Hidden Van Gogh painting revealed by giant X-ray

It’s rare that new paintings by Old Masters are discovered. But that’s exactly what happened in the case of a recently uncovered work by Vincent Van Gogh. It was found at a museum in the Netherlands — but the painting wasn’t lost in some dusty corridor, it was hidden under the paint of another Van Gogh.

Scientists using a giant X-ray machine found an early portrait of a peasant woman beneath Van Gogh’s 1887 work “Patch of Grass.”

via NPR

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1. Yesterday a giant drill bit broke through the surface in London near the Tower Bridge and a similar one appeared in Dumbo, Brooklyn near The Brooklyn Bridge. This was a sign that Paul St George is very close to completing work on an amazing project started by his great-grandfather Alexander Stanhope St George, The Telectroscope, which will be installed at both ends of a transatlantic viewing tunnel between London and New York, allowing people to see each other in the two cities. Visit The Telectroscope website for more info and their blog for the latest updates. via Laughing Squid
2. David Hockney has donated his largest work ever to the Tate. The breathtaking portrait, of a typical Yorkshire landscape, was first exhibited last year at the Royal Academy. It will be displayed at Tate Britain in 2009.

   

   Hockney's big paintings of woodlands in the changing seasons have a bounce that's totally different from anything else in the entire history of British landscape art.

   "The painting is massive. It is made of 50 small canvases, adding up to an area measuring 40-foot wide by 15-foot high. The subject is what you might call the ordinary English countryside: a small copse of trees, with another in the background, and one large sycamore in front, spreading its network of branches above your head. To the right is a house, to the left a road curves away. In the foreground, a few daffodils bloom. The work is the solution to a problem that perplexed and defeated many of the great painters of the nineteenth century: how do you paint a mighty canvas outside, en plein air? To make the work, Hockney has employed the most up-todate digital technology, in addition to the most old-fashioned – the human hand, arm and eye." via BBC | Royal Academy of Arts
3. Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye.
   Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.
   Source:  New York Times
4. Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself. - Samuel Butler

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