At the beginning of the 18th century, five thousand opium chests a year were entering China; by 1838, that number had reached forty thousand. The fact that the import and use of opium was illegal in China meant it had to be bought with silver. The huge profits made from its sale gave rise to [...]

Besides the Canadian Mounties and the maple leaf, what could be more iconic of Canada than Niagara Falls? So it is fitting that the first photograph of Canada is of the Niagara Falls. And it is!

This image of Niagara Falls was discovered twelve years ago in a box at Newcastle University in England. The box, [...]

Michele Marieschi (1710-1743) was an Italian landscape painter who painted veduta (vistas) mostly in Venice. One of his patrons was noted collector,Field Marshal Count Johann Matthias von der Schulenburg (1661-1747), who bought at least two canvases from the painter for 50 and 55 gold sequins respectively. This is one it, called “The Courtyard of the [...]

In the past few days, I have been playing around with colour for a project and experimenting with its inherent emotive qualities. It still never ceases to amaze me how much expression the entire spectrum of colours can produce. In doing this project, I was reminded of a painter whose work I encountered a few [...]

Massproductions develops high quality, tactile furniture in a modernist spirit. The two experienced designers, Englishman Chris Martin and Swede Magnus Eleback, formed Massproductions, after ten years working side by side as consultant for the furniture industry. With their accumulated knowledge from these years, they took the next step by producing and marketing their own collections [...]

AVANT CAR GUARD are a Johannesburg-based three member visual art collective, exhibiting and authoring as a singular artist. They are comprised of Zander Blom, Jan-Henri Booyens and Michael MacGarry, all individual artists in their own right. They have produced three publications on their work, titled Volume I, Volume II and Volume III respectively, and have [...]

Wonderful paintings by Esther Pearl Watson:

I am not very well-traveled. Even though one of my to-do items is to travel to as many places around the world as possible, I am simply not able to do so at this point in my life. As such, I turn to photography. With the rise of Google Earth, Flickr and Photosynth has enabled [...]

Although I have never tried my hands in sculpture before and do not know the tools and processes involved to make a piece come alive, ancient sculptures never cease to amaze me. The level of detail and expression, coupled with a unforgiving medium, achieved with only simple tools, is simply mind-boggling. The ‘Undo’ function I [...]

Even though I like to think that I have an eye for abstract minimalism, I feel completely dwarfed in comparison to artists who painstakingly formulate their work to take on a deceivingly simple and straightforward aesthetic. Andy Collins is one such artist.
Andy Collins’s paintings are lusciously synthetic. Cold and glossy, his large pastel canvases are [...]