JTG Art Blog

2008-12-08T22:05:00.000-08:00

Alfred Hatmal

2008-12-08T22:02:00.000-08:00

Eqbal Mehdi

2008-12-08T21:57:00.001-08:00

Richard Crookes

2008-12-08T21:57:00.000-08:00

Lance Austin Olsen

2008-12-08T21:56:00.000-08:00

Kshitindranath Majumdar

2008-12-08T21:55:00.000-08:00

Ibrahim Zaman

Konya - Sema

Bolu - Gölcük

İstanbul

Balıkesir - Ayvalık

2008-08-16T10:17:00.000-07:00

Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008)

From With the Mist So Dense on the Bridge

I gaze at a rose in the distance
and the charcoal catches fire.
I gaze at my birthplace, farther out,
and the grave expands.”

I said, “Gently, do not die now.
Life is possible on the bridge.
The metaphor is wide enough:
it is an isthmus between this world and the next,
between exile and a neighboring land.”

He said to me, while the hawks hovered above us,
“Take my name as companion,
tell it about me, and you live
until the bridge brings you back to life tomorrow.
Do not say, ‘He lived or died aimlessly marginalized.’
Say, ‘He looked down on himself from above
and saw himself clothed in a tree.’”
And he was happy with that greeting.

If this road is long
there is work for me in mythology;

I was alone on the bridge on that day
after the Messiah withdrew to
a hill in the suburbs of Jericho, before the Resurrection.
I walk, and I cannot go in or out.
I turn like a sunflower.

At night, I am awakened
by the voice of the soldier on night watch
as she sings to her lover:

Promise me nothing,
do not send me a rose from Jericho!

2008-08-15T00:27:00.000-07:00

Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher
Nissim Ezekiel

To force the pace and never to be still
Is not the way of those who study birds
Or women. The best poets wait for words.

The hunt is not an exercise of will
But patient love relaxing on a hill
To note the movement of a timid wing;
Until the one who knows that she is loved
No longer waits but risks surrendering -
In this the poet finds his moral proved
Who never spoke before his spirit moved.

The slow movement seems, somehow, to say much more.
To watch the rarer birds, you have to go
Along deserted lanes and where the rivers flow
In silence near the source, or by a shore
Remote and thorny like the heart's dark floor.
And there the women slowly turn around,
Not only flesh and bone but myths of light
With darkness at the core, and sense is found
But poets lost in crooked, restless flight,
The deaf can hear, the blind recover sight.

2008-08-14T23:34:00.000-07:00

Of Paintings and Poetry

In his 1918 review of the Imagist movement, A Retrospect, Ezra Pound discusses, amongst other things, the difference between painting a landscape and writing a poem about it. He argues that the difference is that the painter describes the landscape while the poet presents it.

It's a nice distinction, and one that you (or I) might care to argue with. However, whether or not you accept Pound's position, it does raise an interesting question about the differences between the two arts. It also raises a number of considerations regarding the whole area of those poets who write about art and artists, a group that includes Pound himself, regardless of his proscriptions.

More here..

2008-08-04T09:40:00.000-07:00

Paul Guiragossian (Lebanon, 1927-1993) Untitled

Khosrow Hassanzadeh (Iran, b.1963) Ashura

Ayesha Mariam Durrani (Pakistan, b. 1975) Mannequins

2008-08-04T09:39:00.000-07:00

Youssef Kamel (Egypt, 1890-1971) Cairo street scene

Francis Newton Souza (India, 1924-2002) Houses in Hampstead

Ram Kumar (India, b. 1924) Untitled (Landscape)

Sohrab Sepehri (Iran, 1928-1980) Kashan

2008-08-04T09:34:00.000-07:00

Beacons
Charles Baudelaire

Rubens, garden of idleness watered by oblivion,
Where quick flesh pillows the impotence of dreams,
Where life's affluence writhes in eddying abandon
Like air in the air, or water in streams.

Leonardo da Vinci, deep mirror of darkness,
Where angels appear, their smiles charged with mystery
And tenderness, within the shadowy enclosures
Of pines and glaciers that shut in their country.

Rembrandt, tragic hospital re-echoing round a sigh;
A tall crucifix for only ornament
Traversed obliquely by a single wintry ray
Through which prayers rise, exhaling from excrement.

Michelangelo, no man's land where Hercules and Christ
Are at one; where powerful phantoms in crowds
Erect themselves deliberately in darkening twilights,
With pressed, rigid fingers ripping open their shrouds.

Rage of the wrestler, impudence of the faun;
Puget the convict's melancholy emperor,
Caging the lion's pride in a weak, jaundiced man,
Deducing beauty from crime, vice and terror.

Watteau, carnival where many a distinguished soul
Flutters like a moth, lost in the brilliance
Of chandeliers shedding frivolity on the cool
Clear decors enclosing the changes of the dance.

Goya, nightmare compact of things incredible:
Foetuses fried for a witch's sabbath feast;
An old woman at a mirror, a little naked girl
Lowering an artful stocking to tempt a devil's lust.

Delacroix, blood lake haunted by evil angels
In the permanent green darkness of a forest of firs,
Where under a stricken sky a muffled sigh fills
The air like a faintly echoed fanfare of Weber's.

Such, O Lord, are the maledictions, the tears,
The ecstasies, the blasphemies, the cries of Te Deum
Re-echoing along labyrinthine corridors:
A dream for mortal hearts distilled from divine opium,

The watchword reiterated by sentinels
A thousand times, the message whispered from post to post,
A beacon burning on a thousand citadels,
A call of all the hunters lost in the great forest.

For is this not indeed, O Lord, the best witness
That our dignity can render to Your pity,
This tide of tears which age after age gathers
To fail and fall on the shore of Your eternity?

2008-08-04T08:13:00.000-07:00

Il Ho

2008-08-04T08:12:00.000-07:00

Laurent Koller

2008-08-04T07:59:00.000-07:00

Bayad plays the oud to The Lady. from the Riyad & Bayad , Arabic tale

2008-08-04T07:30:00.000-07:00

By William Blake (1757–1827)

MY Spectre around me night and day
Like a wild beast guards my way;
My Emanation far within
Weeps incessantly for my sin.

‘A fathomless and boundless deep,
There we wander, there we weep;
On the hungry craving wind
My Spectre follows thee behind.

‘He scents thy footsteps in the snow
Wheresoever thou dost go,
Thro’ the wintry hail and rain.
When wilt thou return again?

’Dost thou not in pride and scorn
Fill with tempests all my morn,
And with jealousies and fears
Fill my pleasant nights with tears?

‘Seven of my sweet loves thy knife
Has bereavèd of their life.
Their marble tombs I built with tears,
And with cold and shuddering fears.

‘Seven more loves weep night and day
Round the tombs where my loves lay,
And seven more loves attend each night
Around my couch with torches bright.

‘And seven more loves in my bed
Crown with wine my mournful head,
Pitying and forgiving all
Thy transgressions great and small.

‘When wilt thou return and view
My loves, and them to life renew?
When wilt thou return and live?
When wilt thou pity as I forgive?’

‘O’er my sins thou sit and moan:
Hast thou no sins of thy own?
O’er my sins thou sit and weep,
And lull thy own sins fast asleep.

‘What transgressions I commit
Are for thy transgressions fit.
They thy harlots, thou their slave;
And my bed becomes their grave.

‘Never, never, I return:
Still for victory I burn.
Living, thee alone I’ll have;
And when dead I’ll be thy grave.

‘Thro’ the Heaven and Earth and Hell
Thou shalt never, quell:
I will fly and thou pursue:
Night and morn the flight renew.’

‘Poor, pale, pitiable form
That I follow in a storm;
Iron tears and groans of lead
Bind around my aching head.

‘Till I turn from Female love
And root up the Infernal Grove,
I shall never worthy be
To step into Eternity.

‘And, to end thy cruel mocks,
Annihilate thee on the rocks,
And another form create
To be subservient to my fate.

‘Let us agree to give up love,
And root up the Infernal Grove;
Then shall we return and see
The worlds of happy Eternity.

‘And throughout all Eternity
I forgive you, you forgive me.
As our dear Redeemer said:
“This the Wine, and this the Bread.”’

2008-03-16T00:38:00.000-07:00

Asia Week in New York

Wang Xizhi Watching Geese by Qian Xuan

Detail of Qian Xuan's “Wang Xizhi Watching Geese.”

Night-Shining White by Han Gan

Fu Sheng Transmitting the Book of Documents by Du Jin

Isn’t part of the point of our Western passion for Asian art to find a serenity that we can’t seem to cook up on our own, a metabolic slow-down, a less-is-more state of grace? One 15th-century Chinese writer recorded such an ideal in a lifestyle wish list that includes: “A nice cottage. A clean table. A clear sky with a beautiful moon. A vase of flowers. No cares of the world.” He was describing the optimum environment for looking at art, but also for living artfully.

“Anatomy of a Masterpiece” has all the elements on his list, and one more: instruction. The curator, Maxwell K. Hearn of the Met’s Asian art department, has given the museum’s lofty Chinese painting and calligraphy galleries the intimacy of a teaching collection, with a limited number of objects accompanied by short labels and photographic enlargements of details. The labels are thematic and ruminative, approaching paintings through ideas rather than dynasties. The photographs are a revelation.
Continued here..

2008-03-16T00:29:00.000-07:00

No one was born an adult - Colors

By Ali Messaoudi

2008-03-02T05:12:00.000-08:00

Safwan Dahoul

2008-03-02T05:01:00.000-08:00

The Dacca Gauzes
Agha Shahid Ali

“…for a whole year he sought

to accumulate the most exquisite

Dacca gauzes.”

– Oscar Wilde /The Picture of Dorian Gray

Those transparent Dacca gauzes

known as woven air, running

water, evening dew:

a dead art now, dead over
a hundred years. ‘No one
now knows,’ my grandmother says,

‘what it was to wear
or touch that cloth.’ She wore
it once, an heirloom sari from

her mother’s dowry, proved
genuine when it was pulled, all
six yards, through a ring.

Years later when it tore,
many handkerchiefs embroidered
with gold-thread paisleys

were distributed among
the nieces and daughters-in-law.
Those too now lost.

In history we learned: the hands
of weavers were amputated,
the looms of Bengal silenced,

and the cotton shipped raw
by the British to England.
History of little use to her,

my grandmother just says
how the muslins of today
seem so coarse and that only

in autumn, should one wake up
at dawn to pray, can one
feel that same texture again.

One morning, she says, the air
was dew-starched: she pulled
it absently through her ring.

2008-03-02T04:52:00.000-08:00

The Language Of Sin

By Adonis

I burn my inheritance, I say:

"My land is virgin, and no graves in my youth."

I transcend both God and Satan

(my path goes beyond the paths of God and Satan).

I go across in my book,

in the procession of the luminous thunderbolt,

the procession of the green thunderbolt,

shouting:

"After me there's no Paradise, no Fall,"

and abolishing the language of sin.

2008-03-02T04:45:00.000-08:00

S H Raza

2008-03-02T04:44:00.000-08:00

Özlem Ünel

2008-02-01T21:43:00.000-08:00

Frontier Walls

By Forough Farrokhzad

Return with me to that star,
Return with me
To that star far away
from the frozen seasons of the earth and its

ways to measure and understand

Where no one fears light.
Return with me
To the start of creation
To the fragrant core of a fertilized egg
To the moment I was born from you
Return with me, you have left me incomplete.

Translated by Fatemeh Keshavarz

2008-02-01T10:55:00.000-08:00

Mudassar Manzoor

At the twilight, a moon appeared in the sky;

Then it landed on earth to look at me.

Like a hawk stealing a bird at the time of prey;

That moon stole me and rushed back into the sky.

I looked at myself, I did not see me anymore;

For in that moon, my body turned as fine as soul.

The nine spheres disappeared in that moon;

The ship of my existence drowned in that sea.

جلال الدين محمد رومي

1207-1273 CE.

2008-02-01T10:46:00.000-08:00

Shirin Neshat

2008-02-01T07:44:00.000-08:00

My Message
Cecil Rajendra

And now you ask
what is my message
I say with Nabokov
I am a poet
not a postman
I have no message.

but I want the cadences
of my verse to crack
the carapace of indifference
prise open torpid eyelids
thick-coated with silver.

I want syllables
that will dance, pirouette
in the fantasies of nymphets
I want vowels that float
into the dreams of old men.

I want my consonants
to project kaleidoscopic visions
on the screens of the blind
& on the eardrums of the deaf
I want pentameters that sing
like ten thousand mandolins.

I want such rhythms
as will shake pine
angsana, oak & meranti,
out of their pacific
slumber, uproot them-
selves, hurdle over
buzz-saw & bull-dozer
and rush to crush
with long heavy toes
merchants of defoliants.

I want every punctuation --
full-stop, comma & semi-colon
to turn into a grain of barley,
millet, maize, wheat or rice
in the mouths of our hungry;
I want each & every metaphor
to metamorphose into a rooftop
over the heads of our homeless.

I want the assonances
of my songs to put smiles
on the faces of the sick,
the destitute & the lonely,
pump adrenaline into the veins
of every farmer & worker
the battle-scarred & the weary.

and yes, yes, I want my poems
to leap out from the page
rip off the covers of my books
and march forthrightly to
that sea of somnolent humanity
lay bare the verbs, vowels
syllables, consonants . . . & say
"these are my sores, my wounds:
this is my distended belly:
here I went ragged and hungry:
in that place I bled, was tortured;
and on this electric cross I died.
Brothers, sisters, HERE I AM."

via 3QD

2008-01-19T21:51:00.000-08:00

Gilbert Pearse

2008-01-19T21:35:00.000-08:00

Vincent Insa

2008-01-19T21:33:00.000-08:00

Anne Jordan

2008-01-01T05:37:00.000-08:00

Ismail Gulgee

1926-2007

Homeland

By Ibrahim Nasrallah

Under the yoke of our mornings

the sun crumbles

and in the darkness of our steps

our panting breath is on fire

these incomplete homelands

in which we we appear to be

nothing more than prisoners of war

2008-01-01T05:33:00.000-08:00

Blood+Honey

by Nathalie Mohadjer

The combination of the literal words Blood+Honey in Turkish means Balkans.

The Balkans have always been a region of borders and wars, the “Backyard” and the “Problem Child” of Europe. The war in BiH (Bosnia – Herzegovina) from 1992 until 1995 took a great toll on human life and infrastructure. In 1998, the administration of the BiH Federation counted 242,330 deaths, 36,470 missing and 175,286 wounded.

More than 12,000 corpses have been exhumed from around 250 mass-graves in BiH after the end of the war. The total number of refugees is 2,200,000.

The financial damages have been estimated by the World Bank to lie between 15 to 20 billion dollars.

Countless cultural artifacts, such as the old bridge of Mostar, the Ferhadija Mosque in Banja Luka and the National Library in Sarajevo were either completely destroyed or badly damaged.

The consequences of the war are, however, much more extensive than the damage that can be observed. In the long term, the ideology of war from ethnic and spatial perspectives is the costliest mortgage that future generations will have to bear. Near the city of Tuzla, in the heart of Bosnia, around 100 refugee camps can be found today. One of these camps is Grab Potok. It was possible to visit Grab Potog for four weeks in November 2004 via the support of the Non-Governmental Organization Snaga Zéne.

Around 100 people live in Grab Potog, split into two wooden barracks. The refugees have been living here since the middle of 1995, and originally come from the region around Srebrenica. In the past they were all self-sufficient and hard-working farmers, today they depend on food donations. Every family lives in a room about 15 square meters large, which serves as kitchen, living room and bedroom. Rain comes through the ceiling, which causes mold and cold air seeps into the rooms because of drafty windows. The shared toilets have standing water.

The camp is isolated from Bosnian society, because it is in the middle of the forest and between the mountains. The rest of the population is far away, which makes the social behavior of these people somewhat disturbed. Their relations to each other are unclear and there are always conflicts. A great degree of violent potential and the consumption of drugs influence everyday life. Frustration about their living situation and poverty is very high, which are compounded by lived traumas that lie just under the surface and from time to time even become visible. There are many children in Grab Potok, who don’t know where they came from – for them the camp is their home. They have behavioral problems and are disturbed, since they only live in this social environment.

The necessity for this and many other such camps was brought about by the “Massacre of Srebrenica”. In July of 1995, Serbian soldiers went through Srebrenica, suburb of Potocare and neighboring Bratonac, stormed the houses and captured all of the men between the ages of 16 and 60. They marched their captives to nearby forests and executed them. It was the most tragic mass-murder in Europe since 1945. Ten years after the end of the war Srebrenica is virtually a ghost town.

In earlier times it was a place for relaxation and escape because of the healing springs and beautiful forests. Very few people returned to Srebrenica; only old women live in Potocare, women who lost their husbands in the massacre of 1995. If they look out their windows, they see the monument to the massacred victims and the attached cemetery – where the identified victims have been put to rest. Across from the monument, on the other side of the only street that leads to Srebrenica, is the “Factory”, which was used as a concentration camp during the Serbian occupation. Almost every month new graves are dug, because there are many executed people not yet identified.

The International Commission for Missing People (ICMP), continuously receive new white body bags. Currently 3000 of these bags can be found at the Corpse Halls of ICMP Tuzla, together with gathered bones from the mass graves in the forests.

It takes a long time for a person to be identified. First a small part of a bone is cleaned, and then a sample is taken. The sample is sent to the USA, where the DNA is analyzed and entered into a computer. This data is then manually compared to data from surviving family members, in order to determine exactly if the DNA is from a brother, father or husband. Across the world there are workgroups on assignment from the ICMP with the task of taking blood samples from survivors who have reported a missing family member. To date only 1880 corpses have been identified.

In Bosnia-Herzegovina the status-quo is standstill and social development is advancing at snail’s pace. And even though the tragic events are not that far behind us, hate is being promoted by nationalistic political parties and the return of the refugees to their hometowns is still not acceptable to the people currently living there. A heavy burden rests on the shoulders of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and it is being passed from generation to generation.

— Nathalie Mohadjer

more here

2008-01-01T05:27:00.000-08:00

Ibrahim Nasrallah

Bewildered

In the beginning
the horses said, we need plains
the eagles said, we need summits
the snakes said, we need lairs
but humans remained bewildered.

2008-01-01T05:19:00.000-08:00

Laila Shahzada

2008-01-01T05:01:00.001-08:00

Shirin Neshat

2007-12-25T23:44:00.000-08:00

Josh Bowe

My work is largely figurative and often very expressive in both colour and mark quality. I work in various media however I find the immediacy of ink very helpful especially when working in the life drawing room. As stated above I have held, and continue to gain numerous solo exhibitions. Because of working with different media and style the most recurring theme is one of visual dynamism.

Website

2007-12-25T23:41:00.000-08:00

Shiau Peng Chen

Shiau-Peng Chen’s works unwittingly lead the viewers to look for clues of various abstract traditions in modern paintings. The austere simplicity with which those paintings are produced demonstrates their intimate relationship with geometric abstraction, Minimalism, Suprematism, and Concrete Art.

However, whether Chen’s exploration is simply continuous with these traditions is still a question worth pondering. As a matter of fact, as long as we attempt to establish a critical perspective, we encounter this question immediately. Before we could really get into Chen’s paintings, we must ask ourselves: how could we distance ourselves from the temptation of the epistemic question, the inescapable question of the whole “abstract traditions”? The distance is critical in the process of viewing Chen’s works.

From Art Today (Taipei) March 2003, By Yu, Wei

Website

2007-12-25T23:31:00.000-08:00

Flying Machine above VCA

By Shiau Peng-Chen

Website

2007-12-24T22:39:00.000-08:00

Dream Deferred

by Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

Like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore--

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over--

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

2007-12-23T05:31:00.000-08:00

Karim Shaaban

2007-12-23T05:13:00.000-08:00

In the way of the thousand suns...

Art work by Pilar Copete

The Bhagavad-Gita says, “If the light of the thousand suns suddenly rose in the sky, its splendor would be comparable to the splendor of the Supreme Spirit.”

In the “way of the thousand suns,” we discover vitality and dynamism, uniting energies, warm and cold light, a horizon deprived of shadows where one can sigh, the happy laughter that breaks the silence, the sparkle of final reward.

The horse, a pretext to detain with strokes the gallop or the step of two spirits joining in harmony.

Thus, with the light of the thousand suns, I search for the calligraphies,

In the way of the thousand suns.

I was born in Bogotá, under a sign that binds me to the earth. Mine is a tropical country, and I discovered its light behind the fresh shoots of native trees and the rest of dew on their tender branches.

In search of the simplicity of the invisible forces of color’s structure and vitality, I studied art at the Corcoran School of Washington, D.C., and at the Ernesto de la Cárcova School in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Leaving the southern spring, I arrived in the East and still remember the shadow of that sacred tree under which I learned and practiced meditation and inner silence. I traveled with monks and lived with miners.

Today, before the sacred space of landscape, body harmony, the rhythm and movement of gesture, I trace contours with the soul, with no haste to arrive to the other shore. I cross the river and discover in it lights and shadows, like the swing of a never-ending game.

I have a premonition of the world with the look of a shooting star and the latent gesture of a traceless witness.

2007-12-23T05:10:00.000-08:00

Pilar Copete

Part II

2007-12-22T11:42:00.000-08:00

RAQS (Dance)

By Noon Meem Rashid

Translated by Ayesha Khanna

ai merii ham_raqs mujh ko thaam le

zindagii se bhaag kar aayaa huu.N mai.n

Dar se larazaa.N huu.N kahii.n aisaa na ho

raqs_gaah ke chor daravaaze se aakar zindagii

Dhuu.NDh le mujh ko nishaa.N paa le meraa

aur jurm-e-aish karate dekh le

come, my fellow dancer, hold me

from life I have fled and arrived

quivering with fear

that in this brothel, life may follow

and find me intoxicated

see me decadent, corrupt and debauched

ai merii ham_raqs mujh ko thaam le

raqs kii ye gardishe.n

ek mubaham aasiyaa ke daur hai.n

kaisi sargarmii se Gam ko rau.ndataa jaataa huu.N mai.n

jii me.n kahataa huu.N ki haa.N

raqs_gaah me.n zindagii ke jhaa.Nkane se peshtar

kulfato.n kaa sang_rezaa ek bhii rahane na paaye

come, my fellow dancer, hold me

these cycles of dance

enigmatic revolutions of sin

with what zeal I spin the wheels of sorrow

and in my mind, I agree

before entering this brothel

not one speck of my troubles should remain

ai merii ham_raqs mujh ko thaam le

zindagii mere liye

ek Khuunii bhe.Diye se kam nahii.n

ai hasii.n-o-ajanabii aurat usii ke Dar se mai.n

ho rahaa huu.N lamhaa lamhaa aur bhii tere qariib

jaanataa huu.N tuu merii jaa.N bhii nahii.n

tujh se milane kaa phir imkaa.N bhii nahii.n

tuu merii aarazuuo.n kii magar tamsiil hai

jo rahii mujh se gurezaa.N aaj tak

come, my fellow dancer, hold me

for me life

is no less than a surreptitious murderer

o beautiful stranger, from its very door

slowly, I come closer to you

knowing you are not my love

and meeting you is unlikely

but still you are that one desire

which eludes me till today

ai merii ham_raqs mujh ko thaam le

ahad-e-paariinaa kaa mai.n insaa.N nahii.n

bandagii se is dar-o-diivaar kii

ho chukii hai.n Khvaahishe.n be-soz-o-rang-o-naatavaa.N

jism se tere lipaT sakataa to huu.N

zindagii par mai.n jhapaT sakataa nahii.n

is liye ab thaam le

ai hasii.n-o-ajanabii aurat mujhe ab thaam le

come, my fellow dancer, hold me

of no divine promise am I a follower

and bondage to this place

has weakened all desire for abstinence

to your body I can cling

but life I cannot battle

so hold me now

o beautiful stranger hold me now

2007-12-21T23:54:00.000-08:00

The Pope’s Kitchen

By Gioachino Giuseppe Belli

The cook wanted to show me,
this morning, all the stuff he bought
for the most holy kitchen. Kitchen?
Some kitchen! You’d think it was a sea-port.

Piles of things, pots and pans and cauldrons,
haunches of veal and beef,
chickens, eggs, milk, fish, veg, pork,
game and all kinds of choice cuts.

So I says: “Your Holy Father does himself all right!”
He says: “You’ve not seen the sideboard,
where praise be there’s as much again.”
I says: “Pardon me, mate!
There must be someone grand for dinner then?”
“Come off it,” he says, “the Pope always eats on his own.”

2007-12-21T23:46:00.000-08:00

Mehmet Can şahin

2007-12-21T23:42:00.000-08:00

Susann Brox Nilsen

2007-12-20T23:08:00.000-08:00

How to Eat a Wolf
By Sharanya Manivannan

Does all lust start and
end like this? Don’t get me
wrong. I loved my wolf.
I held him tethered like
a pussycat. I nursed
the rumble in his belly
with hands gentle as a burglar’s.
He lived on milk
and blood and ocean. He
had violets for his furs.

It’s just that he was
beginning to devour me.
He nuzzled me with claws,
fondled me with fangs
sharp as yearning
He snaked a tongue so
hungry in its kiss it
turned my body to salt.

How do you douse a
dervish swirl? I asked.
Devour it, you said.

So I fantasised
about eating his balls,
rolling them in semolina
seeds and roasting them
golden. I got blooddrunk
on the thought of the
crisp tender cartilage of his ear,
left to simmer in tequila
and cilantro. The dry teats turned
sweet when baked with cinnamon
applesauce, or drizzled with chocolate.
The tangy musk of austerely steamed eyelid.

I set traps.

Mine is the deepest void,
the deepest void you’ll ever know.
And so I lured him to a well.
A wolf can drown in its own
wetness. But mine swam
and lapped and doggypaddled
until I waded back in to get him.

Mine is the darkest smoulder,
the darkest smoulder you’ll ever know.
And so I conspired to let him burn.
A wolf can poach in its own juices.
But mine danced on coals and leapt
ablaze, until I pussyfooted back in to get him.

I became desperate.
I preached to my wolf
about suicide, proselytized
about reincarnation. Come back
as a sleepy kitten, I said.
Come back as a hibernating bear.
Come back as a snail with a flag trail of surrender.
But my love was indefatigable. It was
volcano and oceanic tremor. It was a black lace bra and
too much jazz at 3 a.m.
My love was as big as betrayal.
I pleaded and pleaded until

you finally looked up and said,
You can only kill a wolf
you don’t want to have,
and only then did I see that
your lovewas exactlythe size of two fists.

2007-12-09T00:03:00.000-08:00

Voyages

Julien Sinzogan

Les Voiles du Retour

L' Armada du Retour

Bridges of Creepers

Ships Aground or Exorcism

Julien Sinzogan was born in the Republic of Benin, once one of the largest slave-trading ports on the West African coast. His works often feature ships and depict the mythical return journeys that carried away the people of Benin and other areas of West Africa to be slaves in the New World. Julien Sinzogan lives and works in Paris. After studying architecture in Tashkent and then in Paris, he now devotes his time to drawing and painting. He often combines monochrome drawing with coloured forms which draw upon the sources of vodun and history in Benin.

2007-12-08T23:50:00.000-08:00

Laila Khan Rajpal

From Dreams have no Titles

2007-12-08T23:35:00.000-08:00

Scenes from Bukhara

By Ulughbek Mukhamed

2007-12-08T23:24:00.000-08:00

Anonymous

We lost ourselves the day we were born
Since then the search began
To find those of our family

We were confused
For we were given a family of birth
We had friends from our situation
In this funny place called “society”
We travelled
And felt the semblance of the primeval sensation of life
We wondered why we felt at home on the road
We were made to believe we were a little strange
For how many stay away from “home” for so long?
How many become the rebels we did?

We wandered on empty streets in the night
Feeling the wind of the sea, the river, the mountains of wherever we lived…
We had so many questions and no answers we found
We searches, always searched
We searched even for ourselves…

We delved in unfathomable depths of the being
We rowed for months in strange alien seas
We searched for friends of the soul
Somehow no friends we had, ever
Seemed like friends enough…
How could we explain what “friends” meant to us?
Friends were beings so akin to us
They could read our minds
Walk in step with us on those roads of life
Friends were those who travelled with us
Climbed mountains, forged rivers, conquered seas…
Friends were one life breath, strangely
Such few “friends” we ever found in this world

We stayed aloof…from so much
The norms, the religions, thought processes of the world
We risked our lives, our positions, our family relations for our beliefs

We did the things we believed in
Worked for none but ourselves
We were called selfish for we cared
About our own well being…

We fought, we battled,
We ran like mad from so many, so much
We hid, we absconded, we hibernated

Some of us found our soulmates
Some of us didn’t
Some of us had homes, children, love
Some of us lived lonely in far away homes
Some of us were fulfilled having found the love
The understanding we seeked, the minds akin to ours
Some of us…after a long time stopped searching having understood that in some lifetimes we were meant to be alone
Our soulmates parted from us, living another life…
May be in another world, probably another time zone…

We, the seekers, the thinkers, the rebels
We ache to get together for nowhere seems like home
We long for company of similar minds, sensibilities
We hurt, we bleed, we pain, we die…
But we live completely, every moment of our lives
Live the good and bad as same
Give all of ourselves to the world…
To nature… to art…
For there is no other way to live we know
We seek answers all the time
We question all the time

We are probably the only ones who know how deep pain carves its being into us
And how full happiness makes us feel…
We are comfortable with extremes
We are comfortable with tears, with abandonment, with aloneness…

We, the unknown ones
We, the misfits
We, the seekers, the thinkers, the rebels…

2007-12-06T00:00:00.000-08:00

HASSAN MASSOUDY

Hassan Massoudy was born in 1944 in Najef, southern Iraq, growing up in a traditional Iraqi society. He moved to Baghdad in 1961 learning the various classic styles of calligraphy studying graphic design, communication arts and fine arts. His desire to study art, coupled with the political events in Iraq at the time, saw him leave for Paris in 1969 where he enrolled at the École des Beaux- Arts. Massoudy was not only influenced by the great Arabic masters but also the painters Leger, Matisse, Soulages and Picasso. After receiving his degree in 1975 he returned to calligraphy in a more enriched way, employing classical styles in a newer and freer manner. For thirteen years from 1972 he toured Europe with his Arabesque performance combining music, poetry and calligraphy.

“Sur terre, il y a place pour tous”

- Schiller

“Je me suis abreuvé d’amour, verre après verre, sans que s’épuise cette boisson sans que je sois désaltéré”

- Al-Genïd 8thC

“Méfiez-vous des rêves de jeunesse, ils finissent toujours par se réaliser”

- Goethe 1749-1832

“J’ai compris le sens de l’amour dans le reflet de ton regard”

- Ibn Zaydoun 11thC

“Si vous venez vers moi en marchant, c’est en courant que je viendrai vers vous”

- Rumi 13thC

"Tout danseur désire l’envol”

- H. Michaux

“Si je meurs par crainte du désespoir, l’espoir me ressucite. Que de fois je suis mort et combien de fois j’ai ressucité.”

- Majnoun Layla 7thC

“Je t’aime de deux amours: L’amour-passion et l’amour que tu mérites.”

- Rabia Al Adawiyya 8thC

Hassan Massoudy is an artist for whom the word itself remains the most sublime creative force. His creations are a subtle mix of present and past, oriental and occidental, tradition and modernity. The words and phrases, which are the inspiration for his calligraphy, are drawn from proverbs, poets and philosophers throughout the centuries, ranging from St. Augustine, Virgil and Ibn’ Arabi to Baudelaire and Rousseau.

Peace and tolerance are central themes of his work leading him to work with Amnesty International, UNICEF and other related organisations.

Massoudy’s work was exhibited and used as the primary promotional image for the British Museum’s 2006 exhibition, Word Into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East. This is his first solo exhibition at the October Gallery.

"The gestures of the calligrapher become an open space, welcoming the words of the poet and the imagination of the onlooker".

more here

2007-12-05T07:14:00.001-08:00

Musicality of Emotions

Maryse Casol (born in France, 1957) of Italian and French parentage, is a contemporary artist painter.Living in the south of France, and being much imbued with numerous journeys all over the world,Maryse Casol is renowned for her exotic landscapes and blazing still lifes.

Jardin Secret

Tempete en Pays Catalan

Mélodie Yeddish

Cerisiers en fleurs

Fado Romantique

Géranium de Murano

Reveries

Driven by her love for philosophy and a constant desire for spiritual and mystic transcendence, shestudied the Scriptures of the Torah, and the thoughts of famous philosophers such as Aristotle,Epictetus, Maimonides, and Spinoza.Moved by the desire to express the imponderable musicality of emotions, and the persistence of herpassionate love for art, Maryse Casol enrolled at the Académie Arts et Beaux-Arts in Varennes, Quebec,where she had the great honour to receive comprehensive training over several years from SamAberg, Master, international Art Critic and Art Historian.Completing her studies with resounding success, she integrated the rhetoric of the compositionalaesthetics of art, both classical and modern, with art history, iconographical, semiotic andphilosophical concepts. She also took courses in comparative art criticism covering the variousmovements in painting.

What Casol intends to express in her works, "is not the visible concrete, but the imponderable musicality ofemotions and the quintessence of the intangible". In September 2007, Casol dedicated a rare piece of her art collection, Melodia Gitana, to the SheikhMohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum of Dubai.

website

2007-12-05T06:39:00.000-08:00

Dasht-e-Tanhai

By Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Translated by Ayesha Kaljuvee

dasht-e-tanhaai meiN,

ai jaan-e-jahaaN, larzaaN haiN

teri awaaz ke saaye

tere honThoN ke saraab

dasht-e-tanhaai meiN

duuri ke Khas-o-Khaak talei

Khil rahe haiN tere pehluu ke samaN auR gulaab

uTh rahii hai kahiiN quRbat

se teri saaNs ki aaNch

apni Khushbuu meiN sulagtii

hui maddham maddham

duur ufaq paR chamaktii hui

qatra qatra

giR rahii hai terii dildaaR nazaR kii shabnam

iss qadaR pyaaR se hai jaan-e-jahaaN raKhaa hai

dil ke ruKhsaaR pe

iss waqt teri yaad ne haath

yuuN gumaaN hota hai

gaRche hai abhi subah-e-firaaq

Dhal gayaa hijR ka din

aa bhi gayii vasl ki raat

===================================================

In the desert of my solitude, oh love of my life, quiver

the shadows of your voice,

the mirage of your lips

In the desert of my solitude,

beneath the dust and ashes of distance

bloom the jasmines and roses of your proximity

From somewhere very close,

rises the warmth of your breath

smoldering in its own aroma,

slowly, bit by bit.

Far away, across the horizon, glistens

drop by drop

the falling dew of your beguiling glance

With such tenderness, O love of my life,

on the cheek of my heart,

has your memory placed its hand right now

that it looks as if

(though it's still the dawn of adieu)

the sun of separation has set

and the night of union has arrived.

2007-12-05T06:04:00.000-08:00

Ana Mercedes

Born in Bogota, Colombia in 1942 to architect Manuel JoseHoyos, she studied art at a very young age, often accompanying her father to European museums to learn art history. Basing her work on the complex reality of Colombian culture, she is equally expressive in a variety of media. Through her painting, sculpture, print-making, collage, photography and textiles runs a motif of saturated color, magic and nature.

"Ana Mercedes the artist who never loses her orientation, despite the apparent and continued changes. And one follows her and follows her. Her sunflowers made in concrete, as one who constructs a beautiful puzzle. The beach, the women form palisades who sell fruits. At first, sight they are detail of fruits, painting on dresses, the same old knife, the same old watermelon. But analyze the abstract concept, analyze the form concept; the decorative of Matiz and the corporeity of Piero Della Francesca embracing. And Ana Mercedes continues so buoyant. Creating intelligent, aggressive and beautiful works. A real stone Thrower!"

by Enrique Grau

more here

2007-11-26T10:31:00.000-08:00

Minimalist: Ali Messaoudi

PAPERS OF A BAR

Tomatoes, olives, onions, bread, fish.

Known faces … aknown faces

Laughter, voices, shouts

Blue vulgar jokes

Nostalgic boring stories

And so on…and so on

Multiple combinations of “I” and some kind of others.

Who combined what?

What combined who?

Ali Messaoudi

25.03.2006

PAPERS OF THE TERASSE BAR

Does the absolute have a name?

A status?

A less evident face?

Who could change the name of a rose?!

R.O.S.E

Who could exist out of the established understandings?

Why feelings are so subtle

FutileEvident and absolute at the moments

Fugitive in the outcome?

Ali Messaoudi

26.05.03

More at Art Tribe

2007-11-21T07:24:00.000-08:00

Gerardo Caro

more here

2007-11-21T07:15:00.000-08:00

Arwa Abouon

Untitled (Amidst Air)

Originally from Libya, Arwa Abouon grew up in Canada. Through her playful photographs she questions her own place within a so-called western culture on the one hand and her upbringing in a Muslim household on the other. The work featured in this exhibit is as much a subversion of ideas of nostalgia and the diasporic longing for home, as it is a homage to the trans generational transmission of "traditional" values. Arwa camouflages her models in patterned veils blending them into a similarly patterned backdrop.

2007-11-19T10:06:00.000-08:00

Tasneem El-Meshad

Tasneem El Meshad is an art educator and a freelance painter. She has graduated from Faculty of Fine Arts University of Helwan in Cairo, Egypt.

Graduation project

Green Series

Red Series I

Red Series II

Red Series III

Ever since I was a child, I had a compelling affection and passion for the arts in general and I knew I wanted to become a painter one day. Through rigorous training and a natural talent, I was quickly able to harness my abilities and unique vision and translate them into distinctive works of art that made their way into a number of exhibitions.

I discovered through time, that it is not what the eyes see and the mind reads that reflects an artist’s artwork, but it is the sense of feeling and the mutual relationship that I have with my surrounding existence, that mysterious dimension which ties us all together.

You can notice in my work that I have a tendency of creating motion through the use of warm colors and distinct sharp lines that reflect my own observant and detailed character.I use a wide array of tools and techniques but I truly excel in oil painting, which gives me a sense of saturation and maturity and helps direct my energy positively into my paintings. I now look for new challenges to conquer and for new surroundings to absorb, for I believe that exposing oneself to new cultures raises the artistic bar for an artist and helps us reach for new, higher levels of artistry.

Tasneem's Jewellery Blog

2007-11-17T21:02:00.000-08:00

KCO

Kco is a young french artist from Provence. Art represents a passion for her as she studies Law in high school. She has decided to share her work on line and wishes to know what people feel in front of her paintings. She is 21 and lives in Toulon.

Fau Lie

Arabesquiale

Peau L' Aimik

more here

2007-11-01T10:56:00.000-07:00

Femmes du Monde

They all have stories to tell. Marina, the abandoned wife of a Taliban commander imprisoned in Guantánamo, Cuba. Tima, a young fisherwoman on a minuscule Indonesian island. Azza, a gynecologist in Gaza who refuses to wear the veil. Cassia, a strip dancer in São Paulo. Dayu, a Balian princess.

La cité africaine - Kinshasa

Kyoto

Aicha de Tombouktou

Lucia de Cartagene

These women are all the subjects of portraits by Titouan Lamazou, a French photographer and artist, who spent six years traveling the world to record women's stories in words and images. An exhibition of his project, "Femmes du Monde" (Women of the World), is showing at the Musée de l'Homme here until March 30.

more here

2007-10-31T06:20:00.000-07:00

Understanding Kahlo

From The New Yorker

She was born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón in the house where she would die, in Coyoacán, then a prosperous suburb and later a district of Mexico City. She was the third child of a Hungarian-German immigrant photographer, who was an atheist Jew, and a pious mestiza from Oaxaca. Polio, at age six, withered her right leg and foot. She was among the rare girls admitted to the sterling National Preparatory School, in Mexico City, where she grew from an effervescent tomboy into a brilliant young woman, during the creative tumult of the nineteen-twenties. When she was eighteen, a bus crash left her with spinal and pelvic damage that would entail many surgeries, some of them probably unnecessary. (Was she masochistic? Anyone doomed to a lifetime of pain will find veins of sweetness in it.) While convalescing, she began to paint, depicting herself, in styles influenced by Renaissance and Mannerist masters, with the aid of a mirror set in the canopy of her bed. In 1928, she took up with Mexico’s chief artist, Diego Rivera, who was twenty years her senior. They married in 1929, divorced for a year in 1939, then remarried. They were the loves of each others’ lives, though with innumerable supplements. Their semi-public affairs (her amours included Leon Trotsky and numerous women); their dealings with famous figures in America and Europe, from John D. Rockefeller to Pablo Picasso; and their political adventures, as Communists subject to sectarian pushes and pulls, make Hayden Herrera’s hugely consequential biography, “Frida” (1983), a delirious read. (Herrera is a co-curator, with Elizabeth Carpenter, of the Walker show.) Kahlo died, probably of a complication of pneumonia, the last in a cascade of deteriorative maladies, a year after the opening of her first solo exhibition in Mexico.

continued here

2007-05-31T08:13:00.000-07:00

Shadi Ghadirian

When Shadi Ghadirian was 21, she got a student job printing old photographs at the small photography museum here. She was so drawn by the 19th-century pictures of women with thick black eyebrows wearing head scarves and short skirts over baggy pants that two years later, in 2000, she began incorporating the imagery into her own photography.

Using clothes from the late 1800s, she dressed female friends and posed them in front of painted backdrops to look like the women in the antique photos. But her women appeared with something modern: a newspaper, a tape recorder, a vacuum cleaner.

The shots became known as the Qajar series and made her one of Iran's most famous female photographers.

[ Continued Here]

By Nazila Fathi

Qajar Series

2007-05-31T07:49:00.000-07:00

Zarina Bhimji

Zarina Bhimji is best-known for her hauntingly beautiful films and photographs. She has been nominated for the Turner Prize 2007.

Love (2006)

Your Sadness is Drunk

This Unhinged Her

No Border Crossing

Spider Score

[Source]

2007-05-24T00:56:00.000-07:00

Marwan Sahmarani

50 Martyrs (17)

50 Martyrs (48)

The Horseman Jul-Aug

2007-05-24T00:34:00.000-07:00

Lindsay Erdman at Alliance Francaise de Bangalore

[ Blog]

2007-04-11T04:53:00.000-07:00

Zhang Xiaogang

'Inspired by family photos from the Cultural Revolution period, as well as the European tradition of surrealism, Zhang Xiaogang’s paintings engage with the notion of identity within the Chinese culture of collectivism. Basing his work around the concept of ‘family’ –immediate, extended, and societal – Zhang’s portraits depict an endless genealogy of imagined forebears and progenitors, each unnervingly similar and distinguished by minute difference.

Often painted in black and white, Zhang’s portraits translate the language of photography into paint. Drawing from the generic quality of formal photo studio poses and greyscale palette, Zhang’s figures are nameless and timeless: a series of individual histories represented within the strict confines of formula. The occasional splotches of colour which interrupt his images create aberrant demarcations, reminiscent of birth marks, aged film, social stigma, or a lingering sense of the sitter’s self assertion.

Incorporating the aesthetic of traditional Chinese charcoal drawing, Zhang’s style wavers between the exaggeration of animation and stoic flatness. Muted and compliant, Zhang’s extended family convey individual identity through their unalterable physical features: too big heads, tiny hands, long noses, and subtle alterations in hairstyle give clues to intimate characteristics and stifled emotions. These dream-like distortions give a complex psychological dimension to Zhang’s work, heightening the tension of regulated claustrophobia, and initiating suggestive narrative readings.'

[Source]

A Big Family, 1995

Comrade, 2005

Untitled, 2006

Untitled, 2006

2007-04-06T23:09:00.000-07:00

Landscapes from Chinese contemporary art.

Tu Ke B. 1916

LI QIANGSHENG(Li Cheung Sang) B. 1944, Feng Huang Old City

Lin Dachuan 1912-1985

2007-04-06T23:05:00.000-07:00

Awakenings: Zen Figure Painting in Medieval Japan.

Japan Society, which is celebrating its centennial, has a history of producing exquisite shows of Buddhist art. They appear, on average, every 5 to 10 years, and they can be life-changers. After I saw a show of early Buddhist sculpture there in 1983, I went home, packed a bag and flew to Tokyo. I needed to go to where that art came from, and I spent a month visiting temples and monasteries across the country.

“Awakenings: Zen Figure Painting in Medieval Japan” may not be quite so powerful a stimulus to travel. But with four dozen paintings of Buddhist gods and saints hung in shrinelike alcoves, it is certainly visually transporting. And it covers a broad swath of time and geography, bringing together 13th- to 16th-century hanging scrolls not only from Japan but also from China, where Zen, called Chan in Chinese, originated.

In the West we still have a 1950s hipster notion of what “Zen painting” means: jazzy, exclamatory slashes and splats of black ink on white ground. An art of the “wow.” The Japan Society show gives us a different approach through portraits of some of the personalities, real or fantastic, who generated such energy to begin with. And they’re a formidable crew — some of them loftily celestial, others straight from Comedy Central.

Continued here..

By Holland Cotter.

“Portrait of Mokuan Shuyu,” a scroll made in 1373 by an unknown artist.

"Fish-Basket Kannon," a 15th-century scroll by Bokkei Saiyo, is part of the current Japan Society exhibition.

“The Four Gentlemanly Accomplishments,” a work by Oguri Sokei from the early 16th century.

Hotei. Kano Masanobu (1434–1530). Japanese, Muromachi period (1392–1573), late 15th–early 16th c. Hanging scroll, ink and light colors on paper; 81.5 x 44.8 cm. The John C. Weber Collection. © John Bigelow Taylor.

2007-04-06T13:06:00.000-07:00

Yu Ben

Docking

Unemployed

Old Lady

Countryside village scene

Fruit

2007-04-06T12:58:00.000-07:00

Yun Gee

Three Musketeer Series 1

Three Musketeer Series 2

Right Route to Freedom

Central Park

* From the Sotheby's catalogue, Chinese Contemporary Art.

2007-04-06T12:47:00.000-07:00

Sanyu

If Sanyu struggled with his paintings, he did his best to hide the evidence. The image takes possession of the canvas as if it had simply been waiting for the right moment to manifest itself. In one sense this may be close to what actually happened: one intuits that in most paintings a long period of reflection preceded the physical work with the brush, bringing to mind the Chinese axiom yi zai bi xian: "the conception precedes the brush"as indeed was necessary in China, where the surfaces of paper and silk did not allow of much reworking. As a procedure transposed to oil painting this made possible the wonderfully relaxed naturalness that provides Sanyu's works with their unique charm...", by Jonathan Hay.

2007-04-06T12:40:00.000-07:00

Chu Teh-Chun

* From the Sotheby's catalogue, Chinese Contemporary Art.

2007-04-06T12:29:00.000-07:00

Ju Ming

Guanyin

From the Taichi Series

*From the Sotheby's catalogue, Chinese Contemporary Art.

2007-04-01T01:02:00.000-07:00

Venice and the Islamic World, 828 - 1797

Told often enough that the West and Islam are natural enemies, we start to believe it, and assume it has always been so. But the Metropolitan Museum of Art argues otherwise in “Venice and the Islamic World, 828-1797,” a show that, with classic Met largesse, recreates the spectacle of two different cultures meeting in one fantastic city, where commerce and love of beauty, those great levelers, unite them in a fruitful bond.

Continued here..

Anonymous Venetian
The Reception of the Venetian Ambassadors in Damascus, 1511
Oil on canvas; 46 1/2 x 80 in. (118 x 203 cm)
Musée du Louvre, Paris

Loom-width piece of velvet fabric, Bursa, Turkey, late 16th century
Silk velvet pile, voided ground with silver and gilt-silver wrapped silk brocading; 64 1/8 x 24 3/4 in. (163 x 63 cm)
Kunstgewerbemuseum, Berlin

Pair of Doors, Venice, ca. 1575–1600
Wood (perhaps poplar); ebony moldings and veneer, semiprecious stones, mother-of-pearl, partially gilded and painted; yellow metal and iron; 57 5/8 x 20 5/8 in. (146.4 x 52.4 cm)
Rainer Zeitz, London

Attributed to an Anonymous Painter from Verona or Follower
Bayezid II, (r. 1481–1512), Venice, 1578 or later
Oil on canvas; 27 1/4 x 21 1/4 in. (69 x 54 cm)
Inscribed: BAIAZETH SEC°X
Bayerische Staatgemäldesammlungen, Munich

Mosque Lamp
Cairo, Egypt, ca. 1329–35
Free blown glass, tooled on the pontil; enameled and gilded; H. 14 in.; Diam. 9.4 in. (35.6 x 23.9 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917 (17.190.991)

Bowl, Iran, probably Shiraz, mid-14th century
Cast brass inlaid with gold and silver; H. 4.1 in.; Diam. 9.4 in. (10.5 x 24 cm)
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Museum für Islamische Kunst

“Venice and the Islamic World, 828-1797” continues through July 8 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org.

2007-04-01T00:36:00.000-07:00

Italian Renaissance in the Royal Collection

Italian Renaissance masterpieces from the Queen's Royal Collection including two previously unseen paintings by Caravaggio will be exhibited.

The Art of Italy in the Royal Collection: Renaissance and Baroque is at the Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace from March 30 until January 20 2008.

[Source]

Self-portrait as the Allegory of Painting, 1638-39, by Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1652).
Photograph: The Royal Collection 2006/Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

Carvaggio's A Boy Peeling Fruit.
Photograph: The Royal Collection/Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

David with the Head of Goliath, c1620, by Domenico Fetti (1588-1623)
Photograph: The Royal Collection/Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

2007-02-28T07:07:00.000-08:00

Professor Robert Rosenblum

Robert Rosenblum, art historian and curator: born New York 24 July 1927; Professor of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University 1956-66; Professor of Fine Arts, New York University 1967-2006; Slade Professor of Fine Art, Oxford University 1971-72; Curator, Guggenheim Museum 1996-2006; married 1977 Jane Kaplowitz (one son, one daughter); died New York 6 December 2006.

*Mr. Rosenblum noted the cultural continuity in Vien’s "Selling of Cupids" (1763).

[Source]

2007-01-27T01:57:00.000-08:00

Mansingh Ramchandra Katkar

Monsoon

2007-01-27T01:49:00.000-08:00

Artists Unknown

2007-01-27T01:48:00.000-08:00

Randall LaGro

2007-01-27T01:38:00.000-08:00

Theatre of Dreams - Randall LaGro

#1

#2

#3

#4

#5

#6

#7

#8

2007-01-21T23:59:00.000-08:00

Yolanda Sousa, The Victim of Innocence

S.G Vasudev, She

Shuvaprasanna, The Golden Flute

Tapas Ghosal, Untitled

Shivani Dugar, Drifted

Dipak Banerjee, Panchboot

Prafulla Dahanukar, Untitled

Nikhil Ranjan Pal, And she dreams of....

2007-01-21T20:24:00.000-08:00

Painting with Light

Photographs by Hoda Alavi

2007-01-21T19:29:00.000-08:00

Iranian Art

Mahdi Ahanchi introduces a new technique of combining copper and cold ceramic. He uses this technique in making frescoes, paintings, table and floor lamps, furniture frames etc.

2007-01-11T10:10:00.000-08:00

Benham Tajik

2007-01-11T10:09:00.000-08:00

Egyptian Art

Sabry Mansour - Country Vision

Makram Henein - Nubia

Makram Henein-Horus Return

2007-01-11T09:54:00.000-08:00

Du Yingqiang

A skilled print-maker as well as a painter and draughtsman, Du Yingqiang is known for his landscapes and pastoral scenes depicting his native southern China. Showing the progression of the seasons and the natural rhythms of daily country life, his works are characterised by a crisp and exact technique. At the same time they have a strong poetic quality no doubt resulting from his strong attachment to the region. Typically, Du Yingqiang's landscapes of high mountains or river valleys are executed in traditional Chinese ink and wash, with contrasting vivid bursts of colour such as peach blossoms or autumn foliage in the foreground.

(Source: Zeestone)

Sound of autumn

Beauty of the mountain

Red Trees

Going Home

Home Town

Spring River

2007-01-11T09:44:00.000-08:00

Jia Haoyi

One of China's top traditional painters is a man called Jia Haoyi, or Laojia. He seems like a typical middle-aged man from Northern China, but his paintings are definitely not ordinary. His magnificent freehand brushwork portraying subjects like horses, bulls and landscapes has won him decades of admiration.

Jia Haoyi has infused his northern Chinese character into his art and his magnificent freehand style has won him fame and praise around the world. Many of his works have been displayed at international exhibitions and collected in museums in Asia as well as other continents.

2007-01-10T07:43:00.000-08:00

Falguni Gokhale

Standing tall

Remebering autumn

Warmth of summer

2007-01-10T07:41:00.000-08:00

Paresh Maity

Digha

Talsari

Varanasi

Point Lobos, USA

2007-01-10T07:30:00.000-08:00

Joy Bhaduri

Orange street

Kaal (tomorrow)

Agni sakshi

2007-01-10T07:21:00.000-08:00

Varsha Kharatamal

2007-01-10T07:17:00.000-08:00

Ramachandra Shivaji Kharatamal

Sweet dreams

Moment

Mahatme

2007-01-10T02:05:00.000-08:00

Mansingh Ramchandra Katkar

Fantasy

Haven

2007-01-10T01:47:00.000-08:00

Lakshman Namdev Gore

Mask

Landscape 1

Landscape 2

Landscape 3

Landscape 4

2007-01-10T01:43:00.000-08:00

Falguni Gokhale

Sleeping woman

Mother and child

2007-01-10T01:41:00.000-08:00

J.M.S Mani

"The historical location of Badami, as well as the innocence of the people there, who I find very hardworking and honest in all their ways, inspire me to capture their simplicity through my paintings."

The simple, rustic folk of the Deccan Plateau in South India, with strong Dravidian (an ancient race in South India) features, are the subjects of J.M.S. Mani's paintings. His art is an amalgamation of Indian culture with Occidental Western formalism. His figures are modeled in three-dimensional form, with bold brushwork, similar in style to those of the impressionists.

Mani chooses to depict his characters, the balloon seller, the women with a rooster, in a simple and uncluttered manner. They narrate an untold tale; much like the famous "Dancing Girl" of the ancient Mohenjodaran civilization of the Indus Valley; a tale that tells of the origins of an entire race. Though seemingly simple, Mani's images too, are representative of an entire civilization. The pulsating colours in his paintings offset the dark skin of his characters, creating a sense of drama in his compositions. And it is his colours and compositions which are expressive, rather than the figures themselves. The figures appear to have been frozen within the canvas, and their beauty and grace is enhanced by the restricted use of gestures and expressions.

(Source: Saffronart)

2007-01-09T19:32:00.000-08:00

Ashish Swami

2007-01-09T19:28:00.000-08:00

K.M. Adimoolam

2007-01-07T03:17:00.000-08:00

Marta Wiley