Category: Travel

Postcard from Vicenza, Italy: Art packs punchlines and metaphors

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A brightly colored postage stamp depicting the architectural outline of a building with bold geometric shapes and vibrant colors, labeled 'ITALIA 800' for an event in Vicenza.

Above: Blogger’s unnecessary and intrusive fusion of Javier Jaen’s “Goya” banana (see below) with Francisco Goya’s “The Naked Maja.”

I have an interest in making things as immediate and easy to understand as possible…. It’s not always about how things look technically, but about what they say.”

Javier Jaen interviewed by Molly Long for Design Week, October 20, 2020

And artist/graphic designer Javier Jaen (1983-) succeeds in that immediacy. Without glimpsing the “Goya” title, anyone familiar with “The Naked Maja” by Francisco de Goya (1748-1828) would instantly recognize the banana as referencing it.

A large, artistic representation of a banana peeled and lying against a vibrant pink background.

“Goya” by Javier Jaen

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Postcard from Padua, Italy: How could I forget Giotto’s Hell?

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A postage stamp depicting a scene from the Scrovegni Chapel, showing the Nativity with the Virgin Mary, Joseph, and angels, artistically rendered.

Above: The devil lording over Hell as depicted in “The Last Judgment” by Giotto (Ambrogiotto di Bondone, 1266-1337) in the Scrovegni Chapel

But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.”

Book of Revelation, Chapter 21, Verse 8

Slides in Professor Bill White’s Renaissance art course at Hollins University groomed me into a Giotto groupie prior to standing in awe before Giotto’s actual frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel. And Professor Henning surely pointed out Giotto’s horrific visions of Hell when I was on summer tour about a half-century ago, but I had sharper memories of gazing upward toward his Heaven.

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Postcard from Istanbul, Turkey: Women approach art from different directions

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A Turkish postage stamp featuring an illustration of women, the Turkish flag, and a historical building, representing themes of women's rights and society.

Above: “Femen/Kabatas,” Esra Carus, cardboard cutout, 2016

During a trip in Kabataş, a woman claimed that she and her baby were attacked by about ten half-naked men…. She held a demonstration on the balcony of a hotel in Paris…. It was impossible not to relate with the half-naked show of Femen girls….”

Esra Carus (1968-), Instagram (AI translation)

Two women posing together in front of a cardboard cutout artwork, one wearing a hijab and the other with long dark hair, both smiling amidst a gallery setting.
Above: Translator (left) and Esra Carus during “Grief. Law. Prohibition,” Depo Gallery

We wandered around the streets of the Tophane to Depo Istanbul without much of a clue about what art we’d encounter inside the former tobacco warehouse, renovated in 2008. We were met with “Yas. Yasa. Yasak,” or “Grief. Law. Prohibition,” and immediately were struck by strong, strident imagery.

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