Which Witch? (Hallowe’en Poll)

It’s Halloween tonight in England and if you look up into the darkened sky you will see that it is crowded with witches.  That’s not the sound of the traffic you can hear – that’s the witches cackling as they go about their business (whatever that is,,,)   Witches have been depicted in many paintings.  The

Happy Belated Birthday Picasso! plus poetry challenge

     It was Pablo Picasso‘s birthday yesterday (25th October 2010).  Born 1881 Malaga Spain, Picasso is probably the most innovative, exciting and original artist to have lived.  He had a long life  (1881 –   1973, Mougins, France) filled with creative output and daring.  Some have called him a genius, but most agree that he was quite

The Canvas Pavement

Everyone has seen pavement artists at work from time to time in their city .  Usuall, they will painstakingly chalk a famous and instantly recognisable painting onto the pavement for passers by to admire and donate money to.  But in recent times there has been a spate of breathtaking ‘3D’ optical chalk drawings that are refeshingly new

Ai Weiwei – Seeds of change?

Chinese artist and political activist Ai Weiwei (b. 1957 Beijing) is the latest artist to exhibit in the gigantic space of the Turbine Hall in the Tate Modern gallery London. The commission, the latest in the Unilever series  called ‘Sunflower Seeds’ has only been running  a few days, yet it has already experienced some problems. A 100 million seeds

Lurking behind the sofa…

Have you had a look behind that sofa recently?   I must admit – I haven’t.  I’m much too busy than to bother with these mundane things…;)  It may be worth actually having a look though because I may be lucky and find a long-lost painting by Michelangelo!  Farfetched?  I don’t know so much – judging by

‘Poll – Never a Truer word was said..’

There are lots of wonderful art quotes around.  Some artists are more eloquent and verbose or wittier than others – Picasso, for example could fill a book with his quotes (but more on this artist coming soon….).     Without letting the art work influence you, I would like you to pick your favorite ‘truth’ from these 6 quotes.  Although all

Barcode Messages

    Barcodes are on more or less everything we buy.  They are an optical  machine readable representation of data (the Wikipedia definition).  There are many types of bar codes and lots of combinations.  Some think bar codes are the mark of the Beast 666, mentioned in the bible (here). As usual though, I am only interested in what

Rib painting….

I wonder what our ancestors did with the bones from the animals they killed after they’d eaten them?  Just threw them in the dust to be found by us I suppose.  I suspect that if they painted with sticks they may have used the odd animal or even human bone as a drawing or painting