Mahmoud Darwish | Un altro giorno verrà / Another day will come

Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) è stato un poeta, scrittore e giornalista Palestinese.

È autore di circa venti raccolte di poesie, pubblicate a partire dal 1964, e sette opere in prosa, di argomento narrativo o saggistico.

È considerato tra i maggiori poeti in lingua araba.

Darwish ha vinto numerosi premi per le sue opere.

È stato giornalista e direttore della rivista letteraria "al-Karmel" (Il Carmelo), e dal 1994 era membro del Parlamento dell'Autorità Nazionale Palestinese.

È considerato poeta nazionale della Palestina per cui scrisse nel 1988 la Dichiarazione d'indipendenza, poi proclamata da Yasser Arafat.

I suoi libri sono stati tradotti in più di venti lingue e diffusi in tutto il mondo.

Mahmoud Darwish | Un altro giorno verrà

Shamsia Hassani | Hope is always beautiful even when you know you are the loser

Un altro giorno verrà, un giorno femmineo,

alla metafora trasparente,

compiuto, diamantino, di visita nuziale, soleggiato,

fluido, allegro. Nessuno sentirà

alcun bisogno di suicidio o di migrazione.

Poiché ogni cosa, fuori del passato, è naturale e vera,

sinonimo dei suoi attributi originari.

Shamsia Hassani

Come se il tempo oziasse in vacanza… "Prolunga il bel

tempo

della tua grazia. Illùminati nel sole dei tuoi seni di seta,

e aspetta l’arrivo della buona novella. Poi,

potremo crescere. Abbiamo ancora tempo

per crescere dopo questo giorno…"

Un altro giorno verrà,

un giorno femmineo,

dal cenno canterino e dal saluto e verbo azzurri.

Tutto è femmineo fuori del passato,

l’acqua scorre dalle mammelle della pietra.

Nessuna polvere, nessuna siccità, e nessuna sconfitta.

E le colombe dormono in un carro armato abbandonato

quando non trovano un piccolo nido

nel letto degli amanti.

Shamsia Hassani

Mahmoud Darwish | Another day will come

Another day will come, a womanly day

diaphanous in metaphor, complete in being,

diamond and processional in visitation, sunny,

flexible, with a light shadow. No one will feel

a desire for suicide or for leaving. All

things, outside the past, natural and real,

will be synonyms of their early traits. As if time

is slumbering on vacation…"

Shamsia Hassani | Love

"Extend your lovely

beauty-time. Sunbathe in the sun of your silken breasts,

and wait until good omen arrives. Later

we will grow older. We have enough time

to grow older after this day…"/

Another day will come, a womanly day

songlike in gesture, lapis in greeting

and in phrase. All things will be feminine outside

the past. Water will flow from rock's bosom.

No dust, no drought, no defeat.

And a dove will sleep in the afternoon in an abandoned

combat tank if it doesn't find a small nest

in the lovers' bed…

Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) was a Palestinian poet and author who was regarded as Palestine's national poet.

In 1988, Darwish wrote the Palestinian Declaration of Independence, which was the formal declaration for the creation of a State of Palestine.

Darwish won numerous awards for his works.

In his poetic works, Darwish explored Palestine as a metaphor for the loss of Eden, birth and resurrection, and the anguish of dispossession and exile.

He has been described as incarnating and reflecting "the tradition of the political poet in Islam, the man of action whose action is poetry".

He also served as an editor for several literary magazines in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Darwish wrote in Arabic, and also spoke English, French and Hebrew.

Book sculptures by Jodi Harvey-Brown

- "I have always loved art, and I have always loved to read.

Books pull you into a new world, while art lets you see it.

It made sense to me that these two mediums should come together.

The books that we love to read should be made to come to life.

Characters, that we care so much for, should come out of the pages to show us their stories.

What we see in our imaginations as we read should be there for the world to see.

My book sculptures are my way of making stories come alive" - Jodi Harvey-Brown.

7 masterpieces at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum

Frederick Carl Frieseke | The House in Giverny, 1912

When Frieseke first settled at Giverny in 1906, he stayed at Le Hameau (the hamlet) on the rue du Pressoir.

The two-story cottage surrounded by high walls on three sides enclosing a garden was next door to the home of Claude Monet and had previously been occupied by the American artist Lilla Cabot Perry.

The house shown in The House in Giverny, however, is most likely the Whitman house, the second of Frieseke's three Giverny residences.

Its green shutters and the distinctive open lattice-work of green trellises laden with flowers appear in a number of Frieseke's paintings, including Lilies, Tea Time in a Giverny Garden (both Daniel J. Terra Collection) and Hollyhocks, c. 1912-1913 (Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection).

The intimacy of Frieseke's small painting and his interest in decorative pattern links the artist more closely with the Nabi painters Vuillard and Bonnard than to his neighbour Monet or with Renoir, the French Impressionist he most admired.

The artist stated his creed published in a 1914 interview: "My one idea is to reproduce flowers in sunlight.

I do not suggest detail by form, as I have to keep it as pure as possible or the effect of brilliancy will be lost.

Of course, there is a limit to the strength of pigments, and one can but relatively give the impression of nature. I may see a glare of white light at noon, but I cannot render it literally [...]

I usually make my first notes and impressions with dashes of tempera, then I paint over this with small strokes in oil to produce the effect of vibration, completing as I go". | Source: © Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum

Frederick Carl Frieseke (American, 1874-1939) | The House in Giverny, 1912 | Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Enoch Wood Perry | A Month’s darning, 1876

In their subject matter and compositional format, Enoch Wood Perry’s watercolor paintings are quite similar to his oils, and his method of applying paint was consistently characterized by fastidious attention to detail.

Like his colleague Eastman Johnson, Enoch Wood Perry (1831-1915) studied in Düsseldorf and Paris, where he acquired a respect for careful draftsmanship.

He exhibited "A Month’s Darning" in 1876 at the American Society of Painters in Water Colors and later the same year at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, where it was acclaimed for its evocation of times past.

The critic for the "New-York Tribune" found the woman’s head to be "the best part" of the composition and only regretted "that the sweet-faced girl . . . should have such large-footed men-folks to darn for". | Source: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Enoch Wood Perry | A Month’s Darning, 1876 | Metropolitan Museum of Art

Cindy Hendrick | Watercolor illustrator

A love of gardening, nature and woodland animals inspire Hendrick’s artwork.

Spending time in her surroundings, she observes these friends of the forest and field and their quirky behaviors.

The small company Hendrick started from her home in 2004, Woodfield Press has grown from humble beginnings with a handful of notecards and a couple of paper doll kits to a business with products in up to 450 stores throughout the US and the ability to print 40,000 cards at a time.

Camille Pissarro at the Christie's

Camille Pissarro | Paysannes travaillant dans les champs, Pontoise, 1881

In Paysannes travaillant dans les champs, Pontoise, painted in 1881, Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) depicts a group of five young women harvesting peas on the rural outskirts of Pontoise, a bustling market town about forty kilometers northwest of Paris where he and his family had lived for over a decade.

Pissarro had first treated the theme of picking peas in two oils the previous year, and he returned to the motif at least three times following his move to the agrarian hamlet of Éragny in 1884.

Camille Pissarro | Paysannes travaillant dans les champs, Pontoise, 1881 | Christie's

Happy birthday to Théo van Rysselberghe, born on this day in 1862

Happy birthday to Théophile "Théo" van Rysselberghe (23 November 1862 - 13 December 1926), a Belgian neo-impressionist painter, who played a pivotal role in the European art scene at the turn of the twentieth century.

Van Rysselberghe discovered the pointillist technique when he saw Georges Seurat's La Grande Jatte at the eighth impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1886.

Together with Henry Van de Velde, Georges Lemmen, Xavier Mellery, Willy Schlobach and Alfred William Finch and Anna Boch he "imported" this style to Belgium.