Some students informed me that they could not access the online course Democratic Values & Citizenship
and that the following message kept popping up:
\"This course is not enrollable at the
moment.\"
The problem has been solved and those who wish to join the course please press the image below 
or go to this URL https://vle.um.edu.mt/jc/course/view.php?id=13 .
Check out my son's new blog at http://chevymaniac.blogspot.com/ ... particularly if you're a car fanatic!
To learn more about Adam Reeder, please visit his site at www.adamreeder.com
It will surely be one of my greatest regrets. My 12-year old son was on holiday with me in the UK and we planned to visit an exhibition of ten drawings by Leonardo Da Vinci on his last day with me in Manchester. It was Friday 10th April - Good Friday. When we arrived at the Manchester Art Gallery we learnt that the Gallery was closed. My son was very disappointed.
I visited the exhibition some days later. I felt very disappointed for my son who was unlucky to miss seeing the Royal Collection's finest drawings by the Renaissance universal genius. The Royal Collection contains the world's most important group of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, and these ten drawings are among the greatest treasures of the collection.
This exhibition celebrates the 60th birthday of HRH The Prince of Wales and contains some exquisite studies. Many of these delicate drawings have never been on permanent display due to their fragile nature and, indeed, a dim light illuminates these small drawings in a hall of the Art Gallery.
I was particularly fascinated by a study of drapery (c.1515-17). This is a study for the drapery over the seated Madonna's right thigh in Leonardo's own painting of the Madonna and Child with St Anne and a lamb, now in the the Louvre. The technique is very elaborate. An outline in charcoal was worked up in closely hatched black chalk, which was gone over with a damp brush to make the modelling (or sfumato) even smoother. Touches of brown wash provide a little colour and give greater depth to the shadows. Finally the light on the satiny surface was rendered with a veil of white heightening, delicately applied with a fine brush.
Robert Clark, in The Guardian, Saturday 14 February 2009, referring to this exhibition and the work of Paul Morrison exhibited in the same gallery, wrote
Ten of the greatest ever drawings: incisive, sensitive, a shorthand form of perceptual enquiry, these works by Leonardo Da Vinci show that creative intuitions and living presences can be perfectly embodied with basic means. Red and black chalk, pen and ink, watercolour washes and painstaking finesse metalpoint are wielded with frightening self-assurance. In company like this, Paul Morrison deserves credit for daring to infiltrate the adjacent galleries with his wall-based reflections on drawing's changing historical vocabulary.
If you’re in Manchester do not miss this exhibition. The exhibition is open until 4th May 2009.
Some useful links:
Manchester Art Gallery: Google Map
Ten Drawings by Leonardo da Vinci from the Royal Collection
Paul Morrison at the Manchester Art Gallery
Exhibition preview: Leonardo Da Vinci/Paul Morrison, Manchester
The Virgin and Cild with St Anne (Louvre)
The Royal Collection: all the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci
Have your recently been to Malta's International Airport? If not there's a surprise waiting for you! Now, to use a trolley, you must use a Euro. I learnt about this novelty recently when I was travelling from Manchester to Malta. The Airmalta Airbus was full of British 'mature' tourists who were not carrying any small change, let alone a Euro coin. Indeed, many had to carry their heavy bags out of the arrivals without the use of a trolley. Not a good start to their holiday! Ok, you get your Euro back when you carry and relock the trolley to one of the many trolley-piles at the airport, however, this reminded me of the notorious RyanAir cost-cutting novelty - that of paying to use the onboard toilets.
Tourism is a pillar of our small and vulnerable service-oriented economy. In the service industry little client-oriented things, including their treatment at the airport, make a big difference. Let's not treat the tourist and the Maltese traveller with a supermarket mentality.
Thank you Priscilla for reminding me of this story!
Answer ONE question. You can write your essay in either ENGLISH or MALTESE.
1. The scientist can never claim that science gives a complete picture of the universe. Do you agree with this statement? Support your answer with examples from the history of science and from what is happening in science today.
2. The modern scientific method combines manual dexterity and intellectual ability. Experiments help scientists confirm their scientific hypothesis. Discuss.
3. Technology is usually based on scientific principles and its use has brought untold benefits to mankind. Discuss, with reference to some technological devices you make use in your daily life and/or which you used in your technological project.
4. The profound study of nature is the most fertile source of scientific and technological discoveries. Discuss the above statement by making direct reference to human technological development such as housing, transportation, navigation, structures, clothing, camouflage etc.
5. Often scientific projects (inventions and discoveries) become embroiled in controversy. This usually takes the form of opposing factions, with one side promoting the benefits to humans and the other raising ethical objections. Discuss with reference to fairly recent examples.
Assessment of essays based on these questions is only available for my Junior College students.
12 and ½ Writing Rules from AllPosters.com.
Check out this SlideShare Presentation:
Art exhibitions without exhibits are nothing new. Nothing has been a recognised art form for half a century. But the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris can claim a cultural first this week: for the first time since John Cage penned his noiseless 4'33 and Yves Klein invited thousands to view an empty, white-washed room the Centre Georges Pompidou is devoting an entire retrospective exhibition of 51 years of exhibitions without exhibits by nine different artists. How can a museum retrospectively exhibit nothing? With great care.
The exhibition, Voids, a Retrospective, fills, or fails to fill, five rooms in the French national museum of modern art on the fourth floor of the Pompidou building. All the rooms are entirely empty. The walls are white. The floors are bare. The lighting has been arranged just as carefully as for any other temporary exhibition. The gardiens (guards) watch suspiciously to make sure that the visitors do not touch anything, or in this case that they do not touch nothing.
The exhibition is hailed by one critic as the most radical show ever seen inside a museum, Voids, a retrospective is a celebration of art which, as the artist Robert Barry put it, wants us to be "free for a moment to think about what we are going to do".
The TimesOnline, in association with the Saatchi Gallery, has put together a list of 200 twentieth century artists and is asking visitors to vote for their favourite. The list include famous painters, sculptors, photographers, video and installation artists.
You can vote for your favorite artist/s on the TimesOnline website here.
I voted Marcel Duchamp. You? Will it be Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne, Gustav Klimt, Mark Rothko, Andy Warhol or ... who wins the honour of the greatest modern artist?
Piero Angela, the Italian television journalist renowned for his long-running science and technology programme Quark, has claimed that he has recently made a very important discovery in one of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. While examining the Codex on the Flight of Birds Piero Angela noticed that an image was hiding behind layers of thick handwriting.
In a statement on RAI’s website Angela said that, when he was studying a 
high quality facsimile of the Codex, he detected the faint form of a nose underneath Leonardo’s writing on the Codex’s tenth page. He enlisted the help of art historians, police forensic experts and RAI's graphic department to turn the black text covering the sketch white, then the same tone as the paper.
Over months of painstaking micro-pixel work, graphic designer Giovanni Stillitano gradually "removed" the text and revealed the drawing underneath. What emerged was the face of a young to middle-aged man with long hair, a short light beard and a penetrating gaze.
Piero Angela said that he compared the image to all known self-portraits and the many sketches of young men by Leonardo, but no match was found. Then, struck by similarities to a famed self-portrait of Leonardo in advanced age from around 1512, a work in red chalk on paper and housed in Turin's Biblioteca Reale, Angela wondered whether it might not be a new, younger Leonardo self-portrait.
Criminal investigation techniques were used to digitally correlated the sketch with the known portrait and "age" it with facial reconfiguration technology, sinking the cheeks, hollowing the eyes and furrowing the brow.
The police experts found the two images compatible "to such an extent that we may regard the hypothesis that the images portray the same person as reasonable." The results were validated by a plastic surgeon, Giuseppe Leopizzi, and then double-checked via a digital face-lif
t to rejuvenate the older self-portrait.
Wrinkles removed, eyes brightened, the younger version of the established older self-portrait was superimposed on the newly discovered sketch and found to be almost identical.
Professor Carlo Pedretti at California University, a world authority on Leonardo Da Vinci, described the sketch as "one of the most important acquisitions in the study of Leonardo, in the study of his image, and in the study of his thought too" and he was “perfectly convinced” that the image portrayed the famous Renaissance artist.
More on Leonardo da Vinci can be found in the following sites:
Apap was a leading Maltese artist active during and around the mid-20th century. Apap was born in 1918 and studied painting in Rome at the Regia Accademia di Belle Arti, where his master was the Neapolitan artist Carlo Siviero. At the outbreak of World War II, he surrendered his British passport in return for a residence and work permit in Italy. Arrested after the capitulation of Italy in 1945, he was brought to Malta and t
ried for high treason, together with around twenty-five other Maltese, but was acquitted. His release was followed by a period of intense activity during which he established himself as Malta's leading portrait artist. In 1955 he transferred himself permanently to Rome, where in June 1964 he organized a one-man exhibition at the Galleria L'Agostiniana in Piazza del Popolo, which won him very favourable comments. 
In 1961 he was invited to Windsor Castle to paint a portrait of Princess Anne (exh. 1962; London, Grabowski Gal.). In 1967 he had another successful show, at the Galleria Galeazzo in Alba. His work had by this time become profoundly religious in content, and the bright colours of his earlier paintings gave way to gloomy mauves and grey tones.
Van Gogh is now one of the most well-known post-Impressionist painters, although he was not widely appreciated in his lifetime.
Vincent Van Gogh was born on 30 March 1853 in Zundert in the southern Netherlands, the son of a pastor. In 1869 he took his first job, working in the Hague branch of an international art dealing firm. He began to write to his younger brother Theo, a correspondence which continued for the rest of Van Gogh's life.
Van Gogh's job took him to London and Paris, but he was not interested in the work and was dismissed in 1876. He briefly became a teacher in England, and then, deeply interested in Christianity, a preacher in a mining community in southern Belgium.
In 1880, at the age o
f 27, he decided to become an artist. He moved around, teaching himself to draw and paint and receiving financial support from Theo. In 1886 Van Gogh joined Theo in Paris, and met many artists including Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Pissarro and Gauguin, with whom he became friends. His style changed significantly under the influence of Impressionism, becoming lighter and brighter. He painted a large number of self-portraits in this period.
In 1888, Van Gogh moved to Provence in southern France, where he painted his famous series 'Sunflowers'. He invited Gauguin to join him but they soon began to quarrel and one night, Van Gogh threatened Gauguin with a razor. Deeply remorseful he then cut off part of his own ear.
This was the first serious sign of the mental health problems that were to afflict Van Gogh for the rest of his life. He spent time in psychiatric hospitals and swung between periods of inertia, depression and incredibly concentrated artistic activity, his work reflecting the intense colours and strong light of the countryside around him.
On 27 July 1890, again suffering from depression, Van Gogh shot himself. He died two days later.
From: BBC Historic Figures: Vincent Van Gogh
It is widely acknowledged that Picasso is the most important artist of the 20th century. He experimented with a wide range of styles and themes in his long career, most notably inspiring 'Cubism'.
He was born in Malaga on 25 October 1881, the son of an art teacher. He later adopted his mother's maiden name of Picasso. He grew up in Barcelona, showing artistic talent at an early age. In the early 1900s, he moved between France and Spain before finally settling in Paris in 1904. There he experimented with a number of styles and produced his own original ones, reflected in his 'Blue' and 'Rose' periods.
In 1907 Picasso painted 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon', a revolutionary work that introduced a major new style - 'Cubism'. Picasso worked closely with the French artist Georges Braque in the development of this style. Picasso's next major innovation, in 1912, was 'Collage', attaching pieces of cloth, newspaper or advertising to his paintings.
Picasso n
ow moved from style to style, experimenting with painting and sculpture and becoming involved with the Surrealist movement. In 1937 he produced 'Guernica', a painting inspired by the destruction of the town in northern Spain by German bombers during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso supported the Republican government fighting General Francisco Franco, and never returned to Spain after Franco's victory.
Unlike many artists, Picasso remained in Paris during the German occupation. From 1946 to his death he lived mainly in the south of France. He continued to produce a huge variety of work including paintings, sculptures, etchings and ceramics.
Picasso was involved with a number of women during his life who were often artistic muses as well as lovers. He had four children. On 8 April 1973, he died of a heart attack at his home near Cannes.
From http: //www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/picasso_pablo.shtml
