Category: Articles

SCULPTING THE HUMAN BODY … WITH BICYCLE CHAINS!

South Korean artist Young-Deok Seo uses the unlikely material of bicycle chains as a way to craft realistic sculptures of the human body. For years, we’ve marveled over his figurative artwork, some of it life-sized and others larger than life,…

GOOD PHOTOS OF THE MOON

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When a full moon rises, many people will pull out their mobile phones to try and get a worthy photo, but unfortunately the moon is a really challenging subject to photograph. Two reasons: it is very far away and unless you have a telephoto…

AGRICULTURE – HOW LONG HAS IT BEEN AROUND?

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Recently the Western Cape Minister of Agriculture visited the Mossel Bay District to meet with the Western Cape Women’s Agricultural Organization, whom he calls “the backbone of the agricultural sector”. With agriculture still very much…

BRIDGES … A MEANS OF CONNECTING

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Bridges … a connector for people, traffic, neighbourhoods. They are often architecturally challenging, visually striking, or enshrouded by urban legend. (Sometimes they combine all three.) Take the Ponte Luís I in Porto, Portugal, for example.…

GRAFFITI OR MURAL ART?

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The word graffiti has its origins in both Greek and Italian. Graphein is Greek for “scratch”, “carve” or “write” while graffiato in Italian means “scratched”. Although there have been different forms of graffiti (before it…

MULTIPLE TECHNIQUES, SINGULAR BEAUTY

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Stripes, layers, stacked textures … these striking sculptures by different artists appear to use the same techniques but in fact they’re highly divergent. For one there’s Japanese-American artist Jun Kaneko’s six-foot-tall head sculpture,…

OUR SHOES WILL LEAD US

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What COVID-19 has done to all of us, with no discrimination whatsoever since every single one of us is feeling it, no exceptions, is create a loss of any sense of direction. The virus has put us in a holding pattern, particularly with the second…

PARADYS (KLOOF) THROUGH THE EYES OF DYLAN LEWIS

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Overwhelming. Awesome. World class. These are all words that describe South African sculptor Dylan Lewis’s sculpture garden on Mulberry Farm in Paradyskloof (a very apt name, that!), Stellenbosch. The artist started the garden himself way…

FOTO FOCUS: GREAT TIPS FOR CELL PHONE PICS

USE GRIDLINES TO BALANCE YOUR SHOT Turn on the camera’s gridlines to superimpose a series of lines on the screen of your smartphone’s camera that are based on the “rule of thirds” – a composition principle that says an image should…

A DIFFERENT FACE OF PICASSO

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I have been fortunate, during the course of our travels, to have seen many different exhibitions of Pablo Picasso, one of the most famous and influential artists of the 20th century. During a fairly recent trip to Berlin (before we’d even…

FOTO FOCUS – PICTURE EDITING

Most of the photos we take can be improved in some way, no matter how skillful the photographer. Computer programs and cellphone photo editing apps vary from very basic free editors to advanced programs like Photoshop or ON1 with both mobile…

HOMELESS DURING LOCKDOWN

Sleeping rough presents one of the biggest challenges of survival as a human being. It does not happen overnight and is usually a process triggered by unexpected events and bad choices. Slowly you start sinking into a hole without realising…