Now showing at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden is Here She Comes Now, a selection of Peyton's portraits of musicians. Most of the subjects are from the pop world - but it seems the artist's eye was caught by a certain tenor. Representing opera is Jonas Kaufmann, as captured in the Ring, Carmen and Lohengrin.
"Humour sharpens the sense of all that is human," says Peter Klier, a retired headmaster who turned his hobbies - opera and painting - into his livelihood a few years ago. He's since published several books of operatically-themed illustrations.
His recent Wagner-laweia repositions Richard Wagner's greatest operas in a seaside postcard world of bewbs and botties, dotted with the sort of details that only a true Wagnerite could conjure up. Here are a few samples:
A new exhibition in Berlin takes a look at Wagner from the perspective of more than 50 contemporary artists. Wagner 2013. Kunstlerpositionen opens today at Akademie der Künste and runs to 17 February 2013.
A comprehensive website gives background information on the featured artists, who include directors, film makers, painters and designers, together with a series of video interviews.
David Hockney used his now-favourite creative tool - the iPad - to design this new 176m2 safety curtain for the Vienna State Opera. Echoing the current fetish for stage-within-a-stage productions, it features a giant prompter's box flanked by a proscenium and curtains.
The commission, unveiled yesterday, will greet visitors for a year, after which time it will be replaced by another artist's work.
It's not clear which of the several photos available reflect the true colours of the work, so I've included both extremes.
Everyone knows by now that 2013 marks the 200th anniversary of Richard Wagner's birth. But did you know that 2012 is a special year too?
Yes, it's 150 years since the Master visited the German city of Worms.
And the Wormsers (Wormsese?) are going all out to celebrate with a bumper art show. 30 international artists were invited to contribute to the exhibition Denk Mal an Wagner, which opened yesterday. Amongst them are the notorious Opernregisseur Achim Freyer, who contributes his designs for the LA Ring, and Ottmar Hörl, whose Wagners Hund project strewed 800 plastic models of Wagner's favourite dog around the park benches of Bayreuth in 2004. And there are a few more conventional portraits as well:
Anyone who has seen Steven Campbell's huge mural, which features the treasured Dame garlanded with a tiara of tears, her chin resting on Mount Rushmore, might suspect the Dame herself had paid the child to rip off the real pillow attached to the face. But no, it seems it was an accident. So for now, the Dame looms over the foyer with glue hanging from her chin while concert hall management wait to see if the insurance will stump up.
Sadly there's no image of the portrait online - the photo above shows the artist with some of his other work. Here's a glimpse of it from the Daily Record:
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