As Valentine's Day approaches, a new trend is rippling through the flower, chocolate and diamond industry: consumers want items they purchase that are not harmful to the Earth and its inhabitants + more and more people are starting to ask questions about where products are coming from + demand a more socially and environmentally friendly product.
Useful links:
Flower
www.amystewart.com
www.lewisriver.com
www.esmeraldafarms.com
www.scscertified.com
Chocolate
www.wholefoodsmarket.com
www.equalexchange.com
www.seedsofchange.com
www.dagobachocolate.com
www.uncommongoods.com
Diamond
www.brilliantearth.com
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
The Geography Of Bliss
The Geography Of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World by Eric Weiner is an interesting book, with a mixture of travel + psychology + science + humor to investigate not what happiness is, but where it is + I liked it.
Useful link:
www.ericweinerbooks.com
Useful link:
www.ericweinerbooks.com
Oil Industry Art Show
An art exhibition (Pier Arts Centre in Stromness) documenting life in the North Sea oil and gas industry by Sutherland-based artist Sue Jane Taylor is being held in Orkney + it features paintings, drawings and etchings, a visual record of the impact the North Sea oil industry has had on communities over 20 years.
Useful links:
www.suejanetaylor.co.uk
www.pierartscentre.com
Useful links:
www.suejanetaylor.co.uk
www.pierartscentre.com
Jewelers Of Renaissance
(via 5000 Years of Gems and Jewelry) Frances Rogers and Alice Beard writes:
7. Enseignes
The little leaden saints or ‘tokens’ so extensively worn during the Middle Ages introduced a fashion that persisted through many years of the Renaissance. These emblems, not originally intended for ornament, were often pinned or sewed to the hat, from which conspicuous vantage point they indicated that the wearer had made pilgrimage to the shrine of some saint.
As times changed, the emblems as a whole took on secular, rather than purely religious, significance and the onetime token frankly developed into an adornment known as an enseigne or ‘medallion’. Almost everyone who had a hat saw to it that his headgear bore some kind of emblem. If a man were poor his hat ornament was made of one of the baser metals, copper or bronze. These could be turned out by the dozen, because instead of being handmade they were cast or stamped with a die.
Far different was the enseigne of the rich, termed te bijou par excellence. The goldsmith gave to this hat jewel his highest level of workmanship, his greatest ingenuity of design and his richest materials.
Now beyond a certain point, description of visual appearances is all too prone to leave the same impression as a frame without a picture. The ‘picture’ in this case was the meaning of the device. The typical enseigne of the period, apart from its character as an ornament, illustrates a certain phase of mental attitude.
The Renaissance was a riddle-loving age, an age of quip and quirk and antic disposition. Set conspicuously on the hat for all to see, these ‘toys of the imagination’ embodied this characteristic. They expressed some fancy, notion or idea peculiar to the wearer, but they expressed it indirectly, half revealing, half concealing the meaning. It was like trimming your hat with a rebus which gave the observer an opportunity to exercise his wits on solving the bejeweled puzzle. Rather a welcome pastime in dull company.
Jewelers Of Renaissance (continued)
7. Enseignes
The little leaden saints or ‘tokens’ so extensively worn during the Middle Ages introduced a fashion that persisted through many years of the Renaissance. These emblems, not originally intended for ornament, were often pinned or sewed to the hat, from which conspicuous vantage point they indicated that the wearer had made pilgrimage to the shrine of some saint.
As times changed, the emblems as a whole took on secular, rather than purely religious, significance and the onetime token frankly developed into an adornment known as an enseigne or ‘medallion’. Almost everyone who had a hat saw to it that his headgear bore some kind of emblem. If a man were poor his hat ornament was made of one of the baser metals, copper or bronze. These could be turned out by the dozen, because instead of being handmade they were cast or stamped with a die.
Far different was the enseigne of the rich, termed te bijou par excellence. The goldsmith gave to this hat jewel his highest level of workmanship, his greatest ingenuity of design and his richest materials.
Now beyond a certain point, description of visual appearances is all too prone to leave the same impression as a frame without a picture. The ‘picture’ in this case was the meaning of the device. The typical enseigne of the period, apart from its character as an ornament, illustrates a certain phase of mental attitude.
The Renaissance was a riddle-loving age, an age of quip and quirk and antic disposition. Set conspicuously on the hat for all to see, these ‘toys of the imagination’ embodied this characteristic. They expressed some fancy, notion or idea peculiar to the wearer, but they expressed it indirectly, half revealing, half concealing the meaning. It was like trimming your hat with a rebus which gave the observer an opportunity to exercise his wits on solving the bejeweled puzzle. Rather a welcome pastime in dull company.
Jewelers Of Renaissance (continued)
The Rise Of Landscape Painting
(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:
At Dr Monro’s house Turner met John Robert Cozens (1752-99), a most poetic painter in water colors and the son of a water color artist, Alexander Cozens, who died in 1786; and while Turner owed most to his diligent study of Nature, he always owned his obligation to Cozens, who was indeed his immediate predecessor in water color and the first to produce those atmospheric effects which Turner rivalled and excelled.
In 1799, at age of twenty four, Turner was elected as Associate of the Royal Academy and henceforward, surer of himself and his public, he eschewed the merely topographical imitation of landscape for a nobler art. He looked beyond the mere details to a larger treatment of Nature, seizing all the poetry of sunshine, and the mists of morn and eve, with the grandeur of storm and the glow of sunset. In feeling his way to this period of his first style Turner looked not only to Nature but also to the example of his great predecessors, Claude Richard Wilson, and the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century. The influence of the Dutch School, and particularly of Van de Velde, is apparent in many of these early works, even in ‘Calais Pier’, which, painted in 1803, was held by Ruskin to be ‘the first which bears the sign manual and sign mental of Turner’s colossal power.’ Already, however, Turner had improved on Van de Velde, who was never able to interpret weather so truly and vigorously as it is painted in the rolling sea and windy sky of this stimulating sea piece.
The year before this picture was painted, Turner was elected R A (1802), and during the succeeding years he spent much time in traveling, visiting France, Switzerland, Italy, and the Rhine, and producing innumerable water colors, as well as some of his finest oil paintings.
That splendor of the sky, which was to be peculiar glory of Turner, is first indicated in his ‘Sun rising through Vapor’, painted in 1807, and it was possibly because this was the first picture in which he was able to obtain the effect after which he strove most earnestly that he was so attached to this picture. He sold it, but twenty years later, at the De Tabley sale of 1827, he bought it back for £514 10s. in order that he might bequeath this to the nation, together with his ‘Dido Building Carthage’ on condition they should be hung in perpetuity beside Claude’s ‘Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca’ and ‘Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba.’ Conscious of his own powers and confident in the verdict of posterity, Turner was jealous of other painter’s fame, and he was enraged at the way in which English connoisseurs extolled the pictures of Claude while they neglected his own works.
The pictures already mentioned, together with the lovely ‘Crossing the Brook,’ a view near Weir Head, Tamar, looking towards Plymouth and Mount Edgcumbe, also painted in 1815, may be regarded as the chief masterpieces in oils of Turner’s first period. After 1820 a great change was manifest in his manner of painting. In the early paintings dark predominated, with a very limited portion of light, and he painted solidly throughout with a vigorous and full brush; but his later works are based on a light ground with a small proportion of dark, and using opaque touches of te purest orange, blue purple, and other powerful colors, Turner obtained infinitely delicate gradations which produced a splendid and harmonious effect. This new manner is first seen in his ‘Bay of Baiæ,’ painted in 1823, and six years later, in 1829, it is revealed in all its glory in one of Turner’s most beautiful and poetical works, ‘Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus,’ in which, as Redgrave has said, ‘while in no way gaudy, it seems impossible to surpass the power of color which he has attained, or the terrible beauty in which he has clothed his poetic conception.’ In this glorious picture, ‘a work almost without a parallel in art,’ the nominal subject has little more power over us today than it has in the Claudes. Turner’s painting attracts us primarily, not as an illustration to a familiar story from Homer, but as a glowing piece of color, a magnificently decorative transcription of a flaming sunrise. And with all this the picture is a ‘magic casement’ through which our imagination looks out on a world of romance, for in this color is all the intoxication of triumph, of final victory after perils escaped; and though Turner himself probably did not know it, and few who look upon his masterpiece are conscious of the fact, this picture subconsciously expresses the elation, the pride, and even the touch of insolence, that all England felt after her victorious issue from the Napoleonic wars.
The Rise Of Landscape Painting (continued)
At Dr Monro’s house Turner met John Robert Cozens (1752-99), a most poetic painter in water colors and the son of a water color artist, Alexander Cozens, who died in 1786; and while Turner owed most to his diligent study of Nature, he always owned his obligation to Cozens, who was indeed his immediate predecessor in water color and the first to produce those atmospheric effects which Turner rivalled and excelled.
In 1799, at age of twenty four, Turner was elected as Associate of the Royal Academy and henceforward, surer of himself and his public, he eschewed the merely topographical imitation of landscape for a nobler art. He looked beyond the mere details to a larger treatment of Nature, seizing all the poetry of sunshine, and the mists of morn and eve, with the grandeur of storm and the glow of sunset. In feeling his way to this period of his first style Turner looked not only to Nature but also to the example of his great predecessors, Claude Richard Wilson, and the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century. The influence of the Dutch School, and particularly of Van de Velde, is apparent in many of these early works, even in ‘Calais Pier’, which, painted in 1803, was held by Ruskin to be ‘the first which bears the sign manual and sign mental of Turner’s colossal power.’ Already, however, Turner had improved on Van de Velde, who was never able to interpret weather so truly and vigorously as it is painted in the rolling sea and windy sky of this stimulating sea piece.
The year before this picture was painted, Turner was elected R A (1802), and during the succeeding years he spent much time in traveling, visiting France, Switzerland, Italy, and the Rhine, and producing innumerable water colors, as well as some of his finest oil paintings.
That splendor of the sky, which was to be peculiar glory of Turner, is first indicated in his ‘Sun rising through Vapor’, painted in 1807, and it was possibly because this was the first picture in which he was able to obtain the effect after which he strove most earnestly that he was so attached to this picture. He sold it, but twenty years later, at the De Tabley sale of 1827, he bought it back for £514 10s. in order that he might bequeath this to the nation, together with his ‘Dido Building Carthage’ on condition they should be hung in perpetuity beside Claude’s ‘Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca’ and ‘Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba.’ Conscious of his own powers and confident in the verdict of posterity, Turner was jealous of other painter’s fame, and he was enraged at the way in which English connoisseurs extolled the pictures of Claude while they neglected his own works.
The pictures already mentioned, together with the lovely ‘Crossing the Brook,’ a view near Weir Head, Tamar, looking towards Plymouth and Mount Edgcumbe, also painted in 1815, may be regarded as the chief masterpieces in oils of Turner’s first period. After 1820 a great change was manifest in his manner of painting. In the early paintings dark predominated, with a very limited portion of light, and he painted solidly throughout with a vigorous and full brush; but his later works are based on a light ground with a small proportion of dark, and using opaque touches of te purest orange, blue purple, and other powerful colors, Turner obtained infinitely delicate gradations which produced a splendid and harmonious effect. This new manner is first seen in his ‘Bay of Baiæ,’ painted in 1823, and six years later, in 1829, it is revealed in all its glory in one of Turner’s most beautiful and poetical works, ‘Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus,’ in which, as Redgrave has said, ‘while in no way gaudy, it seems impossible to surpass the power of color which he has attained, or the terrible beauty in which he has clothed his poetic conception.’ In this glorious picture, ‘a work almost without a parallel in art,’ the nominal subject has little more power over us today than it has in the Claudes. Turner’s painting attracts us primarily, not as an illustration to a familiar story from Homer, but as a glowing piece of color, a magnificently decorative transcription of a flaming sunrise. And with all this the picture is a ‘magic casement’ through which our imagination looks out on a world of romance, for in this color is all the intoxication of triumph, of final victory after perils escaped; and though Turner himself probably did not know it, and few who look upon his masterpiece are conscious of the fact, this picture subconsciously expresses the elation, the pride, and even the touch of insolence, that all England felt after her victorious issue from the Napoleonic wars.
The Rise Of Landscape Painting (continued)
Synthetic Diamond Update
The latest CVD (chemical vapor deposition) synthetic diamonds produced by Apollo Diamond Inc are better in color and clarity (a significant improvement) + well-proportioned, relatively large colorless, near-colorless and fancy-colored diamonds (comparable in quality to many natural diamonds in the gem market) are available (0.14-0.71ct range) + for now CVD synthetic diamonds are identifiable by their (unusual internal graining, fluorescence zoning) unique gemological and spectroscopic features + I think, CVD diamond growth techniques will continue to improve in the coming years and will eventually be in the gem market + if in doubt always consult a reputed gem testing laboratory.
Useful link:
www.apollodiamond.com
Useful link:
www.apollodiamond.com
Monday, February 11, 2008
Gem Scam Lives On
Siriporn Sachamuneewongse writes about the typical gem scams in Bangkok (Thailand) + the official view (s) + the dos and dont's + other viewpoints @ http://www.bangkokpost.com/100208_Perspective/10Feb2008_pers002.php
Useful links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_gem_scam
www.geocities.com/thaigemscamgroup
www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AJHi8uC7T8
Useful links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_gem_scam
www.geocities.com/thaigemscamgroup
www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AJHi8uC7T8
Eric Touchaleaume
Eric Touchaleaume has been described as the Indiana Jones of furniture collecting + he has spent the past decade scouring remote, often lawless regions in search of valuable relics, often at considerable personal risk + he has been a Prouvé specialist, and has an amazing collection + he is one-of-a-kind-dealer with unique taste for designs + I liked them.
Useful links:
www.galerie54.com
www.designmuseum.org
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/design/story/0,,2253696,00.html
Useful links:
www.galerie54.com
www.designmuseum.org
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/design/story/0,,2253696,00.html
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