Peter Gabriel ~ Solsbury Hill ~ at Letterman TV Show

Poetry, Tea and Me

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"God is watching us" ~ 'From a Distance' ~ Bette Midler

Vasiliy Ivanovich Shukhaev
The Cello 1921
Albertina, Vienna

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Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse

Action for Happiness Wikipedia

Young artist wins leading prize with haunting depictions of Colditz By Phil Miller

Photo Credit: The National

Haunting paintings of Colditz, home of the infamous prisoner of war camp, have helped a young painter win one of Scotland's leading art prizes. Frances Rokhlin, 24, has won the Glenfiddich Residency Award at the RSA New Contemporaries exhibition, for her series of "small but powerful" paintings and prints. The Edinburgh College of Art graduate, 24, has received the £10,000 award for her display of work in the show which opens today (Saturday 18 February). Ms Rokhlin has painted a series of building exteriors in Edinburgh and Germany and her work "stood out immediately", organisers said. A series of three paintings in muted colours show aspects of Colditz Castle, which was used as a prison during World War II for Allied officers who had escaped from other camps. The artist will now join contemporary artists from around the world on the international residency programme at the Glenfiddich Distillery in Dufftown this summer. Andy Fairgrieve, coordinator of that programme said: “In an age where large-scale attention-grabbing works seem to be in fashion, it is refreshing to see an artist who has the confidence to buck the trend and follow a different path. "Frances' work captured our attention with the economy of scale, palette and historical narrative employed." She is the third artist selected to join the Glenfiddich programme from the New Contemporaries exhibition, and I look forward to seeing what fresh inspiration she will discover during this summer’s residency in the unique environment of the distillery." Born in Croydon, Ms Rokhlin studied on the MFA Fine Art course at Edinburgh College of Art. She specialised in painting and print-making, and has recently travelled to Japan having been awarded the 2016 RSA William Littlejohn Award for Innovation in Watercolour. Colin Greenslade, director of the Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture, said: “The 2017 New Contemporaries exhibition hosts a cacophony of strong voices. Amongst these, Frances Rokhlin's quiet and considered work punches home a strong message which resonates with the viewer long after the encounter." The Glenfiddich Artists in Residence programme was launched by distillery owners William Grant & Sons in 2002, and is one of the largest privately funded artist residency programmes in the UK with a total budget of £130,000. During the three-month residency at the Dufftown distillery, artists are provided with a house and studio, a monthly stipend and a budget to create new work which is then exhibited in Glenfiddich’s on-site art gallery. Artists from India, Australia, China, Korea, Taiwan and Canada will be at Glenfiddich this summer. To date, over 100 artists from 20 countries have participated, including Alison Watt, Christine Borland, Alex Frost, Damian Moppett, Mao Yan and Valay Shende. Glenfiddich Distillery is a Highland tourist attraction as well as a distillery, receiving 75,000 visitors annually. Herald Scotland Photo

Roman Holiday By Paula Diperna

With some time to kill waiting in Rome for a bus to Abruzzo, I was planning on a nice Sunday lunch in the city center. I took a taxi from the station to the Via Margutta. The cab approached my destination and the streets were throbbing with tourists. I was suddenly gripped by the need to get far away. “Never mind, let’s leave,” I said to the taxi driver, who had been gently threading his way through the ancient pathways of the eternal city. “Let’s go instead to the Piazza Bologna,” I said, which was near the bus station. “I’ll have lunch there.” “But do you know that’s the other direction completely?” the driver asked. I said so be it, and I would explain en route. I explained that even though I was a tourist, I preferred not to be surrounded by them. I added that I was headed to Abruzzo to visit relatives. His face broke into a huge smile, “I also have relatives there, signora.” With that, he unleashed a cascade of helpful hints: Abruzzo was “wild and known to be tough but gracious;” the bus station could be dangerous and I should be very careful. The driver took me to a restaurant in the Bologna neighborhood. He kindly put my bags on the sidewalk and we said goodbye. The day was unrolling perfectly, thanks to this fellow. When I later told my relatives about his niceties, they said it had to be a miracle. Ten days later, I was back in Rome, this time with a full-day. I had no agenda, but a Dutch couple I had met had raved about a sculpture they had seen by chance — “Il Pugile,” a first-century A.D. bronze of an exhausted boxer. So contagious was their passion for it that I decided I should see it too. My hotel concierge spent about 30 minutes on the Web trying to locate the piece. He found it, but when I got to the museum, the guard told me the Pugile was elsewhere, in another museum on the other side of the city. Not to be thwarted, I crossed town. The Dutch woman had eloquently called the piece “a kind of time machine, defying any moment.” And she was right. The spent hero sat slumped, hands wrapped, nose broken, head turned in amazement at his survival, it seemed, though one couldn’t actually tell whether he had won or lost his match. I couldn’t take my eyes off “Il Pugile.” I, too, was awed by its silent drama. Still reflecting on my good fortune of receiving this tip from strangers, I stepped onto the street, and decided to go back to the “wrong” museum, which I had given short shrift. I hailed a cab. The driver squinted with disbelief at me, me at him. “You!” we exclaimed in unison. Here was the very same fellow of my Sunday afternoon escapade nearly two weeks ago. He went on about destiny: “Signora, this is impossible. It has never happened to me before in all my years of driving. Do you know how many cabs there are in Rome? Eight thousand at least! Only fate could have brought you to my cab again.” Indeed. I’ve never gotten the same taxi driver twice in any city, and it seemed incredible that a search for Sunday lunch had somehow connected Abruzzo, a random Dutch couple, “Il Pugile,” me and him. Ever helpful, he recommended I not miss the Caravaggio paintings at San Luigi dei Francesi, which was near where I was headed. He dropped me off and again we said goodbye, both delighted with the turn of events. Friends have asked me why I didn’t take his name, but I think it’s because our calling card is not who we are, but the indelible joy and memory of the unexpected experience we had shared. Paula DiPerna is an environmental policy adviser and author who lives in Cooperstown, New York. International New York Times Photo

The Italian American Journal

The Resemblance Is Uncanny.... A Harvard student was bewildered on a visit to Vatican City, not because of the beauty or the history, but because a 500-year-old painting by Raphael which shows a man who is an exact doppelganger of Sylvester Stallone.

Journey to the art of ‘Iberoamerica’ By Ferran Bono -- Valencia, Spain

The Valencian modern art museum IVAM is offering a glimpse of the art produced in “Iberoamerica” over the last century through a selection of 127 works. “This overall visibility is what made us adopt the term Iberoamerican, with no desire to sound paternalistic, even though we are aware of the enormous differences you can find between an artist from Argentina and another one from, say, Cuba,” explains Castro. “That is why the show begins with Torres-García and his defense of Latin American art and his particular reinterpretation of the avant-garde movements.” Indeed, Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García’s influence pervades the entire exhibition. It was he who popularized the catchphrase “our North is the South,” which synthesized his critical views of Western art and his desire to appropriate indigenous values in his search for ties between Europe and the Americas. His constructivist work opens a show that also features relevant artists such as Chile’s Alberto Matta, Cuba’s Wifredo Lam, Argentina’s Horacio Coppola, Guillermo Kuitka and Alberto Greco, Brazil’s Eduardo Kac and Sebastiao Salgado, and Mexico’s Alvarez Bravo and Hermanos Mayo. “IVAM was Spain’s first museum to organize exhibitions of first-rate Latin American artists and to buy work before the boom, even if there were no systematic purchasing guidelines,” notes Castro. IVAM’s complete collection of Latin American art comprises 262 works by 41 artists. The 127 selected pieces represent painting, photography, sculpture, video art, design and installations. Arte iberoamericano en la colección del IVAM. Until July 13 at IVAM, Valencia. EL PAÍS English