather than segregate his academic life from his popular fiction, Mr. Eco infused his seven novels with many of his scholarly preoccupations.”
  
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• Forest imagery hinges on the garage

  20-02-2016 06:30
  
  New Forest, Hampshire Nearly 60 species are depicted on the garage doors, a 10-year record of New Forest wildlifeThe rutted track to Peter’s garage doesn’t look as though it leads anywhere special. But over the past 10 years this friend of mine has been using his garage doors to record the wildlife in his garden and in the forest through which he began to lead walking parties when he retired to the area.Although a skilled draughtsman he was not an experienced painter. On the advice o
  
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• France to get its first Moroccan Cultural Centre in 2018

  20-02-2016 00:21
  
  The Royal government of Morocco will fund a €6.7m Moroccan Cultural Centre, due to open in Paris in late 2018, Le Monde reports. The plan was announced on Wednesday, 17 February at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, in the presence of the King of Morocco Mohammed VI and the French president François Hollande.The architect, Tarik Oualalou, has been working with the Paris mayor’s office and other government bureaus for two years on the project. An earlier plan for a cultural
  
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