peace and quiet. Last spring in the Ukraine

Funfzig harbowanez

German occupation money, produced for the Ukraine during World War II.
Found in a local History museum, East Ukraine.
 

Last year's pics from Italy - Turin (with the arches, of course) and Genoa - with the lions and ships.

вот вам ключи, но не расслабляйтесь!

Украина запаслась газом на год, заявляет Тимошенко

ЕВПАТОРИЯ (Украина), 12 янв - РИА Новости. Объемов газа, которые находятся в подземных газовых хранилищах (ПХГ) Украины, хватит, чтобы обеспечить потребности страны в течение года, заявила в понедельник в Евпатории премьер-министр Украины Юлия Тимошенко.

"Сейчас газ на Украину не поступает, но мы впервые закачали в хранилища такой объем газа - и этот газ принадлежит государственной структуре - что его хватит на год", - сказала Тимошенко.

(...)
Тимошенко прилетела в понедельник в Евпаторию, чтобы принять участие в церемонии вручения ключей от квартир людям, которые пострадали в результате взрыва газа в жилом доме в конце 2008 года.
 

I asked my baby, why everyone is reading her blog, and almost no-one reads mine. She said, okay, all you need to do is enter a big lj-community, find a local guru and write to him: "You are an asshole". She said she did it once, and got 5000 visitors a day. Wow... Everyone seemed happy to see a complacent god overthrown.
I know where to go and know the asshole to write to, but somehow... I haven't got the guts :)

There were only two distinct faces in Assyrian art—one with and one without a beard. Neither of them was a portrait except as attributes or inscriptions designated. The type was unendingly repeated. Women appeared in only one or two isolated cases, and even these are doubtful.

Decline of Italian painting
There was nothing more to do (...) For the men that came after Michael Angelo and Tintoretto there was nothing. All that they could do was to repeat what others had said, or to recombine the old thoughts and forms. This led inevitably to imitation, over-refinement of style, and conscious study of beauty, resulting in mannerism and affectation. Such qualities marked the art of those painters who came in the latter part of the sixteenth century and the first of the seventeenth. They were unfortunate men in the time of their birth. No painter could have been great in the seventeenth century of Italy.

Not impartial, not objective, but a very humorous and living History of Art by J.C. van Dyke, 1909

Now, from the same book (  www.gutenberg.org/files/26638/26638-h/26638-h.html   )
here are some BAD compositions from the great masters

 

Raphael's Madonna with the Blue Diadem: "Irrelevancy of subject and background, main lines of the latter repelling cohesion"
Annunciation by Botticelli: "Subject disturbed by lack of reserve in background, the vision drawn across the foreground by continuing verticals"

    
The Last Judgement by Michaelangelo: "Composition in three tiers and subdivided vertically, a strain to unity."
Birth of the Virgin Mary by Durer: "Subject relegated to background, picture divided through centre."
And, finally, Teniers goes down:

I replaced the poor reproductions from the original (except the last one) by the images from the Web Gallery of Art ( www.wga.hu/ )
 

Art vs nature

"The first stage of the art collector is that in which his admiration dwells on imitation such as the still-life painter gives him, but soon (...)  he seeks the constructive sense of the man who paints the picture.
In the same manner does the student usually develop. With the book of nature before him he is eager to sit down anywhere and read, attracted by each separate item of the vast pattern, but he finds he has opened nature's dictionary and that to make poetry or even good prose he must put the separate words and phrases together."

"Good art, of the gallery, is the best guide to a trip afield"

"Personality in 99 cases out of a hundred is a graft. The forms of artistic expression have been pre-empted long ago."

That's from "Pictorial Composition" by H.R. Poore, published in 1903. Digitized by Gutenberg project:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26638/26638-h/26638-h.html

Hanoi, Vietnam

I took these a year or two ago.
    

Toddlers for Obama

My baby girl is 5 months old. Today, after 30 minutes of unintelligible babbling, she suddenly stopped and quite distinctly said: O-ba-ma.
This appears to be the first word she said. Now, imagine McCain had won...

6 times 4 or 4 times 6? who cares?

President Medvevev wants to extend presidential term to 6 yrs. It could be worrisome if we indeed had normal elections.

No more illusions :)

My blog is worth $0.00.
How much is your blog worth?

and I can't blame the financial crisis :)

how we do this market thing

Oil prices dropped by half, but gasoline prices in Russia somehow remained as high as ever. People started asking questions. Now, the government, citing the US markets, ordered Russian oil companies to cut gas prices, or else... The companies grudgingly agreed. This is how market economy works in our country :)

I tried to sing a lullaby to my baby, but instead of falling asleep, she started singing along.

I bark if you park

  
Sign reads: "No Park..."

Taganrog; 300.000 residents; one famous birth; one famous death

Chekhov was born here and Tsar Alexander I died here - they got monuments to both of them. I don't know Chekhov's reasons, but Alexander might die of sheer boredom. No, the place is nice, but what on Earth do people DO there?
  

swinging subway train

 
ink, pen, A3 paper.

  
bye-bye summer.

Women's sports rulezzz

   

this sculpture looks perfectly normal until you start thinking : what the hell is going on there? Two women (apparently) are playing basketball and a man is trying to join in, but unable to jump or run, just sticks in the way like a dumbass. This is a truly feminist sculpture in disguise. Dates back to Soviet era, found in in Moscow River Port park.

Mike, the sculptor I wrote about earlier, is leaving for Canada soon. So much joy for Canada, so much pity for me. Because now, to talk to him about drawing and stuff, I'll have to fly 9 hrs by plane. Anyway, he asked me to get a few images of horses' heads from the Animal Anatomy Atlas, which I post here as well - just in case someone might need them too :) I didn't draw these, of course
  

some background

Disclaimer: I love my country. But you gotta see this :)

   more at  http://mihailfedorov.ru/toys/russia/

        

now, that was prophetic! :)

 
cross-posted from simplex

Izvestia - a look inside

I can't quite remember, how on Earth I got into this building, but never mind. That's Izvestia newspaper publishers. Look at the walls - the purest Soviet design with workers and peasants reading newspapers. Ironically, they are reading Pravda (the rivalry between these two Bolshevik papers at some point got so acute, that the Party had to interfere).
They also show off some old curiosities - like a typewriter that belonged to Bukharin, Izvestia's editor-in-chief, shot by Stalin.
 

Thank you Mr Bush

... and special thanks to Mr Saakashvili. You two have strengthened Putin's regime like nobody else. Before the war in Georgia it looked like Putin may finally retire and his cronies gradually go with him. Now it appears, that the military party in Russia is indispensable - especially when everyone around is yelling "Isolate Russia". 

1. I never liked Putin. But will I criticise him, when the war is around? No. Nobody ever will. That's what Brits taught me: before the war started we can be anti-war, but with the first shot, we'll all back our army (that's what they said about Iraq).
2. You only need clever, moderate, sensitive politicians in peacetime. Imagine Al Gore reacting to 9/11 - I'm afraid that might be a disaster. The US exactly needed a heavy-handed Bush to fight terrorist bullies. Yeah, with illegal ops, with undeclared prisons, with Guantanamo and Abu-Ghraib - but that yielded some result. Now, many Russians may ask: is President Medvedev tough enough? Another Cold war is seen coming. Maybe let Putin stay in charge?