Dilip Simeon's blog

Starry, starry night Paint your palette blue and gray Look out on a summer's day With eyes that know the darkness in my soul Shadows on the hills Sketch the trees and the daffodils Catch the breeze and the winter chills In colors on the snowy, linen land Now, I understand what you tried to say to me Oil-on-canvas painting by Vincent van Gogh; June 1889 It depicts the view from the east-facing window of his asylum And how you suffered for your sanity And how you tried to set them free They would not listen, they did not know how Perhaps they'll listen now Starry, starry night Flaming flowers that brightly blaze Swirling clouds in violet haze Reflect in Vincent's eyes of china blue Colors changing hue Morning fields of amber grain Weathered faces lined in pain Are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand Now, I understand, what you tried to say to me How you suffered for your sanity How you tried to set them free They would not listen, they did not know how Perhaps they...

A bold new exhibition by a young Myanmar artist challenges people not to turn away from dead babies and brutalised women in conflict zones overlooked by the world’s media. The  London show , ‘Please Enjoy Our Tragedies’, is by Sai, a multimedia artist who blocks out his last name for security reasons. Some of Sai’s work will be shown at the Venice Biennale  from 23 April , as part of the European Cultural Centre’s  Personal Structures exhibition . While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine currently dominates global attention, Sai draws links between that conflict and domestic repression in Myanmar. “The same stakeholders are involved in Myanmar as in Ukraine,” he told openDemocracy. “Russia arms Myanmar’s generals and China supports them. It’s not a Ukraine problem; it’s a global problem.”… https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/myanmar-sai-artist-junta/ Silent strike empties streets in Myanmar on anniversary of coup More  posts on Myanmar

Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities presented its recent discoveries on Saturday which include five tombs belonging to a  pharaonic necropolis complex at Saqqara , just outside the capital Cairo. The tombs, which are believed to have housed senior officials from the Old Kingdom and First Intermediate period of ancient Egypt, date back to as long ago as 2700 BC. Excavations began in September and the most recently discovered tombs were unearthed last month. "All of those five tombs are well-painted, well-decorated," Mostafa Waziri, head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, told reporters. "Excavations did not stop. We are planning to continue our excavations. We believe that  we can find more tombs in this area ."  Archaeologists found not only well-preserved paintings, but also small statues and pottery as well as stone and wooden coffins. The area where the tombs were discovered is rich with ancient Egyptian history. The necropolis is close to the...

For around three centuries, the girl reading a letter in the dimly-lit solitude of a Johannes Vermeer painting gave no indication of what the message contained. Facing an open window, her figure gently curved as she scanned the note in her hands, her body appeared slight against the vacant wall behind her. But last week, the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden, Germany, where she's been housed for most of her long life, has finally unveiled an amorous secret, hidden long ago beneath layers of paint. Ahead of  its upcoming show  about the celebrated Dutch painter, the museum has released an image of a drastically changed "Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window," which the Dutch artist painted between 1657 and 1659. Following a painstaking four-year-long restoration, the empty wall now shows a monumental painting of Cupid, discovered by X-ray in 1979, but now revealed for the first time… https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/vermeer-gemaldegalerie-2021-hidden-cupid/inde...

As his fame grew, Dalí’s reputation was undermined by his outrageous pronouncements. He confessed that he dreamed of Adolph Hitler “as a woman” whose flesh “ravished me.” Although he insisted he rejected Hitlerism despite such fantasies, the Surrealists, who were allied to the French Communist Party, expelled him in 1939. He also later extolled Spain’s fascist leader Gen. Francisco Franco for establishing “clarity, truth and order” in Spain. Yet just before the civil war began, Dalí painted  Soft Construction with Boiled Beans  ( Premonition of Civil War ) , in which a tormented figure, straight out of the works of Francisco Goya, tears itself apart in what Dalí called “a delirium of autostrangulation.” The work is a powerful antiwar statement.... Salvador Dalí spent much of his life promoting himself and shocking the world. He relished courting the masses, and he was probably better known, especially in the United States, than any other 20th-century painter, including even f...

Archaeological "treasures," including Greek ceramics and 2,400-year-old wicker baskets filled with fruit, have been discovered at the site of the ancient sunken city of Thonis-Heracleion, off Egypt's coast. Thonis-Heracleion was Egypt's largest Mediterranean port before Alexander the Great founded Alexandria in 331 BCE. A team from the European Institute for Underwater Archaeology (IEASM), led by French marine archaeologist Franck Goddio, have been studying the area for years. Their 2021 mission, conducted in close cooperation with the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities of Egypt, revealed "extremely interesting results" at the site of Thonis-Heracleion in the Bay of Aboukir, IEASM said in a statement last month... https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/thonis-heracleion-egypt-scli-intl-scn/index.html

While ancient Egyptian mummy portraits have long been objects of curiosity, only a minimal amount of scholarship exists about them. Many questions have lingered since they were uncovered by archeologists around the Egyptian city of Fayum in the late 1800s. Who painted them? What pigments and substrates did the artists use, and where were these materials procured? Were the paintings made during the subject's life or after death? In 2003, the conservator Marie Svoboda made it her mission to unravel these mysteries. She'd recently joined the ranks of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and while the institution's collection was rich and sprawling, a small group of 16 works caught her attention. The detailed, wide-eyed faces in these paintings, known as mummy portraits, date back to 100 to 250 C.E. Each of them had originally been affixed to a mummy, shrouding the face of the dead…. https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/egyptian-mummy-portraits/index.html Fayum mummy portrait ,  M...

Art and science can seem two opposites on a spectrum. One is creative and interpretive, the other exact and empirical. But an emerging technology known as Pure Structural Colour -- dubbed the "boldest, brightest color on Earth" in a new exhibition -- shows how interplay between the two may be revolutionary for both. Panels of Pure Structural Colour that imitate the shades of butterfly wings on display at London's Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Credit: Roger Wooldridge/Royal Botanic Gardens Kew Pure Structural Colour is produced from nanostructures -- tiny particles that reflect and scatter light to replicate the brightest hues found in nature. It was developed by Lifescaped, a lab and studio founded by the scientist and artist Andrew Parker. This month, artworks incorporating the technology have gone on public display for the first time at "Naturally Brilliant Colour," an exhibition at the UK's Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, London. The gallery itself is dark, w...

NB : No, not politics, but nationalism, which Albert Einstein called ' the measles of mankind '. It is a tragedy that a talented person be abused in her own country because she refuses to kneel before this false god. This is  not just a Chinese problem, its  a lesson we all need to learn. DS   The  Academy Awards this year  could have been a major moment of pride for China. Chloe Zhao, a Beijing-born filmmaker, made history Sunday by winning the best director Oscar for her movie  Nomadland  -  becoming the first Asian woman  and only the second woman to ever win the award. Zhao's movie also won best picture. Book review: ‘The Zhivago Affair’ was one of the most fascinating of the Cold War’s cultural skirmishes // Boris Pasternak's refusal of The Nobel Prize. His son's memoirs But China i s not celebrating -- at least not officially. On the contrary, this year's Oscars was not aired anywhere in China -- including on two major streaming platf...

45,500 years is a long, long time. It is nearly 23 times as long as the distance between the point at which you are reading this article and the birth of Jesus Christ. It is roughly 9 times as long as the distance between the present day and the rise of ancient Egyptian civilization.  And, according to a  recent archaeological paper , that is how long ago artists on an island in modern-day Indonesia were in a cave, painting an adorable rendering of a pig.  If their estimations are correct, that pig portrait could be the oldest known example of a figurative drawing, meaning a form of art that attempts to depict the real world rather than designs or patterns… https://www.salon.com/2021/01/13/this-45500-year-old-cave-painting-of-a-pig-may-be-the-oldest-known-work-of-art/ More posts on art

Thousands of  rock art pictures  depicting huge Ice Age creatures such as mastodons have been revealed by researchers in the  Amazon rainforest . The paintings were probably made around 11,800 to 12,600 years ago, according to a press release from researchers at Britain's University of Exeter. The paintings are set over three different rock shelters, with the largest, known as Cerro Azul, home to 12 panels and thousands of individual pictographs. Rock art across Africa is dying, say experts Located in the Serranía La Lindosa in modern-day Colombia, the rock art shows how the earliest human inhabitants of the area would have coexisted with Ice Age megafauna, with pictures showing what appear to be giant sloths, mastodons, camelids, horses and three-toed ungulates with trunks. "These really are incredible images, produced by the earliest people to live in western Amazonia," said Mark Robinson, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter…. https://edition.cnn.com/style/...

" Nobody in my family had ever gone through horrors of the Partition in particular as an actor in it but I never understood why I always felt deeply and was always lured by the stories, visuals or events of '47. One of the biggest migration and movement that was forcibly acted upon the common people of South Asia, clearly based on the lines of their religion. As ridiculous it sounds, it was more haunting to me as a legacy of 'Colonization' and a never fading away scar on the soul of the Sub-continent. Out of all the histories, be it political or economical. What mattered to the most was shattering of the 'Hope'- breaking down of the idea of being a  Human. .. The idea of bargaining and bartering of fellow humans on some negotiation table, talking of their exchanges and movement. I would not even hesitate to say that History of south-asia is nothing but certainly in the post-partition era, where we still find 14th August 1947 as our reference point for various p...

“All I wanted to do when I started was change the world, and now, 60 years on, I’ve succeeded,” says the 84-year-old artist. “But it’s worse now than when I started, we’re really living in a hell of a year, aren’t we?”....  When the Welsh artist  Ralph Steadman  picks up the phone, he sounds a bit paranoid. “It’s Friday the 13th, you know,” he says with a doomsday tone. “I’m terribly superstitious,” he adds. “It’s not only that, but the year itself. And everything that has happened this year. We’ve gotta get out of this year. Like that song by the Animals, We Gotta Get Out of This Place.” Viral Menace, artwork by Ralph Steadman: His new picture book  Ralph Steadman: A Life in Ink , tracing over half a century of artwork, reflects as much. From his political satire – depicting Boris Johnson as the devil and Donald Trump as a dwarf – to his trademark Gonzo journalism work created alongside the American writer Hunter S Thompson for the novel-turned-film Fear and ...

Pablo Picasso  was still married to the former ballerina Olga Khokhlova when he became captivated by a 17-year-old girl outside the Galeries Lafayette in Paris in 1927. He was 28 years her senior, but Marie-Thérèse Walter soon became his muse for voluptuous portraits and gave birth to his daughter before he moved on to the next of his many relationships, with  Dora Maar , the surrealist photo-grapher and painter.  That daughter, Maya Ruiz-Picasso, now 84, has spoken of the women in her father’s life and her own close relationship with the artist for a new book edited by her daughter, the art historian Diana Widmaier-Picasso.  Picasso and Maya: Father and Daughter,  published next month, explores Picasso’s depictions of Ruiz-Picasso and the relationship between a father and his eldest daughter.... https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/aug/16/my-father-picasso-secret-daughter-tells-of-posing-in-pink-bootees

During the large-scale protests this past weekend in Salt Lake City, Utah, a public artwork had its symbolic meaning completely transformed when demonstrators poured red paint onto the giant hands. “Serve and Protect” is a large bronze sculpture by artist  Gregory Ragland  depicting two hands side-by-side with their palms facing upward, demonstrating the sign language, ‘to serve’.  The public art commission was completed in 2013 and measures 20′ x 20′ x 38″ and is located outside of the Public Safety Building.  The striking symbolism of the bright red paint pooling like blood has sparked debate online. From cries of vandalism to being a powerful political/protest statement, the opinions on such an act span the spectrum. What’s clear is that art matters, and can be a powerful form of expression and frustration. https://twistedsifter.com/2020/06/red-paint-completely-changed-this-serve-and-protect-sculpture-during-the-protests/

As a  European Renaissance art historian , I study the evolving image of Jesus Christ from A.D. 1350 to 1600. Some of the  best-known depictions of Christ , from Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” to Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment” in the Sistine Chapel, were produced during this period.  But the all-time most-reproduced image of Jesus comes from another period. It is  Warner Sallman’s light-eyed, light-haired “Head of Christ” from 1940 . Sallman, a former commercial artist who created art for advertising campaigns, successfully marketed this picture worldwide. Sallman’s painting culminates a long tradition of white Europeans creating and dissemi-nating pictures of Christ made in their own image.  The historical Jesus likely had the brown eyes and skin of other  first-century Jews from Galilee , a region in biblical Israel. But no one knows exactly what Jesus looked like. There are no known images of Jesus from his lifetime, and while the Old Testament Kin...

The bomb reproduced in a life-sized 3D image on the floor of the Imperial War Museum seems almost comical – so big and clumsy, like something out of an old film of a Jules Verne story. Surely this monster was never used. But the Soviet Union’s Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever created, was once detonated. Suspended beneath a bomber because it was too big to fit inside, it was  dropped over the Barents  Sea  and exploded with a force of 57 megatonnes, more than 1,500 times the combined strength of the two atomic bombs America dropped on Japan. Ai Weiwei’s History of Bombs is an artwork about incalculable destruction in the form of an encyclopaedic collection of bombs and missiles, depicted with clinical precision across the floor of the Imperial War Museum’s central hall and flowing up a staircase. At a time when the world is quaking from a natural pandemic, he reminds us of our mind-boggling capacity to obliterate ourselves. It’s a mesmerising piece of...

The Empire of Light  (  L'Empire des lumières ) is a series of paintings  René Magritte  covered more than a dozen times from 1947 to 1965. They depict the paradoxical image of a night-time street, lit only by a single street light, beneath a daytime sky. In this case the artist was inspired by the works of  John Atkinson Grimshaw , an English painter from the  Victorian era , who had delighted in his time to paint urban views at sunset. see images here

There is no existing vocabulary to illustrate a condition that requires a special kind of reality. Once it comes to a point when the authority cannot rationally communicate or have a clear exchange of ideas or when they cannot allow the argument, then the only thing they can do is to make you feel that rationality, moral judgment and the law no longer work. They must prove to you that nothing works except power itself. And that power is identified with incomprehensible treatment.. You began an 81-day confinement on 3 April 2011. What happened that day? That day, I woke up and prepared to go to the airport with my assistant Jennifer, who had begun working with me not long before. This was our first trip together and we were going to go to Taiwan to prepare for an exhibition opening later that autumn. Our flight was to Hong Kong where we would transfer to Taipei. Many things happened in the days before the trip. I had been under surveillance and followed by secret police for years...

Who can fail to have been moved by all the images of people on their doorsteps clapping for the NHS last night? They filled TV screens and news websites, presenting a warming picture of solidarity in enforced solitude – all alone yet all together. But there are some far less reassuring images circulating on social media. Some people are saying we now all exist inside an  Edward Hopper  painting. It doesn’t seem to matter which one. Edward Hopper’s Cape Cod Morning, 1950. Photograph: Alamy I assume this is because we are coldly distanced from each other, sitting at our lonely windows overlooking an eerily empty city, like the woman perched on her bed in Morning Sun, or the other looking out of a bay window in Cape Cod Morning. “We are all Edward Hopper paintings now,” according to a WhatsApp compilation of Hopper scenes: a woman alone in a deserted cinema, a man bereft in his modern apartment, a lonely shop worker and people sitting far apart at tables for one in a ...