Firework Architecture at Shanghai Expo 2010

Chinese Firework

Hungarian Pavilion - Architect Tamás Lévai

British Pavilion - Architect Thomas Heatherwick

Faces of Happiness

5 - 30
Manó

in the meantime 25 years of hope and disappointment success and failure dreams and reality truth and lie good and bad teachers superb and foul trainers the warmth of the family and the indifference of the world experience and privation feast and hunger adventure and hard work books books books and friendships love

2
Bendi

he is already suspecting something

Rescue

In this brave new world when warships are used to rescue ash-victim British tourists, a new politician emerged into light during the first public election debate in Britain with nice words, tenderness and open eyes. Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg is a new hope for a change in this new world.

All aboard!

Love Salad

A sexy purple-red colour salad of Yotam Ottolenghi to celebrate love with its real flavours: bitter and sweet. WOW!

Ingredients:

lots of red things:

2 blood oranges

110 ml blood orange juice

20 ml lemon juice

60 g maple syrup

1 pinch salt

1/2 tsp orange blossom water

1/2 small radicchio, leaves separated

1 small red endive, leaves separated

1 handful small red leaves

1 tsp olive oil

coarse sea salt and black pepper

150 g good quality ricotta cheese

20 g pinenuts, toasted

100 g pomegranate seeds (from 1 small fruit)

Start by making an orange syrup. Cut the top and bottom of each orange, then cut down the sides, following the fruit's natural lines, to remove the skin and white pith. Hold the fruit over a small bowl and cut in between the membranes, thereby removing the individual segments. Put these into the bowl. Squeeze any remaining juices from the fruit into a small saucepan, then add enough juice to bring it up to 110ml. Add the lemon juice, syrup and a pinch of salt, and bring to a light simmer. Leave to reduce for 20-25 minutes, until you're left with about three tablespoons of thick syrup. Strain through a fine sieve, allow it to cool down, then stir in the orange blossom water.

To assemble the dish, roughly tear the radicchio leaves into large pieces and put in a bowl. Add the endive leaves, oil, salt and pepper, then toss gently. Divide the dressed leaves between two plates, building up the salad by dotting it with orange segments and spoonfuls of ricotta. Drizzle the syrup on top and finish with a scattering of pinenuts and pomegranate seeds together with the small red leaves.

Nintendo Pieta

Kordian Lewandowski Pieta

He used the Nintendo characters Mario and Princess Peach

2008

Styrofoam

Michelangelo Buonarotti La Pietá

He used the Bible characters Jesus and Maria

1499

Marble

Book Love

Abelardo Morell 
Book Damaged by Water
2001

There are people, who imagine a heaven that is a mad big library. I am one of them. When I see this photo of a long suffering wet book, I feel like crying, I feel love.

Skin and Bone

Office Building in Bucharest

North Elevation

I am creating my website, and found some nice drawings worth putting here in the blog. This is a statement elevation of an Office building in Bucharest, Romania I made in 2008 that is about the separation of the skin and the bone of the structure. The elevation layer is like an envelope, independent of the structure and the function of the building, with its own meaning, its own artistic quality.

Nightmare

Nightmare

textile appliqué stuffed, hand and machine stitched

100/100 cm

2009

I had a dream and put it into my textile art - the dream was a nightmare, but when I look at the piece it makes me feel secure. The nightmare is out of my life and is on his own.

Nightmare

coloured pencil drawing

20/20 cm

Heaven

Richard Wright

The idea of heaven - as a perfect place where God lives and where you end up if you live right - is an essential part of our life, our dreams, our hopes. There is no perfect proof of heaven, but the idea lives: there is an archetypal image of heaven in our mind and we recognise this image again and again in art: paintings, music and poetry; and in the magical moments of life: love, birth and death.

Sting: Fields of Gold

Easter Dream

Twombly Heaven

Easter is about a dream to get into Heaven. Jesus did it.

Landmark Monster

Anish Kapoor: Orbit Tower

Today's British sculptors and sponsors have a scale-megalomania. The bigger the better, they intend to dominate entire landscapes, towns and now Anish Kapoor London.

This time he even decided he is an architect! His second-hand Eiffel Tower mixed with the DNS spiral twist to be built as the artistic centrepiece of the 2012 Olympic Park is a cheap misunderstanding of architecture, structure and sculpture even with the help of the brilliant structural engineer from Arup Cecil Balmond.

With the Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal's generous offer of the total steel material needed and the mayor Boris Johnson's enthusiasm to leave a sign of his reign in London the project unveiled yesterday seems to be an April Fools joke, a shameful monster of anti-art dilettantism.

Katya and the Power of Devil

Katya Kabanova ENO 2010

Poor Katya, she is full of love and desire, but unfortunately the men around her are week and her mother in law is the evil in disguise.

Married Katya becomes infatuated with another man, gives in to temptation and ends her life because of her sense of sin. However it is her evil mother in law in the background who directs the events, manipulates her and his husband and leads the human drama to the final tragedy.

The huge black shadows and the joyless sets of the performance suggest that life is either black or white, right or wrong, stifled or sinful. When confronted by the complexities of human relationships people become mad and psychotic. Life is messy.

Mother in Law and the Devil

Kaleidoscope and the Model of the Universe

E8, Garetti Lisi's New View of the Universe

Garetti Lisi's model of the universe places all known particles and the four fundamental forces of nature (electromagnetic, the strong force, the weak force and gravity) onto an exceptionally complex eight-dimensional 248-point mathematical model known as E8 that was formulated in the late 19th century.

Since E8 is perhaps the most beautiful structure in mathematics, it is very satisfying that nature appears to have chosen this geometry. Elegant simplicity and complexity combined with the inherit reflective qualities of our world; natural forms repeat themselves over and over, the fundamental structure of the universe is incredibly beautiful.

Patterns as seen through a kaleidoscope tube

The beauty of the colourful mirrored systems is the base of the geometric imagery of the kaleidoscope - a finite box containing an infinite vision that creates the sensation of being part of infinity. You feel like the whole universe is a hall of mirrors: reflections reflecting reflections.

Yayoi Kusama: Dots Obsession 2004

In today's art there is a progressive effort to move towards defocusing, in which no single element of the composition is given more importance than any others: there is a desire to break down the hierarchy of the elements.

Yayoi Kusama, a Japanese contemporary artist has an obsession for infinity. She perceives the world as an array of infinitely repeating patterns, which she has termed infinity nets. Her work is the expression of these visions. You are drawn into Kusama’s world like the centerpiece of an echoing, infinite landscape and experience the dissolving into the world around you.

Kusama currently lives in a mental institution in Tokyo by choice while creating her infinity works. For a normal brain to imagine infinity seems to be impossible.

Structure is God

Concert of Péter Mátrai in Budapest

When God enters into the creative process, you sense the divine structure of the Universe.

This is how you feel if you listen to the concert or Peter Matrai on electric instruments. There is a clear structure of the whole performance: preface, treatment and epilogue. And there is the clear structure of every piece with composition, melody and rhythm which build up the whole circle until the catharsis at the end.

The preface: the 'Intervals' with its dynamism invites you to leave your everyday self and enter into the world of art, into the world of the artist.

Small etudes follow: atmosphere, memories, sequences of feelings and thoughts, all this with different and unusual electronic instruments, computer samples, new sounds and noises. The concentration is intense, every element has meaning and is part of the whole. This is the journey of a soul: in his past and present, in his feelings, in his love for music. The small pieces have concrete themes, and you enjoy the correspondence of the music with them. You smile, you enjoy, you feel the music, you feel what you are inspired to feel.

And then comes the epilogue, the 'In memoriam' piece to the memory of two architect-friends. This is a small theatre-performance with candles, staggering, brutal hits and noises, flame, fire and ashes at the end.

Catharsis is what you feel: this is life, this is all.

The Music of Life

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot at Barbican Centre, London

40 zebra finches are exploring an aviary for three months at Barbican Centre on amplified guitars and cymbals installed on sandy islands planted with grass. The spontaneous everyday activity of the beautiful tiny feathered creatures on the sensitive strings makes a complex soundscape from the speakers around the gallery.

There is no composition, structure and melody in this music. This is the music of the self-abandoned, free life, the repetition and interference of the patterns of continuous everyday activity.

Arranging the twigs, toddling on the strings, the different types of arrival: the gliding stir and tumbling throb; the light and dynamic variations of departure, the positioning and preening - these are the continuously flickering patterns without any compositional intent which have a comforting, captivating effect on the visitor.

There is a joyful aesthetic contrast between the tiny soft animals with their beautiful coloured feathers and the masculine, professional instruments: the sight and the sound together gives you a lightweight happiness.

A meditative experience.

Magical Numbers

To

good life

we need

only

3

virtues

FAITH HOPE LOVE

but

against the power of

evil

there are

7

deadly sins

to avoid

and

10

commandments

to keep

On the Paintings of Laszlo Szotyori

Laszlo Szotyori: Station Hall

Dazzling lightfall

pink vision upstairs

uncertain blue

shy yellow beneath

hesitant existence

of statuesque man-ghosts

in the shadow of light

Laszlo Szotyori: The Evening

Voiceless pointless

is the plane floating

in the landscape

its black shadow a gap

in the last ray of the sun

remotely a light clearing

further trees and the sea

oh the tired blue of the sky

the silent breath of the water

the black body of the plane

the mass of closed passengers

Laszlo Szotyori: The Meeting of Giants

In the flame of the church

in the light of faith hope love

humility and offering

is the plane bathing

suddenly

it comes to a halt

would stop for a prayer

Falling Angel

Angels are celesital beings connected to experiences without rational explanations.These mysterious winged messsengers are present everywhere: you rarely see them, you can only sense them. Their presence is felt when we use our imagination.

Angels do not neccesarily resemble the image we have of them. The pictures we find on paintings represent the wishful thinking of artists of diverse periods.

Flare II, a sculpture of dense wire mess of a falling figure within a wire cloud by Anthony Gromley has been installed in St Paul's Cathedral's Geometric Staircase in London. It leaves viewers to decide whether it is human or angel.

„Flare II is my attempt to use applied geometry to construct an energy field describing a human space in space.” – said Gormley.

Insomnia

Print of Anne Lindberg

"Insomnia is not bad in itself. You can lie awake at night and think; the quality of insomnia depends entirely on what you decide to think of. Can you decide to think? - Yes, you can. At night I lay awake at the darkness, listening to the silence, prefiguring the future, picking out of the past the scraps I had overlooked, so that the weight of destiny no longer bore on the current problems of my life, whatever they were at the time (for who lives without problems of everyday? Why waste the nights on them?)." Muriel Spark

Faithless: Insomnia

Acupressure points:

Embroidery language

This Hungarian folklore pattern speaks of love with an archaic sign language using the beauty of the tulip and the peacock as symbols of male and female sex, fertility, sun and heaven. The reversed heart form is the symbol of male sex, the open tulips are for female fertility, and the plum-like shape between is for female genitals. The tulip opens up to the sky and offers herself to heaven. All this activity is catalysed on the warmth of the sun symbolised by the peacock-eye pattern.