Discovering Zhou Gang

What do you do on wet days when you are on vacation? We like to visit museums. So as today is very rainy, we went to Toulon this afternoon to visit the Museum of Asian Arts (Musée des arts asiatiques).
Located in a house with garden which once belonged to the son and later the grandson [...]

Color vs Black and White

The son of a rabbi and fine Talmudist, Saul Leiter studied to become a rabbi himself but soon left Pittsburg to settle in New York once he felt the rabbinate was not his calling. Instead he wanted to be a painter.
After visiting a photography exhibition, Leiter took an interest in this form of art [...]

Séraphine

By the age of seven, Séraphine Louis Maillart (1864-1942) was already an orphan. She lived for six years with her older sister then, like most girls from poor families at the time, got a job as a servant. She worked in a convent then for different families in the town of Senlis.

One of the people [...]

Playing with Photoshop: Tomato

This is the second (almost) red tomato in my garden, after I played with Photoshop.

Playing with Photoshop

I have spent ages – too long in fact – playing with Photoshop today. Here is the first draft.

Creazone

Creative workshops are extremely trendy here. People from all ages and all walks of life take up scrapbooking, painting, engraving, etc.
A young woman just a few yards from my house made advantage of this trend and set up an art workshop with a difference: she teaches art and English. Apparently her workshop is popular with [...]

Collages: Kiek Jansen

Collage: a form of art in which various materials such as photographs and pieces of paper or fabric are arranged and stuck to a backing.
In one of yeasterday’s post, I wrote about the house where Henri Matisse grew up. I mentioned his mother’s shop but did not mention that part of it is now a [...]

Matisse’s Family House

Henri Matisse lived here. He was born in his grand mother’s house in 1869 before his parents moved to this house when he was still a baby. They owned a grain store. His father went round the local farms which he provided with grains and fodder while his mother ran the shop.
Matisse attended the local [...]

Art and Older People

One of the nursing homes in my hometown is currently holding an exhibition. It is an exhibition with a difference as the artists are some of the residents themselves.
Mrs B. (a former art teacher) volunteers once a week at the old people’s home. She has two groups: the people who suffer from Alzheimer’s disease and [...]

Art Project: Scandinavian Artists

The end of the school year is great for projects. We now know more or less what classes we’ll teach and even sometimes with whom. So today I was approached by a History teacher who wil teach the Humanities section next year. He told me about an exhibition which will take place in Lille’s art [...]