Art is a diverse range of cultural activity centered around works utilizing creative or imaginative talents, which are expected to evoke a worthwhile experience, generally through an expression of emotional power, conceptual ideas, technical proficiency, or beauty.

There is no generally agreed definition of what constitutes art, and its interpretation has varied greatly throughout history and across cultures. In the Western tradition, the three classical branches of visual art are painting, sculpture, and architecture.

Theatre, dance, and other performing arts, as well as literature, music, film and other media such as interactive media, are included in a broader definition of "the arts".

The nature of art and related concepts, such as creativity and interpretation, are explored in a branch of philosophy known as aesthetics. The resulting artworks are studied in the professional fields of art criticism and the history of art. Read more ...

Maurits Cornelis Escher (June 17, 1898 - March 27, 1972) was a Dutch graphic artist who made woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints, many of which were inspired by mathematics. Despite wide popular interest, for most of his life Escher was neglected in the art world, even in his native Netherlands. He was 70 before a retrospective exhibition was held. In the late twentieth century, he became more widely appreciated, and in the twenty-first century he has been celebrated in exhibitions around the world.

His work features mathematical objects and operations including impossible objects, explorations of infinity, reflection, symmetry, perspective, truncated and stellated polyhedra, hyperbolic geometry, and tessellations. Although Escher believed he had no mathematical ability, he interacted with the mathematicians George Polya, Roger Penrose, and Donald Coxeter, and the crystallographer Friedrich Haag, and conducted his own research into tessellation. Read more ...

Originality is merely an illusion. ~ M. C. Escher

Don't look at life through rose colored glasses.
It's all about perspective and seeing through the illusion. ~ Ellie

Escher's work often depicts Sacred Geometry or the mathematical nature of reality.

One step at a time ... What are you looking for? Appreciation, understanding, compassion, healing, love, peace, acceptance, relationship, friends, security, success, recognition, direction, answers, God, a place that says you're home, the destiny you feel within you, your purpose, some or all of the above.

Quote: I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality. It helps me solve my problems and survive.

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderon (July 6, 1907 - 13 July 1954) was a Mexican painter known for her many portraits, self-portraits, and works inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico. Inspired by the country's popular culture, she employed a naive folk art style to explore questions of identity, postcolonialism, gender, class, and race in Mexican society. Her paintings often had strong autobiographical elements and mixed realism with fantasy. In addition to belonging to the post-revolutionary Mexicayotl movement, which sought to define a Mexican identity, Kahlo has been described as a surrealist or magical realist.

She is also known for painting about her experience of chronic pain. Her 1940 self-portrait titled The Dream (The Bed) holds the record for the most expensive work by a female artist ever auctioned. The year it was painted was also marked by her remarriage to artist Diego Rivera and the assassination of her former lover Leon Trotsky. Read more ...

Frida Kahlo's self-portrait "The Dream" sold for record-breaking $55m   BBC - November 21, 2025

A surrealist painting by famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo has sold for $54.7million - shattering the auction record for an artwork by a woman. The painting, from the 1940s, went for more than 1,000 times its original auction price in 1980, after a tense bidding battle between two collectors, according to the auction house Sotheby's.The work depicts Kahlo asleep in a canopy bed beneath a skeleton entwined with dynamite.

Vincent Willem van Gogh (March 30, 1853 - July 29, 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade he created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life. They include landscapes, still lifes, portraits and self-portraits, and are characterized by bold colors and dramatic, impulsive and expressive brushwork that contributed to the foundations of modern art. His suicide at 37 followed years of mental illness and poverty. Read more ...

The brushstrokes in the van Gogh masterwork are consistent with the fluid dynamics of Earth's atmosphere - and, possibly, the broader Universe.   PhysOrg - September 18, 2024
Vincent van Gogh's painting "The Starry Night" depicts a swirling blue sky with yellow moon and stars. The sky is an explosion of colors and shapes, each star encapsulated in ripples of yellow, gleaming with light like reflections on water. Van Gogh's brushstrokes create an illusion of sky movement so convincing it led atmospheric scientists to wonder how closely it aligns with the physics of real skies. While the atmospheric motion in the painting cannot be measured, the brushstrokes can. Researchers specializing in marine sciences and fluid dynamics iuncover what they call the hidden turbulence in the painter's depiction of the sky.

This Famous Van Gogh Painting from 1889 - The Starry Night - Features Astonishingly Accurate Physics   Science Alert - September 18, 2024
Created by Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh in 1889, The Starry Night is one of the most intriguing works the art world has produced. Not only is it breathtakingly evocative, the roiling, swirling sky seems to suggest a detailed understanding of the physics of turbulence. Now, a new, in-depth analysis confirms it. The brushstrokes in the van Gogh masterwork are consistent with the fluid dynamics of Earth's atmosphere - and, possibly, the broader Universe.

Hidden Van Gogh self-portrait found behind another painting   CNN - July 15, 2022

A hidden self-portrait by Vincent van Gogh has been discovered behind one of his paintings, covered by layers of glue and cardboard for more than a century. The image was found when art conservators took an X-ray of Van Gogh's 1885 "Head of a Peasant Woman" painting ahead of a forthcoming exhibition. They discovered the concealed image at the back of its canvas hidden by a sheet of cardboard. Experts say the revealed artwork is believed to have been unknown until now.

Disputed Van Gogh painting is genuine, says new study   CNN - January 21, 2020

A disputed painting of Vincent van Gogh has been declared a genuine self-portrait by the Dutch master, almost 50 years after its authenticity was first called into question.

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (April 15, 1452 - May 2, 1519) was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who was active as a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect. While his fame initially rested on his achievements as a painter, he has also become known for his notebooks, in which he made drawings and notes on a variety of subjects, including anatomy, astronomy, botany, cartography, painting, and paleontology. Leonardo is widely regarded as a genius who epitomised the Renaissance humanist ideal, and his collective works contributed to the development of European art to an extent rivaled only by that of his younger contemporary Michelangelo. Read more ...

Scientists identify secret ingredient in Leonardo da Vinci paintings - egg yolks   CNN - March 29, 2023

"Old Masters" such as Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli and Rembrandt may have used proteins, especially egg yolk, in their oil paintings, according to a new study. Trace quantities of protein residue have long been detected in classic oil paintings, though they were often ascribed to contamination. A new study found the inclusion was likely intentional - and sheds light on the technical knowledge of the Old Masters, the most skilled European painters of the 16th, 17th, or early 18th century, and the way they prepared their paints.

Hidden baby Jesus revealed under Leonardo da Vinci's 'Virgin of the Rocks'   Live Science - February 6, 2020

This isn't the first signal that the "Virgin of the Rocks" hid older sketches that might have led to a different masterpiece. A similar effort, using infrared light in August 2019, revealed a sketch of a different Virgin Mary posed higher in the frame, as Live Science previously reported. But this new scan of the painting using a technique called macro X-ray fluorescence (MA-XRF) - as well as a new algorithm to interpret the data - revealed the head and wings of this unseen baby Jesus.

New algorithm helps uncover forgotten figures beneath Da Vinci painting Virgin of the Rocks   PhysOrg - February 4, 2020

In doing so they revealed, more clearly than ever before, the hidden figures that Leonardo first drew before changing his design to the one that he eventually painted. These included abandoned images of an angel and the Infant Christ.

Pablo Ruiz Picasso (October 25, 1881 - April 8, 1973) was a Spanish painter and sculptor who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and the anti-war painting Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian air forces during the Spanish Civil War. His career spanned more than 76 years, from his late teens to his death in 1973. Read more ...

What Secrets Lie Beneath the Surface of Picasso's Blue Period Paintings?   Smithsonian - April 13, 2022

Over the past two decades, researchers have discovered hidden under paintings in multiple works from Pablo Picasso’s Blue Period. Most famously, examinations at the turn of the millennium uncovered a woman’s face under The Old Guitarist (1903-1904). More recently, conservation has revealed painted-over elements in The Blue Room (1901), Crouching Beggarwoman (1902) and The Soup (1903).

Hidden Artwork Found Beneath Picasso 'Blue Period' Masterpiece   Live Science - February 17, 2018

Pablo Picasso painted one of his "Blue Period" masterpieces, one showing a crouching, cloaked woman, on top of another artist's work.

Unprecedented study of Picasso's bronzes uncovers new details   PhysOrg - February 18, 2018

Musee national Picasso-Pari completed the first major material survey and study of the Musee national Picasso-Paris' world-renowned Pablo Picasso bronzes using cutting-edge, portable instruments.

Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.

Some say they see poetry in my paintings; I see only science.

Art is harmony.
Harmony is the analogy of contrary and of similar elements of
tone, of color and of line, conditioned by the dominate key, and under
the influence of a particular light, in gay, calm, or sad combinations.

The portrait of Klimt's patrons' young daughter, made in the last years of the artist's life, was spared from destruction during World War II when it was separated from his works that later burned during a fire at Immendorf Castle in Austria.

Never lose the first impression which has moved you. If you have really
been touched, you will convey to others the sincerity of your emotion.

A room hung with pictures is a room hung with thoughts.

A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?