Word: woode
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...zebra mare, which had been brought from the Cape of Good Hope and given to Queen Charlotte in 1762. This "painted African, ass," the first seen in England, was installed in the royal menagerie at Buckingham Gate. When he came to paint it, Stubbs set it in an English wood, its black-and-white hide in almost shocking contrast to the green tunnels of boscage and filtered shade that stretch behind it. It is as though one had taken a wrong turn in the Forest of Arden and encountered a mildly grazing apparition from another world...
...course, there is pathos in Stubbs' hunting scenes. His portrait of the Earl of Clarendon's gamekeeper about to cut a doe's throat in a darkening wood is a gravely haunting mixture of the archaic and the matter-of-fact. Venison, to be eaten, must be killed, but the thickening shadows seem to enfold a more sacrificial rite than the mere stocking of a larder. This, like all Stubbs' paintings, must also be seen as a manifesto of the supreme ideology of late 18th century England: the celebration and defense of property. If the wrong...
Aalto was crazy about wood. His enthusiasm grew out of a national aesthetic. Finns take an intense, quasi-mystical pleasure in their forested countryside, and timber is the country's economic mainstay. The hard, featureless blond birch that Aalto favored had been standard material for Finnish domestic objects. But in the polemical years around 1930, his abandonment of modern, mass-produced tubular steel was a retograde act. Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier had based their famous chairs and couches on state-of-the-art tubing. Aalto became convinced that tubular steel was "not satisfactory...
...particular buildings. A chair made for the Finnish civil guard headquarters is blunt and homely, but utility was the point: half a dozen or more could be stacked up for storage. A stacking armchair designed in 1929, its rear legs, back rail and arms a single piece of bent wood, is swanker, a kind of streamlined Thonet. Yet despite the curvature, it is still a plain old chair, a clunky seat stuck onto four legs-a goat just beginning, it appears, to turn into a gazelle...
...both of Sankai Juku's performance pieces, but they mix now with scenes of spiritual questing and transcendence, all performed with the erotic austerity of some deep sense memory. The style of buto now performed by Sankai Juku is an exercise in selective simplicity, like a piece of wood planed and smoothed so only the knot in the center remains...