Glorious Rebirth

Oscar Wilde’s statement “an egg is always an adventure; the next one may be different”, obviously made within a particular context, could well be used in connection with Franc Grom’s creative artworks.

Touching and Tasty

If “variety is the spice of life” and “a picture paints a thousand words”, then young Kelly McCollam is really achieving quite something by introducing a new and very interesting flavour to the art world with her inventive recreations of some of Van Gogh’s masterpieces using salt, spices and food-colouring as her sole medium to pay homage to her favourite painter.

Fascinating Indecision

“Calm and motion, dissolution and density, the contrastive play with gravity and overcoming it, with reality and simulation, (...) rising or falling?” These are some of the words used by Michael Stoeber to describe the absolutely mesmerizing gravity-defying sculptures by Cornelia Konrads.

Magic Tape

“Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect”, someone quoted Teller, a sixty-four years old full-time magician since 1975, to refer to Sarah DiNardo’s artistic production. And, in fact, nothing would more fittingly describe what she, herself, calls her “love for using tape”.

The Throne of Africa

Today again, and just as it happened with our previous posts on the Tree of Life, the Transforming Arms into Art Project or the Freedom sculpture, we bring you another art piece produced within the scope of a humanitarian project devised with a deep concern for social awareness and social justice. Its ultimate objective is that of encouraging a culture of peace in a country emerging from a sixteen-year long civil war. We are referring to the unique project “Transforming Arms into Art” developed in Mozambique. We, therefore, expect to touch your hearts and alert you to the global need for solidarity and against the destructiveness fuelled by illicit arms trade throughout the world.

Story Telling

“I wonder what’s in a book while it’s closed.(...) something must be happening, because as soon as I open it, there’s a whole story (...) and all kinds of adventures and deeds...” says Bastian, the young boy in Michael Ende’s fantastic book The Never-ending Story.

Making a Feast of Straw

“The key to life is imagination. If you don’t have that, no matter what you have, it’s meaningless. If you do have imagination... you can make a feast of straw”, says Jane Stanton Hitchcock, New York Times bestselling author, who started her career as a playwright and screenwriter.

Nothing could better fit Rajan Koshy, a rice straw artist born near Trivandrum, in Kerala, southern India, and living in Galveston. A nurse by profession at the University of Texas Medical Branch, Koshy has dedicated himself to creating art pieces using rice straw, since he wants “to save an ancient and endangered form of art”, as he states.

Underwater Wonder World

Imagine yourself diving into the crystal-clear blue waters of the Caribbean, into that unique blue you can find nowhere else in the world. Imagine yourself exploring the sheer beauty of the coral reefs and swimming among the most colourful species of fish and other underwater organisms. Pure magic! Now go a step further and imagine suddenly finding yourself among absolutely stunning sculptures scattered on the seabed. It can only be that you have unknowingly entered a magic world... We are precisely taking you on a guided tour of that enticing and fantastic place.

Flowing, Floating, Fleeting...

“Life is energy: pure creative energy”, says celebrated author Julia Cameron. Nothing could better fit the powerful yet fluid and strongly sensual sculptures by Gil Bruvel, whose work impresses and intrigues viewers at first sight and makes them prisoners of its fascinating and inescapable appeal.

Fairy Tale Forest

Forests are the very source and the main setting of fairy tales. As Sara Maitland states in her book Gossip from the Forest: The Tangled Roots of Our Forest and Fairytales, “Forests to... northern European peoples were dangerous and generous, domestic and wild, beautiful and terrible. And forests were the terrain out of which fairy stories... evolved”. This could well have been the idea behind the creation of Steel Flowers and Trees Sculptures, a fascinating collection of works by world famous artist Zadok Ben-David, on exhibition at the Singapore Botanic Gardens between October 2012 and February 2013.

Shooting Poverty into Art

Although not so much falling within the aesthetic pattern of the artworks we have been dealing with in this blog, we bring to you today something that, however, totally meets its objective of also introducing art pieces which have been produced within the scope of humanitarian projects with a social purpose. In fact, and just as we hope to have achieved with our post on the Tree of Life and the project behind it, we expect to touch your hearts and to emotionally engage you.

Feast your Eyes on Feathers

Fancy a peacock’s superb tail, trailing behind it as if in a pageantry full of pomp and circumstance. Now think about the magnificence, the beauty, the fascinating colours in shades of deep blues and greens and the absolutely perfect shape of each of its feathers...  It could only spark off the greed of royalty and the vanity of the affluent throughout the world.

Beyond Boundaries

“... The call to go on a journey takes the form of a loss, an error, a wound...we are being summoned to make a transition. It will always mean leaving something behind... The paradox here is that loss is a path to gain.” This statement by David Richo, psychotherapist, university teacher and author, could well have been Bruno Catalano’s keystone for the creation of his thought-provoking sculptures.

Visions on Paper

“The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper and re-imagines the world”, said Malcolm Gladwell, an English-Canadian journalist, best-selling author and speaker. Nothing could fit better Calvin Nicholls, himself a Canadian too, who has dedicated his activity to the crafting of mind-blowing paper sculptures.

Bigger than Life

A long life (in fact, he lived until he was 104), a huge talent, a lively man, Oscar Niemeyer, the renown modernist Brazilian architect, left remarkable buildings throughout the world with the unmistakable signature of his genius. He was responsible for the construction of Brasilia in a record time (1956-1960), the present capital of Brazil. This astonishing city, which was born out of the dream of another visionary as was President Café Filho, was to be inaugurated by Jucelino Kubitschek de Oliveira, in 1960.

Cinderella Time...

... is but a fleeting one, as we all know from the fairy tale of our childhood. However, it is a time of magic, of beauty, of sheer joy, suspended and disconnected from real time. It is the time when all wishes are granted, although with a deadline to which everything and everyone must submit. It is, therefore, ephemeral and that makes it even more fascinating.

Let there be Beauty…

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so goes the saying. And, indeed, very often what looks trivial or even unattractive to some may contain in itself the very seeds of Beauty. It takes the sensitive eye of an artist to be able to create Art from materials as common and uninteresting as industrial nails, toothpicks, corks, eggshells, coffee beans or even paint brushes.

Evanescent Beauty

Picture yourself walking on your daily routines and stumbling on a huge hole on the ground which only yesterday wasn’t just there. You falter, doubt your senses and feel a vague sensation of dizziness while you freeze your steps for fear of falling into it. At a second and more attentive observation, however, you realize to your bewilderment that what lies on the pavement right under your eyes is but a 3D drawing that looks so realistic you could swear, at first sight, that it was, in fact, a hole.

Blowing in the Wind

Imagine freshly washed linen hanging on endless lines, neatly arranged and put on to dry.  Finnish artist Kaarina Kaikkonen uses second-hand clothing, and mostly hundreds of discarded men’s shirts and jackets, to create huge installations which have been raising contradictory opinions and political controversy, which immediately reminds us of the open air laundries of Mumbai, for instance.

Metamorphoses of Reconciliation

Doing research on Art – as in any other field of knowledge – sometimes offers you amazing surprises. That was precisely the case when, quite by accident, we came across a solitary project developed by an Italian artist, Sergio Pacori, quite unknown beyond the limits of his Gorizia hometown in Northeastern Italy.

Born in Gargaro, Italy (or Grgar, once a part of Western Slovenia, municipality of Nova Gorica, or Nuova Gorizia), in 1933, Sergio Pacori has been fascinated by the art of forging ever since his early years.  His first works, however, were made of wood logs found on the beach and chosen for their imaginative appeal.