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 ...

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

buzz…

Posted on January 6, 2007 @ 12:23 pm by massimo | Filed under: architecture,bargain,blog,cheap,china,fun,illustration,india,island,people,travel,wordpress

singapore travel illustration aynaku

Singapore’s inexorable economic growth drove me there, around 1995, looking for an architectural job which I got in a week time. The city lost since long its ancient flavour of thriving and exotic colony, and it is actually submerged under a gleaming concrete, glass and chrome order. Yet the Indian area is somehow set apart from the predominantly Chinese status-quo. Little India is not very extensive and during my spare time I used to simply wander around and sample its sights, scents and sounds, just following my nose, because the aroma of Indian spices and cooking seems to be everywhere… Particularly the narrow alleys around Selangor Rd. are buzzing with activity like a beehive, and there I found a welcoming guest house where I finally moved on a hot early afternoon. After a while I fell asleep in my brand-new, amply windowed and clean room, and there I slept several hours until an increasingly steady, humming sound, as of unknown insects, suddenly woke me up. It was nighttimes already, my head ached dangerously and it took a few minutes to realize that the mysterious buzz coming from the open window, was nothing else that the sound of an chatting Indian crowd in the road below. Moreover the Veerama Kali Amman Temple, (a shivaite temple dedicates to Kali) almost opposite my room, is popular with worshippers especially at dusk.

Illustration Friday’s topic is: buzz

hymalayas

Posted on December 23, 2006 @ 11:21 am by massimo | Filed under: another green world,blog,books,fun,himalaya,illustration,india,news,people,travel,wordpress

roerich india travel illustration aynaku

This illustration is inspired by Nicholas Roerich’s paintings dedicated to the ethereal beauty of Himalayas. Born in Russia in 1874 Roerich went to India in 1923 and settled in the Kullu Valley, Himachal Pradesh.
Here he painted a large gallery of pictures that not only reflect the magnificent vision of the mountains, but also embodies something of the spiritual history and legends with which they are associated. Some of his works are permanently exhibited in a beautiful and ancient wooden-building in the village of Naggar, where – merely by chance – I had stopped during a bus ride among the enchanted Himalayan valleys of northern India.
Here I learned that besides his renewed brilliance in art ( however Roerich is not an outstanding figure in art history), he also was an untiring worker for world peace and dreamt of an international understanding trough art and beauty until his ideals were finally incorporated in the international pact for the protection of cultural institutions and monuments in times of war and civil commotion, a pact known as “The Roerich Pact”, accepted by 35 Nations including the USA.

Illustration Friday’s topic is: peace

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