Varieties of worlds spread out around me. "Doro-Doro, Dero-Dero, Muni-Muni, Kira-Kira", if my artwork is expressed with onomatopoeia, it sounds like this. Born on a planet named the earth, with the gender of female, I has lived for 22 years according to the counting rule in this country. Named Toi Rina, I am diligently alive the present time.
For long time, I have sometimes feeling like my soul apart from the body. It differs from out-of-body experience. Being a humankind without any doubt, still I might be on the way to become a humankind. What I saw more was more interesting. When I heard the sound of conversation, it was very curious for me that they communicate each other through the strange sound I could not understand. I find myself who observe others as if they were animals I have never seen. "Ah, I myself am also one of the strange animals", soon I restore myself.
For me like that, it is difficult to express the world I exprience using any words. Since I want to approach such a world more closely, and to express myself more completely, I continue to make painting or artwork with my whole efforts. The people who see my work are taken into another world, feel a special feeling they never felt, and brought to confusion where they lose their identity, who they themselves are. I want to make such artworks. The feeling and viewpoint I mentioned above infect the other people and synchronize each other, and I myself chemically react, then we can see more varieties of colors and hear more cries deeply from our soul.
Contradiction, despair, anger, hope, light, and happiness, everything is mixed and caotic in this world. That is "Doro-Doro, Dero-Dero, Muni-Muni, Kira-Kira". As long as I am alive, I want more and more people know and feel the "alive" world I am making. So I disclose myself to make artwork. That is "alive force" itself for me. (Rina Toi)
Wieslaw A. Zdaniewski (WAZ), is a Polish-born, Sweden educated, American writer, photographer, and scientist. He learned the craft of photography in Poland after the World War II from his father, both engineer and fine art photographer. During the past four decades, WAZ's photography exhibitions toured North & South America and the European Union, and his works were published in English, Spanish, Swedish, Polish, and other languages.
Presently WAZ’s time is devoted exclusively to photography and international publishing projects. He is working on an extended book project “The Silence of the Rocks”, a result of several years of trekking and mountain climbing on three continents.
In his currently completed cross-cultural book project (that is also simultaneously being presented online in USA, EU, Japan) “Fotoskolan - 30 years after”, WAZ makes an emotional return journey to Gothenburg (Sweden) to photograph the same people 30 years after he photographed them in 1980.
Regardless of the rapidly progressing digitalization of arts and new media, WAZ continues to cultivate traditional photographic methods, and lets his search for capturing the essence of our passing time stretch from moody landscape photography, through street snapshots, to cross-cultural photo essayistic, and intimate black & white studio portraitures.
Wieslaw A Zdaniewski aka WAZ proclaims: “For me photography has
always been a part of life. Weaved into my life's fabric, I just take it for
granted. It is like sleeping, eating or walking”.
Yugoslavian-born illustrator Manya Stojic creates simple brightly colored acrylic paintings. Bold splashes across the lavishly applied swirls of paint fill each of her paintings. Her best known picture books are Rain, Snow, Wet Pebbles under our feet and Hello World! Greetings in Forty-two Languages around the Globe!. which includes pictures of children uttering the same friendly "Hello!," each in their own native language. Rain similarly focuses on African creatures who sense that the seasonal rains are fast approaching their dry savannah home. Tiger’s Story, Elephant's Story and Gorilla's Story bring these endangered animals closer to children hearts.
Book Awards:
One of The Ten Best Illustrators in 2000 by New York Times
Shortlisted for Kate Greenaway Award 2001
Award “NEVEN” for The Best Illustrated Book in 2002, for the book OBLICI (Shapes), Belgrade, Serbia&Montenegro
ユーゴスラビア生まれのイラストレーター、マニャ・ストイッチュは明るく色付けしたシンプルなアクリル画を描きます。たっぷりと絵具を使った渦巻や太めの筆遣いが、彼女の絵の特徴です。代表的な絵本としてはRain(日本語版「あめ!」)とSnow(ゆき), Wet Pebbles under our feet (足の下の雪で濡れた小石)とHello World！Greetings in Forty-two Languages around the Globe!(地球上の42の言葉でごあいさつ! 世界の皆さんこんにちは!)があります。この本では、親しげに「こんにちは」と母国語であいさつをしているいろいろな地域の子供達が描かれています。またRainでは、アフリカの動物達がサバンナの乾いた土地に雨季が近づいていることを敏感に感じる様子を描いています。Tiger’s Story, Elephant's Story and Gorilla's Story (トラの物語、象の物語、ゴリラの物語)は絶滅の危機に瀕している動物達に対して、子供達が親近感を感じるように描かれています。
Kanem uses color harmonies and esthetic dissonance to express a healing propensity through her silk art.
Works depicted were created in Point Cumana, Trinidad, and at KSMT (a haven for emancipated writers and poets in Popenguine, Senegal).
Trained in both conventional medicine and traditional healing methods, Kanem relies upon idioms, symbols and emanations from such seats of ancestral knowledge and power as Ghana, Egypt, Mali, Nigeria, India, Hawaii, Apache-Mescalero, Peru, Australia and her native Panama … and she deploys newer signifiers, too, giving figure to the irreverent exuberance of jazz, capoeira and calypso.
Mt. Fuji was registered as the World Cultural Heritage site by UNESCO in 2013. This year is also the 50th anniversary of the death of an artist who lived in Gotenba City near Mt. Fuji to paint it, Meiko Ohmori, the first guest artist for this online gallery.
Meiko Ohmori was attracted by the beauty of Mt. Fuji, and kept on painting it through his life. He wrote an essay "Painting Fuji for 30 Years" on Geijutsu Shincho Vol.4 No. 7.
