and once again, the magic of drawing

Drapery for seated figure
Leonardo Da Vinci, 1470
Louvre Museum

Interesting Japanese concept

Nin




=patience and endurance while waiting for better times

Quiz results

And the answer to October quiz is:

110-130 AC

From the exhibition Roman Imperial Painting
24 September 2009 - 17 January 2010
Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome
More info and photos

(So why was I told that the history of painting starts with Giotto? I want my money back)

It's a small world: ancient gold jewellery

Photos: Museum with no frontiers and MET Museum

I'm really curious about: Byzantine empresses

Maria of Alania




Maria of Antioch




Piroska of Hungary/ Irene




and Theodora

...or maybe just fascinated by their representation.

Worshiping women

I hope you're enjoying this journey through the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean. These photos belong to an exhibition that is now being held in The National Archaelogical Museum. It only lasts till 30 November: Worshiping Women, Ritual and Reality in Classical Athens

Link to more photos and descriptions here
&
Link to the website of the National Archaelogical Museum in Athens showing photos of lots of the exhibits there. I love it!

October challenge

Date this!





The answer next week, or so

Fashion loves art

From Francis Montesinos' Autumn Winter 2009/2010 collection
Dalí's Mae West room is displayed at the Dalí Museum in Figueres.

as seen in vogue.es

And now relaaaax...

....Close your eyes and think of faraway places (but only after clicking here below)

That was the song Kolaymi, from the album "Dance into Eternity", by Omar Faruk Tekbilek. I don't have words to explain the beauty of his music.

Lately in love with: Turkish Izmir tiles in Istanbul

Many of these decorate Topkapi Palace and the Mausoleums of the Sultans in Istanbul

Photo credit: Jorapa's Flickr photostream

I can't take my eyes off you

Sculpture of Artemis

Now at Ephesus Museum, Selçuk, Turkey, but once located in the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

In these days only ruins of the Temple remain.

A stroll around the Ancient City of Ephesus

Quote

"Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth"

Theodor W. Adorno

A short mention about an exhibition in Paris

elles@centrepompidou

women artists in the collections of the National Modern Art Museum

May 27-24 2010
11h00 - 21h00

EXHIBITION ITINERARY


The show is hung in chronological order by themes. It brings together a selection of over 500 works by more than 200 artists, from the beginning of the 20th century up to the present day.

Pioneer
Level 5. Abstract, primitive, functional, urban, mixed media, surreal, amazons, objective... Eight rooms display the works of these pioneers who were at the forefront of change in all the artistic media: Shirley Jaffe, Joan Mitchell, Sonia Delaunay, Natalia S. Gontcharova, Hannah Höch, Frida Kahlo, Judit Reigl, Suzanne Valadon, Diane Arbus, Dora Maar.

Free Fire
Opening level 4. Niki de Saint Phalle, Karen Knorr, Rosemarie Trocket, among others, represent those who played historic roles, feminists, critics, photographers and performers, with their personal visions of reality.

Body slogan
Level 4. Precocious and inventive in photography and video, women artists have lately transformed the art of drawing, revitalising the very notion of body. ORLAN, Atsuko Tanaka and Ana Mendieta worked on the representation of the body and its stereotypes, notably that of the life drawing genre, as well as ways of staging it in their early performances.

The Activist Body
Level 4. Women artists played a key role in redefining visual and theoretical categories, and explored and commented on ways of bridging the abstract and the figurative, the organic and the systematic, the conceptual and the sensual. Typical among these was Louise Bourgeois, Agnes Martin, Vera Molnar, Valérie Jouve, Hanne Darboven.

A room of One's Own
Level 4.Borrowing Virginia Wool's title of her book dealing with questions about the conditions of art production, this part of the exhibition is gathering the works of artists exploring the notion of private space, weaving new connections between mental projections and exhibition space. Here we find Dorothea Tanning, Tatiana Trouvé, Charlotte Perriand, Sophie Calle.

Wordworks
Level 4. From story-telling to listing, through autobiography, quotations, legends and the many facets of the artist's book, creative women like Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Natacha Lesueur, Cristina Iglesias, Eija-Liisa Ahtila explore the various uses of language in art. Concept Art, urban myths, appropriation and post-modernism all use words as a medium while video installations redefine the idea of story-telling.

Immaterials
Level 4. Matali Crasset, Alisa Andrasek, Tacita Dean, Louise Campbell, Isa Genzken, Nancy Wilson-Pajic, Geneviève Asse and more leave us with one of the most striking characteristics of contemporary art, namely its disembodiment. The title refers back to one of the Centre Pompidou's cult exhibitions, "Les immatériaux" (Immaterials).

Source: Centre Pompidou's website

Album covers

And talking about the 60's, I really like this post about psychedelic album covers in Hippy Couture blog.

Interesting book, I think

A book about collaborative creativity, shared intelligence and the co-operative ethic as allowed by the latest development of IT technologies.

As the back cover reads : " You are what you share, that is the ethic of the world being created by YouTube and MySpace, Wikipedia and Facebook. We-Think is a rallying call for the shared powe of the web to make society more open and egalitarian. We-Think reports on an unparelleled wave of collaborative creativity as people from California to China devise ways to work together that are more democratic, productive and creative."

In fact the author put drafts of the book online for others to comment and the final result has been shaped by many contributions all over the world.

I'm fascinated by the chapter where the author links the development of tools that are now widely used for online collaboration to ideas of the 1960s counterculture, like participation, decentralization...
Interesting in any case!

More about the book here, and you can get to the author's website here.

I also love the illustrations by Debbie Powell.