Cornelis Drebbel was a Renaissance-era Dutch inventor who was famous for his ingenious gadgets and spectacular displays of mastery over light and air.
LAURIE ANDERSON MICHAEL McMILLEN, Bendigo, 2009, Birch and maple, 28 x 57 x 5 inches, Courtesy LA Louver, Venice CA. Two recent displays in Los Angeles set me on this perilous rumination, displays of mastery from artists who have long moved me with the twinned ineffability and logic - the simultaneous need to exist and existential improbability - of their work.
It delivered a worthy winner of the best-picture award, a decent array of acceptance speeches, a few japes on the red carpet and a steady display of ring-mastery by Ellen de Generes, who hosted for a second time.
Only one or two students out of every 100 displayed the level of mastery that the federal panel governing the tests defines as advanced, the government said.
He sees, finally, that behind this self-effacing display of apparently effortless mastery there are thousands of hours of deliberate, carefully considered practise.
It was, in the span of just a few hours, a dizzying display of the political mastery that Mr. Putin has over his country and his own image — a tough, can-do warrior; caring father of his people; and guarantor that no slight to Russia's pride will go unanswered.
But it is also testimony to how Mr. McConnell has been able to draw on 25 years of Congressional savvy to display a mastery of legislative maneuvering.
From this point on, Miller's best scenes display a mastery of conversation, a gift for sketching vivid characters on the margins of a play, and a narrative talent for seizing the spectator's attention from the start.
At least not to the English spectator raised on a diet of mannered off-spin and the odd glimpse of Qadir, whose seven for 96 at the Oval six years previously displayed a different kind of mastery, a sense of a rhythm being generated, an artistry of more subtle variations.
