WOW 
Thursday, 08. May 2008
It Rolls!
This rotating house, designed as art by the Eindhoven based architect, artist, inventor and freethinker John Körmeling [check out his other crazy works] spins along the curve of the Hasseltrotonde in Tilburg, NL.The house, which looks as if it is real, rotate on the roundabout in the direction of the traffic and complete one full round in 20 hours.
Read more about the Rotating House.
(via The Presurfer)
Friday, 15. February 2008
Goodbye Art
I was recently pointed in the direction of an amazing artist. He is imaginative and creative, and its not just paints and oils he uses to create art. Food, fire, nature ... whatever. He uses his hands, feet and head to paint. His name is Phil Hansen and his art project is called Goodbye Art.This guy is fantastic. Basically, he makes temporary art and then destroys it. In addition to photos documenting his art, he also has videos showing how he made it.
Here's his portrait of Amy Winehouse, which he carved from frozen red wine - then melted:
Other examples: He built a sculpture of Jimmy Hendrix with match sticks and then lit it on fire. Perhaps you remember the on-camera piece of paint-dipped karate chops to reveal a portrait of martial arts legend Bruce Lee, or the 7-foot-by-12-foot portrait that he made by rubbing the grease from a large order of MacDonald’s French fries.
Take a few minutes to check him out on his YouTube channel showcasing his Goodbye Art series. Visit also Phil Hansen's website.
You may also like to read this great article
Dictators, Disasters, and Cheez Logs - The Art of Phil Hansen by City Pages.
A Valentines Day love song.
See also Hansen's blog, where he describes getting the idea, soliciting submissions for the original ABC poem, and creating the workspace where he'd film the moving Sweetarts.
I'm sure you'll be as amazed as I am.
Saturday, 26. January 2008
Felice Beato's Japan: Places & People
Felice A. Beato (ca. 1825–1908) was the most-celebrated of 19th century photographers in Japan.Although not the very first to photograph in Japan—the first studios opened in the late 1850s—Beato was the first to work extensively in the country. He ran a studio in Yokohama from 1863 to 1877. After leaving the country in 1884, he opened a furniture and curio business in Burma. Beato’s residence in Japan coincided with a period of rapid modernization during the Meiji period, 1868–1912.
Employing a documentary style, Beato’s work encompassed studio portraits, landscapes, and scenes from daily life. Most of his portraits are hand-colored, a practice that he introduced to Japan. The photo of the artist is, in fact, the man who was responsible for coloring Beato’s pictures. Inspired perhaps by woodblock prints, Beato produced a series of photos of the Tokaido Road, running between Kyoto and Tokyo (Edo). -- Source: Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology
Felice Beato's Japan: Places - This 50-image album features scenes along the routes that foreign sightseers travelled in the opening years of the Meiji period. Album courtesy of the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Essay by Allen Hockley.
Click the picture for a larger view
Felice Beato's Japan: People - These photos of men and women from different walks of life catered to foreign curiosity about the "exotic" Japanese. Most were taken in Beato's studio in Yokohama. Album courtesy of the Smith College Museum of Art. Essay by Alona C. Wilson.
Click the picture for a larger view
Friday, 25. January 2008
Leonardo: Right to Left
Leonardo wrote in Italian using a special kind of shorthand that he invented himself. People who study his notebooks have long been puzzled by something else, however. He usually used "mirror writing", starting at the right side of the page and moving to the left. Only when he was writing something intended for other people did he write in the normal direction.Left: A sample of Leonardo's writing as it appears in his drawings.
Right: This is how it would look reversed by a mirror.
People who were contemporaries of Leonardo left records that they saw him write and paint left handed. He also made sketches showing his own left hand at work. Being a lefty was highly unusual in Leonardo's time. Because people were superstitious, children who naturally started using their left hands to write and draw were forced to use their right hands.
More @ Leonardo: Right to Left.
See also the other sections of this site:
Exploring Leonardo by The Museum of Science.
I wish you a fruitful day ahead.
Enjoy life and be an optimist.
Try it yourself!
Wednesday, 23. January 2008
iKlimt - The Life and Work of Gustav Klimt
iKlimt is an evocative, beautifully designed Flash site about the life and work of Gustav Klimt.A very serene interface with music, a nice compilation of klimt's artwork, and well-written essays about the Austrian artist. If you're viewing a painting, you can select a magnifying tool and a small viewing window appears, which you can drag across parts of the painting to see details close up.
Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907
Thursday, 10. January 2008
The Ballerina Gallery
Lorena Feijoo - San Francisco Ballet
This collection of ballerina photos is a tribute to all these great ballerinas.
The facts about the dancers have been collected mainly from the official sites of the Bolshoi Theatre, the Mariinsky Theatre (Kirov) and the Royal Ballet, plus The Encyclopaedia of Dance & Ballet, The Oxford Dictionary of Dance and the Russian Ballet Encyclopaedia.
The Ballerina Gallery - lots of pictures, informations and videos!
Anneli Alhanko - b. 1954 - Royal Swedish Ballet
Tuesday, 11. December 2007
Egypt: 19th Century Lithographs
David Roberts was born is Scotland in 1796. After moving to London, he achieved a respectable reputation as an artist prior to 1838 when he traveled to Egypt and the Holy Land to paint the monuments, architecture and people. Upon his return to England, his works were published (in conjunction with the lithographer Louis Haghe) in a six volume set, in which all 248 lithographs were hand colored. The first three volumes depicted Egypt and Nubia; the second three, the Holy Land. The set, which was sold by subscription, was an immediate success. Roberts was admitted to the Royal Academy and he continued to travel and paint until his death in 1864.
After more than 150 years his paintings are still the most beloved and popular illustrations of Egypt and are highly sought after by collectors.
Beautiful: Egypt: 19th Century Lithographs by David Roberts.
Tuesday, 04. December 2007
Ask Simon
Born in Basel, Switzerland in 1951, Simon de Pury is one of the art world's leading figures, renowned for his deep and long-standing knowledge of the global marketplace and his legendary performance at the auction podium.Now Simon de Pury tells you everything you need to know about buying and selling at auction: Ask Simon.
Simon de Pury in action
Edward Hopper
"A Hipper Hopper: With a dazzling new show, the MFA brings a New England legend out of the shadows"- Boston Magazine
"Hopper was, in movie star terms, essentially the Henry Fonda of American art"
- Newsweek
Edward Hopper (1882–1967) produced some of the most enduringly popular images in American art. His diners, movie palaces, and middle-class buildings reflect American life between the world wars; his light-filled watercolors of Gloucester, Maine, and Cape Cod evoke the austere beauty of those places. And his quiet, yet riveting, pictures of people in their apartments, offices, and hotel rooms express both a sense of urban isolation and the bittersweet comfort of being alone.
Nighthawks - 1942
I'm resolved to sell my Edward Hopper, NIGHTHAWKS, 1942. For more information please visit the online auction on Ricardo (in German).
Learn about the life and iconic work of Edward Hopper You can take a unique look at Hopper’s personal sketches and notes by viewing the interactive sketchbook or listen the excerpts from the exhibition audio guide.
Edward Hopper by The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
The Mansard Roof - 1923
Saturday, 01. December 2007
Women of Renown
Artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi uniquely combined the popular theme of beautiful women with his personal specialty, warrior prints showing legendary heroic figures from Japanese and Chinese history. From the historical woman warrior Tomoe to the fictional sorceress Takiyasha, from ancient empresses to present-day criminals, Kuniyoshi’s dynamic portrayals show women who were not just passive beauties but strong, courageous, talented, and sometimes even wicked.Women of Renown: Female Heroes and Villains in the Prints of Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861) by Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Picture above:
Beautiful young Chûjô-hime was abused by a wicked stepmother and sought refuge at the temple of Taima-dera, where she met two mysterious nuns who wove an exquisite tapestry depicting the paradise of Amida Buddha. The nuns revealed to the devout girl that they were incarnations of Amida Buddha and the Bodhisattva Kannon. The legend of the Taima-dera tapestry's miraculous origin probably came into being because the real tapestry was imported from China in the eighth century, long before equivalent weaving technology existed in Japan.
Saturday, 24. November 2007
Mona Lisa - Why so Famous?
I learned something new today:"The Mona Lisa is widely considered the greatest portrait of all time. It appears in countless advertisements, has inspired poetry, sculpture, forgeries, and theft. But seriously, why? The painting is small, only 30 x 21 inches, the color is somber, the background seems desolate and eerie, and the subject isn't anyone historically significant. So, what is all the brouhaha about? Is it really all about her mystifying gaze and a quirkly smile? Well, let's take a closer look."
500 Years of Italian Dance
Assembled by Walter Toscanini (1898-1971), the Cia Fornaroli Collection documents the full sweep of Italian dance history from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century. It underscores his belief that Italy played a seminal role in the genesis and development of Western theatrical dance and exerted a profound influence on performance, choreographic, and pedagogical traditions throughout Europe and in the United States, on stages both elite and popular.500 Years of Italian Dance (Infos)
Treasures from the Cia Fornaroli Collection (Digital Gallery)
See also: Jerome Robbins Dance Division - The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
Wednesday, 21. November 2007
Women in Japanese Postcards
Woman with Umbrellas - Japanese, Late Meiji era - Tomioka Eisen, Japanese, 1864–1905
Women in Japanese Postcards
The Department of Art of Asia is working on a series of surveys of the Asian holdings, each of them intended to enhance remote access via this site. Most of the 2,250 items from the first two phases of a survey of our Japanese paintings, sculpture, textiles, masks, and Buddhist arts, funded by the Kajima Foundation, are available online, and work has begun on the third and final phase. Some 1,000 digitized images of Japanese prints are produced every month, and we are preparing to upload new photographs of the entire Morse collection of Japanese pottery (over 5,000 pieces). More than 3,500 examples of Japanese metalwork and lacquer, and over 20,000 Japanese postcards from the Leonard A. Lauder collection (nearly 9,000 of them with full cataloguing), can already be viewed on this site.
Don't miss the other Japanese Prints ||| the Japanese Painting by MFA Boston.
Actor Tatsuoka Hisagiku as Tomoe
「ともへ 辰岡久菊」
Japanese, Edo period, 1740 (Genbun 5), 4th month
Artist: Torii Kiyonobu II, Japanese, active about 1725–1760
Monday, 19. November 2007
The Mind of Leonardo - The Universal Genius at Work
Although Leonardo is commonly known as a “universal genius”, the exhibitions dedicated to him have almost always focused on some specific area of his activity: art, anatomy, technology, studies on water, on flight, and so on.The Mind of Leonardo offers its visitors a different point of view, inviting them to explore the genius’ very mode of thinking and his unitary conception of knowledge as the effort to assimilate, through bold theoretical syntheses and inventive experiments, the laws that govern all of the wondrous operations of man and nature.
This approach gives rise to a different image, one that helps to dissolve the aura of mystery in which the myth of Leonardo has often been shrouded: a mind tenaciously endeavoring to decipher the rational processes that animate the phenomena of the physical world as well as the “motions of thought”, driven by the desire to achieve a perfect imitation of nature in drawing and painting.
The Mind of Leonardo - the Universal Genius at Work
An exploration of the work and processes of the "Universal Genius" through text, images, reconstructions and animations.
Don't miss the Multimedia index and the Models index.
Thursday, 13. September 2007
Facing East - Portraits from Asia
Portraits have a thousand uses.Facing East - Portraits from Asia explores how portraits expressed identity in Asia and the Near East. Paintings, sculpture, and photographs of Egyptian pharaohs, Chinese empresses, Japanese actors and a host of other subjects, reveal the unique ways that the self was understood, represented, and projected in Asian art.
The exhibition includes approximately 70 masterpieces from the collections of Chinese, Japanese, South Asian, Islamic and Ancient Near Eastern art at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and the Freer Gallery of Art.
