It’s old news, really. For a few years, the video was sitting along with over hundred drafts waiting to be published, along with the link to the related article, Has the secret to eternal life been found? Russian scientist says he is stronger and healthier after injecting himself with 3.5 MILLION year old bacteria.
Yet another article has been published in 2018, A Russian Scientist Injected Himself With 3.5-Million-Year-Old Bacteria from Curiosity, the site that promises to make you smarter.
I prefer not to provide precise instructions on how my paintings should be interpreted. In meta-realism, it is more important to experience magnetism and light. – Victor Bregeda
Victor Bregeda was born in 1963 in Taganrog, Russia, into a family of painters. The artist has stated that he has been painting for as long as he can remember.
After attending an art school in Russia, Bregeda made a decision to move forward with his personal interpretation of creative art, putting himself in sharp contrast with his academic art training.
This rebellious move proved victorious as Victor’s art quickly gained recognition in local and international contests.
“The key genres of my artwork are plein aire landscapes, still life compositions and portraits performed in a metarealistic style with strong roots in subconscious philosophy. I use a variety of techniques and materials while trying to invent new ones. I attempt to reveal the true nature of things hidden from empirical understanding,” — V. Bregeda
Metarealism is synonymous to metaconscience, which means beyond psychological consciousness, beyond a subjective psychological polarized view of reality. Metarealism seeks to depict the reality which exists beyond that psychological subjective perspective. Metarealism proposes not only to communicate further than the pictorial aspect of the perception of other dimensions of reality, but also the essence of those dimensions and their relation to us as human beings.
“I have been particularly influenced by the smooth techniques espoused by the Dutch school of painting. The artists who inspired me the most were Leonardo Da Vinci, Hieronymus Bosch, Peter Bruegel, Max Ernst, and Nikolai Rerikh. I like the French school of the 18th – 19th centuries as well as the works of Andrew Wyeth. I grew up in a strong creative environment. My artistic abilities are in my blood, thanks to my forefathers.” — V. Bregeda.
See more of Victor Bregeda on his official website.
Iranian cartoonist Alireza Karimi Moghaddam shares his admiration for Vincent van Gogh in an ongoing comic series starring the Post-Impressionist painter.
La fêtes des voisins
Born in 1981, Tof Vanmarque grew up in Lanrivoare, Breton countryside. After being bored at the Technical High School in Brest, he’s off into the world, trying a good number of odd jobs, tiler and shepherd among them. Always drawing, he enrolls into the Pivaut School in Nantes in 2003 to learn the art, craft and technique of creating cartoons.
«J’ai gagné en technique, perdu en imagination. Je n’avais plus de coeur, plus d’âme, j’étais lobotomisé. L’école formait des travailleurs, pas des créateurs,» Tof says, roughly translated in English as “I gained in technique, lost in imagination. I had no heart, no soul, I was lobotomized. The school trained workers, not creators.”
He paints and hangs in the bars of Nantes “easy canvases, food. Bouquets of flowers, portraits of old people, elephants; sale brought me enough to survive.” Then he discovers surrealism, reads André Breton. Fantastic characters arise. Back in Brest, thanks to the advice of choreographer Patrick Le Doaré, he embarks on creating of rather ambitious paintings. First exhibition, in 2010, then his participation at the MAC Paris show the following year, exhibit in galleries in Cabourg and Belgium… Thus the adventure has begun.
See the gallery here to find the names (in French) of the artworks above.
New Year’s Eve 2019 Media Corporation of China gala concert. Amazing, wonders Russian blogger Alex Exler (exler.ru) in his post, and I quote, imprecisely translated, “How is it possible to set such a large-scale spectacle, where a huge number of people not only move synchronously (music usually helps here), but also gets to the right point at any given time, and very precisely.”
I have found a plausible explanation in one of the comments to the post. Roughly translated: The choreography of movement here is rather simple: at each given moment of time each Chinese should know exactly who are the other Chinese he should run after, and beside which Chinese he should stop. And only a few Chinese should know exactly where to run and where to stop.
But then again, they aren’t simply synchronously run and stop en masse. They perform en masse!
On 19 November 1819 Ferdinand VII of Spain inaugurated the Museo Real de Pinturas. Two centuries later the present-day Museo Nacional del Prado is commemorating its Bicentenary.
Francisco Goya Portrait of Ferdinand VII of Spain in his robes of state (1815). Museo del Prado
The works housed at the Prado Museum (link to the collection) are displayed on three floors, and illustrate the history of the cultural politics of the Spanish court.
Therefore, there are paintings by court painters and great artists of the past, such as the Venetian painter Titian,who was the official portrait painter of Charles V, who loved the Flemish painters, as well.
Titian. Danae Receiving the Golden Rain. 1553. Museo del Prado
We owe to Philip II, instead, the world’s greatest collection of paintings by Hieronymus Bosch; whereas Philip IVallowed Velazquez to express himself to the best of his talent, and bought works of the Italian Renaissance for this art collection.
Hieronymus Bosch. Fantasía moral (Visio tondali). Museo del Madrid
Thanks to Philip V paintings by French painters enriched the collection; whereas the court of Charles IV was dominated by the personality of Francisco Goya, on display at the Prado Museum with almost 130 works.
Francisco Goya. The Clothed Maja. Museo del Prado
A large section of the Prado Museum is characterized by religious paintings, not only because the Church has played a dominant role in Spain over centuries, but also because in 1872 paintings coming from the collection of the Museo de la Trinidad, full of medieval works coming from all over Spain and painted by artists who hadn’t work for the sovereigns, entered the museum.
That’s why you’ll find works by El Greco, who worked especially in Toledo.
As for Spanish, Flemish and Dutch art you can’t miss: The Triumph of Death by Brueghel; Artemis by Rembrandt; the three paintings of mythological subject by Rubens (Perseus and Andromeda; The judgement of Paris; The three Graces); Las Meninas by Velazquez. (The Art Post Blog).
Cee-Roo is a Swiss YouTube channel that collects images and sounds of different countries, and then makes fascinating video clips with ethnic music soundtracks. The work is tedious, the way I see it, but the result is amazing. For three minutes you find yourself surrounded by the exotic atmosphere of faraway lands.
It’s not learning experience per se, but rather an exciting teasing experiment, entertainment, if a bit kitchi.
Honestly, I enjoyed it. God knows, perhaps someone would want to explore the place beyond the charming kitch and then it might become a start of an amazing journey into the world that start right behind your doorstep and never ends.
Stages of Life. 1785-1798.
The source of this post references Les Collections -Le Musée de l’Image | ville d’Épinal and RMN Grand Palais for images.
Stages of Life. 1800.
It is fascinating to see how clothes and accessories have changed over the years. Baby walkers are present in all the paintings whereas toys are varied: dolls, butterfly nets, drums, puppets, hoops.
Stages of Life. 1805.
Not too surprising that in most of the pictures men are dressed in military uniforms. Boys often attired as little military man as well.
Stages of Life. 1817.
Angels are ever present on prints ranging from XVIII to the first half of the XIX century, but nearly disappear around 1850s.
Stages of Life. 1822.
Stages of Life. 1826.
Stages of Life. 1840-1852.
Stages of Life. 1854.
Stages of Life. 1858.
This fabulous selection of prints with a brief overview I found on this Russian site А МОЖЕТ БЫТЬ, ВСЕ БЫЛО СОВЕРШЕННО ИНАЧЕ…
The logo of the site may be interpreted as And, perhaps, everything was completely different… To those who reads Russian and interested in, yes, French history, the site is worth a visit. As it often turns out, if not entirely EVERYTHING, still SOMETHING most definitely was completely different.
Vladimir Stakheev, born in 1963, is a Russian painter from Moscow, member of the Union of Creative Artists of Russia.
He restored frescoes and wall paintings in ancient temples, worked in mixed technology, combining pencil, pen, brush, needle (scratching the top layer of paint), airbrush, and different materials: watercolor, ink, gouache, tempera.
He collaborated with various publishing houses — artistic design of books, newspapers, magazines, illustrated V. Bianchi, N. Zadornov, S. King, D.R.R. Tolkien.
At the same time — surprise or not — he is the author of several famous graphic series in the style of HARD KITCH.
Here is his FUNNY CATS series: airbrush, pen, brush, pencil, acrylic, watercolor.
Hard kitch, all right. I like cute kitties as much as millions of others. His, in my opinion, combine an amazing tenderness and elegance of composition with an absolute ironic desperation of content.
Stakheev’s illustrations of The Lord of the Rings: 
And some of his other works:
Contra Spem Spero... Et Rideo 