ForLOVEoftheARTS

Arunas Rutkus was born in 1961, in Vilnius, Lithuania. He graduated in 1985 from the Lithuanian Academy of Art. In addition to painting he studied stained glass, fresco, mosaic, ceramics, sculpture and film making.

Great Native American Chiefs Remembered... https://www.historynet.com/native-american-indian-chiefs/?r Thanksgiving Day: A Native American View https://links.org.au/native-blood-truth-behind-myth-thanksgiving-day-now-video

Click on the link below to read about Edward Curtis, the author of the photographs. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/edward-curtis-shadow-catcher/568/ "THANKSGIVING: Celebrating the Genocide of Native Americans" by Gilbert Mercier The sad reality about the United States of America is that in a matter of a few hundreds years it managed to rewrite its own history into a mythological fantasy. The concepts of liberty, freedom and free enterprise in the “land of the free, home of the brave” are a mere spin. The US was founded and became prosperous based on two original sins: firstly, on the mass murder of Native Americans and theft of their land by European colonialists; secondly, on slavery. This grim reality is far removed from the fairy-tale version of a nation that views itself in its collective consciousness as a virtuous universal agent for good and progress. The most recent version of this mythology was expressed by Ronald Reagan when he said that “America is a shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom loving people everywhere.” In rewriting its own history about Thanksgiving, white America tells a Disney-like fairy tale about the English pilgrims and their struggle to survive in a new and harsh environment. The pilgrims found help from the friendly Native American tribe, the Wampanoag 'Indians,' in 1621. Unfortunately for Native Americans, the European settlers’ gratitude was short-lived. By 1637, Massachusetts governor John Winthrop ordered the massacre of thousands of Pequot Native men, women and children. This event marked the start of a Native American genocide that would take slightly more than 200 years to complete, and of course to achieve its ultimate goal, which was to take the land from Native Americans and systematically plunder their resources. The genocide begun in 1637 marks the beginning of the conquest of the entire continent until most Native Americans were exterminated, a few were assimilated into white society, and the rest were put in reservations to dwindle and die. Read more here: http://newsjunkiepost.com/2010/11/25/thanksgiving-celebrating-the-genocide-of-native-americans/

Nabil Anani is one of the most prominent Palestinian artists working today, born in Latroun in 1943. After graduating in Fine Arts from Alexandria University, Egypt in 1969, Anani returned to the occupied Palestinian territory and began a fruitful career as an artist and a teaching mentor at the UN training college in Ramallah. He is considered as a key founder of the contemporary Palestinian art movement. He held his first exhibition in Jerusalem in 1972 and has since exhibited widely in Europe, North America, the Middle East, North Africa and Japan – both as an individual artist and with groups of his Palestinian contemporaries. Anani is a multi-talented artist, for he is a painter, a ceramicist and a sculptor. He pioneered the use of local media such as leather, henna, natural dyes, Papier-mâché, wood, beads and copper. Over the past four decades, he built an impressive catalogue of outstanding, innovative and unique art. Anani was awarded the first Palestinian National Prize for Visual Art in 1997 and became the head of the League of Palestinian Artists in 1998. Much of Anani’s work focuses on the symbolism of the olive tree, a major component of Palestine’s landscape. For him, the destruction of the olive tree by Israeli forces parallels the plight of the people living under the occupation.

PALESTINE RESISTS THROUGH THE EYES OF ARTIST SLIMAN MANSOUR. He is one of the leading artists born in the Palestinian village of Birzeit in 1947. He studied Fine Arts at the Bezalel Art Academy in Jerusalem. He is a co-founder of the Wasiti Art Center in Jerusalem (Now director of the Center). He is also a member of the “New Vision” artist group, which focuses on the use of local material in artwork. Mansour’s creativity and determination to revive Palestinian identity has led him through a diverse range of disciplines, including cartoon drawing and authoring two books on Palestinian folklore. He has had solo exhibitions in Ramallah, New York, Cairo, Gaza and Stavanger, Norway. In 1998 he won the ‘Nile award’ at the Cairo Biennial and the Palestine Prize for Visual arts. Mansour first came to prominence for his surrealist masterpiece, Camels of Hardship in 1973. The Dali-esque image @ 3:52 of a Palestinian peasant struggling under the literal weight of dispossession has become a classic of its kind, and became the launch pad for a career that would be defined by original approaches to representing the struggle for his homeland. Identified as a subversive by Israeli security forces, Mansour was plagued with harassment. In 1981 at Gallery79 (during the Intifada), an exhibition was closed after only six hours and he was arrested. “They told us we are not allowed to use red, green, black, and white in our works,” he recounted in a later interview. Such treatment was to be a recurring theme of a career that was regularly interrupted with jail time.

The second son of U.S. President Joe Biden, Robert Hunter Biden (born February 4, 1970) is reportedly selling his artwork that is listed for between $75,000 and $500,000. Those are startling prices. Does anybody believe Hunter Biden — who has dabbled in painting, without training, for just the last few years — is creating such masterpieces that he has rocketed past generations of struggling artists to command such valuations? The eye-watering sums, unheard of for a debuting artist, have prompted serious concerns by former White House ethics chiefs, who fear that money for the works could be used as proxy political donations or to curry favor with President Joe Biden and his family. So, the White House has come up with a plan to let Hunter Biden sell his art without him — or anyone in the Biden administration — finding out who bought the stuff. The idea is to discourage potential purchasers who might actually be more interested in buying favor with President Biden than in embracing the creative visions of his son. Walter Shaub, the former Office of Government Ethics director under President Obama, said that Hunter's lucrative art career has a shameful and grifty feeling to it. "The notion of a president's son capitalizing on that relationship by selling art at obviously inflated prices and keeping the public in the dark about who's funneling money to him has a shameful and grifty feel to it. He can't possibly think anyone is paying him based on the quality of the art. This smells like an attempt to cash in on a family connection to the White House." Adult children of presidents have the right to earn a living, of course, and it's probably impossible to do so wholly apart from their parent's fame and power. But Hunter Biden is already under scrutiny as The Department of Justice is investigating his finances regarding past dubious dealings.

Italian artist Cristina Guggeri has cunningly created this series of photo-montages showing prominent political and religious “leaders” performing their “daily duties” on their true “thrones” doing what they do best:)) Included are some of their 'pearls of wisdom'.

Zbigniew Preisner is a Polish film score composer. He studied history and philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Never having received formal music lessons, he taught himself music by listening and transcribing parts from records. His compositional style represents a distinctively sparse form of tonal neo-Romanticism. Paganini and Jean Sibelius are acknowledged influences. The images are of statues and monuments from cemeteries around the world. The voice is by Teresa Salgueiro, a Portuguese singer.

Mira Nedyalkova is a Bulgarian artist and photographer based in Sofia who creates stunning, sensual, surreal and evocative imagery by approaching photography and the element of water with the touch of a painter.

Mira Nedyalkova is a Bulgarian artist and photographer based in Sofia who creates stunning, sensual, surreal and evocative imagery by approaching photography and the element of water with the touch of a painter.

Chiharu Shiota is a Japanese performance and installation artist haunted by the traces that the human body leaves behind. She is best known for collecting discarded objects and notes to create room-filling, monumental yet delicate, poetic environments. Central to the artist’s work are the themes of remembrance and oblivion, dreaming and sleeping, traces of the past and childhood, and dealing with anxieties. Shiota finds diverse visual expressions for these subject matters, the most celebrated being impenetrable installations made of black thread which often enclose various household and everyday, personal objects: a burnt-out piano, a wedding dress, a lady’s mackintosh, sometimes even the sleeping artist herself. Shiota studied at Kyoto Seika University, Canberra School of Art, and Berlin University of the Arts with Marina Abramovic and Rebecca Horn. Her work has been presented at the Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh, 2013), Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (United Kingdom, 2012), National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2007), Neue Nationalgalerie (Berlin, 2006), and MoMA PS1 (New York City, 2003), as well as the Biennials in Venice, Fukuoka, and Yokohama. Born in Osaka, Japan, in 1972, Shiota currently lives and works in Berlin.

Mira Nedyalkova is a Bulgarian artist and photographer based in Sofia who creates stunning, sensual, surreal and evocative imagery by approaching photography and the element of water with the touch of a painter.

Michał Łukasiewicz is a Polish artist born in 1974 in Puławy, Poland... and since 1995 has lived and worked in Antwerp, Belgium. Currently he lives and works in his hometown in Poland. His works can be purchased here: https://lukasiewiczmichal.bigcartel.com/

Michał Łukasiewicz is a Polish artist born in 1974 in Puławy, Poland... and since 1995 has lived and worked in Antwerp, Belgium. Currently he lives and works in his hometown in Poland. His works can be purchased here: https://lukasiewiczmichal.bigcartel.com/

Michał Łukasiewicz is a Polish artist born in 1974 in Puławy, Poland... and since 1995 has lived and worked in Antwerp, Belgium. Currently he lives and works in his hometown in Poland. His works can be purchased here: https://lukasiewiczmichal.bigcartel.com/

Photographer Antonio Palmerini from Rome, Italy quotes a poet when stating: "If you can't sleep at night, it's because you're awake in somebody else's dream". Just like in his photographs, where the subjects are projections of an imaginary and distant world, turned into vagabond ghosts and tormented wanderers. Photography is the mirror of imagination. As he puts it himself: "Rather than offering a conventional image of a face or a landscape, I prefer to take a handkerchief, twist it however I like, and photograph it accordingly". The techniques he uses to create this dream-like effect through photography are double exposure, long exposures and high contrast in film processing. When he finds subjects that cannot be captured on film, such as dreams or subconscious impulses, then Palmerini recourses to drawing and painting. Palmerini meditatively walks on two creative horizons, that of drawing and that of photography. The first to expand on what cannot be photographed, the second to testify situations and evoke the very existence of people.

After a lengthy career as both a designer and art director, Antonio Mora - an artist from Spain, stepped into another field of creativity that enabled him to play with pieces that are more surreal and dipped in fantasy. By taking multiple photos he artfully juxtaposes them into surreal and breathtaking works of art. Multiple exposure photography is a technique that goes as far back as the 1890s using traditional film and analogue cameras. It is the superimposition of two images together, to create something else that is entirely beautiful. Nowadays there are a lot of techniques used such as Adobe Photoshop and photo editor or other image manipulation programs.

Italian photographer Paolo Ventura (born in Milan, 1968) is known for constructing and photographing elaborate dioramas to tell cinematic visual stories. He controls the entire artistic process... constructing and painting small-scale scenes, photographing the sets, and hand painting the photographs. Ventura was raised by a celebrated Italian children's book illustrator, and throughout his youth, his father would delight him and his brother with fanciful sketches and bed-time stories. That sense of childlike wonder pervades all of his work, which often features images of street performers, theaters, and cinemas. But Ventura's work is also imbued with a sense of disquiet that is all the more jarring for the superficially playful whimsical nature of his subjects, perhaps reflecting his unease about our increasingly changing technological world. He often uses himself as an actor, photographing himself, and then digitally manipulating himself into his constructed backgrounds. He also incorporates live actors that include members of his family, casting his son, wife, and twin brother as participants in his narratives. His narratives are tinged with nostalgia for a bygone era, and they evoke simpler moments from Italy's past—the faded-pink stucco buildings, the cobblestone streets—but with a dark twist. Pre- or post-war, they are populated by shadowy, suspicious figures in hats and trench coats. Ventura graduated from the Academia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan in 1991. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at Forma International Center for Photography, Milan, Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles, and Maison Europeenne de la Photographie, Paris, and in 2012, he was selected by curator Vittorio Sgarbi to create a series of works for the Italian national pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale. His works have been acquired by prominent public collections including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. and the Martin Margulies Collection in Miami, Florida. Four monographs of his work have been published: War Souvenir (Contrasto, 2006), Winter Stories (Aperture and Contrasto, 2009), The Automaton (Peliti Asociati, 2011) and Lo Zuavo Scomparso (Punctum Press, 2012).