hello i am a new user to this. 

i am a person who loves to draw. 

i draw many things. 

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i hope also that you also all like my art work.

It all started in October of 1995, when Asia witnessed one of its longest total solar eclipses. John McDermott, then working as a photographer for a business magazine in Bangkok, had decided to travel to Cambodia for the cosmological event, and to watch it from the 12th-century Hindu temples of Angkor Wat. “A solar eclipse is always incredible. It does something to the light that makes everything seem flatter and more special,” McDermott explains. “But seeing an eclipse in Angkor Wat was just mind-boggling, and I decided then and there that I wanted to make photographs with that otherworldly, astronomical quality that the eclipse created.”

Which is how the Little Rock, Arkansas, native, who has since 2003 been based in Siem Reap—the nearest city to the temples—started to “chase the light,” seeking to replicate the same dreamy effect that the solar eclipse produced. Armed with his many cameras and black-and-white infrared film cartridges from Kodak, a specialty film that was discontinued in 2007, he started pacing the temples of Angkor year after year, shooting thousands of photographs.

The dramatic results of McDermott’s efforts can be seen in his 2009 book Elegy: Reflections on Angkor, which offers a comprehensive photographic portrait of the achievement of the ancient Khmer builders and architects. The grainy black-and-white stills document an extraordinary archeological feat that still puzzles experts. The photographs have a distinctly pictographic quality to them, which brings to mind the sketches of the temple complex made by the first French explorers to stumble upon it in the mid-19th century, when it was barely visible among Cambodia’s luxuriant vegetation.

Since that first visit in 1995, McDermott has been totally captivated by the country, and he now runs three galleries there that show his own works as well as those of a few up-and-coming Cambodian artists. “It is an unusual situation,” he admits. “Since the temples are the main draw for tourists visiting Cambodia, they are interested in photographs of Angkor Wat. When I show these pictures in other countries, however, people are shocked. I even get letters from some who decide to travel to Asia to see the temples for themselves.”

After a series of successful shows at the Sundaram Tagore galleries in Beverly Hills, New York, and Hong Kong, McDermott has expanded his quest to chase the light. His current project is taking him to a number of temple valleys in other Asian countries—hopefully before global tourism changes them forever. “I am not anti-tourism,” he explains. “Tourism brings employment and a chance at education to many countries—but inevitably it also brings other, less desirable changes. For the temples, this has meant a loss of some of their magic and spirituality.”

In anticipation of such developments, McDermott is now rushing to photograph places that exist currently as “alien landscapes in our midst,” but are on the cusp of transformation by being put on the tourist track. “I want my work to serve a historical purpose as well, to document what is on the verge of being modified completely,” he says. To that end, he has begun shooting in locations that include the Temple Valley in Bagan, Myanmar, and Sukhothai in Thailand—both of which may not survive as they are for much longer.

Sundaram Tagore, the owner of the galleries, says that McDermott “epitomizes the notion of East-West dialogue. He’s a Western-born artist living in Cambodia, and his deep love for the vanishing parts of Asia is captured powerfully in his work.”

These days, McDermott’s passion for the texture of ancient stones in tropical sunlight is guiding his lens even further afield, all the way to the monumental complex of Petra, in Jordan. “I still have a fridge full of rolls of discontinued infrared film, because it gives me the basis for that ethereal appearance I am looking for,” the photographer says, “and I love the way it maintains the stones’ darker texture against the light.”

In preparation for the day that the infrared supply in his fridge runs out, however, McDermott also makes use of a similar effect that can be produced digitally, even though its edge is “too clean,” in his words, compared to film. “This digital process has to be used with caution,” he explains, “since it has a tendency to turn greens and whites into transparent, luminescent bright spots among the sober black, white, and gray tints—and emphasizing that light excessively can seem very gimmicky. So I try to play down these infrared characteristics, in order to retain the dreaminess”—the same dreaminess of a total solar eclipse in 1995 that fascinated him so, and has kept him on the road ever since.

Ilaria Maria Sala is an Asia-based writer. Taken from ArtNewsLLC.

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Fruits of the Vineyard by David Galloway

An ancient French vineyard is reborn as a site for permanent art installations and modern architecture

For decades, the ancient vineyard of Château La Coste, located on a rolling 600-acre plain near Aix-en-Provence, was a sleeping beauty waiting to be brought to life. Once the center of a major wine-producing region cultivated as early as the Roman times, and a rest stop for pilgrims on the way to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, the property had seen far better days when Irish real-estate developer and art collector Paddy McKillen purchased it in 2002. Convinced that wine-making is “a noble task,” McKillen resolved to restructure the vineyards and to introduce the latest biodynamic standards for their cultivation. At the same time, he realized that La Coste would be a wonderful setting for art.

With that in mind, he invited leading architects and artists to come to La Coste and propose projects that could be realized on its historic terrain. Today, five Pritzker Prize winners and a score of sculptors have left their marks there. With Aix (2008), for example, Richard Serra inserted vast sheets of steel into a hillside at varying angles, like skewed steps. Sean Scully’s signature geometries are realized in the myriad cuts and colors of stone that make up his Wall of Light Cubed from 2007. And Franz West accented the vineyard’s promenade with his bright yellow Faux-Pas (2006), a kind of phallic totem that straddles the line between sculpture and furniture.

The first new structure on the property was the two-part, gravity-flow chai (winery), designed by Jean Nouvel and completed in 2008. Although a nearby 17th-century Palladian-style château with a miniature, baroque garden had long set the architectural tone for the landscape, Nouvel’s gleaming, elegant structure of corrugated aluminum seemed to transport the domain into a new millennium. The winery was soon joined by Frank Gehry’s Music Pavilion, while Tadao Ando’s minimalist “information center” slowly took shape.

In one of the center’s three reflecting pools, a monumental spider by Louise Bourgeois perches above the surface; the second pool holds an Alexander Calder stabile, and the third showcases Hiroshi Sugimoto’s conical Infinity (2010), which rises from the water and tapers to a point no more than one millimeter in diameter. Shimmering in the light beneath the intense blue skies of Provence, Ando’s building and Sugimoto’s sculpture seem almost to dematerialize, while the pools surrounding Ando’s structure reflect the verdant surrounding hillsides. The entire complex encourages a zen-like quiet and introspection.

Ando’s chapel, perched on La Coste’s highest ridge, is a renovated structure that was once a stop for those 16th-century pilgrimages. Completely overgrown when McKillen acquired the property, it was believed by locals to be a former shepherd’s hut, or a gardening shed. Ando stripped the structure of vegetation, took it apart stone by stone, and meticulously reconstructed it, finally encasing it in a glass cube. Its new roof sits slightly higher than the top of the walls, so that by day a narrow band of sunlight filters in.

In the chapel, as with British artist Andy Goldsworthy’s nearby Oak Room (2009), silence feels almost tangible. For Goldsworthy’s permanent installation, he literally wove together the trunks of oak trees cleared from a nearby forest to create a kind of cave within a hillside—a monumental, cathedral-like space that is one of the many surprises awaiting visitors to La Coste. A tour of the property presently takes about 90 minutes, but with new works being added constantly, that duration is certain to expand.

One of the latest projects there involves the erection of a pair of prefabricated houses—among the first of their kind—that Jean Prouvé designed for World War II refugees in 1945. Of the 450 structures originally built, these are perhaps the sole survivors. Restored under the supervision of the architect’s son Nicolas, they now house art libraries fitted with original Prouvé furniture. Linking them is a rare, 17th-century Viet-namese teahouse pavilion, where visitors can sip tea and browse through the objects housed in the adjacent libraries. Meanwhile, work has begun on a bell tower by Henri Matisse’s grandson Paul, a light tunnel by James Turrell, a pair of bridges by Norman Foster, and a Renzo Piano–designed building for aging grand cru wines. Most of this structure is to be underground, but an upper level will house a photography center.

The bulk of a five-star hotel, conceived for the site by Marseille’s Tangram Architects and scheduled for completion late next year, is also to be located underground, embedded in the Provençal landscape. Other exhibition spaces, research facilities, and a cooking school are on the drawing board, as is a concert hall designed by the world’s oldest living architect, the 105-year-old Oscar Niemeyer. A series of organic gardens is being developed by French landscape designer Louis Benech.

The First Step of publishing the Intro page of the new Application due around end of January 2013 !

A (Creative Book) as a collection of past and present Art work and Ideas of Roland E W Mucke alias Aktell aka Aktell2007, for Web-Flash Artistry and UpperCut Artists Promotion, Hawkes Bay - New Zealand

A professional platform and collection of past and present Art work and Ideas within a main Creative Book portfolio sub-domain site showcasing the very best in smaller features connected and presented within booklets, and accompanied within this Application is the new version (v4) of the UpperCut Artists enhanced FIND, CREATE, ESTABLISH Artists Online Search Presence software component which connects, showcase and caters in general for the very best of Artists, Designer, Models, Photographers, Stylists (MUAs etc.) and businesses from all around the world! and because if you are serious about to get found as an Artists worldwide or in your own country of origin then you should look after your (Online Presence) and FIND, CREATE and / or ESTABLISH it!

Intro page to view at this Link:  http://www.acreativebook.webflashartistry.com/

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