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Tag: Italy
Italian Artist Paints with Wine
Wine has been the inspiration of many famous painters throughout the centuries, but Florentine artist Elisabetta Rogai is taking the relationship between the drink of Dionysus and art to a whole new level, by using wine as paint.
Can a painting truly age? The concept was first explored English writer Oscar Wilde, in his book, “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, and now, over a century later, it’s taking a new meaning in the work of Elisabetta Rogai. The Italian painter uses only white and red wine, with no other chemical additives, to create beautiful paintings. This “allows the wine to reproduce on the canvas exactly the same process of ageing that normally takes place inside the bottle,” she explains, adding that “the wine aging, which normally occurs over the years, takes only a few months on the canvas.” The difference between a freshly painted artwork and a three-months-old one is clearly visible; the texture changes and the colors evolve from young purples and cherry reds to more mature tones of amber, orange and brown. Unlike the portrait of Dorian Gray, her works become more beautiful with time.
But Elisabetta Rogai wasn’t the first artist to try and paint with wine. Many others have tried before her, but the results were less than satisfactory, due to a variety of factors. The challenge of removing alcohol through Reverse Osmosis, the density of the wine, chromatic scale limitation, the volatility of alcohol and the possibility of working only on small canvases have been the main reasons why most painters gave up on the idea of using wine as paint. Elisabetta Rogai herself admits it took a long period of research and experimentation, and help from the University of Florence to develop her wine paintings, but the results were definitely worth it. Although she uses regular bottled wine for her paintings she also takes bottles of wine to the Florence University laboratory for processing, and takes home a gooey residue with a texture similar to oil paints.
To keep the aging of the wine going on on indefinitely, until the colors fade almost completely, Elisabetta Rogai has created a natural color fixating system based on water and flour. This leaves the hues unchanged but prevents colors from fading over a certain threshold. Her wine paintings are available for prices starting at € 5,000 ($6,400).
Mudslides in Italy
My wife has relatives in Calabria that were affected by these mudslides.
A massive mudslide has swept through an Italian town after heavy rains saturated the ground.
Footage of the slide was captured in the town of Maierato, in the region of Calabria.
Around 200 residents of the southern Italian town were evacuated after the enormous landslide tore down pylons and wrecked buildings.No deaths or injuries have been reported.
According to an initial investigation made by Italian civil defence officials, the landslide could have been caused by heavy rains in the Calabria region.
Local residents had to be evacuated and taken to the police school of Vibo Valentia, the closest city.
The events in Maierato are surrounded by more than 100 smaller landslides in the Calabria region – all caused by heavy rains, according to reports in Italy.
The country has a history of terrifying landslides. In October 2009, 29 people were killed in the Sicilian city of Messina and a state of emergency was declared by the Italian government.
Joke Of The Day
A doctor started having an affair with his nurse. A short while later, she told him that she was pregnant. Not wanting his wife to know, he gave the nurse a sum of money and asked her to go to Italy and have the baby there.
“But how will I let you know the baby is born?” she asked.
He replied, “Just send me a postcard and write “spaghetti” on the back. I’ll take care of expenses.” Not knowing what else to do, the nurse took the money and flew to Italy.
Six months went by, and then one day the doctor’s wife called him at the office and said, “Dear, you received a very strange postcard in the mail today from Europe, and I don’t understand what it means.”
The doctor said, “Just wait until I get home and I will explain it to you.”
Later that evening the doctor came home, read the postcard, and fell to the floor with a heart attack. Paramedics rushed him to the hospital emergency room. The head medic stayed back to comfort the wife. He asked what trauma had precipitated the cardiac arrest.
So the wife picked up the card and read: “Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti – Two with sausage and meatballs; two without.”
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