Art: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 9

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Q2007

WonderArt

Introduced commercially in 1907, Autochrome Lumière used a microscopic mosaic of dyed potato-starch grains over a photographic emulsion to record colour on glass.

The Lumière process spread millions of tiny red-orange, green and blue-violet starch grains across a glass plate, filling the gaps with lampblack and coating the screen with light-sensitive emulsion. After reversal processing, the finished transparency needed transmitted light to glow. Long exposures softened movement and the irregular mosaic lent images a pointillist atmosphere: modern colour arriving through an unexpectedly edible material.

Autochrome LumièreRead card

Q2015

DriveArt

When arthritis made embroidery painful, Anna Mary Robertson Moses — Grandma Moses — began painting scenes of farm life in her late seventies. Her first solo show opened in New York when she was 80, and she painted into her 101st year.

Her sister suggested painting might be easier on stiff hands than needlework. It was — and something else came with it. A New York collector spotted her pictures in a drugstore window; the 1940 exhibition was titled 'What a Farm Wife Painted'. She produced more than 1,500 paintings in about two decades, most of them memories of rural seasons, and became one of America's most beloved artists before her death at 101 in 1961.

Grandma MosesRead card

Q2016

DriveArt

In 1772, at 72, Mary Delany noticed how a geranium petal matched a scrap of red paper — and invented the 'paper mosaick'. Over the next decade she cut 985 botanically precise flower collages, each built from hundreds of tiny paper pieces.

'I have invented a new way of imitating flowers,' she wrote that autumn. Botanists including Joseph Banks admired the collages' scientific accuracy; some carry hundreds of paper petals layered on black backgrounds. She worked for about ten years until her eyesight failed in her early eighties. The ten albums she called the Flora Delanica now rest in the British Museum — the life's work of an artist who started at 72.

Mary DelanyRead card

Q2017

DriveArt

Bill Traylor was born into slavery in Alabama around 1853. In 1939, in his mid-eighties and living rough in Montgomery, he picked up a pencil — and in roughly three years produced more than a thousand drawings on scavenged cardboard.

He worked on a sidewalk by day, drawing sharp-edged mules, dogs, dancing figures and memories from plantation life, and slept in the back room of a funeral parlour. A young artist bought him poster paints and saved hundreds of the drawings. Traylor died in 1949, almost unknown. In 2018 the Smithsonian gave him a landmark retrospective — billed as its first for an artist born into slavery.

Bill TraylorRead card

Q2023

DriveLiterature

When no publisher would take his 1935 collection, E. E. Cummings printed it with money from his mother and called it 'No Thanks'. The dedication lists the fourteen publishers who turned it down — typeset in the shape of a funeral urn.

The fourteen names — Farrar & Rinehart, Simon & Schuster, Random House and the rest — descend the page in a neat column that readers have long seen as a little urn, as if the rejections were being given a decent burial. Cummings was already a known poet; the book still could not find a home. He answered with typography instead of bitterness, and the joke outlived every refusal.

E. E. CummingsRead card

Q2032

DriveMind

From 1946 in Rio de Janeiro, Nise da Silveira refused to administer lobotomy and electroshock, then standard psychiatry. Sidelined into occupational therapy, she opened painting studios for her patients — and their art astonished the world.

The studios opened in September 1946 inside a national psychiatric centre; by 1952 the work had grown into the Museum of Images of the Unconscious, now holding hundreds of thousands of paintings and sculptures. Carl Jung admired the collection and corresponded with her in the 1950s. Some patients dismissed as unreachable produced work of startling power — evidence, she argued, that the task was never to subdue the mind but to give it a language.

Nise da SilveiraRead card

Q2040

StillnessArt

In 2011, Norway's public broadcaster televised a coastal voyage in full: 134 hours, live, unedited. Roughly half the population tuned in at some point. 'Slow TV' had begun two years earlier with a seven-hour train ride that became a surprise hit.

The Bergen-to-Oslo train broadcast of 2009 drew over a million Norwegian viewers, many of whom reportedly reached for their coats at the final station announcement. The Hurtigruten voyage of June 2011 still holds the record for the longest live documentary ever aired. No plot, no commentary, no cuts — just coastline, weather and the occasional waving crowd on a pier. Its makers' theory: television had forgotten that attention can be restful rather than captured.

Slow televisionRead card

Q2046

StillnessScience

The Cloud Appreciation Society, founded in 2005 to defend 'unfairly maligned' clouds, collected members' photographs of a strange, turbulent formation. In 2017 the World Meteorological Organization added it to the International Cloud Atlas as 'asperitas'.

The trail began with a 2006 photograph from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, of a sky like a rough sea viewed from below. Founder Gavin Pretor-Pinney — whose society's manifesto pledges to 'fight blue-sky thinking' — spent years proposing the classification, and 'asperitas', from the Latin for roughness, became the first new name added to the atlas since 1951. Amateurs with cameras and patience still get to write in science's reference books.

AsperitasRead card

Q2051

WonderMind

The 1993 study behind the 'Mozart effect' involved 36 college students and one spatial task, with a benefit that faded within about fifteen minutes. Later analyses of some forty studies found little to no lasting effect on intelligence.

The original finding was real but tiny and temporary — nothing about babies, nothing about IQ. Marketing did the rest: by 1998 the governor of Georgia had arranged for every newborn in the state to receive a classical CD, ultimately donated by a record company. The honest residue of the research is gentler and better: music can lift mood and arousal, which briefly helps some tasks — and Mozart needs no laboratory justification to be worth your evening.

The Mozart effectRead card

Q2053

WonderArt

On Monday 12 March 1951, an American newspaper panel called 'Dennis the Menace' launched in sixteen papers — and in Britain, a comic starring a different naughty boy with exactly the same name went on sale. Neither camp knew of the other.

Hank Ketcham drew his blond, well-meaning menace in California; DC Thomson's Dundee office built its scowling, jumper-wearing one for The Beano, whose issue went on sale that same Monday under a cover date of 17 March. When the twin debuts came to light, both sides investigated and concluded it was pure coincidence — two cultures, one irresistible name. Both boys are still in print, three-quarters of a century on.

A transatlantic coincidenceRead card

Q2057

WonderHistory

The Codex Gigas, made in Bohemia in the early 1200s, stands almost a metre tall, runs to 310 calfskin leaves and weighs some 75 kilograms. Analysis of the script points to a single scribe, working for decades.

Legend calls it the Devil's Bible: a monk, walled up for his sins, supposedly wrote it in a single night with unholy help — which is folklore, though the book does contain a famous full-page portrait of the devil. The sober scholarship is stranger in its way: one patient hand, perhaps twenty to thirty years, copying an entire Bible, encyclopaedias, chronicles and cures into a single volume. Swedish troops carried it off from Prague in 1648, and it rests in Stockholm today.

Codex GigasRead card

Q2060

WonderScience

The Pioneer probes of 1972–73 carry gold-anodised plaques showing a man, a woman and directions to Earth — humanity's first physical message beyond the solar system. Some newspapers airbrushed the figures; readers wrote in to protest the nudity.

Carl Sagan and Frank Drake designed the plaque in weeks; Linda Salzman Sagan drew the figures. The pulsar map on it gives Earth's address in a language physics anywhere should read. Sagan later reprinted the outraged letters — one accused the space agency of spreading filth beyond the solar system — alongside his own wry defence. Both probes have long fallen silent, but the plaques sail on, built to outlast every monument on Earth.

Pioneer plaqueRead card

Q2062

WonderScience

In 2025, researchers fired laser micro-doses into volunteers' eyes to stimulate one cone type alone — a pattern natural light can never produce. Five people saw an unprecedentedly saturated blue-green beyond the normal human palette. They named it 'olo'.

Ordinary light always excites the eye's cone types in overlapping mixtures; the Berkeley 'Oz' system dodged that rule by targeting individual M cones with adaptive-optics precision. Participants could only match olo by mixing in white light to wash a real colour towards it. The name plays on 0-1-0 — only the middle cone on. Some vision scientists prefer 'an extreme saturation experience' to 'new colour'; either way, it is a hue no unaided eye will ever meet.

The 'Oz' experimentRead card

Q2065

WonderTechnology

Deep in a west Texas mountain, engineers are installing a clock designed to keep time for ten thousand years — powered partly by daily temperature swings, ticking through centuries whether or not anyone visits.

Designer Danny Hillis proposed it in the 1990s as a provocation: civilisation, he argued, had lost the habit of thinking past the next quarter. A first prototype has ticked since New Year's Eve 1999 and lives in London's Science Museum; the full-scale version, funded by Jeff Bezos inside a 150-metre shaft, has no announced opening date. The clock is engineered so its bells ring a new sequence each day it chimes — never repeating across ten thousand years.

Clock of the Long NowRead card

Q2066

WonderHistory

At Ise in Japan, the grand shrine's main sanctuaries are dismantled and rebuilt on an adjacent plot every twenty years, a cycle running — with some historical interruptions — since the year 690. The next rebuilding is due in 2033.

The point is not the buildings but the knowledge: each generation of shrine carpenters raises the sanctuaries once as apprentices and once as masters, so thousand-year-old joinery lives in working hands rather than in archives. Western conservation asks how to stop time; Ise answers by letting the wood go and keeping the skill. The shrine is always new and always ancient — a building maintained the way a song is, by being performed again.

Ise Shikinen SenguRead card

Q2068

WonderHistory

In January 2026, archaeologists announced a 2,000-year-old hoard from a routine dig in Norfolk, England: a near-complete carnyx — the tall Celtic war trumpet — along with a sheet-bronze boar's head from a battle standard and five shield bosses.

The carnyx towered over a warrior's head and brayed through an animal-mouthed bell; Roman writers recorded how the massed sound unnerved their legions, and Roman art collected the instrument as a trophy. Only two others were known from Britain before this one, which ranks among the most complete in Europe. The find came not from a treasure hunt but from the quiet machinery of planning rules — a routine excavation before construction, which is how much of Britain's past now surfaces.

Norfolk carnyx hoardRead card

Q2070

WonderArt

For a century, the painted caves of France's Dordogne could not be directly dated — everyone assumed their black pigments held no carbon. In 2026, imaging found charcoal in the lines at Font-de-Gaume, and a bison came back: about 13,000 years old.

The assumption dated from early chemical studies that found manganese oxides and looked no further; no one had ever confirmed the absence of carbon. A CNRS team led by Ina Reiche re-examined the pigments with non-invasive imaging, found charcoal traces, and took micro-samples for radiocarbon dating. The first direct dates place the drawings in the Magdalenian era, near the end of the Ice Age. A hundred-year-old 'impossible' dissolved because someone checked the premise.

Font-de-GaumeRead card

Q2071

WonderScience

On Christmas Eve 1968, as Apollo 8 rounded the Moon, astronaut Bill Anders grabbed a camera and caught the Earth rising over the lunar horizon — a small blue world in black space. 'Earthrise' became one of the most influential photographs ever taken.

The crew had been drilled to photograph the Moon, and the moment was unscripted: colour film was found in a hurry while the view slid past the windows. Anders later distilled the mission into one line — they had come all that way to explore the Moon, and what they really discovered was the Earth. The photograph is widely credited with energising the environmental movement; the first Earth Day followed sixteen months later.

Earthrise, 1968Read card

Q2073

DriveLiterature

If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

By 1981 Morrison had already tested the advice on herself. She wrote her first novel, 'The Bluest Eye', in the early mornings before her editing job at Random House, raising two sons alone. She wanted a book about a Black girl taught to hate her own face, and no such book was on the shelf. The line is not really about ambition. It is about absence: notice what is missing, then accept that the gap is your work.

Toni Morrison, speech to the Ohio Arts Council (1981)Read card

Q2089

DriveLiterature

You must change your life.

The poem describes a broken statue in a museum: no head, no arms, no eyes to meet. Rilke spends thirteen lines arguing that the stone still looks back, that it burns from inside like a lamp turned low — and then, with no warning, the last line stops describing and gives an order. He wrote it after two years as secretary to the sculptor Rodin, who had told him to go to the zoo and look at an animal until he could really see it.

Rainer Maria Rilke, 'Archaic Torso of Apollo' (1908)Read card

Q2108

DriveArt

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?

He was twenty-eight and had been drawing seriously for barely a year, having failed as an art dealer, a teacher and a preacher. The letter was written days after a furious row with his father that ended with Vincent leaving home. Around 820 of his letters survive, roughly 650 of them to Theo, who sent the money that bought the paint. The date is often given as 1888; it is 1881, before he had painted anything anyone remembers.

Vincent van Gogh, letter to his brother Theo (1881)Read card

Q2109

DriveArt

I found I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn't say any other way — things I had no words for.

In 1915, teaching in a small college in South Carolina, O'Keeffe decided that everything she had been trained to do was somebody else's language. She put the paintings away, spread paper on the floor and worked in charcoal until the shapes were hers. A friend showed the drawings to the photographer Alfred Stieglitz in New York without asking her. He exhibited them; she travelled up to complain, and stayed.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Some Memories of Drawings (1976)Read card

Q2110

DriveArt

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique.

Graham said this to the choreographer Agnes de Mille, who had just had the biggest success of her life with 'Oklahoma!' and was miserable about it — she thought the work was mediocre and the praise proved her judgement was broken. Graham's reply was that an artist does not get to grade the work. The job is to keep the channel open and stay dissatisfied, because dissatisfaction is what keeps anyone marching.

Martha Graham, quoted in Agnes de Mille, Martha (1991)Read card

Q2111

DriveHistory

Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

Jacobs had no training in planning. She was a magazine writer who looked out of her window in Greenwich Village and noticed that the streets officials called slums were working, and the tidy projects replacing them were not. The argument here is about rent, not nostalgia: new construction has to earn back its cost, so only proven, well-funded ventures can afford it. Bookshops, studios, odd little businesses and untested ideas need cheap old rooms.

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)Read card