Wednesday, March 8, 2017

Photography by Anna McNaught Anna McNaught is a talented... crss





















Photography by Anna McNaught

Anna McNaught is a talented photographer, graphic designer, and artist currently based in LA, California. Anna received her BS in Photography from Ithaca College, New York. She creates stunning dreamlike and fine art photo manipulations. 

I developed a strong passion for photography and design from a young age with a constant drive to create and observe the world around me. As a child, I was enthralled with the fast paced, glamour and glitz world of fashion, photography, and design. This has evolved and matured from the superficial into my artistic pursuit of emotion and meaning through the media of photography and graphic design. 

Follow her on http://ift.tt/2mnexrQ


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“You know, there’s one place that all the people with the...









“You know, there’s one place that all the people with the greatest potential are gathered. One place and that’s the graveyard. People ask me all the time, what kind of stories do you want to tell, Viola? And I say, exhume those bodies. Exhume those stories. The stories of the people who dreamed big and never saw those dreams to fruition. People who fell in love and lost. I became an artist—and thank God I did—because we are the only profession that celebrates what it means to live a life.”

- Viola Davis, from her acceptance speech last month after being awarded the Oscar for Actress in a Supporting Role for her performance in “Fences”.

Storm Mountain LodgeNestled in the glorious Banff National Park,...













Storm Mountain Lodge

Nestled in the glorious Banff National Park, Storm Mountain Lodge consist of 14 historic cabins scattered across five acres of protected subalpine forest. Decorated in a cozy, rustic style, each wooden cottage is a private escape, complete with warm, wood burning fireplace and antique soaking tub.

Exceptional Canadian cuisine with an imaginative touch is served in the main lodge’s country-style dining room, and there’s also a charming lounge, where guests can cuddle up with an exquisite Canadian vintage in front of the roaring fire.

Compare prices for this lodge at TripAdvisor

ArtFair: JustMAD During February, one of the most important... crss


Rafael Jiménez


Paulo Damiao


Isabel Muñoz


El Rojo


Javier Vázquez


Jesus ZURITA


Paulo Damiao


Uriel Con

ArtFair: JustMAD

 During February, one of the most important European Emerging Art Fair opened its doors in Madrid. The main goal this year was to stay strong in supporting emerging art galleries, and especially artists with Art residency programs. Among them, we were especially seduced by (in order of appearance): the plasticine portraits of Rafael Jiménez, the small bubbled images of Paulo Damiao, the delicate photos of Isabel Muñoz, the street art of El Rojo, the polyurethane hyperrealist sculpture of Javier Vázquez, the red paintings of Jesus Zurita, the intimist painting of Paco Pomet, and the post-pop art of the Colombian artist Uriel Goon. 

Check our Facebook for more original art.
Posted by Very Private Art

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Phonsay - Digital Photography Phonsay Phothisomphane  a.k.a.... crss

















Phonsay - Digital Photography

Phonsay Phothisomphane  a.k.a. p22_art is a painter & conceptual photo artist currently based in Australia. He relocated to Melbourne to focus on photography and digital editing. Styling his images around architecture, geometrical shapes and patterns, lines, angles, people and the bizarre world of surrealism. Phonsay is represented by Thierry B Fine Art. For more check out his website.


Enjoy past photography features and follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

posted by tu recepcja

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Pioneertown: A Movie Set That Became A Real Town

In 1946, a bunch of Hollywood legends including Roy Rogers, Dick Curtis, and Russell Hayden —tired of travelling to far-off locations to shoot western movies, that were very popular at the time— decided to build a Wild West set, in the High Desert of Southern California, where directors could shoot movies and the crew could live. They drove out to a spot 4 miles to the northwest of Yucca Valley, and two hours from Los Angeles, and started building facades and spaces to resemble a 19th-century western town. The town was named Pioneertown.

The project was a huge success. More than two hundred westerns were filmed at Pioneertown, including The Cisco Kid, and it served as the backdrop for a large number of television shows, notably Judge Roy Bean and The Gene Autry Show. As the years rolled by and Hollywood’s interest shifted from westerns to new ideas, business in Pioneertown dwindled and the town assumed a new role—that of a tourist attraction.










Why Giving Up Playing Music When You've Grown Up Is Bad For Your Brain

Do you know that every year, almost 100% of public school students in America begin an instrument if a school music program exists in their school? Yet over 50% of students simply quit a few years later.[1]

Even though parents encourage their children to take up a musical instrument, they never really treat music as important as other subjects. The benefits of learning maths and languages have always been greater than music in parents’ eyes, or even in children’s eyes as they grow up. So grown-ups just quit playing music.

An even more common phenomenon is that, as people grow up, they put off playing music as it doesn’t serve any concrete purpose in their hectic life in which work, vacation, friends and family times are of higher priority.

If you qui playing music because of one of the above reasons, you can’t miss the following findings explained by the music educator, Anita Collins. She explained in a TED Ed video how playing instruments benefits our brains and what she says will change the way you look at music:[2]

Music stimulates multiple areas in our brains and strengthens our problem solving skills.

Neuroscientists try to understand how our brains work by monitoring them in real time. Different tasks like painting and reading have corresponding areas of the brain where activity can be observed.

When participants are listening to music while being observed, researchers see that multiple brain areas are being stimulated at once. Our brains process the sound elements like melody and rhythm and put everything together to let us feel the musical experience in just a split second.

Researchers also try to observe the brains of people who play music.

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While multiple areas of their brains also light up like music listeners’, playing music engages every area of the brain at once, especially the visual, auditory, and motor cortices.

Playing music combines the brain areas which involve our linguistic and mathematical skills and creativity, utilizing both hemispheres of our brains.

Therefore, playing music is said to increase the volume and activity in the brain’s corpus callosum. And the enhanced brains allow musicians to apply their strength to other activities including more effectively and creatively solving problems in different settings.

People who play music have great memory as they’re used to interlinking messages and emotions in music.

Music is made up of messages and emotions and therefore, musicians are processing all this information as they play music.

Musicians often have higher levels of executive function, a category of interlinked tasks that includes planning, strategizing, and attention to detail and requires simultaneous analysis of both cognitive and emotional aspects. This ability has an impact on how our memory systems work.

Music playing comprises a number of memory cues that can trigger our brains to retrieve memories.[3] This maybe able to explain why musicians appear to be used to applying multiple cues when storing memories.

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Musicians tend to give each memory multiple tags, such as a conceptual tag, an emotional tag, an audio tag,and a contextual tag, like a good internet search engine; making creating, storing, and retrieving memories more quickly and efficiently

Now you know how good it is to continue to play musical instruments, I think your next action is pretty clear, right?

It doesn’t matter how long you’ve put the instrument aside, picking it up is enough to get you to play it again.

All you have to do is to take your first step and take out your instrument.

What’s your forgotten instrument? The piano that’s always been in your living room? The violin that you’ve put under your bed? Or that guitar you played only over the summer when you were still at uni? Pick it up, take it out and clean it.

I’ve always been playing the piano and drums and I love playing these instruments, but not a lot of people know that I used to play the violin too. My violin was my long-forgotten instrument which I put under my bed.

Last week, I took out my violin from the dusty box and all the memories of me practicing violin just came back. I cleaned it and tried to tune its sound. (I’d almost forgot how to tune its sound.) Then I picked up my bow, my poor bow with bow hair breaking out, and moved it over the strings…it sounded terrible.

It sounded terrible because I hadn’t played it for too long, and it’s also because my violin and my bow were all out of maintenance. But all those memories motivated me to take up the instrument again.

Watch more live music to light your fire.

Watching or listening to live music has the magic to leave you feeling more motivated than ever to play your own. Every time after watching a live performance of any kind of music, I just want to play my piano when I get back home. And whenever I see the amazing performance by some great violinists, I want to practice my violin and get more skilful in it.

Look for music score of your favorite music to keep your fire burning.

This always works. There must be some songs you really love and want to know how to play.

Look for the music score on the internet or in the library, that’s how you can keep the fire burning. When you have a goal — to learn to play your favorite songs beautifully, you’ll work hard for it.

Of course, you have to pay attention to the difficulty level of the piece of music. Don’t push yourself too hard, take it slowly and try to work on the fundamentals first before challenging yourself for some difficult pieces.

You can watch the whole video on TED Ed here to find out more about the amazing benefits of playing an instrument.

Featured photo credit: TED Ed via ed.ted.com

Reference

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