Art: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 8

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Q1924

StillnessBiography

Neşet Ertaş inherited the Abdal and bozlak tradition from his father Muharrem Ertaş, then renewed it through an extensive body of his own songs and performances.

Ertaş grew up inside a working musical lineage, accompanying his father and learning not only melodies but the social world that gave them weight. His singing let the bozlak's high, unguarded cry hold separation, poverty, love, pride and the road; his bağlama answered without ornament for ornament's sake. He became nationally known without sanding away the Abdal tradition that formed him. The achievement was not escape from inheritance, but a voice distinct enough to keep inheritance alive.

Neşet ErtaşRead card

Q1925

WonderBiography

Peruvian singer Yma Sumac commanded an exceptionally broad range, moving between cavernous lows, brilliant high notes and vocal colours that resisted a single category.

Born Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo in Peru, Sumac entered international popular culture through recordings that placed orchestral spectacle around her astonishing instrument. Publicity often wrapped her in fantasies of an exotic Inca princess, a story easier to market than a modern artist directing her own sound. The mythology should not be mistaken for the achievement. Her voice could move from subterranean resonance to airborne precision and make the distance feel architectural.

Yma SumacRead card

Q1926

StillnessBiography

Queen Liliʻuokalani composed more than ceremonial music: songs such as Kuʻu Pua i Paoakalani turned intimate melody into memory during political dispossession and confinement.

Liliʻuokalani was Hawaiʻi's last reigning monarch and a prolific composer whose songs joined poetic language to a keen sense of place. After the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, she was confined in ʻIolani Palace; music written around that period carried loyalty, loss and attention to those outside the room. Aloha ʻOe became globally familiar, but familiarity can blur the political life behind the melody. Her songbook is also an archive of a sovereign mind refusing to be reduced to defeat.

LiliʻuokalaniRead card

Q1946

WonderArt

Indonesian batik makers apply hot wax in lines and dots to resist dye, then repeat waxing, colouring and removal to build patterned cloth through controlled acts of concealment.

Wax does not colour the cloth; it preserves selected ground while dye changes everything exposed. Removing the wax, adding new barriers and dyeing again lets a maker layer decisions that may be almost invisible until the final boil. In Indonesia, motifs and uses accompany life from infant slings to weddings, work, performance and burial, while designs also register centuries of exchange. Batik's surface is therefore both image and process map: every colour records where the cloth was open, and where it was deliberately kept safe.

BatikRead card

Q1947

WonderArt

Asante and Ewe weavers create distinct kente traditions by weaving narrow silk or cotton strips, cutting and arranging them, then sewing the lengths into expansive cloths.

The scale of a finished kente wrapper can hide its modular construction. Long, narrow bands emerge from the loom carrying complex warp and weft designs; joining them demands decisions about rhythm, interruption and alignment across the whole cloth. Asante and Ewe makers have related but different histories, techniques and visual vocabularies, so kente should not be flattened into one code of colour meanings. Its later association with Kwame Nkrumah and Pan-African identity added global political resonance to already specific local arts.

Kente clothRead card

Q1948

WonderArt

Cochineal dye is made by extracting carminic acid from dried female scale insects raised on prickly pear cactus, then using mordants and acidity to create reds from pink to crimson.

Indigenous dyers in the Americas cultivated cochineal and mastered the salts, acids and alkaline additions that make one source yield remarkably different colours. After the Spanish conquest, the concentrated dye became a guarded imperial commodity shipped into European textiles and paintings and onward through global trade. Its brilliance crossed borders; the wealth and power around it did not cross evenly. To find cochineal in an artwork is to find chemistry, skilled cultivation and colonial extraction compressed into colour.

CochinealRead card

Q1949

DriveArt

Faith Ringgold joined painted cloth, quilting and written narrative in story quilts that placed Black family life, history and imagined freedom inside the language of major art.

Ringgold moved beyond the prestige rules of oil painting by working with fabric, sewing, borders and text—forms long diminished as women's work or craft. In Tar Beach, a child flies above a Harlem rooftop and the George Washington Bridge, claiming the city through imagination when social reality withholds control. The written voice around the image does not explain the art; it enlarges who gets to narrate it. Ringgold made the soft edge of a quilt carry arguments sturdy enough for a museum wall.

Faith RinggoldRead card

Q1950

WonderArt

Artisanal Talavera in Puebla and Tlaxcala depends on a linked process of clay preparation, shaping, glazing, pigment work and kiln control transmitted through specialist workshops.

Talavera is often recognised by its luminous surface, but the visible decoration is only one stage in a demanding chain. Clay bodies, wheel or mould, enamel, mineral pigments and firing must behave together; some makers oversee the whole sequence while others inherit one specialism. The Mexican tradition grew through Indigenous knowledge, Spanish ceramic forms and wider trade, a history of contact shaped by unequal power as well as invention. Each workshop keeps a distinct hand inside a shared process.

Artisanal Talavera of Puebla and TlaxcalaRead card

Q1951

WonderArt

Chinese paper-cut artists use scissors, knives or chisels to turn a single sheet into connected motifs for windows, interiors, festivals, weddings and other social occasions.

Every opening must leave enough paper to hold the rest together, so composition is also an exercise in structure. Regional practices range from fine, delicate scenes to bold forms; makers adapt motifs to birthdays, marriage, seasonal festivals, prayer and the architecture of a particular room. The art has often been passed among women from childhood, while contemporary artists also use machines and new media. Its vitality lies in that elasticity: one inexpensive sheet can still carry a highly local world.

Chinese paper cuttingRead card

Q1952

StillnessArt

Arabic calligraphers exploit the script's connected right-to-left forms—stretching, compressing and arranging letters—while controlling line through a cut reed qalam.

The Arabic alphabet's twenty-eight letters change form as they join, giving the calligrapher a system in which proportion and movement can operate inside language. Traditional practice begins with material intelligence: the angle of a cut reed, soot-based ink, prepared paper and a hand trained to repeat a stroke until it carries ease. The same principles have travelled into stone, metal, textiles, type and calligraffiti. Legibility and beauty do not sit on opposite sides; the art keeps negotiating the exact distance between them.

Arabic calligraphyRead card

Q1953

StillnessArt

Armenian khachkars are upright stone steles centred on a carved cross and surrounded by interlaced plant, geometric and figurative motifs, each composition individually worked.

A khachkar may mark worship, remembrance, protection or a bond between secular and sacred life. Craftspeople cut local stone with chisels and fine points, often setting the cross above a sun or wheel of eternity and surrounding it with patterns dense enough to seem woven. Families and master-apprentice lineages transmit methods while leaving room for regional character and individual invention. Repetition supplies the grammar; dignity comes from refusing to make any memorial merely interchangeable.

KhachkarRead card

Q1954

WonderArt

Pacific barkcloth makers strip and beat selected inner bark until the fibres spread into supple sheets, then join, dye, rub, stencil or paint the material for local uses.

Barkcloth is not one pan-Pacific style. Paper mulberry and other plants become materials with different names, textures, designs and social lives across Tonga, Samoa, Tahiti, Hawaiʻi, Fiji and many other islands. Beating expands and locks the fibres without weaving; makers may build great sheets from smaller pieces and pattern them with plant dyes, rubbing boards or freehand marks. In some communities cloth accompanies birth, marriage, rank, mourning and exchange, making a tree's inner skin part of the public fabric of life.

BarkclothRead card

Q1955

StillnessArt

In the 1920s, Yanagi Sōetsu, Kawai Kanjirō and Hamada Shōji coined mingei for everyday folk craft, arguing that useful objects made outside elite art could possess profound beauty.

Mingei redirected attention from the signed masterpiece towards pottery, baskets, textiles, woodwork and tools shaped by repetition and use. Yanagi founded the Japan Folk Crafts Museum in 1936 and collected not only Japanese work but Korean, Ainu and Taiwanese objects, placing the movement inside Japan's complicated imperial century as well as its design history. Its central question remains fertile and contested: who gets to name the beauty of another person's ordinary object? Looking carefully is valuable; so is examining the power carried by the gaze.

MingeiRead card

Q1956

WonderArt

Etel Adnan moved between poetry, essays, painting, tapestry and accordion-fold books, letting colour and language answer different parts of a life lived across Beirut, Paris and California.

Mount Tamalpais became one of Adnan's enduring subjects, not because she exhausted its appearance but because looking kept changing both mountain and observer. Her small paintings build landscapes from concentrated blocks of colour; her writing lets politics, war, nature and perception move at another tempo. She often worked across languages and geographies without forcing them into a tidy identity. In her hands, translation was not a lesser copy—it was the method by which one reality discovered another medium.

Etel AdnanRead card

Q1957

WonderArt

For many suzanis, a draftswoman drew one design across loosely joined cotton strips, which were separated for relatives to embroider and finally sewn back together.

Suzani derives from a Persian word for needle and names large embroidered textiles associated especially with settled communities in present-day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. They formed part of a bride's dowry and furnished interiors, their flowers, vines and medallions carrying the time of women working together. Because separate strips could be embroidered simultaneously, motifs sometimes meet imperfectly and neighbouring colours shift at the seam. Those irregularities are not failed finish; they are evidence that one composition was entrusted to several lives.

SuzaniRead card

Q1958

DriveArt

Semiha Berksoy built a seventy-year practice across opera, theatre, cinema, literature and painting, turning self-portraits, stage roles and personal memory into one dramatic visual world.

Berksoy trained in music and visual art, became Türkiye's first woman opera artist and performed in Europe, yet she never treated painting as a secondary career. Her figures arrive frontally and theatrically on canvas, cardboard and bedsheets, surrounded by written names, dates, curtains and memories that make biography part of the set. She painted herself, loved ones and roles she had inhabited until private room and public stage overlapped. The result is not a portfolio of disciplines; it is a life refusing to be divided into departments.

Semiha BerksoyRead card

Q1959

DriveArt

Füreya Koral helped establish modern studio ceramics in Türkiye while creating vessels, sculptures and large architectural panels that made clay part of everyday public space.

Koral began sustained work in ceramics in the late 1940s, learning in Switzerland and Paris before establishing a studio in Istanbul that became an important meeting and teaching space. She drew on Anatolian ceramic histories without treating tradition as a pattern book, testing how glaze, modular form and abstraction could inhabit modern life. Her panels entered markets, hotels and public buildings, places where art meets people not arriving as an audience. Clay ceased to be only an object in a room; it helped make the room.

Füreya KoralRead card

Q1960

StillnessArt

Ara Güler's photojournalism followed workers, fishers, children, ferries, alleys and changing neighbourhoods, preserving twentieth-century Istanbul as lived history rather than scenery.

Güler called himself a photojournalist and visual historian, a useful distinction from the myth of the photographer waiting only for beauty. His Istanbul is full of labour and weather: nets drying by the water, faces lit through smoke, streets altered by industry and migration, grand architecture sharing the frame with precarious lives. He also photographed artists and archaeological sites across the world, building an archive of extraordinary scale. Yet his deepest method remained intimate—history is convincing when someone can still be seen inside it.

Ara GülerRead card

Q1963

WonderArt

The Catalan Atlas of 1375 joined nautical charts to cosmology, rulers, caravans and travel lore across six richly illuminated parchment leaves.

Usually attributed to the Majorcan Jewish cartographer Abraham Cresques and his workshop, the atlas moves from calendar and cosmology into a mapped world. Accurate Mediterranean coastlines share parchment with Mansa Musa, Silk Road caravans and creatures drawn from travellers' reports. It borrows the coastal precision of portolan charts while functioning as an illuminated courtly portrait of what lay beyond sight.

Catalan AtlasRead card

Q1967

WonderDesign

Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion map unfolds Earth from an icosahedron, keeping continents unbroken in its principal layout while concentrating interruptions in the oceans.

Fuller developed the projection from the 1930s and later refined it with Shoji Sadao. Its triangular faces can unfold in several arrangements rather than centring one nation or dividing the globe into customary hemispheres. In the best-known layout, the cuts fall mainly through oceans and the continents remain visually continuous around the Arctic. The geometry also makes an argument: political borders need not dictate how a planet is framed.

Dymaxion mapRead card

Q1969

WonderArt

Albert Munsell organised colour by hue, value and chroma, separating what family a colour belongs to from how light and how intense it appears.

Munsell's early twentieth-century system imagined colours in an irregular three-dimensional solid. Hue circles the centre, value rises from dark to light, and chroma extends outward with saturation. Because equally numbered steps aimed to look perceptually even, artists, soil scientists, conservators and manufacturers gained more than names: they gained coordinates for comparing what eyes see.

Munsell color systemRead card

Q1981

WonderArt

Maria Sibylla Merian depicted insect metamorphosis together with the plants each species lived on, joining close observation, ecology and art.

Natural-history plates often arranged dead specimens as isolated types. Merian raised caterpillars, watched them pupate and painted egg, larva, pupa and adult around the host plant that fed them. In Suriname she also relied on enslaved African and Indigenous people as guides, household workers and sources of botanical knowledge—contributors her published plates did not name. Her compositions made transformation inseparable from habitat, anticipating an ecological way of seeing.

Maria Sibylla MerianRead card

Q1993

WonderBiography

Ingrid Daubechies constructed compactly supported orthonormal wavelets that made multiscale signal analysis practical for digital compression, denoising and reconstruction.

A Fourier analysis tells which frequencies exist, but wavelets can also preserve where a brief change or sharp edge occurs. Daubechies found finite, mathematically exact families that could be computed efficiently and reconstruct the original signal. Their descendants live in JPEG 2000, fingerprint storage, medical imaging and scientific data. Her abstraction succeeds because it is selective without being careless: it gives smooth areas less attention and spends detail where the world changes.

Ingrid DaubechiesRead card

Q2006

WonderArt

Late nineteenth-century chronophotography recorded successive phases of movement in image sequences or on one plate, making animal and human locomotion available for measurement.

Eadweard Muybridge used rows of cameras to separate a horse's stride into instants; Étienne-Jules Marey developed methods that layered regular exposures from one viewpoint, turning motion into trace and interval. The images corrected assumptions hidden in paintings, opened new study of bodies and supplied early cinema with part of its visual grammar. Before film made pictures move, photography made movement pause long enough to think.

ChronophotographyRead card