Showcase: Gustav Klimt

Posted on by Cosmina

“All art is erotic.”

Gustav Klimt

• 14th of July 1862 – 6th of February 1918

• symbolist painter 

• influences: Japanese, Chinese, Ancient Egyptian and Mycenaean.

• influenced: Egon Schiele.

Gustav Klimt was born in Vienna, in 1862, the first born son of the Klimt couple. His father, Ernst Klimt, worked as an engraver and goldsmith, from whom he learned how to manipulate the famed metal.

Early in his artistic career, he was a successful painter of architectural decorations in a conventional manner, but for the rest of his life and even after, he was always the subject of a controversy.

Continue reading Showcase: Gustav Klimt

The 10 Best Superhero Movies of All-Time

Posted on by Cristian Mihai

This is arguably the best time to put together such a list: the technology is there, allowing for special effects to help us suspend disbelief, the actors who have been cast to play the parts are as brilliant as they come, and studios are investing more and more money into big budget adaptations of comic books.

I have no doubt that we’ll see more and more superhero movies, some of them quite brilliant and easy to recommend.

That being said, here are the ten best superhero movies of all time.

Continue reading The 10 Best Superhero Movies of All-Time

What Really Sells a Book?

Posted on by Cristian Mihai

Some might say the trickiest part is actually selling the book. Or writing it? Opinions differ. But what really sells a book? What marketing tool? What recipe to follow? Is there a recipe?

Well, let’s analyze one of my favorite novels, The History of Love by Nicole Krauss, and hope that I’ll be able to offer some insight as to how people decide to buy a book. Continue reading What Really Sells a Book?

Showcase and Interview: Gina Iacob

Posted on by Cristian Mihai
Gina Iacob is a twenty five year old self-taught Romanian artist, who likes to experiment with different techniques and styles. She’s also interesting, interested, inspiring, inspired, and quite funny. Don’t believe me? Check this interview out.

Continue reading Showcase and Interview: Gina Iacob

Showcase: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Posted on by Cristian Mihai

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman, caricaturist, and illustrator whose immersion in the colourful and theatrical life of Paris in the late 19th century allowed him to produce a collection of enticing, elegant, and provocative images of the modern, sometimes decadent, affairs of those times.

Jane Avril (1893)
La buveuse (Woman Sitting at Table) 1888
May Milton (1895)
Ambassadeurs (lithograph) 1892
In Bed The Kiss (1892)
At the Moulin Rouge (1895)
Rousse (1889)
Divan Japonais (1892)

Are You In Love With Your Own Writing?

Posted on by Cristian Mihai

“A word after a word after a word is power.” ― Margaret Atwood

There’s this thing called verbal narcissism. It’s pretty much the ability to game a wall, if it comes to that. To sell sand in the Sahara Desert.

It also means to be so in love with your own words that it could mean talking on and on about things that few people ever care about. Or it could happen that you do deliver a strong message, but you’re using so many words to do so, that it’s all distilled to the point of making people want to smack you over the head with their keyboards. Continue reading Are You In Love With Your Own Writing?

You’re No Leonardo DaVinci and That’s Okay

Posted on by Cristian Mihai

I was doing a bit of research into Pablo Picasso for the showcase of his earliest works, and I read that he created some fifty thousand works during his life. Fifty thousand. If you were to do one per day, it would take you some 136 years. A hundred and thirty six years…

Do you understand the level of commitment that is required of one if he desires to become phenomenal? One of the best? To be considered a genius by his peers? You literally have to break yourself in half. To be so obsessed about whatever it is you’re doing that you end up sacrificing a lot of other stuff.

Yes, you can have anything you want, but you’ll have to give up on (almost) everything else to get it.

Now, Leonardo DaVinci.

Areas of interest: invention, painting, sculpting, architecture, science, music, mathematics, engineering, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy, botany, writing, history, and cartography. The father of paleontology, ichnology, and architecture. One of the greatest painters of all time. Credited with the invention of technology we never properly developed until hundreds of years after his death, such as the helicopter, the parachute, or the tank. Continue reading You’re No Leonardo DaVinci and That’s Okay

Art and Hope

Posted on by Cristian Mihai

To those of you who don’t know me well enough, I say this: My name is Cristian Mihai. I’m 28 years old. And I have been writing for fourteen years.

I make art. I aspire to create beauty.

I wrote because I was broken, felt alone, different, too weak to even matter in a big and cruel world.

It made me feel less awful.

It made me feel as if I was kind of good at something.

Isn’t this what truly matters? How you’d define passion? To be kind of glad you’re kind of good at something. Continue reading Art and Hope

Book Review: Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov

Posted on by Cristian Mihai

From Amazon.com:

It is estimated that some three million people died in the Soviet forced-labour camps of Kolyma, in the northeastern area of Siberia. Shalamov himself spent seventeen years there, and in these stories he vividly captures the lives of ordinary people caught up in terrible circumstances, whose hopes and plans extended to further than a few hours.

Feeling depressed? Feeling as if life’s unfair? Hard? People are mean? Read Kolyma Tales. That should make you feel better.

Don’t believe me?

“The men were not shown the thermometer, but that wasn’t necessary since they had to work in any weather. Besides, longtime residents of Kolyma could determine the weather precisely even without a thermometer: if there was frosty fog, that meant the temperature outside was forty degrees below zero; if you exhaled easily but in a rasping fashion, it was fifty degrees below zero; if there was a rasping and it was difficult to breathe, it was sixty degrees below; after sixty degrees below zero, spit froze in mid-air. Spit had been freezing in mid-air for two weeks.”

Continue reading Book Review: Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov

Showcase: Wassily Kandinsky

Posted on by Cristian Mihai

Credited with painting one of the first recognized purely abstract works of art, Wassily Kandinsky developed a style like none other. The geometry, the colors, the way everything blends and takes shapes before your eyes…

A truly wonderful artist, one of my favorites, and one of the most important abstract painters. Continue reading Showcase: Wassily Kandinsky