animals

March 30, 2012
We all deal with different kind of animals in our lifetime. Some of them are extremely familiar to us and ...
The Travelling Artist – Why Become One?

January 25, 2012
A lot of artists have a habit of travelling and using their memories and changing environment to inspire ...
istanbul triptych

January 23, 2012
I recently paid a visit to Istanbul. It was my first time and I must say that Iistanbul ...
family memories

September 28, 2011
My parents, a couple of true sea lovers never owned their own boat, yet they often arranged our ...
underwater landscapes

September 20, 2011
Kaş, once an unspoiled fishing village, is now a relatively unspoiled tourist town on the southern bulge of Turkey's ...
Lanzarote

September 13, 2011
A friend of mine lives in Las Palmas, Canary Islands. He recently wrote me about Lanzarote, an island of ...
boundaries

September 10, 2011
Most of us live their lives within a consolidated routine, whose boundaries completely depend by our will. In other ...
last minute!

September 8, 2011
Yes, I am quite an organized fellow when it comes to plan my trips. Since I'm going to be ...
Harry Morgan

September 4, 2011
I've not been yet in the U.S. These days however, a good reason to drive me there would be ...
stereotypes

August 27, 2011
Plenty of cheap flights to India in Bangkok! I had bought one, a night flight to Delhi. I had ...

messages

Posted on March 10, 2007 @ 11:11 am by massimo | Filed under: blog,books,fashion,fun,illustration,island,mediterranean,people,sailing,travel,ukiyo-e,wordpress

masefield aynaku travel illustration

“I must down to the seas again to the vagrant gypsy life, To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife; And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover, And quiet sleep and a sweat dream when the long trick’s o”
Just imagine rescuing these beautiful words from inside a wrecked floating bottle… Perhaps that was the day before the world had been wired for elettricity! Seamen then sent their messages in the bottle, and hope that someone would get their s.o.s…I find out that this procedure is somehow similar to what a blogger does nowadays: we don’t really know who is going to get our digital messages, yet we know that someone will get them…and that’s enough to give us a hint.

Illustration Friday’s topic is: wired

the floating world

Posted on January 27, 2007 @ 6:43 pm by massimo | Filed under: art,blog,books,fun,himalaya,illustration,india,japan,package tour,people,travel,ukiyo-e,wordpress

ukiyo-e aynaku travel illustration

From1688 up to1868 the chonin, urban merchants and townspeople became the affluent bourgeoisie and the standard-bearer of a new Japanese popular culture. With plenty of money, they lived a life of luxury and created a lifestyle of their own, centred greatly on the pursuit of pleasures. Chonin gave rise to new forms of theatre, poetry and visual arts, such as woodblock printing or ukiyo.e. Prints were produced -entirely by hand- by the artist, the wood engraver and the printer. Off course my short report gives only a hint of the extraordinary care and the most careful registering required by the printer in order to produce the flawless, multicoloured pictures envisioned by the artist. The attitude of living just for the moment came to life especially in every city’s pleasure quarter or “Floating World”, whose streets where lined with theatres, restaurants, public baths and houses of assignation. Life in red-light districts was brimming with excitement and artists pictured it. As matter of fact erotic prints constituted a considerable portion of the repertoire of most woodblock artist…
The funny thing is that I learned everything about, not during my staying in vibrant Tokyo, but a few months later when I found myself in a remote Indian Himalayan village, among perfumed cedar forests and moody sacred cows. In a local bookstore I bought a volume of the magazine Art of Asia entirely devoted to Japanese art and spent some rather solitary nights reading about the marvellous Floating World…Who knows? I guess that the old zen adage: “both deluded beings and Buddhas gaze at the same moon” is the proper ending of this story.

Illustration Friday’s topic is: red

monkey

Posted on January 21, 2007 @ 12:11 pm by massimo | Filed under: animals,blog,books,china,fashion,fun,illustration,mythology,news,people,ukiyo-e,wordpress

monkey suwkong aynaku illustration travel

“Monkey King (or Sunwukong) was born from a stone. He wanted to be like the immortals and be free from death. He was extremely smart and capable, and learned all the magic tricks from a master Taoist. He could transform himself into seventy-two different images such as a tree, a bird, a beast of prey, or a bug as small as a mosquito so as to sneak into an enemy’s belly to fight him or her inside out. Using clouds as a vehicle, he can travel 180,000 miles a single somersault…”
Monkey is the Chinese classic by ancient scholar Wu Ch’eng-en I am reading these days. It combines the divine and human and is an allegory of own personal journey to spiritual development.

Illustration Friday’s topic is: super hero

koen olie

Cheap Web Design London

indian southampton restaurants

Dimas

sameer thapar

guto

Dawid Michalczyk

priya

Limousine Berlin

where to travel

animals

The Travelling Artist – Why Become One?

istanbul triptych

family memories

underwater landscapes

Lanzarote

boundaries

last minute!

Harry Morgan

stereotypes

Login

XFN

WordPress

messages

the floating world

monkey

hymalayas

aquarium

the rains

submarines

robofish

a simple soul…

flavour…

Archives

Recommended

Categories

Blogroll

Others