Robert McCloskey

Tornado over Kansas is a 1929 oil-on-canvas painting by the American Regionalist painter John Steuart Curry. It depicts a dramatic scene in which a family races for shelter as a tornado approaches their farm, and has compositional connections to Curry's earlier 1928 painting Baptism in Kansas. The artist is believed to have been influenced by Baroque art and photographs of tornadoes. He developed a fear of natural disasters and a reverence towards God during his childhood, both of which are apparent in the painting.

Following its 1930 debut, Tornado over Kansas was considered a notable Regionalist work, but native Kansans disliked the choice of subject matter. Although the painting won awards and was lauded by some, others criticized Curry's amateur style of painting. Curry's work attracted criticism from contemporary painters Stuart Davis and Thomas Hart Benton, and logical inconsistencies and technical errors in the composition have been noted. (Full article...)

Danie Mellor (born 13 April 1971) is an Australian artist who was the winner of 2009 National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award. Born in Mackay, Queensland, Mellor grew up in Scotland, Australia, and South Africa before undertaking tertiary studies at North Adelaide School of Art, the Australian National University (ANU) and Birmingham Institute of Art and Design. He then took up a post lecturing at Sydney College of the Arts. He works in different media including printmaking, drawing, painting, and sculpture. Considered a key figure in contemporary Indigenous Australian art, the dominant theme in Mellor's art is the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian cultures.

Since 2000, Mellor's works have been included regularly in National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award exhibitions; in 2003 he was awarded a "highly commended", for his print Cyathea cooperi, and in 2009 he won the principal prize, for a mixed media work From Rite to Ritual. His other major exhibitions have included the Primavera 2005 show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and the inaugural National Indigenous Art Triennial (Culture Warriors) at the National Gallery of Australia in 2007. In 2012, his work was included in the National Museum of Australia's exhibition Menagerie: Contemporary Indigenous Sculpture as well as in the second National Indigenous Art Triennial, while international recognition came in 2013 with representation in the National Gallery of Canada's exhibition of international indigenous art. (Full article...)

• ... that The Wiccan Web recommends drawing pentagrams on your computer screen with tinctures?
• ... that in May 1983 British public health physician Spence Galbraith suggested withdrawing blood products made from blood donated in the U.S. after 1978?
• ... that John Hoke III, who is dyslexic and the chief design officer of Nike, has described drawing as his first language?
• ... that the catalogue for Tanzania. Masterworks of African Sculpture highlighted traditional artworks such as a Sukuma mask?
• ... that a British filmmaker forced the British Board of Film Classification to watch paint drying for ten hours?
• ... that two books of photos and drawings by Margot Dias were called "among the best-illustrated anthropological volumes ever produced"?
• ... that Percy Kelly hoarded his drawings and paintings until the end of his life, saying that his cottage would someday "upstage Beatrix Potter's home"?
• ... that to encourage the development of Bissau-Guinean cinema, one foreign filmmaker provided the country's film institute with cameras, lights, and a Steinbeck guitar?