Janus

Separation

Edvard Munch's painting

Deus sive Natura

Clothespin

Usyal Mehmet Ali, Park Chaudfontaine (Belgium)

Cape Roca

Where the land ends and the sea begins...

The Universal and the Particular

Bill Viola

The Fates and the Witches

Goya's paintings

Lake Maurepas (Louisiana). Eugene Vasenyoff for National Geographic

Rajasthan

Desert of Rajasthan (India). Shivji Joshi's photo to National Geographic.

Gabriele Münter

Gabriele Münter, Jawlensky und Werefkin (1908/09) in the Lenbachhaus of München (Munich)

Y

Mark Wallinger's Sculpture in Oxford - Magdalen College

"The sculpture, ‘Y’, has taken two years to create and can be found in Magdalen College’s grounds in Bat Willow Meadow, where it completes a circle of willow trees.

The tall, tree-like sculpture reflects the changing light throughout the day and visitors can walk up to and around the work. When the meadow floods, as it often does at certain times of the year, the reflections of ‘Y’ on the water should add another dimension to the sculpture."

Black Forest Schwarzwald

Photo from Selkuc Aral

Van Gogh: Four Seasons

Hand of God

Lorenzo Quinn's sculpture: The Hand of God, now in London (Park Lane)

Fongoli Chimps

Revolution in our knowledge of chimps. They like to swim and they create spears for hunting.
New discoveries from Jill Pruetz in the region of Fongoli (Senegal).

Hævnen (In a Better World)

A lovely Danish movie on forgiveness, directed by Suzanne Bier.

"Anton is a doctor who commutes between his home in an idyllic town in Denmark, and his work at an African refugee camp. In these two very different worlds, he and his family are faced with conflicts that lead them to difficult choices between revenge and forgiveness. Anton and his wife Marianne, who have two young sons, are separated and struggling with the possibility of divorce. Their older, ten-year-old son Elias is being bullied at school, until he is defended by Christian, a new boy who has just moved from London with his father, Claus. Christian's mother recently lost her battle with cancer, and Christian is greatly troubled by her death. Elias and Christian quickly form a strong bond, but when Christian involves Elias in a dangerous act of revenge with potentially tragic consequences, their friendship is tested and lives are put in danger. Ultimately, it is their parents who are left to help them come to terms with the complexity of human emotions, pain and empathy. Written by Sisse Graum Jørgensen, Producer"

Winter's Bone

Great movie now on DVD, with Jennifer Lawrence directed by Debra Granik.

Pandora's Seed

One of the greatest books of this century.

"In the Western world we are more comfortable than ever before. So why aren't we happier or healthier? Spencer Wells uses the latest research to show the answer lies in our hunter-gatherer roots.
Settling 10,000 years ago may have led to modern civilization, but it also opened a Pandora's box: everything from our sweet tooth to stress, environmental problems and terrorism can be usefully traced back to the mismatch between genes and lifestyle.
On a globe-trotting journey, Wells illustrates how we can learn from our ancestors how to thrive in the future.

Spencer Wells is a leading population geneticist, documentary filmmaker and author of The Journey of Man and Deep Ancestry. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1994 and conducted his post-doctoral training with Luca Cavalli-Sforza at Stanford University. His landmark research findings from a field study that encompassed 25,000 miles of Asia and the former Soviet republics led to advances in the understanding of the male Y chromosome and its ability to trace ancestral human migration.
He was previously director of the Population Genetics Research Group at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at Oxford and was recently appointed Frank H.T. Rhodes Visiting Professor at Cornell University. Wells is currently National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence and spearheads the Genographic Project. He lives with his wife, a documentary filmmaker, in Washington, DC."

First Work of Art

The first world's artwork (known until now).
From Blombos Cave in South Africa.
Dating around 80-75.000 years ago.

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Klimt

Cassone (1913) - Klimt's painting

Sephardic Song

Spencer Wells and Human Genetics

Spencer Wells

Gothic

Summer Garden

Webshots Click on the link. You'll find a better resolution of the photo.
© Deleu /AGE Fotostock

Nuno Crato

One-Moment Meditation

Sri Lanka

National Geograpic's Photo (Gaston Lacombe)

What an Astronaut's Camera Sees

Quoting:
"An intimate tour... in 1080p... of Earth's most impressive landscapes... as captured by astronauts with their digital cameras. Dr. Justin Wilkinson from NASA's astronaut team describes the special places that spacemen focus on whenever they get a moment.

We start with the coast of Namibia in southwestern Africa, the very dry desert coast of the Namib Desert. You can see a cloud band butting up against the shore and some straight sand dunes in the lower left of the picture. Yeah those are big red sand dunes that the astronauts say is one of the most beautiful sites that you can get when you're flying.

Coming into the view on the left is an impact crater right in the middle of the picture, right about now and some wind streaks. We know where this area is because it's a bit unique. We've got a major dune field coming into the picture on the left there: the Oriental Sand Sea, as it's called in French, and on the top is the Isawan Sand Sea.

This is the island of Sicily with cloud over Mt. Etna, so you can't quite tell there's a big volcano in the middle of the picture right now. And there's the toe of the boot of Italy coming into the picture from the left. See a good example of sun glint on the right with the sea reflecting the sun.

This is the smooth east coast of the Kamchatka peninsula again. As you move inland it gets even more striking as a picture because of all the volcanoes on this peninsula and the snowy mountains. There's a volcano just coming into the picture from the top left there. You can see a knob-shaped feature.

Here is a smaller finger of land in China sticking into the Pacific Ocean. In winter you can see all the snow lower left. This is called the Qindoa P eninsula and we recognize it. And again, the sun glint point moving along the coast upper center.

In a very clear picture, the Zagros mountains with snow on them in Iran, in the country of Iran.

Here we have the north coast of Australia and the gulf of Carpenteria and some islands. The biggest island at the bottom of the screen there is Groote island, which means the big island in Dutch.

When you see a huge powerful feature like this and the astronauts do shoot them a lot and we have had some detailed views looking right down the eye, looking at the eyewall. In fact I seem to remember views of breaking waves on the sea surface at the bottom of the eye. Amazing detail.

Look at this neat picture of Great Salt Lake in Utah. And the variation in color? That's due to an almost a complete blockage of the circulation of the lake by a trestle for a railroad that crosses from one side to the other. It stops the circulation and things get a little bit saltier and certainly saltier at the north end of the lake.

Here you see two circles coming in to the top of the view now. These are either volcanoes or effects from inside the earth producing circular features. We think this is the Big Bend area of Texas.

This is an interesting sideways view of the peninsula of Florida, with the Keys stretching out into the lowest part of the picture there. And the shallow seas around the Bahama Islands top right. And Cuba coming into the picture lower right.

And this I believe is the coast of Northern Chile in South America. It's a very straight coast, except for that strange headland out to the right just disappearing. And so the desert is the first part of the inland zone, and then you see much blacker at the top of the picture the Andes Mountains with some many dozens of volcanoes.

Here is a thunderhead. The typical look of the thunderheads, the big rainstorms, that develop over the Amazon Basin. And another one coming in top right. Here's an obviously a major river. There's an even bigger one coming in on the right. That looks to me like it could well be the Amazon River, with one of its big tributaries on the left. And the flow would seem to be from the bottom of the picture to the top."

Indonesia

Photo from National Geographic

Omo's People/3

Photo from Hans Silvester

Omo's People/2

Omo's People/1

Omo's people. They live in Africa near the river Omo (in Ethiopia). It's a special place for humanity because it was the location where Richard Leakey discovered the first Homo Sapiens (they lived there 195.000 years ago...). Photo from Hans Silvester.

Great Composers 1 - Bach

Namibia

© National Geographic

The Elephant Celebes

Famous painting from Max Ernst. "The Elephant Celebes" (1921) or The Elephant from Celebes is one of the greatest surrealist paintings.

Time-lapse

Timelapse
- The City Limits from Dominic on Vimeo.
Enlarge the video to see it...

Luz

Ana Baptista(©)'s Photo

Orpheus and Eurydice

Click to enlarge the painting

Eurydice bitten by the serpent - Titian's painting Orpheus and Eurydice (1508).

Anish Kapoor (2)

The same work from Anish Kapoor but from another angle or even at night.

Anish Kapoor

Click to see it.
Anish Koopar's sculpture (Cloud Gate) in Chicago (Millenium Park). Anish was born in Mumbai and lives now in the U.K.
If you want to know more of Kapoor's work browse his own site: HERE.

Gandhi

Buddhabrot

Click to see it

buddies

Euan Walker and Ellie (Springer Spaniel) Paul Walker – www.pawspetphotography.co.uk

Dogs

West Highland White Terrier // Paul Walker – www.pawspetphotography.co.uk

Venice

Deborah Howard, Venice and the East: the impact of the Islamic World on Venetian Architecture, 1100-1500. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2000.


Venice, "eastern city" of Europe.

serenitas

Click to enlarge.
Rui Cambraia's Photo

San Miniato al Monte/Firenze

Click to see it.
A work of visual art by Helena F. Monteiro (2010).
San Miniato al Monte is a basilica in Florence (the construction of the present church begun in 1013).

Anselm Kiefer and Zin Zum

Anselm Kiefer's painting, Zin Zum (1989).
Zin Zum [Tzimtzum] describes the cabalistic view of creation as a contraction of the power of God to a single dot.