Kahlil Gibran: "La perplessità è l'inizio della conoscenza!"

• Tenderness and kindness are not signs of weakness and despair, but manifestations of strength and resolution.

• Tenerezza e gentilezza non sono sintomo di disperazione e debolezza, ma espressione di forza e di determinazione.

• La generosità significa dare più di quello che puoi, e l'orgoglio sta nel prendere meno di ciò di cui hai bisogno.

• Generosity is giving more than you can, and pride is taking less than you need.

Igor Zenin

Barbara Cole, 1953 | Abstract / Fine Art photographer

While we're completely blown away when we see paintings that look like pictures, we're even more excited when we come across pictures that look like paintings! Such is this set, called Painted Ladies, by Barbara Cole, Canadian🎨 photographer. The self-taught photographer not only challenges our reality, she does it all using Polaroid film!

"I fell in love with Polaroid film sometime late in 1987", Cole says. - I had been experimenting with the Polaroid Spectra camera and Tungsten light and I loved the mood that its warm colors and creamy palette evoked. In the end, however, it proved too difficult to work within the limitations of this simple point and shoot camera and I abandoned it.

Édouard Manet | L'eredità artistica

La carriera pubblica di Manet durò dal 1861, anno della sua prima partecipazione al Salon, fino alla sua morte, nel 1883.

Le sue opere esistenti, catalogate nel 1975 da Denis Rouart e Daniel Wildenstein, comprendono 430 dipinti ad olio, 89 pastelli e più di 400 lavori su carta.

Sebbene duramente condannato dai critici che hanno criticato la sua mancanza di finitura convenzionale, il lavoro di Manet ha avuto ammiratori fin dall'inizio.

Uno era Émile Zola, che scrisse nel 1867:

"Non siamo abituati a vedere traduzioni così semplici e dirette della realtà, quindi, come ho detto, c'è un tale imbarazzo sorprendentemente elegante ... è un'esperienza davvero affascinante contemplare questo pittura luminosa e seria che interpreta la natura con una gentile brutalità".

Ignacio Zuloaga | Genre painter

Ignacio Zuloaga y Zabaleta (1870-1945), was a Basque Spanish painter who was famous for his depictions of traditional Spanish figures such as gypsies and bullfighters.

He was awarded the grand prize for painting at the Venice Biennale in 1938.

He is considered to be one of the most important Spanish painters from the end of the 19th Century and beginnings of the 20th Century.

Ignacio Zuloaga was born in Éibar in the Basque Country in the North of Spain, near the Monastery of Loyola.

Robert Liberace, 1967 | Realist Figurative painter

Born and raised in Rockland County, New York, Robert Liberace was introduced to the world of art world through an old library copy of Hogarth's "Dynamic Figure Drawing" almost four decades ago.
It helped spark his enthusiasm for drawing, and he received a Knights of Columbus Scholarship for art along with a baseball scholarship to George Washington University in 1985.

Before long his interest in art blossomed into a full-fledged obsession.

José Cruz Herrera (Spanish, 1890-1972) | Genre painter

José Cruz Herrera (1890-1972) was an Spanish painter who concentrated principally on Genre works and landscape art. He worked in Spain, Uruguay, Argentina, France and especially Morocco, where he lived for much of his life in Casablanca. Many of his works are displayed at the Museo Cruz Herrera in his home town of La Línea de la Concepción (Cádiz).

Alex Kanevsky, 1963 | Abstract painter

The Russian-born American painter Alex Kanevsky was born in Rostov (Russia) in 1963 and came to the United States in 1983 with his family. Kanevsky settled in Philadelphia where he later studied and graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

He was honored with many prestigious awards while attending PAFA including the Pearson Memorial Prize for Painting; the Pennsylvania Governor's Award for Painting; the William Emlen Cresson Memorial Travel Scholarship, which he used for travel in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, France and Russia in 1992; and a full fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center in 1994.

Alexandre-Auguste Hirsch | Genre painter

Auguste-Alexandre Hirsch (Lyon 1833 - Paris 1911) was an French🎨 Academic painter. Hirsch's artistic career was marked by diversity. Beginning in 1857, when Hirsh debuted at age twenty-four, the artist's early submissions to the Paris Salons included portraits as well as religious, genre🎨 and historical subjects. A visit to Morocco in 1870 inspired his mature period and its focus on the women in and around the community of Tetuán.

This study of "exotic" women may have informed the present work of an alluring figure stretched across a gauzy white cloud, her jet-black hair flowing across a midnight-blue sky, her alabaster skin shimmering with reflected starlight.