Wednesday, 23 June 2010 08:31

Discovery News reports, "The Vatican already announced the discovery of St.Paul’s icon last June, to mark the end of the Pauline year. But the portrait was part of a larger fresco that also included the full-face depictions of the other three apostles."

“Using a new laser technology, we have been able to burn off some rather thick deposits of white calcium without damaging the extraordinary colors of the frescoes,” said Barbara Mazzei, director of the two year restoration project."

Tuesday, 15 June 2010 09:11

I took the risk of calling myself a painter and it is a fact that I paint ten hours a day, two hundred and fifty days a year. The hundred or so remaining days are given over to wanderings, distress and the obstinate search for a "consciousness of being", suddenly lost and without which nothing is possible, especially not the passionate and often hazardous creation of those sorts of mirrors that we call works of art.

Let's say that any clear-sighted person is revealed in their thoughts and actions which, like a mirror, reflect back their own image, revealing their true selves. In this regard, a work of art provides a good example: as a mirror for its creator, it has the further faculty of revealing in a discreet but sure way, the whole creation.

Days without inspiration are dark ones. They remind us constantly, as the author of Ecclesiastes does, that all is dust and returns to dust. This very fact kills all forms of joy and hope. But on a closer look, this reality hides another axiomatic one: this cosmic dust, more or less coagulated and assembled in diverse forms, holds in its inmost being the Spirit of the Universe.

Monday, 14 June 2010 21:35

Our society today is obsessed with knowing more and more about less and less. And then there is Hugh McDonald, writer, teacher, philosopher, painter, musician, and translator. He is a Canadian  renaisance man.

In his usual modest undertones, he describes himself thus:

"Born in North Ontario a mile from endless rocks and wilderness, in sight of the big smokestack, and spent ten years in the North. Eight years in South Ontario within hearing distance on a calm day from the Falls. Two or three years in Halifax. Half a year in Montreal.

Two years working on an ocean freighter. One year in Waterloo going to university. Three years in California going to university. Three years in Poland going to University (Catholic University of Lublin)..Was 300 km downwind from Chernobyl in 1986. More than twenty years in Niagara Falls. Resumed playing music in 2007 when the dog died. Works as a translator of books."