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hello, I invite you to join the group Painters of the world, for all of us dispute the TMChampionship. Help us to be beautiful and a group winner:) http://www.chess.com/groups/home/painters-of-the-world

From the Feuilletons http://www.chess.com/img/basics/print.gif) no-repeat scroll 0% 0%;">Print http://www.chess.com/img/basics/email.gif) no-repeat scroll 0% 0%;">Send http://www.chess.com/img/basics/comment.gif) no-repeat scroll 0% 0%;">Comment 23/10/2009 From the Feuilletons From the Feuilletons is a weekly overview of what's been happening in the German-language cultural pages and appears every Friday at 3 pm. CET.. Here a key to the German newspapers. Frankfurter Rundschau 17.10.2009Contemporary German literature has finally shed it "doubts about language", Ina Hartwig writes approvingly, and it's thriving. "The Germans suddenly seem to have rediscovered their need to tell stories. About the provinces, illness, the flow of commodities, fetishism, cars and cities and, of course, love. The books are getting thicker and thicker. There seems to be a need to make up for lost time. Even West Germany which, like the GDR, ceased to exist with the fall of the Wall, is the subject of literary probing - and not only by the cool brigade, but also by romantics and critics, who are well positioned to describes the new harshnesses. And to describe it them without provoking ideological paroxysms. We might be in the midst of a book industry crisis us but you could not say the same of literature itself." Frankfurter Rundschau 19.10.2009The Frankfurt Book Fair has ended as it began: with scandal. Having been invited to speak at the closing ceremony, which was jointly organised by the Book Fair and the Federal Foreign Office, the Chinese environmental activist and dissident Dai Qing was prevented from doing so, as Natalie Soondrum reports. Peter Ripken, the Book Fair's project manager, announced the cancellation just a quarter of an hour before the event was due to begin. "When Qing asked why she was not allowed to talk, Ripken informed her that it was the wish of the Federal Foreign Office, and that he was in complete agreement with the decision. The translator Shi Ming said, 'His argument changed. At one stage he said that he had never been in favour of Dai Qing speaking. Later he said that the Foreign Office did not want her to talk.'"The Book Fair closed on Sunday and on Monday, it was promptly announced that the 67-year-old Peter Ripken had been fired (more here).Die Welt 20.10.2009Van Gogh's "Shoes" may be of "little importance to the history of art", writes Uta Baier, but they have provoked much philosophical musing over the years. The battered old boots are now the subject of a small exhibition in Cologne's Wallraf-Richartz Museum. Heidegger saw the shoes as a negative cast of a peasant woman's life; the art historian Meyer Shapiro saw a self-portrait, and then came Derrida's "Verite en peinture": "Derrida expressed doubt that this was even a pair of shoes at all. And he was right, because these are two left shoes. The observation opens up entirely new interpretations, including the Freudian one, which Derrida contemplates with relish. In this new light, one shoe could be male and the other female. At any rate, Derrida puts paid to the notion of art as a mirror of reality. 'These shoes are an allegory of painting itself.'"

So I figure this forum uses the term 'Artist' in a general sense. Not just pertaining to painting, drawing, sculpting, etc., but to include writing as well as anything one would consider 'art'. Myself I am a writer, albeit not a very good one but a writer nonetheless ;) So if it was OK I would like to post some of my writings. I have been in many other forums on other sites and do not get any good feed back, if it's good, bad, indifferent, you now. Most response I get was I loved it, it was SO good. Riiight, if it was THAT good why have I not earned a cent of my writing and get rejected 97 times out or 100 submissions I submit (which is up from when I just got out of college. At that time I was being rejected 99.3 times out of 100, SCORE!). My thinking was since chess is a game of the mind I may get more intelligent responses. Just a thought.

http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/bamboozling-ourselves-part-1/

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Celestial-Sleuth.html#

I have the doubts please any one solve my doubt. they are 1.) why human paint? 2.) for what he painting? 3.) why human only paint? & 4.) from where the painting or drawing comes? from his/her brain, knowledge, imagination, heart, hand or anything else? finally you log off the computer & go to any silent empty spaces, sit alone & close your eyes. Than ask these above questions & tell what did you think & how did you feel.. thanks by Shree Ganesh.

some of Van Goghs' quotes: A painting to rest the brain or the imagination. I have a terrible lucidity at moments when nature is so beautiful. I am not conscious of myself any more, and the pictures come to me as if in a dream. It is so more easy to make a good picture than it is to find a diamond or a pearl. It means trouble, and you risk your life for it. I cannot help it that my paintings do not sell. The time will come when people will see that they are worth than the price of the paint. Vincent Von Gogh

i'd like to discuss something with the group here. some time ago i had an argument with my friend about the topic of photography. regardless of it being an art or not i think, today, too much credit is given to the photographer. without exeption, when i see a photo - i always say "a great photo" and not "the man who took it is a genius". arguably, i take many good photos but i never take the credit. for example - if a take a great shot of a mountain i can take no credit. why? well - i did not "make" the mountain. i did not make the camera. i did not make the sun shine in such way. i did nothing else than make the "click". i'm saying that while in art as painting or writing, where a man takes materials (color or words) and creates something that only he sees, does it with his own effort and utilises his knowledge and skills, his ingenuity and hopefuly, does it really well (worth a mans recognition and worthwile)... i see not such effort in photography... too little is "done" by the man in my opinion... what are your views of the subject?

Tuesday, March 3, 2009 Presented by Down & out on the language of London Were Orwell's views on English clouded by class prejudice? Robert Fulford, National Post The most admired and most quoted of George Orwell's essays, "Politics and the English Language," written in the winter of 1945-46, begins with a familiar opinion: "Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way." Sixty-three years later, that remains a favourite complaint among those who believe the world is going to hell. It would be hard to find a period in modern history when no one has floated the same idea. It was already commonplace when Orwell was growing up, at the beginning of the 20th century. Language seems always to be declining, like politeness. Since Orwell advised us to think critically about what we read, I was encouraged to entertain a few heretical thoughts about him last week when I encountered those opening words for perhaps the fiftieth time. "Politics and the English Language" appears in the first of two new collections of Orwell essays, both of them compiled with loving respect by George Packer and published by Harcourt -- All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays and Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays. Beyond question, it remains a great essay. We cannot be reminded too often of Orwell's central thesis that slovenly writing produces slovenly thought and foolish thought leads to ugly prose. But that opening, coming down to us from just after the Second World War, seems, when you consider the historical context, thoughtless. Can we still say that the English language in 1945-46 was in a particularly bad way? In retrospect, it seems to have been used in the mid-1940s by some remarkable stylists, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, among others. The funniest English writer, P. G. Wodehouse, was spinning out an endless series of books in never less than superb English. T. S. Eliot and W.H. Auden were hard at work. Most important, at that moment the English language had just given the greatest political performance in its history, turning away from England's shores the most formidable of all military machines, Germany's. In the hands of Winston Churchill, language rallied the British, sustained them through desperate years and led them to victory. It was the supreme political accomplishment of Britain in modern times. How could Orwell, writing at precisely that moment, have ignored this central fact of his and England's existence? In an essay called "Politics and the English Language," how could he have failed to notice both the pre-eminent English politician of the century and his uniquely effective eloquence? Orwell's politics, sad to say, stood in the way of the truth. He claimed the ability to face unpleasant facts, which often meant recognizing that many of his fellow leftists were apologists in the West for Stalinist mass murder. His willingness to state the harsh reality of communism, from a leftist position, scandalized and infuriated thousands of fellow socialists and marked him permanently as an honest man in a dishonest time, a heroic truth-teller who defied the liars who surrounded him. He was also committed to a profoundly negative view of the upper classes, among whom Churchill (as a Tory with a noble ancestry) was included. "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism," Orwell wrote in 1946. He called England in the 1940s, "a family with the wrong members in control." He could not acknowledge that during the war the one family member with the talent to save Britain was the Conservative prime minister. But, as Orwell wrote in another connection, "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." In 1946, on this crucial point, that struggle proved too much for him. This was at the climax of his literary career, just after the appearance of Animal Farm, three years before the publication of his dystopian masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and four years before his death from tuberculosis in 1950. Although he's now admired by many conservatives, Orwell was a passionate socialist who hoped and believed the class system was on the way to extinction: "This war, unless we are defeated, will wipe out most of the existing class privileges. There are every day fewer people who wish them to continue." In his diary, he reported he was sickened by the advertising in the London Underground, "the silly staring faces and strident colours, the general frantic struggle to induce people to waste labour and material by consuming useless luxuries." He expected the war would sweep all that away. The two new volumes from Harcourt remind us again and again that Orwell was at heart a teacher anxious to share his opinions on every subject. He wrote to his publisher that "I think [Jean-Paul] Sartre is a bag of wind and I am going to give him a good boot." In these pages we find him telling us precisely the way tea should be made and fiercely defending the value of English cooking (against French!). Embarrassingly, he was a chronic and reflexive homophobe, an enemy of "the pansy left" and "nancy poets;" he proudly declared, "I am not one of your fashionable pansies like Auden and [Stephen] Spender." Imagine what a Canadian human-rights commission would do to him today. Orwell liked to compare honest, truthful writing to a window pane through which we can see the truth clearly. He believed that one can "write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality." But his self-created personality got in his way. The son of an imperial civil servant, he made every effort to declare his solidarity with the lower classes. He deified every aspect of working-class life, from pubs to pigeon fanciers. He was a rare example of a downstart, a bright Eton graduate who signed on first as an imperial policeman in Burma and then became a socialist, a hobo, a dishwasher, a soldier in the Spanish Civil War and an ill-paid freelance writer. His chosen class consciousness blinded him when he sat down to write a definitive essay on the English language. Today, he remains an authority on the use of the English language and one of its great practitioners. But he missed the most startling development of his time in the subject that he famously made his own.

ART SPIEGELMAN WANTS A BLOOD TEST The acclaimed comic artist was once banned from Robert Crumb’s house, loves chicken fat and hates the term “graphic novel”. He also takes very little pleasure from drawing, writes Gary Moskowitz ...Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFESipping from a glass of white wine and secretly itching for a cigarette (he later admitted), Art Spiegelman glibly entertained a gaggle of British adult comic-book fans. We were all in a small theatre at London's Institute for Contemporary Arts, where Spiegelman explained his rationale for what is perhaps one of his most shocking drawings from the 1970s: a decapitated man getting fucked in the neck.“I did the most vile comics I could possibly think of, because I thought that’s what underground comics were all about,” he said with an unapologetic shrug. He then admitted that Robert Crumb, a comic artist renowned for testing the limits of taste in his own drawings, banned him from his house in San Francisco in the 1960s. His wife was just too disturbed by that particular image. The drawing appears in Spiegelman’s most recent effort, a new edition of "Breakdowns: A Portrait of the Artist as Young %@&*!", created first in 1978. This book, said Spiegelman, should lend some insight into his evolution from vile cartoonist to Pulitzer Prize-winning artist and illustrator. The Pulitzer came in 1992 for "Maus", a personal story about the Holocaust in which Jews were depicted as mice and Nazi Germans as cats. Though canonised now as an important unconventional memoir, "Maus" was originally met in 1978 with “a stunning silence”, Spiegelman said. His goal for the project, first drawn with a fountain pen, was to make readers feel like they were reading a diary.“Breakdowns” offers a trek through Spiegelman’s early work and development as a comic artist, revealing what he grappled with before "Maus". At the lecture, Spiegelman presented slides from the book--rough, silly, strange and sometimes simple images that exemplified his mantra: “comics should be whatever you want them to be.”For "Maus" fans who know little of Spiegelman’s earlier work, “Breakdowns” may seem surprising--a rowdy departure from the sombre narratives and intense self-scrutiny that followed. Yet it captures the visceral energy of underground comics in the 1960s and '70s, a time when a growing group of adults used the medium to grapple with complicated and often raunchy subjects. Next year McSweeney's will release “Be a Nose!”, a "warts-and-all" reproduction of Spiegelman's private sketchbooks.Spiegelman made Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people in 2005, but his route to fame has indulged some detours, such as creating Garbage Pail Kids for Topps Bubble Gum and some time in a psychiatric hospital in upstate New York in the late 1960s. He designed covers for the New Yorker for years (Françoise Mouly, his wife, as the art editor), including a post-9/11 image of the Twin Towers. But he walked away from the hallowed gig that same year because, as he briefly mentioned to this audience, he didn’t like how tepid mainstream media had become after the attacks. He ended up putting out his own book on 9/11, called “In the Shadow of No Towers", and he shared with us the story of how he ran toward the towers after the first plane hit, to get to his daughter, who was attending school nearby. Spiegelman is not without his share of ticks. He admitted that he hates collaborating with other artists, he talks out loud while he works and he takes very little pleasure in drawing. “I don’t have the natural skills or patience to draw well,” he said. “I take no pleasure in drawing a tree just for a tree’s sake. I only draw a tree when I absolutely need a tree.”Speaking quickly and enthusiastically, Spiegelman treated the comments from the evening's presenter (Posy Simmonds, a British comic artist) as if they were irritating speed bumps. He was keen to explain his undying love for comic art. Specifically, for the ways in which it allows an artist to communicate directly, no matter how bizarre the message.“I like the ‘chicken fat’, the stuff that makes you go back and read it over and over and over, because there’s something sinister under the surface. The stuff with an urgency to it”, he said. He talked at length about the gripping illustrations of Mad, a popular satirical magazine. He then showed comic strips of a Jack-in-the-Box that suddenly jumps out of the box and starts talking to children and adults around him. It’s funny, but also creepy, because the toy has busted out of his confines and nobody is quite sure what he’s going to do next. Spiegelman is a comic artist’s comic artist, if there is such a thing. He grew up reading stacks of comics that his father found, salvaged from comic-book burnings in America after the second world war. The books were burned after Senate subcommittee hearings on juvenile delinquency and crime. Comics were often considered dangerous after Dr Fredric Wertham, author of the influential book "Seduction of the Innocent", proposed that comic books were directly linked to juvenile crime in the 1950s (something David Hajdu writes about at length in "The Ten-Cent Plague", which came out earlier this year). Spiegelman has taught classes on the history and aesthetics of comics. He hates the word “graphic novel” because he claimed it's misleading. “I’m called the father of the modern graphic novel. If that’s true, I want a blood test,” he said. “’Graphic novel’ sounds more respectable, but I prefer ‘comics’ because it credits the medium. [‘Comics’] is a dumb word, but that’s what they are.”Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, by Art Spiegelman, Pantheon BooksPicture credit: Nadja Spiegelman (top), Art Spiegelman(Gary Moskowitz is a journalist and musician, based in London. His last piece for More Intelligent Life was about witnessing America's election from London.)

ezanne's Shadow: A Master's Influence Lingers by Susan Stamberg Listen Now [7 min 19 sec] add to playlist See Cezanne's Paintings Enlarge Paul Cezanne The colors and textures of Cezanne's paintings, such as Madame Cezanne in a Red Armchair, influenced countless future generations of artists. The Art Institute of Chicago Enlarge Ellsworth Kelly Ellsworth Kelly's stripped-down aesthetic takes its cues from Cezanne's strong and simple lines. Above is his 2002 oil painting, Lake II. Beyeler Collection “If you're interested in pictures, then you have to be involved with [Cezanne], because his painting almost defined how pictures have been at least for the last 100 years.” Jeff Wall From Canvas To Film Enlarge Jeff Wall The composition of Jeff Wall's photo Card Players (above) draws upon Cezanne's 1890-92 oil painting The Card Players (below). Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art Enlarge Paul Cezanne Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art Morning Edition, February 26, 2009 · Pablo Picasso called Paul Cezanne "the father of us all"; Jasper Johns reportedly paid more attention to the 19th-century French postimpressionist than to any other artist. From Matisse to Mondrian, Braque to Giacometti — the list of venerable artists who were inspired by the master painter reads like the syllabus of an art history class. Now, "Cezanne and Beyond," a new exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, explores the artist and his influences. The exhibit opens with The Bather, Cezanne's 1885 oil-on-canvas of a man in a white swimsuit contemplating the water. Curator Katherine Sachs says that for decades, the painting was one of the first things visitors saw upon entering New York's Museum of Modern Art in New York. Countless artists encountered the painting there — and carried it away in their mind's eye. Artist Ellsworth Kelly says he's been hypnotized by Cezanne for most of his life. When he was 14, Kelly's mother gave him an art book that included all the masters, from Giotto to Picasso. Kelly's favorite reproduction was Cezanne's Chestnut Trees at the Jas de Bouffan — an avenue of slim, winter-into-spring trees Cezanne could see from his window in Provence. "I took [the painting] out of the book and put it on the wall," Kelly remembers. More than a decade later, Kelly made a series of elegant, pared-down sketches inspired by Cezanne's chestnut trees. Three Trees (1), Three Trees (2) and Three Trees (3) all appear in the Philadelphia show. Kelly's simple, supple lines are as pure as those of Henri Matisse — another artist who admired Cezanne. In 1899, Matisse bought Cezanne's Three Bathers, which he eventually donated to the city of Paris, requesting that they take special care of the painting that had nurtured him every day of his life. Matisse learned simplicity and color from Cezanne. Matisse's friend and rival Picasso had a more playful approach to the Provencal master; according to Sachs, Picasso found the seeds of cubism in Cezanne, who broke the tradition of viewing painting as a window on life. "[Cezanne] didn't reproduce the world as he saw it. He reproduced, or represented, his own personal emotions in front of the object," Sachs explains. Sachs says that Cezanne's tendency to infuse his work with personal expression — in layers of color and shape — became a hallmark of 20th century painting, from the ropes of paint created by Jackson Pollock, to the geometric women found in the works of Willem de Kooning. "I think he gave many artists permission to paint, as Cezanne said, [their] sensations," Sachs says. Contemporary photographer Jeff Wall, whose work is included in the Philadelphia show, says he's loved Cezanne since he was a child. Wall's photograph of three women playing cards — Card Players — was inspired by Cezanne's painting The Card Players, which shows three men at a table hunched over a card game. "These pictures have been going through my head for 50 years," Wall says of the paintings included in the exhibit. "If you're interested in pictures, then you have to be involved with [Cezanne], because his painting almost defined how pictures have been at least for the last 100 years." The Philadelphia Museum of Art also put on a Cezanne show in 1996 — a knockout retrospective with some 200 oil paintings, watercolors and drawings. So, it might be asked: Why stage another? "Why do we need to go back to a Shakespeare play or listen to a Beethoven symphony?" asks Joseph Rishel, co-curator of the Philadelphia show. "They're the fundamentals. They're the things that nurture us every day of our life. And you can't have enough of them."

The Evolution of Art We may be genetically predisposed to appreciate listening to Sinatra or staring at a Seurat. James Q. Wilson NEWSWEEK From the magazine issue dated Mar 2, 2009 Art suffuses our lives. Whether it's bluegrass, heavy metal, Frank Sinatra or Mozart, music moves us all. On a trip to a foreign city, visiting an art museum is a mandatory exercise. Imaginative writing affects many of us, though—alas—with decreasing frequency. Why should art be important? Being seen as an "art lover" may increase our status, but otherwise art is not useful. Yet art has been part of the human experience since Paleolithic man painted on the walls of caves in Lascaux, France, and Altamira, Spain, more than 30,000 years ago. Art preceded cities, agriculture and writing. Denis Dutton, an art professor in New Zealand, has proposed a bold new explanation. He argues that humankind's universal interest in art is the result of human evolution. We enjoy sex, grasp facial expressions, understand logic and spontaneously acquire language—all of which make it easier for us to survive and produce children. In "The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution," Dutton contends that an interest in art belongs on this list of evolutionary adaptations. In making his case, Dutton has to refute the late Stephen Jay Gould's argument that human culture is a socially formed byproduct of our large brains. Dutton easily overcomes this argument by pointing out how many "byproducts"—such as a spoken language—have given humans a huge evolutionary gain. But he must still explain why an interest in art gives us an edge. This is no easy task. Just because many people have a trait does not mean that it confers an evolutionary advantage. I like the Boston Red Sox, but I doubt that preference was genetically passed on to my children. (Happily, they became Sox fans anyway.) Drawing on Charles Darwin's second great book, "The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex," Dutton argues that art, like broad shoulders in a man and a narrow waist in a woman, facilitates seduction. We tell stories, sing songs, invent tales, recount jokes and draw pictures in order to find a mate and, having found one, produce children. We value art because, Dutton claims, it may be made of rare and valuable materials and require much skill to produce. People value wealth and skill in choosing a mate. We can add to Dutton's argument the fact that when 3-month-old infants are shown pictures of women who had been rated by adults as either attractive or unattractive, the babies looked much longer at the attractive ones. This is a stimulating but not entirely satisfactory argument. Some forms of art may have evolutionary explanations that do not involve sexual selection, and some forms of beauty may not be linked to art at all. Take music: we can imagine men and women singing to one another for sexual reasons, but we can also imagine music being used to induce sleep, energize an army, or identify friends and enemies. Or painting: zoologist Desmond Morris and others have encouraged chimpanzees to paint. Some of their works were hung in museums, without being labeled as the work of chimps, and they received much acclaim. Did these animals paint to lure sexual partners? It seems unlikely. Likewise, the cave paintings done 30 millennia ago probably had no connection with romance (many were done in remote parts of caves in which no one lived) and may have been produced by shamans for religious purposes. And we may value beauty even when no human has produced it. Anthropologists have shown that people in many cultures value views of the seashore, a sunset or a mountain peak much more than they like flat ground or hot sun. We have been born with a love for certain kinds of beauty that in turn influences how we react to music, painting and literature. Dutton recognizes these limitations to his explanation of why art has persisted. His love of music, he notes, cannot be confined to its role in sexual communication; as a child he was entranced (as was I) with Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, long before he had the faintest interest in girls. Moreover, art, especially music and poetry, helps us see into the human personality. When I dated the girl who later became my wife, we went off to dance to Tommy Dorsey. That certainly involved sexual selection. But that cannot explain why every year we attend a Mozart opera. As with everyone else, we value beauty even though we define it differently from people who enjoy the Sex Pistols. Evolution has, without any doubt, left people with an appreciation for both natural and man-made beauty, but sexual selection explains, I think, only a small part of the reason. But read Dutton's book: his masterful knowledge of art and his compelling prose make it a thing of beauty. Wilson has been a professor at Harvard and UCLA and is the author of “The Moral Sense.” URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/185821

I had come across this interesting study of linguistics during my studies at college. I had forgotten about it till I stumbled upon it recently. If you enjoy words and the complexity the English language brings, then you might enjoy this read. Although this study can exist in many other languages too as noted at the bottom of the article, I think some substance might be lost in translation. "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." is a grammatically correct sentence used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated constructs. It has been discussed in literature since 1972 when the sentence was used by William J. Rapaport, an associate professor at the University at Buffalo. The sentence is unpunctuated and uses three different readings of the word "buffalo". In order of their first use, these are c. the city of Buffalo, New York (or any other place named "Buffalo"), which is used as an adjective in the sentence and is followed by the animal; a. the animal buffalo, in the plural (equivalent to "buffaloes" or "buffalos"), in order to avoid articles (a noun); v. the verb "buffalo" meaning to bully, confuse, deceive, or intimidate. Marking each "buffalo" with its use as shown above gives Buffaloc buffaloa Buffaloc buffaloa buffalov buffalov Buffaloc buffaloa. Thus, the sentence when parsed reads as a description of the pecking order in the social hierarchy of buffaloes living in Buffalo: [Those] (Buffalo buffalo) [whom] (Buffalo buffalo buffalo) buffalo (Buffalo buffalo). [Those] buffalo(es) from Buffalo [that are intimidated by] buffalo(es) from Buffalo intimidate buffalo(es) from Buffalo. Bison from Buffalo, New York, who are intimidated by other bison in their community also happen to intimidate other bison in their community. THE buffalo FROM Buffalo WHO ARE buffaloed BY buffalo FROM Buffalo ALSO buffalo THE buffalo FROM Buffalo. "Buffalo buffalo (subject) [which the] Buffalo buffalo (Indirect object) buffalo [verb] buffalo [another verb] Buffalo buffalo [Direct Object]. [Noun], (which the) [Noun verb] [verb] [noun]. It may be revealing to read the sentence replacing all instances of the animal buffalo with "people" and the verb buffalo with "intimidate". The sentence then reads "Buffalo people [whom] Buffalo people intimidate [also happen to] intimidate Buffalo people." Preserving the meaning more closely, substituting the synonym "bison" for "buffalo" (animal), "bully" for "buffalo" (verb) and leaving "Buffalo" to mean the city, yields 'Buffalo bison Buffalo bison bully bully Buffalo bison', or: 'Buffalo bison whom other Buffalo bison bully themselves bully Buffalo bison'. To further understand the structure of the sentence, one can replace "Buffalo buffalo" with any number of noun phrases. Rather than referring to "Buffalo buffalo" intimidating other "Buffalo buffalo", one can use noun phrases like "Alley cats", "Junkyard dogs", and "Sewer rats". The sentence then reads "Alley cats Junkyard dogs intimidate intimidate Sewer rats." This has the same sentence structure as 'Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo'. Ambiguity If the capitalization is ignored, the sentence can be read another way: Buffaloc buffaloa buffalov Buffaloc buffaloa Buffaloc buffaloa buffalov. That is, bison from Buffalo intimidate (other) bison from Buffalo that are intimidated by bison from Buffalo. Parsing difficulty Other than the confusion caused by the homophones, the sentence is difficult to parse for several reasons: The use of "buffalo" as a verb is not particularly common and itself has several meanings. The construction in the plural makes the verb "buffalo", like the city, rather than "buffaloes". The choice of "buffalo" rather than "buffaloes" as the plural form of the noun makes it identical to the verb. There are no grammatical cues from syntactically significant words such as articles (again possible because of the plural construction) or "that". The absence of punctuation makes it difficult to read the flow of the sentence. Consequently, it is a garden path sentence, i.e., it cannot be parsed by reading one word at a time without backtracking. The statement includes a universal predicate about a class and also introduces a later class (the buffalo that are intimidated by intimidated buffalo) that may, but need not, be distinct from the first class. Parsing is ambiguous if capitalization is ignored. Using another adjectival sense of 'buffalo' ('cunning', derived from the sense 'to confuse'), the following alternative parsing is obtained: 'Buffalo bison [that] bison bully, [also happen to] bully cunning Buffalo bison' (that is, the head of the verb phrase occurs one 'buffalo' earlier). The relative clause is center embedded, a construction which is hard to parse. Extendability The sentence can be extended to Buffaloc buffaloa Buffaloc buffaloa buffalov buffalov Buffaloc buffaloa Buffaloc buffaloa buffalov. In other words, bison from Buffalo that (other) bison from Buffalo intimidate, in turn intimidate bison from Buffalo that (other) bison from Buffalo intimidate. In this case the subject and object of the central verb are "balanced" at five words apiece. Indeed, for any n ≥ 1, the sentence buffalon is grammatically correct (according to Chomskyan theories of grammar). The shortest is 'Buffalo!', meaning either 'Bully (someone)!', or 'Look, there are buffalo here!', or 'Behold, it is the city of Buffalo!' Other words Other English words can be used to make grammatical sentences of this form, containing many consecutive repetitions. Any word that is both an animate plural noun and a transitive verb will work: examples include police, fish, people, and smelt. For example "Fish fish fish fish fish", which can be read as "Fish(n) (whom) fish(n) fish(v), fish(v) fish(n)", or, "Fish which are fished by fish, fish other fish". Other languages Similar sentences exist in other languages. German: Die Männer, die vor dem Schokoladenladen Laden laden, laden Ladenmädchen zum Tanzen ein, meaning "The men, who loaded chests in front of the chocolate shop, asked shop girls for a dance". Or Wenn hinter Fliegen Fliegen fliegen, fliegen Fliegen Fliegen nach, meaning "When flies fly behind flies, flies fly after flies". Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian: Bar barbarbarbarbar bar bar barbarbarbarbar, meaning "naked barbarian-bar-barbarian [barbarian usually hanging out in bars for barbarians] carried naked barbarian-bar-barbarian." Or Når graver Graver graver graver, graver graver Graver graver for andre, meaning "When digger Graver [his name is Graver] digs graves, digger Graver digs graves for others." Spanish: ¿Cómo como? Como como como, meaning "How do I eat? I eat the way I do". Dutch: Als achter vliegen vliegen vliegen vliegen vliegen vliegen achterna, meaning "If flies flie behind flies, then those flies are flying behind flies". Or "Als graven graven graven graven graven graven graven graven", meaning "When counts dig graves for other counts, counts are digging graves for other counts".

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/books/review/Gottlieb-t.html In case you missed this article here it is. Rolef

Well, I make "paintings" on PowerPoint, so it'll probably be a lot easier for me to upload my stuff than for the rest of you. I made the one below for the final in Creative Writing class (it was part of a "picture poem." I've taken out the poem, I didn't like it, and there was a paper to go with it that I have no desire to upload). I'll probably post more stuff later.

I’ve been itching for a long time to rave about the virtues of illustrating with PowerPoint, so here it goes. It definitely takes some skill, but that’s about all. As long as you have a computer with Microsoft Office, you can make “art” on PowerPoint without having to work with paint/clay/stone (your opinions probably differ from mine, but I sometimes just want to shove paint into a parallel universe). It’s probably cheaper, too, and it’s easy to fix your mistakes. I think it’s possible to draw almost anything on PowerPoint, albeit it probably takes longer than if you’re good at drawing outlines by hand. What I think is the best thing about PowerPoint, however, is that it’s easy to add colors. In that respect, it’s definitely faster than coloring by hand, and you can change the colors time and time again if you think they need to be tweaked. Because color has such power to convey mood, I think that the ability to apply it quickly and accurately is, well, awesome. But what about textures? PowerPoint has like 24 textures built-in, and barely any of them are even potentially useful. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to make your own textures. Like say you want something to look like clay (I’m dreaming of having enough time to make an all-illustration book about the Golem of Prague). I googled “modeling clay,” and found <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-1610611985 1107304683 0 0 159 0;} @font-face {font-family:Calibri; panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:swiss; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-1610611985 1073750139 0 0 159 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:12.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> http://www.livengoodstudios.com/gallery_james.htm. From this <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-1610611985 1107304683 0 0 159 0;} @font-face {font-family:Calibri; panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:swiss; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-1610611985 1073750139 0 0 159 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:12.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> I cut out this (from somewhere or other) (I’ve zoomed in on it) <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-1610611985 1107304683 0 0 159 0;} @font-face {font-family:Calibri; panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:swiss; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-1610611985 1073750139 0 0 159 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:12.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> Darkened it, saved it as a picture, used the picture as the fill for an oval, an now I’ve got the head to use for the golem (yes the eyes look a little cheesy but I think it’ll seem okay when they aren’t an enormous point of interest). <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-1610611985 1107304683 0 0 159 0;} @font-face {font-family:Calibri; panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:swiss; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-1610611985 1073750139 0 0 159 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:12.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> So I envy those who can work in paint or clay or other mediums. But if you ever feel like experimenting with something, try to make a “painting” on PowerPoint! (In the off chance that anyone actually does that, I can give you some help on how to make the details)

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/community/shameless-promotion-for-the-group-artists-of-chesscom if you could stagger your posts so we get some exposure for a sustained time that would be great.