Studying a painting is the exact opposite of the better part of our life spent glued on our smartphone. Isn’t it weird then that sharing this blog through social media brings me so many personal connections and mini-conversations that I would not have otherwise? Truly honoured that people I know (and some that I don’t) decide to Follow me, I am thankful for the Likes and the time you take to fill the Comment box. Active looking versus passive flicking, it all comes back to squeezing more out of the little time we have and getting something meaningful in return. Like most, I flick through Facebook (sometimes) and Instagram (more often) to check on my friends and to feast on the visual world I love so much. Yet, for my sanity, I try to balance the fast and furious short attention span of social media with slow, detailed observations of artworks from a bygone era. Looking at the Impressionists, I envy the sophistication of what people used to wear, the refinement of outings to the opera and the silent dialogue that such scenes establish with our modern days. Until I spent too much time recently looking at Renoir’s La Loge. I suddenly realised the lorgnette and opera glasses […]
Freshly back to my Art History studies, my friend Lorenza was hoping for a few jewel-related stories into the discussions of our course on Impressionism. Jewelry and gemstones are high on my grid but mixed with Impressionism, isn’t it a stretch? Not in my world: Opal is the Impressionist gemstone par excellence! Look at the range of pastel colors this opal displays: the soft brownish orange turning to a blushed apricot and a hint of coral, the green alternating between moss and forest until it fluoresces neon-like while bright aqua blue is dispersed widely with rare specks of royal blue emerging from the depth. This spectacle is what us gemologists call play-of-color, and it is visually very similar to the open and broken brushstrokes associated with the Impressionists and Monet in particular. Let me take you beyond the surface of opal for a bit of gemology… Erosion can have beautiful consequences. Water runs down, picks up mostly silica and other minor elements and becomes a silica-rich solution which permeates cracks. Once there, such solution deposits as small silica spheres which can vary in size depending on temperature and pressure. As the process repeats itself, a whole structure of tiny […]
The days are a bit colder, it’s winter almost everywhere…Can you feel it too? I thought I’d share my vaccine against life becoming a grisaille, one of those melancholic artworks exclusively in shades of grey. So today, I give you…COLORS. Yes. Tried and tested, add colors to your outfit, pop some colorful jewelry and it will fight the gloom and lift your spirits…People are bound to notice and comment on it so you get to share the joy! Ta da! One area I really cannot live without colors is when I cook. My epiphany was when I wondered how I could make my son ingest something other than white food and stumbled on an Ottolenghi cook book. My husband and I used to live around the corner from his first deli in London. Such fond memories of delicious and colorful food well before Ottolenghi became the acclaimed chef he so deserves to be. His original deli was all white walls to let the colors and unusual combinations of his scrumptious Mediterranean food work their magic. First on your eyes, then your taste buds. Pomegranates shining like rubies in his grain salads, the classic green and red contrast revisited with green beans, brocoli, red chili and poppy seeds… In a nutshell, cooking […]