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Showing posts from May, 2014

Italy... Murano and Burano

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Island of Murano He said, "We don't have any women masters in Murano and that's because, a woman cannot blow glass and talk at the same time"... Well what can I say, the problem is universal! Jokes apart, the masters subtle rotation of the rod, with a blob of glass hot out of the furnace at one end, and gravity doing its part in pulling the blob off the rod, to form weird shapes, is nothing but sheer magic. A gentle blow from the other end and a few strokes of the rod and voila, a vase comes to life. If you thought this was sheer brilliance one must admire the pulling technique with awe. Clearly, working on glass with the pulling technique is like sculpting castles of the sand. The imaginative parlance of the 'Master' is far beyond any viewer in the room. A couple of gentle pulls using tongs clubbed with gravity doing a tad of its part and the end result can be anything but your imagination! Apart from farming, I cannot imagine another practi...

Italy... Art lovers Paradise!

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Piazza Navona - Rome Art stops time, and I experienced it as well. Staying fixated at a painting full of exuberant colors is not something new and one must surely have done it at least once in life. Someone once told me that it would takes months just to explore Rome and half of it would surely be spent standing in from of a 3x4. You never quite understand that till you stumble upon Rome's cobbled-stone Piazza's, especially the most famous of all, Piazza Navona. This square  is enlivened every day by many artists who with their art succeed in capturing the features and the typical expressions of those being depicted.  Be it a ballerina in red with her back facing us or the carpet of poppy laid out for you along the rolling hills of Tuscany, each artist brings his inspiration to life with so much care and concern.  It is easy for an untrained eye to get mixed up with the work of a real artist pitted against a counterfeit one. Today their is more of chaos and cl...