Roland Collection of Videos & Films on Art

Roland Collection of Videos & Films on Art

We ran across this website by chance.

The Roland Collection of Videos & Films on Art is a tremendous "pay to buy" collection of art films and art videos - all titles are available for sale - but the site also offers free viewing of 450 complete films on-line. Available by art period are:

Early Cultures
First Civilisations
Africa
Pre-Columbian America
Romanesque and Gothic
Renaissance and Mannerism
Northern Renaissance
Rembrandt
Baroque and Rococo
Neo-classicists and Romantics
The Victorians
Impressionists and Post Impressionists
Art Nouveau
Expressionism
Cubism and Futurism
Into Abstraction
The Bauhaus and De Stijl
Dada and Surrealism
Modern Masters
Modern and Contemporary Sculptors
Contemporary Painters
New Directions - New Dimensions
Modern Architecture and Design

Unfortunately, surely in order to urge the viewer to buy the original quality video or film, online quality is only top at "100%" - a very small screeb size (though the films and videos are also viewable at e.g. 300% or larger screen size). Pull the right lower edge of the RealPlayer display to play with size.

Still, it is terrific stuff, e.g. take a look at Tassili N'Ajjer - Prehistoric Rock Paintings of the Sahara.

Crossposted to LawPundit.

Modulator's Menagerie

Modulator's Menagerie

The Modulator has a "Friday Ark" posting (a play on Noah's Ark) in which he states:

"I'll post links to sites that have Friday (or shortly thereafter) photos of their chosen animals as I see them (no photoshops and no humans).

Leave a comment or trackback to this post and I'll add yours to the list. If there is interest I'll keep this as a weekly feature."

We add here an everyday photo of our Siamese cat Lucas, who is named after Luca Signorreli (also known as Luca da Cortona, or Cortene), a Renaissance painter who we rank among the first truly naturalist painters and who has been called "the first to illustrate our own house of life". Bernard Berenson (see also here and here and here) called him the "grandest illustrator of modern times". We have a copy in oil of Signorelli's Portrait of a Man, which we regard to be art's best male comparable portrait to Leonardo da Vinci's painting of the Mona Lisa. (Portrait of a Man is found in original in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, Germany and the Mona Lisa of course is in the Louvre in Paris, France).

We think that there is no doubt that man evolved from primate apes, but the interesting question is what preceded them? We think it is cats - and this may account for the special relationship between the felines and humanity, a close tie recognized as far back as the Ancient Pharaonic culture in Egypt and beyond. The cats are reflections of ourselves and to our knowledge are the only other animal to turn their backs on humans and pout when offended.

Luca Signorelli II

.

Crossposted to LawPundit.

Lists of Best of the Bests : Books Movies Music

Lists of Best of the Bests : Books Movies Music

Lists of Bests has links
to best of best lists
for books, movies and music.

Ivan Hajek : The World's Greatest Accordion Player

Ivan Hajek : The World's Greatest Accordion Player

So you think the accordion player is old-fashioned? That is just a bit of misinformation about what is possible with this instrument.

Want to hear the man we regard to be the world's greatest accordion player?
You have never heard an accordion played like this - and I am a fan of rave and modern music. Turn it up LOUD. This man has the gift of God in him.
This is fabulous stuff - sort of like a one-man orchestra.
It will lift you out of your seat and you will feel the magic of music.

Ivan plays on TV and in concert, but he loves the contact to his audience. I met him on the main square in Munich, where he was playing for onlookers for free, who gathered around in great numbers, even though they did not know who he was.

Take a look at Akkordeonspieler Ivan.Hajek - his pages are available in English, German, Italian, Czech, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Make sure you try the samples - his music is out of this world.
Unfortunately, he only delivers his CD's in Germany. But if you like his music, WRITE to him. Maybe that will change.

(cross-posted to the LawPundit, the LexiLine Group and ArtsPundit)

Art Blog of Marja-Leena Rathje

Art Blog of Marja-Leena Rathje

There is a nice art blog at

Marja-Leena Rathje


with some good materials on prehistoric art.

Van Eyck, Chandeliers, Perspective and Art History

Did early Renaissance painters use optical tricks to paint with perfect perspective?

See this August 26, 2004 article by Sarah Boxer in the New York Times entitled Computer People Reopen Art History Dispute

Visual Art Taking Over?

Visual Art Taking Over?

The Weekend edition of the Financial Times, May 29/May 30 2004 - which I was given gratis today at the Frankfurt Airport, thank you! - has an article entitled "Visual art on the rise" in its FT Arts and Weekend section.

The article concludes that the British art audience "has changed forever" in recent eras and that the visual arts are supplanting literature and music because they "seem best equipped to take the pulse of contemporary life, to describe the now".

Where does this put blogs? Should we be adding more pictures?

World's Greatest Sidewalk Art Painter

World's Greatest Sidewalk Art Painter

Go to this link to see some pictures by what we dub the World's Greatest Sidewalk Art Painter bouncechrissy: ***Pictures are back up!***.

The pictures as so 3-D it is hard to believe they are two-dimensional paintings on a sidewalk. This is "modern art" at its best. This guy should be famous - maybe he will be. Nobody seems to know his name- he's an Englishman.

Speech pauses like you know and uh more frequent among humanities professors

The following article of January 3, 2004 by Michael Erard in the New York Times refers to various studies about speech disfluencies such as "uh" or "um".

Interesting is one study showing that speech pauses such as "you know" and "uh" are more frequent among humanities professors and social scientists. As Erard writes:

But it may be Nicholas Christenfeld, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, and other researchers who have come up with the most appealing findings. He counted uhs among professors giving lectures and found that the humanities professors say you know and uh 4.85 times per minute, social scientists 3.84 and natural science professors 1.39 times, which, he said, suggests that humanists have more expressive options from which to choose.

We suspect, however, that it means that the natural science professors are lecturing about more certain factual materials, whereas the social scientists and humanities professors need these verbal pauses to "construct" their statements about things which - in the last analysis - are relatively more uncertain.

Mandarin Design Daily:The MEG Blog

Via Mandarin Design Daily:The MEG Blog and Whiskey River (which is a blog with many fabulous quotations) we are led to this quotation, to which we ascribe and have, most of our life:

"Don't ask yourself what the world needs;
ask yourself what makes you come alive.
And then go and do that.
Because what the world needs
is people who have come alive."

- Harold Whitman