McLaren Senna makes its way to Monaco

[caption id="attachment_8891" align="aligncenter" width="894"] Photo: Fight Aids Monaco[/caption] HSH Princess Stephanie celebrated International Aids Day by handing out eight memorial quilts at the Oceanographic Museum, each quilt carrying the names, birthdates and dates of death of 72 victims of the disease. Each quilt is four by four metres and the highly original works of art have been made by volunteers since 2011. Hervé Aeschbach, coordinator of Fight Aids Monaco, said: “This is a high point in the life of the association. First for the preparation of quilts, where volunteers and affiliates work to draw, sew, assemble. There are many hours of work, in which everyone talks about the people they honour. And then today, the presentation of quilts to the public is the second high point. Some of these 16-square-metre works of art will be exhibited at the Ministry of State, the National Council and the Lycée Technique et Hôtelier.” Princess Stephanie, the founding president of Fight Aids Monaco, said: “It’s very emotional. We are here to remember those who died in the physical suffering, and often in mental suffering, abandonment, isolation. We show them today that we are there, we support without judging them, even if they are no longer on this earth. It is important to take action because, nowadays, no one does anything in neighbouring countries, we talk a little on TV, and that’s it. HIV is a forgotten cause. Monaco is a small country but it does much more than large countries in terms of information, awareness, education. International Aids Day is made to remember that HIV exists, that HIV kills, it hits every day, regardless of social class, religion, ethnicity or skin colour.” This year marks 35 years since the discovery of the disease that was soon to be called AIDS.

[caption id="attachment_4946" align="alignleft" width="450"] Halliday painting Trevi Fountain in Rome. Photo: camburnfineart.com[/caption] British artist Alan Halliday, whose paintings caught the eye of the Monaco Embassy earlier this month at the Berkeley Square Art and Antiques Fair, has been invited to draw the dancers of Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo. The history of this distinguished ballet company goes back to Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, the dance tradition which Halliday has drawn and painted for the last forty years. Camburn Fine Art says that Halliday, who has more than 100 exhibitions worldwide, is arguably the best interpreter of theatre performances since Walter Sickert, and has produced a body of work that has involved all the major ballet companies including the Bolshoi, the Mariinsky and the Royal Ballet, Bejart, Stuttgart Ballet Dutch National Ballet, New York Ballet, Cincinnati Ballet (artist-in-residence there in 1996), the Caracalla Dance Theatre in Beirut and English National Ballet, where he is still resident artist; theatre companies such as the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon, the Royal National Theatre, the Peter Hall Company at the Old Vic, and Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London. Philip Franks, RSC actor and National Theatre director, has said of Halliday’s work: “Theatre is almost impossible to record, but Halliday’s paintings are alarmingly successful. They have the accuracy of observation, selectivity of memory and the intensity of imagination. They are what it was like.” Halliday, who now lives in France, by the Loire, was described by The Times art critic John Russell Taylor as having a style that is “ boldly calligraphic. Even his large-scale oil paintings depend largely on the definition of effective line while his smaller works in ink, gouache and pastel are built on a structure of amazingly fluid, spontaneous strokes of the pen; but they are in fact more than that. While the line may define the form, it is the colour which gives it form and life.”