Miscellaneous-Pics.Blogspot.Com Blog Report

Yesterday and the day before yesterday this blog reached a new water mark in pg. hits. Where as we usually receive any where from 60 to 500 unique visitors per day, there was 1,710 unique visitors and 1,888 page views. The WW1 Dazzle Camouflage Battleships got pounded, and continues to. We were just wondering why? Maybe a television program, or a popular blog post. If anyone knows, feel free to tell us.

Pictures of Picasso

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was an Spanish painter, draughtsman, and sculptor. As one of the most recognized figures in 20th-century art, he is best known for co-founding the Cubist movement and for the wide variety of styles embodied in his work. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and his depiction of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, Guernica (1937).

Found Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso

Barnaby Ward pixel art

barnaby ward

Following on from Dan McPharlin here’s two samples from another contemporary Illustrator Barnaby Ward, Dick Hogg’s put me on to these examples so I’ll add his notes here:

“This is one of those illustrators who pops up on ffffound every now and then. Not strictly a science fiction illustrator all of the time but the stuff that I like are the ones that have strange robot-like things going on in them. And, erm, girls. Always girls. This bloke has got a one track mind! I love the girls in his drawing. as someone who constantly draws quasi-porn in my sketchbook it makes me sick to find someone who is better at it than me. Ah well, good luck to him. Apparently he lives on an island. Perhaps he is somewhere with a low female population like Alaska!”

See more of Barnaby Ward here: http://www.somefield.com/

and Dick’s work here: http://h099.com/

Found Here: http://www.sci-fi-o-rama.com/

circos - visualizing the genome, among other things

Circos is designed for visualizing genomic data such as alignments, conservation, and generalized 2D data, such as line, scatter, heatmap and histogram plots. Circos is very flexible — you can use it to visualize any kind of data, not just genomics. Circos has been used to visualize customer flow in the auto industry, volume of courier shipments, database schemas, and presidential debates.

The creation of Circos was motivated by a need to visualize intra- and inter-chromosomal relationships within one or more genomes, or between any two or more sets of objects with a corresponding distance scale. Circos is similar to chromowheel and, to a lesser extent, genopix.

Found Here: http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/circos/?

European Parliament

The European Parliament (Europarl or EP) is the only directly elected parliamentaryEuropean Union (EU). Together with the Council of the European Union (the Council), it forms the bicameral legislative branch of the Union's institutions and has been described as one of the most powerful legislatures in the world.^[1] The Parliament and Council form the highest legislative body within the Union. However their powers as such are limited to the competencies conferred upon the European Community by member states. Hence the institution has little control over policy areas held by the states and within the other two of the three pillars of the European Union. The Parliament is composed of 785 MEPs (Member of the European Parliament), who serve the second largest democratic electorate in the world (after India) and the largest trans-national democratic electorate in the world (342 million eligible voters in 2004).^[2][3][4] institution of the

It has been directly elected every five years by universal suffrage since 1979. Although the European Parliament has legislative power that such bodies as those above do not possess, it does not have legislative initiative, as most national EU parliaments do,^[5] but it does in a de facto capacity (see Powers and functions] below)^[6]. While it is the "first institution" of the European Union (mentioned first in the treaties, having ceremonial precedence over all authority at European level^[7]), the Council has greater powers over legislation than the Parliament where codecision procedure (equal rights of amendment and rejection) does not apply. It has, however, had control over the EU budget since the 1970s and has a veto over the appointment of the European Commission.^[5]

The European Parliament has two meeting places, namely the Louise Weiss building in Strasbourg, France, which serves for twelve four-day plenary sessions per year and is the official seat, and the Espace Léopold complex in Brussels, Belgium, the larger of the two, which serves for committee meetings, political groups and complementary plenary sessions. The cost of having all MEPs and their staff moving several times a year from one place to another is of concern to some. The Secretariat of the European Parliament, the Parliament's administrative body, is based in Luxembourg.^[8][9]

The President of the European Parliament (its speaker) is currently Hans-Gert Pöttering (EPP), elected in January 2007. He presides over a multi-party chamber, the two largest groups being the European People's Party-European Democrats (EPP-ED) and the Party of European Socialists (PES). The last Union-wide elections were the 2004 Parliamentary Elections, however Romania and Bulgaria joined in 2007 and elected their members in that year (see European Parliament election, 2007); the next union-wide parliamentary elections are in 2009 (see European Parliament election, 2009).

Found Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Parliament

European Parliment Propaganda Poster

The European parliament building in Strasbourg, France, is “an enormous replica of the unfinished tower of Babel,” called the “The Tower of Eurobabel” by the European press, Dr. David R. Reagan, wrote in the Dallas-based Lamplighter Magazine.

An EU poster shows the people of Europe rebuilding the Tower of Babel. The text on the poster says, “Europe: Many Tongues – One Voice.” The stars on the poster are inverted into pentagrams, a recognized occult sign.

Found Here: http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?read=35729

Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525 – September 9, 1569) was a Netherlandish Renaissancepainter and printmaker known for his landscapes and peasant scenes (Genre Painting). He is nicknamed 'Peasant Bruegel' to distinguish him from other members of the Brueghel dynasty, but is also the one generally meant when the context does not make clear which "Bruegel" is being referred to. From 1559 he dropped the 'h' from his name and started signing his paintings as Bruegel.

Themes

Bruegel specialized in landscapes populated by peasants. He is often credited as being the first Western painter to paint landscapes for their own sake, rather than as a backdrop for history painting.

Attention to the life and manners of peasants was rare in the arts in Brueghel's time. His earthy, unsentimental but vivid depiction of the rituals of village life—including agriculture, hunts, meals, festivals, dances, and games—are unique windows on a vanished folk culture and a prime source of iconographic evidence about both physical and social aspects of 16th century life. For example, the painting Netherlandish Proverbs illustrates dozens of then-contemporary aphorisms (many of them still in use in current Dutch or Flemish), and Children's Games shows the variety of amusements enjoyed by young people. His winter landscapes of 1565 (e.g. Hunters in the Snow) are taken as corroborative evidence of the severity of winters during the Little Ice Age.

Using abundant spirit and comic power, he created some of the early images of acute social protest in art history. Examples include paintings such as The Fight Between Carnival and Lentsatire of the conflicts of the Reformation) and engravings like The Ass in the School and Strongboxes Battling Piggybanks. On his deathbed he reportedly ordered his wife to burn the most subversive of his drawings to protect his family from political persecution.^[1]

Polish Riot Police Try New Mindf*ck Technique

"Polish Riot Police Try New Mindf*ck Technique"

Found Here: http://incredimazing.com

KATOWICE, Poland (AP) -- A Polish court on Tuesday acquitted 22 former riot police

The verdict in the southern city of Katowice ended a two-year trial, Poland's second attempt to convict the officers for their role in the most deadly incident of bloodshed during the 18-month crackdown.

Judge Aleksandra Rotkiel said prosecutors failed to provide ``indisputable proof.''

Chief prosecutor Piotr Skrzynecki said he would appeal.

It was another setback in a decade-long ...

Polish riot police used batons to break up a protest by nurses in Warsaw on Wednesday, escalating an already bitter stand-off between the conservative government and health workers demanding better pay. charged with gunning down striking miners during the old communist regime's 1981 martial-law crackdown on the Solidarity movement.

Hundreds of hospitals have been affected by strikes for six weeks. Strikers are also calling for reform of the creaking state health service and threaten to join the exodus of Polish workers to Western Europe if their demands are not met. Police forced several dozen protesters, mostly women, off a street in front of Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski's office, where they had camped in tents overnight. A police spokesman said minimum force was used to clear the illegal protest.

"They treated us like hooligans in a stadium," said Izabella Szczepaniak, president of the Association of Nurses and Midwives. "They pressed us against the barriers so hard we could hardly breathe ... police should not treat health workers like criminals."

Protest leaders said several nurses had been roughed up.

On Tuesday, several thousand doctors and nurses marched through Warsaw, waving signs reading: "Protest of white slaves" and "We want a decent wage".

The prime minister, who met union representatives on Tuesday, has offered pay rises of 15 percent per year over the coming three years, but protesters say wages were low to start with and those for other professions are rising faster.

A wave of young Poles heading west since Poland joined the European Union in 2004 has already created bottlenecks in other professions and that could easily spill over to healthcare. Polish doctors and nurses earn salaries way below counterparts in Western Europe.

Kaczynski has said he is ready to negotiate but would not deviate from "economic realities". Polish wages rose almost 9 percent year-on-year in May, raising expectations that interest rates would go up again soon.

Opposition leaders said parliament should investigate the police action against the protesters.

"Sending police at nurses is not the way to solve this conflict," said Donald Tusk, comparing it with the way armed riot police dealt with protestors under the communist regime.

Found Here: http://www.javno.com/en/world/clanak.php?id=55135

Cremation of Care

Cremation of Care

The Cremation of Care ceremony was devised in 1893 by a member named Joseph D. Redding, a lawyer from New York.^[9] It was originally scheduled to follow the serious "High Jinks" dramatic performance (later known as the Grove Play) on the first weekend of the summer encampment, and served as a catharsis for pent-up high spirits. In 1913, the ceremony was separated from the Grove Play and moved to the first night to become "an exorcising of the Demon to ensure the success of the ensuing two weeks". The Grove Play was moved to the last weekend of the encampment.^[10]

The ceremony involves the poling of a small boat across a lake containing an effigy of Care (called "Dull Care"). Dark, hooded figures receive from the ferryman the effigy which is placed on an altar and at the end of the ceremony, is set on fire. This "cremation" symbolizes that members are banishing the "dull cares" of conscience.^[2]

The ceremony takes place in front of a 45-foot (14 m) high hollow owl statue made of concrete over expanded metal framing and steel supports. The moss- and lichen-covered statue simulates a natural rock formation, yet holds electrical and audio equipment within it. During the ceremony, a recording of the voice of Walter Cronkite, a member of the Bohemian Club, is used as the voice of The Owl. Music and pyrotechnics accompany the ritual for dramatic effect.

Found Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemian_Grove#Cremation_of_Care

James Whíte

James White has been drawing since the age of 4, scribbling down his favorite characters such as Superman, Batman, the Dukes of Hazzard, etc. Being from a military family, he made 3 big moves through childhood but never strayed from his colored-pencils.

After going through school constantly being yelled at for drawing in class (by teachers, not parents) he applied and was accepted in 1995 to the Graphic Design course at a community college in Truro, Nova Scotia. Graduating with honors he proceeded schooling by taking Interactive Technology.

Upon graduation in 1998 he landed a job immediately in the website/graphic design field, all the while keeping up on his traditional drawing, painting and digital creation.

James allowed both sides of corporate design and personal art to feed each other, and on his own time he has created logos, flyers, posters, CD covers and websites for various local music and entertainment companies. Today, James works on personal posters and art prints while still working fulltime in the graphic design industry for a company called Raised Media in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Found Here:

http://blog.signalnoise.com/

Chen Zhun for FHM China

Photographer Chen Zhun for FHM China. More visual pleasure inside!

Via etoday.

Found Here:

http://www.etoday.ru/

Solid Gold Sculpture of Kate Moss by Marc Quinn

Siren is the work of artist Marc Quinn whose most famous sculpture was Alison Lapper Pregnant which appeared on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square.
His sculpture of Moss said to be the largest gold statue to be made in the world since the time of Ancient Egypt.
Speaking about choosing the supermodel as a subject, Quinn said: “I thought the next thing to do would be to make a sculpture of the person who’s the ideal beauty of the moment.”
The 50kg statue will be displayed in the Nereid Gallery of the British Museum, alongside other statues such as Crouching Venus, a Hellenistic model of Venus surprised while bathing.
Quinn’s latest work, which shows Moss in a yoga pose, is part of a collection, entitled Statuephilia, by contemporary artists going on display at the British Museum.
It is the second time the London-born artist has used the model as his muse. He previously created Sphinx, a white-painted bronze sculpture of the fashion icon.
Quinn is also known for Self, a bust of his head made from eight pints of his own frozen blood.
Other artists exhibiting include Damien Hirst and Angel of the North creator Anthony Gormley.
Gormley said: “The British Museum is a laboratory of possibility for any creative mind. It is filled with objects that reach across time and touch us intimately.
“Seeing as a child the great head of Rameses and the Assyrian winged bulls at the British Museum was what made me become a sculptor.”
The exhibition will run from October 4 to January 25.

Found Here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

British artist Marc Quinn stands with his solid gold sculpture of British supermodel Kate Moss at the British Museum in London, Britain, 02 October 2008. Quinn's 50kg solid gold statue of Moss in yogic pose was unveiled to the public for the first time 02 October. Siren, a GBP1.5 million (1.9 million Euros) solid gold sculpture, is one of several contemporary sculptures in the exhibition Statuephilia. EPA/ANDY RAIN

Found Here: http://www.monstersandcritics.com/people/features/article_1434471.php/In_photos_Solid_Gold_Sculpture_of_Kate_Moss?page=7

Ernesto Neto

ernesto neto is considered one of the absolute
leaders of brazil’s contemporary art scene.
his inspiration comes partly from brazilian
neo-concretism. at the end of the 1950s and
beginning of the 60s the movement’s best-known
proponents, lygia clarc and hélio oiticica,
rejected modernism’s ideas of autonomous
geometric abstraction. instead, they wanted to
equate art with living organisms in a kind of
organic architecture, and invite the viewer to be
an active participant.

ernesto neto works with abstract installations
which often take up the entire exhibition space.
his materials are gossamer-thin, light,
stretchable fabrics in nylon or cotton. like fine
membranes fixed to the ceiling by long,
stretched threads his works hang down into
the room and create shapes that are almost
organic. sometimes they are filled with scented
spices and hang in tear-shaped forms like
gigantic mushrooms or huge stockings,
sometimes he creates peculiar soft sculptures
which the visitor is allowed to feel through
small openings in the surface. he also creates
spatial labyrinths which the visitor can enter
and thereby experience the work and interact
with it.

neto’s art is an experience which creates
associations with the body and with something
organic. he describes his works as an
exploration and a representation of the body’s
landscape from within. it is important to neto
that the viewer should actively interact with
and physically experience his work by feeling,
smelling, and touching it.

for malmö konsthall neto will create a
completely new work which he is calling
'the malmö experience'. the exhibition in
malmö will provide an overview and synopsis
of neto’s previous works and contain a number
of important works which will be presented in
a new way. in a huge 'organic labyrinth' of
fabrics and shapes, which takes up the entire
exhibition space, the visitor can experience
the work from both inside and outside.
the exhibition is based on the colours of the
rainbow and the body labyrinth/organism
consists of a number of smaller spaces which
together constitute the whole.

Found Here: http://www.designboom.com/contemporary/neto.html

Ernesto Neto began exhibiting in Brazil in 1988 and has had solo exhibitions abroad since 1995. He represented with Vik Muniz their country in 2001 Venice Biennale, his installations were featured in Brazil's national pavilion and in the international group exhibition at the Arsenale.

Neto's work has been described as "beyond abstract minimalism". His installations are large, soft, biomorphic sculptures that fill an exhibition space with viewrs can touch, poke, and even sometimes walk on or through. These are made of white, stretchy, stockinglike material, which he stuffs- to fill out and solidify the amorphous forms- with Styrofoam pellets or, occasionally, aromatic spices: in some installations, he has also used this material to create translucent scrims that transform the space's walls and floor. His sculptures can be regarded as expression of traditional abstract form, but in their interaction with the viewer they work on another level as well.

• 1994, 1997 Escola de Artes Visuais Pargua Lage, Rio de Janeiro
• 1994-96 Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro

One of his most acclaimed installation is the one at the Panthéon in Paris called Léviathan Thot.

Neto has been awarded chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Found Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernesto_Neto