| Landscape perspectives
DAVID HOCKNEY, known for incisive portraits and quirky urbanity, lived in Los Angeles for decades before rediscovering the English landscape of his youth. John Constable, his celebrated countryman, is so closely identified with early 19th century landscape painting that his favorite location, the Stour Valley in Suffolk, is known as Constable Country.
It isn't an obvious pairing, but Hockney is at the Huntington Library in San Marino, looking at "Constable's Great Landscapes: The Six-Foot Paintings." The exhibition is the first to round up all six of Constable's monumental masterpieces and the first to put his full-scale sketches on public view, along with about 50 related items.
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UNC Asheville art grads update work with show
ASHEVILLE - Work by more than 30 UNC Asheville alumni is on view through March 2 at UNC Ashevilles Highsmith University Union Gallery. A variety of media is represented, including ceramics, painting, photography and mixed media. Participating artists graduated from UNCA between 1972-2006. An opening reception will be 6-7:30 p.m. Feb. 17 in the gallery as part of UNC Ashevilles homecoming festivities. The gallery, open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily when classes are in session, is located on the ground floor of UNC Ashevilles Highsmith University Union. For more, call the student union at 232-5000. .
Armed with video cameras, residents help take down drug house
SPOKANE -- One Spokane neighborhood is safer after three simultaneous SWAT raids Wednesday night where detectives, armed with search warrants, fanned out in west central Spokane looking for identity thieves and drug dealers. The police were assisted by neighbors fed up with the activity in their neighborhood, who got the proof of the drug dealings going on using a video camera, the digital recordings of drug deals providing enough evidence for detectives to get a search warrant. Beginning in January neighbors began recording the non-stop traffic paying brief visits to Jeanette Johnson's home. In one week they recorded 56 cars and 67 people all visit Johnsons house. Residents behind the camera say they documented dozens of drugs deals as well as people smoking their purchases in their cars and the nuisance activities that follow the drug trade.
'What Just Happened?' Grabs More Big Names
I just can't decide whether I should be excited or worried about Robert De Niro's upcoming film, What Just Happened? In December, I brought you news of of the star once again teaming up with Barry Levinson (they collaborated on Wag the Dog) on an adaptation of Hollywood producer, Art Linson's memoir, which he turned into a screenplay. De Niro will play Ben, a movie producer based on Linson, who struggles with the treachery of Hollywood and a failed second marriage. All of this is not the worry -- it's the excellent, growing cast. There seems to be a fine line in cinema between a solid cast making a film stellar, and overwhelming talent leading to a disasterous, exploding film failure. However, Wag pulled it off, so the worry could be for naught. The Hollywood Reporter says that Stanley Tucci, John Turturro and Kristen Stewart have all signed on as co-stars.
Behind the Camera - Secret Life of Man Who Saved Jews From Nazis
He was responsible for bringing to the world a high-quality compact camera that changed the face of 35mm photography. But after dogged research by a British rabbi it has emerged that Ernest Leitz II had a secret but possibly greater claim to fame - saving Jews from Nazi persecution in prewar Germany.
Days after Hitler's rise to power, Leitz, who manufactured the Leica camera, began taking on a string of young Jewish apprentices from the town of Wetzlar where his optics factory began producing Leicas in 1925. He purposely trained them so that he could transfer them to New York to work in the Leica showroom on Fifth Avenue or at distributors across the US and thus rescue them from the fate that was to befall many other Jews.
Others were able to escape punishment for being related to Jews by marriage, thanks to Leitz's intervention.
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