Anywoli

Anywoli is a traditional mancala game played by the Anuak people of the Gambela province, in Ethiopia, as well as in the Akobo, Pochalla and Jokau regions of Sudan. The name of the game means "bringing to life" ("giving birth"). Anywoli has similarities to mancalas found in Nigeria and Ghana, such as Ba-awa and Obridjie.
Rules.
The board used to play Anywoli has two rows of twelve holes each. Anuak call these holes "oto" (pl.: "udi"), meaning "house". At game setup, 4 seeds are placed in each hole. Seeds are called "nyibaré", meaning "children (sons) of the board game".
Players take turns; each owns one of the rows.
At his or her turn, the player takes all the seeds from one of his/her holes and relay sows them counterclockwise. The sowing ends when the last seed falls in an empty hole or when a capture occurs.
Capture occurs whenever, during play, a hole holds exactly four seeds: those seeds are removed from the game, and taken by the player who owns the hole. In the special case where the last seed of a sowing is placed in a hole holding three seeds (thus forming a four-seed hole), the captured seeds are taken by the player who is moving, independent of who owns the hole. This also ends the player's turn.
When only 8 seeds are left on a board, the player who moved first at the beginning of the game captures them and the game ends. The winner is the player who captured most seeds.


Declare (typeface)


Shingo Hirafuji

 is a Japanese professional shogi player ranked 7-dan.
Early life.
Hirafuji was born in Toyonaka, Osaka on October 15, 1963. He entered the Japan Shogi Association's apprentice school as student of shogi professional in 1980. He was promoted to 1-dan in 1983 and obtained full professional status and the rank of 4-dan in April 1991.
Promotion history.
Hirafuji's promotion history is as follows:


Wally Hedrick

Wally Bill Hedrick (1928 – December 17, 2003) was a seminal American artist in the 1950s California counterculture, gallerist, and educator who came to prominence in the early 1960s. Hedrick’s contributions to art include pioneering artworks in psychedelic light art, mechanical kinetic sculpture, junk/assemblage sculpture, Pop Art, and (California) Funk Art. Later in his life, he was a recognized forerunner in Happenings, Conceptual Art, Bad Painting, Neo-Expressionism, and image appropriation. Hedrick was also a key figure in the first important public manifestation of the Beat Generation when he helped to organize the Six Gallery Reading, and created the first artistic denunciation of American foreign policy in Vietnam. Wally Hedrick was known as an “idea artist” long before the label “conceptual art” entered the art world, and experimented with innovative use of language in art, at times resorting to puns.
1940s.
Wally Hedrick was born in Pasadena, California. He came out of the military and car culture, first glimpsing the liberating promise of San Francisco bohemia in the late 1940s, then moving to the city permanently after seeing combat in the Korean War (1950–1953). Hedrick visited California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) in 1946. During this period, he joined Progressive Art Workers with David Simpson, John Stanley and others. The Progressive Art Workers was a social club which also functioned as a co-operative through which the group the members were able to exhibit their works. At this time, too, Vesuvio Cafe in San Francisco's North Beach district hired Hedrick as an action painter to work (i.e. 'make paintings') while a jazz combo performed:
"That was his job. He made these paintings and while he would paint the musicians would play along with him. He would go like this and they would go doodoo doop. It was very popular in North Beach. The guy would make four or five paintings in an evening."
1950s.
Hedrick made an early break with the conventions of art training and art-making. "There were three directions an artist could take at that time," Hedrick says, "Figuration, Abstract-Expressionism. And this third thing, which was out of the surrealist and Dada tradition." Hedrick began "working out a form of personalized Dada", which led "perhaps to his most influential contribution to the course of Bay Area art: an elaborate kind of punning. The puns not only became titles...but appeared in the painting itself."
Hedrick's mature artistic career began with paintings of popular imagery—American flags, radios, television cabinets and refrigerators—years before the rise of New York Pop Art. John Coplans included Hedrick's use of popular imagery in 1951 in his timeline of the antecedents to Pop Art. Hedrick "began painting flags in the 1950s, before New York's Jasper Johns did. Soon after, Hedrick -- ever the anti-careerist -- painted many of those flags black to protest the Vietnam War."
In the early 1950s, Vesuvio Cafe, a popular Beat hangout, employed Hedrick to sit in the window dressed in full beard, turtleneck, and sandals and create improvisational drawings and paintings. Hedrick's figure, therefore, helped ushered in the Beat lifestyle which ballooned in the later 1950s; by 1958 tourists to San Francisco could take bus tours to view the North Beach "Beat" scene. Hedrick once confided to his student Jerry Garcia that "he and his friends were the "real" Beat Generation."
At the time, Hedrick was one of the first San Francisco artists in the early 1950s to work almost exclusively with metal. He began welding in 1952, and these efforts are considered the first kinetic-junk assemblages. Hedrick made assemblages and sculptures from beer cans, lights, broken radio and television sets, refrigerators, and washing machines he found in junkyards. "What interests me", he said later, is "to take garbage and make it into art, kind of ironic art." He painted over the surfaces with thick layers of impasto and gesso which incorporated the work into the aesthetic of action painting. He was particularly pleased when he could fix an abandoned appliance sufficiently that at least some piece of it would work and he could turn his assemblages into moving sculptures.
"Some of his most memorable sculptures came from crushing and welding beer cans together, or stacking and welding them...In 1956 he made the first light sculpture that I had ever seen; a fixture that responded to sound. Later on he had the piece on at his house during a Christmas celebration for which Wally put on some Miles and Coltrane on and the sculpture went crazy! I also remember his assemblage Xmas Tree Sculpture, that lit up and danced!"
Although using beer cans was popularized in 1960 by Jasper Johns, Hedrick began the practice in art many years earlier, during the early 1950s. One of Hedrick's favorite beer can sculptures "was made up of smashed beer cans in a kind of pyramid, as sort of a mountain, so I called it "American Everest"." The welded beer can sculptures "carried over until -- 1969."
During the 1950s, Hedrick's efforts followed two main paths: painting and sculpture. More specifically, between 1952 and 1958, Hedrick begins his kinetic junk assemblages, beer can sculptures and 'Black Painting' series. Not only do Hedrick's junk kinetic beer can sculptures, now all lost or destroyed, possibly rank as the seminal "kinetic junk sculptures...made before Tinguely", but also, Hedrick is one of the first American artists to oppose US intervention in South Vietnam.
Pre-conceptualist.
Some artists at the time considered Hedrick a 'pre-conceptualist': "Wally's mind, I think... is of primary significance in this way. I think he's much more a preconceptualist than perhaps any of the others... the paintings, and the objects that he created are really more expressions of an idea." Indeed, Marcel Duchamp "was one of Wally's greatest gods, always."
Korean War.
In 1951, during the Korean War, Hedrick was drafted into the United States Army against his will, escorted away by US Army MPs without even having the chance to call his parents. "Wally must have been a problem for them, though, because Wally didn't ever do military things quite the way they intended...you told Wally not to do it, that's what he would do. He was stationed in Korea until 1952. During this time, his paintings and assemblages shifted from neo-cubism to metaphysics to political subjects painted in a cartoonish style and dealing particularly with the escalation of the Vietnam War.
Studio 13 Jazz Band.
Hedrick joined the "Studio 13 Jazz Band" in 1952. The group was founded at the San Francisco Art Institute in the late 1940s by two members of the Bay Area figurative painters David Park and Elmer Bischoff.
"Peace" (1953).
 In 1953, one of the earliest paintings of his career as an artist presented a crumpled American flag defaced with the word 'Peace'. Thomas E. Crow contrasts this work with Jasper Johns’s "anonymous stenciling", drawing attention to the way Hedrick mimics the flamboyant calligraphy found in the decoration of hot-rod cars. Crow sees the work in contrast to Johns’s reticence, as a protest aimed against the waste of lives in Korea, and at Cold War adventurism in general. Additionally, "Peace" (1953), "demonstrates an intuitive understanding of 'language as symbol' which predates the present postmodern use (of language) by twenty years. Hedrick’s pre-pop paintings were included in John Coplan’s historical “Pop Art, USA," the first exhibition to attempt a collective look at the movement in the United States, presented at the Oakland Art Museum during September, 1963. Even after his Pop Art phase, Hedrick continued "his risk-taking forays into regions where, mostly, angels fear to tread".
In the late 1940s he experimented with light. By 1953 he had created a “light machine” that combined keyboard, glass, speakers, and homemade projectors and colored lights that responded to changes in pitch, register, and volume, which was an early precursor of the psychedelic light shows of the '60s—and years before the light shows of Haight-Ashbury.
'A genuine beatnik' who helped usher in the Beat Generation.
Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead studied with Wally Hedrick and Elmer Bischoff at San Francisco Art Institute. It was the only school Garcia would ever be proud of attending. Hedrick served Garcia as a model not only as a painter but as an expositor of a way of life. To Garcia, Hedrick was a genuine beatnik. Hedrick thought Garcia bright and hip, and advised Garcia to attend poetry readings at the North Beach coffee houses, such as the Co-Existence Bagel Shop, the social centre of the Beat community. It was Hedrick who turned the young Garcia on to acoustic blues and Jack Kerouac’s "On the Road" and all its attendant attitudes. "On the Road" changed Garcia’s life forever. “Wally taught me that art is not only something you do, but something you are.”
As "a genuine beatnik" Hedrick was employed at a 'beatnik' bohemian sitting at the bar at Vesuvio Cafe, a famous hangout in San Francisco’s North Beach. Vesuvio Cafe employed Hedrick to sit in the window dressed in full beard, turtleneck, and sandals and create improvisational drawings and paintings. Hedrick's figure, therefore, helped usher in the Beat lifestyle which ballooned in the later 1950s; by 1958 tourists to San Francisco could take bus tours to view the North Beach "Beat" scene.
Although Hedrick once confided to Garcia that "he and his friends were the "real" Beat Generation", the seminal visual artists in the 1950s in San Francisco, including Hedrick, shunned the ‘beatnik’ label. None of them liked being called “Beats” and they especially abhorred the label “Beatniks”, a sobriquet of disparagement coined by San Francisco’s famed columnist Herb Caen. As Bruce Conner stated: “I don’t know any artist that would call himself a beat artist…If somebody did, you’d consider him a fake, a fraud running a scam.”
The Six Gallery, happenings, and funk art.
"The opening night was the big thing in San Francisco. The opening night and all the artists, mainly artists, went out there and those few people that were into socialites or whatever they were, they went out. And then after that, you could go out there during a weekday and there would be nobody in the gallery. Nobody gave a damn." -- John Saccaro
Made from what was known as the King Ubu Gallery ("an all poet thing"), in 1954, Hedrick co-founded The Six Gallery in San Francisco, California with David Simpson, Hayward King, John Allen Ryan, Deborah Remington and Jack Spicer—and by 1955, had "become the official director". Although "the activities of the "6" were poorly documented", the Six Gallery functioned as an underground art gallery for the members and a meeting place for poets and literati alike. "The Six" was a focal point for countercultural activity during a crucial transition point—unconventional artists were deep underground—partly because no audience encouraged them to emerge, partly because it was safer there. "The Six" delighted at the chance to defy authority. As the gallery director, Hedrick organized and participated in the spontaneous exhibition/poetry reading/performance events that were the precursors of the 'Happenings' of the 1960s.
"We didn't think of ourselves as a group. The other groups had a very strong group feeling, and they'd sit around and talk about taking over the world, or at least every art department in the Bay Area."
In the wake of the artist collective galleries such as Ubu and Six came galleries run by professionals.
"Hedrick was instrumental in transforming the cheery satire of Pop Art into the more outrageous bite of funk art." The birth of 'California Funk Art' can be found at the Six Gallery. Robert Arneson, the so-called "Father of the Ceramic Funk Art movement". considered Hedrick, "The Godfather of Funk Art".
Hedrick received his B.F.A. in Art from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1955.
The Six Gallery reading.
"The Six Gallery reading" took place on October 7, 1955, at the Six Gallery, when Allen Ginsberg, at Hedrick's invitation, read "Howl" for the first time. The event has become nearly as much a part of the city's mystique as the 1849 Gold Rush or the 1906 earthquake.
Hedrick approached Ginsberg in mid-1955 and asked him to organize a poetry reading at the Six Gallery. At first, Ginsberg refused, but once he’d written a rough draft of "How", he changed his mind. An account of the night can be found in Jack Kerouac's novel "The Dharma Bums", where he describes collecting change from each audience member to buy jugs of wine with Hedrick.
Hedrick's 'Six Gallery Reading' was the first important public manifestation of the Beat Generation and helped to herald the West Coast artistic revolution that became known as the San Francisco Renaissance.
Jay DeFeo.
In the late 1950s, San Francisco became the beat poetry capital of the universe, but the visual artists who were part of the same epoch are less celebrated. The three-story building at 2322-24 Fillmore, where Hedrick and Jay DeFeo lived and worked was the unofficial center of the small San Francisco art world in 1955–65. Hedrick met artist Jay DeFeo, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, and they married in 1954. Jay DeFeo's best-known painting, "The Rose", was made in their Filmore Street apartment, took almost eight years to create and weighs 2,300 pounds, all paid for by her husband, Wally Hedrick.
Kinetic sculpture.
"When I arrived in San Francisco in 1957, I remember going to "The Place" at North Beach with Michael McClure. There was this assemblage by Wally Hedrick in the window. I think it was part of a stovepipe, there was a doll's head in the vent, and it had wheels; it was like a cart (with a cane on it)." -- Bruce Conner
" 'The Christmas Tree' was supposed to have something to do with playing colors by light, but it was totally random as far as I could tell, just absurd." -- Bruce Conner
In 1958 one of his mechanical assemblages "attacked" a woman at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's annual Christmas party and holiday exhibition. His "Xmas Tree" was "sort of the pinnacle of the kinetic junk sculptures because I'd never attempted anything so complicated", built out of "two radios, two phonographs, flashing lights, electric fans, saw motor--all controlled by timers, hooked so [they] would cycle all these things." One of the record players played "I Hate to See Christmas Come Around". At the opening, which Hedrick refused to attend, he set a timer so that the piece "suddenly began flashing its lights, honking its horns, and playing its records." One woman who was standing next to the piece when it suddenly turned on found her fur coat tangled in it and then received an electrical shock. "It caused quite a sensation not because of its artistic merit, but because it attacked this lady, which I thought was very nice... I wasn't making it as an art thing. I was more interested in making a "thing", and if it attacked people—well I guess I knew it was going to attack...I knew it would probably attack because I laid the trap. So it entertained me; I thought the evening was a success."
"Sixteen Americans".
In 1955, art curator Dorothy Miller came to the West Coast. She included Hedrick in the 1959 "Sixteen Americans" show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, NY. Hedrick, knowing full well the importance of being on hand for the opening, gave his plane ticket for the New York museum exhibition and spectacle to friends, rather than participate. It would be 25 years before Hedrick figured prominently again in New York City, during the Whitney Museum of American Art’s, "Beat Culture and the New America: 1950-1965" exhibition in 1995.
Not only did Hedrick not attend the 1959 "Sixteen Americans" opening at the Museum of Modern Art or even go to see the exhibition, he further distanced himself from the mainstream art world by declaring that artists such as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Robert Motherwell were too firmly rooted in formal traditions. Instead, Hedrick asserted, “You’ve got to have a deep sense of the human and you have to have a political stance. Painting is not above politics. Anything that has to do with the soul also has to do with the stomach.
In 1959, again recalling his Asian military experience, Hedrick painted "Anger" (or "Madame Nhu’s Bar-B-Q"), the first artistic denunciation of American policy in Vietnam. "Anger", visually equates an act of forceful sexual penetration with corrupt political manipulation. Explosive rage and indignation are symbolized by an atomic cloud serving double duty as the form of male and female genitalia perpetrating the deed."
In 1959, both Hedrick and DeFeo became original members of Bruce Conner's Rat Bastard Protective Association.
1960s.
Hedrick and DeFeo's apartment lease at 2322 Fillmore was suddenly terminated (due in part to DeFeo's excesses) toward the end of 1965. Hedrick and DeFeo divorced in 1969.
The "Black Paintings" were Hedrick's protest against the Vietnam War. Hedrick took "about 50" of his early canvases and painted them black. Hedrick's "Black Paintings" culminate in 1967 with "War Room". This series "was an idiosyncratic protest, but a passionate one."
War Room.
War Room is "a group of four eleven-by-eleven foot black canvases, each filling a wall of the room" then arranged "into a square...in the shape of a room...and a door to go in it." The installation has been described as a significant item of Bay Area art history.
During this time, Hedrick was accused of stealing paintings, including a canvas by Clyfford Still, from the San Francisco Art Institute, where he was teaching, then either painting them black or painting his own iconoclastic pictures over them.
In December 2008, Christopher Miles, art critic for the LA Weekly, nominated the War Room (exhibited at Mara McCarthy's The Box, March 21 - April 26,) for Best Show of the Year (2008).
Also, in December 2008, Walead Beshty, art critic for Artforum Magazine, nominated the War Room (exhibited at Mara McCarthy's The Box, March 21 - April 26) among the most notable Los Angeles exhibitions in 2008.
1970s (Wally's Fix-It Shop).
In the early 1970s Hedrick was fired from a teaching post at the San Francisco Art Institute, after circulating a petition protesting America's presence in Vietnam.
After the dismissal Hedrick began a period of self-imposed artistic exile, devoting most of his time to operating a home repair business (appropriately named, "Wally's Fix-It Shop") in the town of San Geronimo, California. This is an example of the way Hedrick "operates outside the busy highway of contemporary art". The small repair business proved moderately successful. Hedrick's repair skills were first recognized during the Korean War, when he was given the task of fixing radios.
His paintings of the 1970s were mainly crude black and white renditions of old mail order catalogue illustrations. It was also rumored he was the originator of the tag SKIDS which appeared on road signs in Northern California . He also put that in paintings later .
1980s.
In the 1980s he shifted to large-scale canvases of rough and aggressive imagery, often sexual." From 1988 to his death, Hedrick lived and worked in Bodega Bay, California, with his long-time companion, Catherine Conlin.
1990s.
Hedrick recycled the Black paintings -- recycling being another recurring theme in his work -- during the Persian Gulf War, slathering the older black paintings them with new statements in white acrylic paint like, "So damn, whose sane?".
2000s.
After 25 years, "The War Room" was brought out of storage to be the centerpiece for the 5th Annual San Francisco International Art Fair in 2003, courtesy of Lincart. The work was described as "the most topical thing on view." In 2003, with new American aggression taking place in the Persian Gulf, Hedrick returned to making all-black paintings. On December 17, 2003, Hedrick died of congestive heart failure at his home in Sonoma County at the age of 75.
Commentary and criticism.
"I can remember in about 1959 or '60, the joke going around the art school in the city was, 'A garage man had hauled away Hedrick's paintings and said, 'I don't know what art is.' We'd all laugh like mad, you know, 'cause most of us weren't sympathetic towards Wally Hedrick's art at that time." -- Terry St. John
As early as 1963, John Coplans, the future editor of Artforum Magazine (January 1972–January 1977), would confess the "fashionable world of contemporary painting" (i.e. East Coast) unpleasant reaction to the independent, offensive, 35-year-old Hedrick: "there is little doubt that Hedrick is an original, yet the fashionable world of contemporary painting tends to reject Wally Hedrick's work out of hand." Its no surprise, therefore, “the pathos of Hedrick’s situation was that few not already converted were ever likely to witness Hedrick’s accomplishments."
Art curator Walter Hopps, in his forward to 1985 Hedrick’s Adeline Kent Award exhibition catalogue at the San Francisco Art Institute, stated that Hedrick "decided to ignore the ideal of "career", "fame" and "greatness" to which his peers aspired, and settled for a simpler life, uncomplicated by openings and galleries and cocktail parties."
According to "Artweek", he never ceased to creatively forged ahead, whereas "too many of the other iconoclasts of the same era have themselves become icons, cranking out homages to their own faded talents.
"Hedrick consistently refused to be interested in what he describes as a "high art look," which he then considered a waste of time and energy." Additionally, the subject matter and motifs of his art often included "rough and aggressive imagery, "painted in a fury that gains its edge from the blatant sexual rawness. Thus, Hedrick's "big, tough paintings are strong medicine...and disturbingly enigmatic."
Significance and legacy.
The cultural historian Rebecca Solnit in her 1990 book, "The Secret Exhibition: Six Californian Artists", reasserted Hedrick’s artistic achievements:
 It is now possible to say that Hedrick was ahead of his time: the first American to protest the Vietnam War, the artist to paint flags before Jasper Johns painted flags, who made kinetic junk sculpture before Tinguely did. Hedrick was a forerunner of Pop Art, Bad Painting, Neo-Expressionism, and image appropriation. It might be more useful to view Hedrick as an artist who was of his time in a unique way, a maverick whose responses to the world showed it in a different light.
"Maybe the most important thing about Wally is that he could have been so rich and so successful and so famous," said Professor Rollison, a colleague of Hedrick's at The College of Marin.
He was described as an underground institution. "Wally and Jay's (DeFeo's) house on Fillmore was the unofficial first stop on the art itinerary of anyone important in the art world, national or international." said Carlos Villa.
Career highlights.
Hedrick’s works have been exhibited in galleries and museums including The Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and The M. H. de Young Memorial Museum. His work resides in public collections which include The Smithsonian Institution, The Museum of Modern Art, di Rosa, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and The M. H. de Young Memorial Museum.
Hedrick taught at the San Francisco Art Institute "shortly after graduating (from SFAI). In 1959 he also stopped teaching as a form of protest against the war, and was eventually fired." Later, Hedrick taught at San Francisco Academy of Art, San Francisco State University, University of California at Davis, San Jose State University and INdian Valley College, at the time a separate school then College of Marin but later incorporated into College of Marin, where he held Professor Emeritus status. His students included Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead , William Wiley, Robert H. Hudson, William Allen and Mike Henderson.


Manuel Marin (sculptor)

Manuel Fernandez (1942–2007), otherwise known as Manuel Marin, was an artist and a convicted art forger. After working in the art world for 30 years, he admitted to making and selling millions of dollars of forgeries, mainly copies of works by the American sculptor Alexander Calder. Fernandez and his wife, Monica Savignon, served prison sentences for their crimes. Marin's sculptures created under his own name nevertheless continue to enjoy buoyant international sales through galleries and auction houses in the USA and Europe.
Biography.
Fernandez was born in 1942 in Cieza, Murcia, Spain. Fernandez grew up in Spain, and as a teenager, he trained as a bull fighter.
In his twenties, he moved to London and, then, New York where he made and sold art.
He later settled and continued working in Tenafly, New Jersey with his wife and children. He also owned a home and spent time in Malaga, Spain.
Artnet’s price database shows that since 2007, 417 of his sculptures have come up for sale at auction, selling for thousands of dollars.
Manuel Fernandez died in 2007.
Conviction.
Following an FBI investigation, a federal grand jury indicted Manuel Fernandez and Monica Savignon on fraud and conspiracy charges in 1997. At that time, the couple had been producing and selling forged artworks for over a decade.
The court reported that they had sold over two million dollars of these forged artworks. Fernandez created the works while Savignon acted as art dealer, consigning the works to auction houses and selling them to collectors. Most notably, Fernandez and Savignon sold more than $1.5 million worth of counterfeit Alexander Calder works, often mobiles or standing mobiles, some of which Fernandez signed with CA to mimic Calder’s signature. The couple also made fake copies of works by the artist Romare Bearden.
Their crime was far-reaching; they sold these forged artworks in the United States, Spain, England and France. The couple even convinced Sotheby’s, the auction house, to sell a fake Calder work by providing false provenance history for the sculpture.
Richard Vitrano, another convicted art conman, testified at his April 2000 hearing that "Mr. Marin was probably the most prolific art counterfeiter in the New York City area in the '80s." Vitrano claimed that Marin's crimes went beyond those addressed in the aforementioned case. Vitrano said from Marin "we bought a [Guy Pène] Du Bois, Thomas Hart Benton, a William Aiken Walker, a Warhol, we bought a [Pierre] Lesieur. We bought a Hans Hoffman, which was the larger one. We bought a [A.F.] Tait. We bought a Henry Farney."
In order to protect their identities, the couple operated under different aliases. As mentioned above, Manuel Fernandez usually sold art under the pseudonym Manuel (Manny) Marin, but court records document that he also used the names Giuseppe Marin, Manuel Marcel, and Manuel Cisneros. Monica Savignon went by Franchesca Agnelli, Monica Marcell, Monica Rabassa, Monica Fernandez, Monica Marin, and Monica Cisneros.
In 2000, Manuel Fernandez and Monica Savignon were convicted in federal court on fraud and conspiracy charges. Fernandez and Savignon were sentenced to the maximum prison time for their crimes, 33 months. The court also ordered that the couple pay $2,695,00 in restitution. In their sentencing, Fernandez and Savignon agreed that they would not "in any way, shape or form endeavor to create, consign, transfer or sell any art work made in the likeness of a known work or artist."
Later life.
Having moved home to Spain Marin continued to create sculpture, mostly in the form of mobiles in a style reminiscent of Alexander Calder, though under Marin's own name and using his own studio stamp. These works, typically created in steel and featuring suspended geometric forms painted in strong primary colours, appear frequently on the market at galleries and leading auction houses offered at prices a tiny fraction of what Calder's work can command, which may explain their widespread popularity.


Gordon Snee

Gordon Snee (1931 - 2013) was a British abstract painter who began work in the late 1940s. During his lifetime he rarely exhibited his work. It was only after his death in 2013 that his life's work was revealed.
Snee has been described as an "outstanding talent", "one of the 'lost painters' of the post-war period, and "one of the finest post-war abstract painters".
Biography.
Gordon Snee was born in 1931 in Burnley, Lancashire, into a working-class family who worked in the cotton mills. The family moved to Gainsborough, Lincolnshire when Snee was six. He was the first of his family to be educated beyond the age of thirteen. In 1948 he won an academic scholarship to the Slade School of Art, where he won scholarships for further tuition. Six of his early lithographs are held in the Slade collection. After college, he stayed on in Highgate, London, where his first works were exhibited and sold.
He moved back north in 1956, first to Lincolnshire, and then to Saddleworth in Lancashire. He taught art at Salford Technical College and then at Manchester College of Art.
In 1976, he moved back to Lincolnshire, and set up a studio at his family home in the village of Willingham-by-Stow, near Gainsborough. He commuted by train every week from Gainsborough via Sheffield to his teaching work in Manchester. It is clear from his notebooks that these train journeys were an important time of reflection for him. He recalled them later in the 'Railway Ovals', one of his most successful series of pictures.
In 1983, Snee left teaching and returned to full-time painting. Over the next twenty years he produced his most accomplished work, a substantial body of abstract paintings, mostly in acrylic, that explores his experience of seeing. He also made woodcuts and detailed maquettes for sculptures. None of this work was exhibited in his lifetime. His last studio pictures were completed in 2003, and he continued to draw and sketch until 2013, the year that he died.
The full extent of his work was discovered after his death in 2013. As well as hundreds of paintings, drawings and maquettes he also left a photographic archive of his major pieces, a substantial collection of sketches and work-up drawings, and some seventy notebooks. This legacy was saved from destruction on the day of his funeral by the intervention of his daughter Jo.
Work.
Snee's early work is recognisable as kitchen sink realism. By the 1960s he had moved on to abstract art. He explored colour field, geometric abstraction and hard-edge painting. His mature work draws on the conventions of classical European painting, occupying a mid-ground between figuration and abstraction. Many pictures are recognisable as landscapes, head-and-shoulders portraits, still lifes, and pairs of human figures. His later paintings might be readable as any of these at the same time.
Exhibitions and prizes.
Snee rarely exhibited his work. During his lifetime, his paintings were shown in Liverpool, Lancaster, Nottingham, Gainsborough, Manchester and London. His only solo show was at the Oldham Art Gallery in 1968.
In 1967 his painting 'Malabu Mink' was a cash prize-winner in the John Moores Painting Prize.
A series of 'pop-up' exhibitions were held in Sheffield following his death in 2013 and the discovery of his major work. A Foundation to support his legacy was launched at his first major retrospective, 'The Joy of Seeing', in 2018.


Latvian orthography

Latvian orthography historically used a system based upon German phonetic principles, while the Latgalian dialect was written using Polish orthographic principles. The present-day Latvian orthography was developed by the Knowledge Commission of the Riga Latvian Association in 1908, and was approved the same year by the orthography commission under the leadership of Kārlis Mīlenbahs and Jānis Endzelīns. Its basis is the Latin script and it was introduced by law from 1920 to 1922 in the Republic of Latvia. For the most part it is phonetic in that it follows the pronunciation of the language.
Alphabet.
Today, the Latvian standard alphabet consists of 33 letters.
The modern standard Latvian alphabet uses 22 unmodified letters of the Latin alphabet. The Latvian alphabet lacks "Q", "W", "X" and "Y". These letters are not used in Latvian for writing foreign personal and geographical names; instead they are adapted to Latvian phonology, orthography, and morphology, e. g. "Džordžs Volkers Bušs" (George Walker Bush). However, these four letters can be used in mathematics and sometimes in brand names: their names are "kū", "dubult vē", "iks" and "igrek". The Latvian alphabet has a further eleven letters formed by adding diacritic marks to some letters. The vowel letters "A", "E", "I" and "U" can take a macron to show length, unmodified letters being short. The letters "C", "S" and "Z", which in unmodified form are pronounced , and respectively, can be marked with a caron. These marked letters, "Č", "Š" and "Ž" are pronounced , and respectively. The letters "Ģ", "Ķ", "Ļ" and "Ņ" are written with a cedilla or a small comma placed below (or, in the case of the lowercase "g", above). They are modified (palatalized) versions of "G", "K", "L" and "N" and represent the sounds , , and . Non-standard varieties of Latvian add extra letters to this standard set.
The letters F and H appear only in loanwords.
Historically the letters CH, Ō and Ŗ were also used in the Latvian alphabet. The last of these stood for the palatalized dental trill which is still used in some dialects (mainly outside Latvia) but not in the standard language, and hence the letter Ŗ was removed from the alphabet on 5 June 1946, when the Latvian SSR legislature passed a regulation that officially replaced it with R in print. Similar reforms replacing CH with H, and Ō with O, were enacted over the next few years.
The letters CH, Ō and Ŗ continue to be used in print throughout most of the Latvian diaspora communities, whose founding members left their homeland before the post-World War II Soviet-era language reforms. An example of a publication in Latvia today, albeit one aimed at the Latvian diaspora, that uses the older orthography—including the letters CH, Ō and Ŗ—is the weekly newspaper "Brīvā Latvija".
Sound–spelling correspondences.
Latvian has a phonetic spelling. There are only a few exceptions to this:
Latvian orthography also uses digraphs "Dz", "Dž" and "Ie".
Old orthography.
The old orthography was based on that of German and did not represent the Latvian language phonemically. At the beginning it was used to write religious texts for German priests to help them in their work with Latvians. The first writings in Latvian were chaotic: there were as many as twelve variations of writing "Š". In 1631 the German priest Georg Mancelius tried to systematize the writing. He wrote long vowels according to their position in the word — a short vowel followed by "h" for a radical vowel, a short vowel in the suffix and vowel with a diacritic mark in the ending indicating two different accents. Consonants were written following the example of German with multiple letters. The old orthography was used until the 20th century when it was slowly replaced by the modern orthography.
Computer encoding.
Lack of software support of diacritics has caused an unofficial style of orthography, often called "translit", to emerge for use in situations when the user is unable to access Latvian diacritic marks on the computer or using cell phone. It uses only letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet, and letters not used in standard orthography are usually omitted. In this style, diacritics are replaced by digraphs:
Some people may find it difficult to use such methods and either write without any indication of missing diacritic marks or use digraphs only if the diacritic mark in question would make a semantic difference. There is yet another style, sometimes called "Pokémonism" (In Latvian Internet slang "Pokémon" is derogatory for adolescent), characterised by use of some elements of leet, use of non-Latvian letters (particularly w and x instead of v and ks), use of c instead of ts, use of z in endings, and use of mixed case.
Keyboard.
Standard QWERTY keyboards are used for writing in Latvian; diacritics are entered by using a dead key (usually ', occasionally ~). Some keyboard layouts use a modifier key AltGr (most notable of such is the Windows 2000 and XP built-in layout (Latvian QWERTY)). In the early 1990s, the Latvian ergonomic keyboard layout was developed. Although this layout may be available with language support software, it has not become popular because of a lack of keyboards with such a configuration.


Khachik Dashtents

Khachik Dashtents (; "Khachik Tonoyi Tonoyan", May 25, 1910 – March 9, 1974) was an ethnic Armenian Soviet writer, poet and translator.
Biography.
Khachik Dashtents was born in a shepherd's family on May 25, 1910 in Dashtadem, Sasun, Western Armenia (Turkey today).
After the Armenian Genocide, he moved to Yerevan and graduated from the Yerevan State University in 1932, and later studied at the Moscow State Linguistic University (graduating in 1940).
In 1934 he became a member of the Union of Soviet Writers.
Dashtents is an author of poetry collections ("Songbook", 1932; "Spring Songs", 1934; "Fire", 1936), "Tigran The Great," a historical drama (1947), translations from William Shakespeare, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and William Saroyan. The "Khodedan" (1950) and "Call of Plowmen" (published posthumously, in 1979) novels tell the tragic story of Western Armenians during World War I.
He is the father of filmmaker Tavros Dashtents.
He died in Yerevan, Armenia on March 9, 1974.


El Arnab

El Arnab is a traditional Arab solitaire based on the general equipment and gameplay of mancala games. It is played by the Kababish people of Sudan. The name "El Arnab" means "the rabbit".
Rules.
El Arnab's board is a mancala board comprising 2 rows of 3 pits each, with an additional larger pits ("stores") located at each end of the board. The game setup is as follows:
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To begin the game, the player takes all the seeds from the pit at the upper left corner of the rows, and relay-sows them counterclockwise. Sowing also includes the stores.
This relay sowing (and thus the game itself) never ends; it is meant to be just a pastime. It happens that every 27 circuits of the board, the board goes back to its initial setup.
In his 1925 article R. Davies stated that the pattern repeats every 26 circuits; but he miscounted. His informant, an elderly Arab, seems to have been aware of this; when Davies said he counted 26 the informant made a joke that apparently went over Davies' head.


Tamil keyboard

Tamil Keyboard is the keyboard layout used in Computers or any mobile devices to input Tamil language scripts.
The keyboard layout approved by Government of Tamil Nadu is Tamil 99. InScript is the Keyboard layout standardized by Government of India for inputting text in languages of India written in Brahmic scripts.
Tamil keyboards are often bilingual keyboards, combined primarily with English Language for ease of access and use.
Tamil 99.
Tamil 99 is a keyboard layout approved by the Tamil Nadu Government. The layout, along with several monolingual and bilingual fonts for use with the Tamil language, was approved by Government order on 13 June 1999.
Designed for use with a normal QWERTY keyboard, typing follows a consonant-vowel pattern. The arrangement of the characters allow for fast and simple typing for users familiar with the script.
InScript.
InScript (Indian Script) is the standard keyboard for Indian scripts. It is a touch typing keyboard layout for computer. This keyboard layout is standardized by Government of India for inputting text in languages of India written in Brahmic scripts, as well as the Santali language, written in the non-Brahmic Ol Chiki script. It was developed by Indian Government and supported by several public and private organisations. This is the standard keyboard for 12 Indian scripts including Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil and Telugu etc.
Usage.
Windows 10.
On Windows 10, Go to Settings.> Time & Language.> Region and Language.> Add new language.> Tamil (India) or Tamil (Sri Lanka) and select install. Then click Tamil (India) or Sri Lanka and select the options. Now select the Keyboard you want (Inscript or Tamil 99). Note: Tamil 99 is only available in Windows 10 April 2018 Update and higher.
iOS.
On iOS, Go to Settings.> General.> Keyboards.> Keyboards.> Add New Keyboard, and select Tamil, Select the required keyboard, such as Tamil99, Anjal or InScript.


Janice Biala

Janice Biala (September 11, 1903 – September 24, 2000) was a Polish-born American artist whose work, spanning seven decades, is well regarded both in France and the United States. Known for her "impeccable taste and remarkable intelligence", as well as her "intuitive feeling for composition and her orchestration of color", she made paintings of intimate interiors, still lifes, portraits of her friends, and cityscapes of the places she traveled. Her work, which defies easy classification, lies between figuration and abstraction. A modernist, she transformed her subjects into shape and color using "unexpected color relationships and a relaxed approach to interpreting realism."
Early life and education.
In 1903 Biala was born in Biała Podlaska, a small city in the Kingdom of Poland with an important Imperial Russian garrison. Her birth name was Schenehaia Tworkovska. She immigrated to New York in 1913, arriving with her mother, Esther, and brother, Yakov (Jacob). Her father, Hyman Tworkovsky, was a tailor who had emigrated New York earlier. Biala's parents changed their surname to Bernstein because a relative whom they listed as sponsor on their immigration documents bore that name. The family also Americanized its forenames. Biala, whose Hebrew name was Schenehaia, became Janice and Yakov became Jack. Jack would later change his surname to a simplified form of the original family name and, using that name, Jack Tworkov, would establish himself as a highly regarded painter of the New York School. Following her brother's lead, Janice Bernstein became Janice Tworkov and, in 1929, was naturalized as a U.S. citizen with that name.
Biala was educated in New York's public school system. At an early age she decided to become a professional artist and, during her high school years, she and friends got together for informal sketching sessions. When she was twenty she enrolled at the National Academy of Design's art course where Charles Hawthorne was teaching a life drawing class. At this time she also met Hawthorne's associate, Edwin Dickinson, who was teaching a class at the Art Students League. and in the summer of 1923 she convinced her brother Jack to accompany her to the artist colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in order to study with Hawthorne and Dickinson. During 1924 and 1925 she studied at Manhattan's Art Students League where Hawthorne was then teaching. In 1924 Dickinson made a portrait of her which shows a serious young woman, somberly dressed. Despite differences of medium and treatment, Biala's self-portrait of 1925 shows similarities of style. From Dickinson, Biala learned to focus on the essential elements of a subject, to see these elements as abstract forms on the two-dimensional plane of the canvas, and to select the color values that would become the key to the finished work. Dickinson recognized that color relationships are more important to the artist than single colors in isolation. As he did, she painted figuratively but she believed color harmonies to be more important than accurate representation of a subject. Their compositions tended toward bold, simplified shapes and were more reductively abstract and spatially flat than those of many of their contemporaries.
In 1929 and 1930 Biala participated in group shows at the G.R.D. Salon. G.R.D. was one of a few New York galleries that showed modernist paintings of both women and men. It was a non-profit gallery named in honor of Gladys Roosevelt Dick by her sister, Jean S. Roosevelt. Along with Biala's paintings, the 1929 show included works by E. Madeline Shiff, Virginia Parker, and E. Nottingham. In a review that appeared in "The New York Times", Lloyd Goodrich noted her fine feeling for colors and commented that her work showed similarities to the fauvist paintings of André Derain. This remark shows prescience since it was Derain's fellow fauvist, Henri Matisse, about whom she would later write "I have always had Matisse in my belly." The 1930 show, assembled by Agnes Weinrich, contained works by Provincetown artists, including Charles Demuth, Oliver Chaffee, Karl Knaths, William and Lucy L'Engle, Niles Spencer, Marguerite and William Zorach, as well as ones by Biala and her brother Jack.
During the 1920s Biala had painted using the name Janice Tworkov. Soon after the close of the G.R.D. exhibition in February she changed her name to Biala. She adopted the new name on advice from her friend and fellow Provincetown painter, William Zorach, in order to avoid confusion with her brother Jack. She had been supporting herself with a series of low paying jobs and when the G.R.D. shows had not produced sales of her work she accepted an invitation from her friend, Eileen Lake to accompany her on a trip to Paris. There, on May 1, she met the author, Ford Madox Ford. Although they did not marry, the two became inseparable, living and working together until Ford's death in 1939. Less than half Ford's age, she was vigorous, ambitious, and gradually becoming more confident in her ability as an artist. In contrast, he continued to write prolifically but his best work was behind him and his health was declining. The two of them endured dire financial straits, often raising their own vegetables in a kitchen garden attached to the villa they rented near Toulon. Biala made portraits of Ford and contributed artwork to his books. Ford incorporated versions of Biala in his writings, including a poem, "Coda," a late (1936) addition to the "buckshee" sequence of poems composed in 1932. The poem is addressed to Haïchka, the diminutive form of her Hebrew name, Schenehaia, meaning "pretty creature." It celebrates "all my past and all your promise" and it praises her for possessing a magnetic personality, always unpredictable, and for bringing vitality and productive energy to their relationship. Despite their continual struggle against poverty, they managed to maintain close contacts with writers and artists, including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Constantin Brâncuși.
In 1931 Biala's work appeared in New York at Macy Galleries. In this exhibition of Provincetown artists she was identified, anachronistically, as "J. Tworkov." A year later, as Janice Ford Biala, she contributed paintings to a show called "1940" at Parc des Expositions, Paris. Reporting on this show, a New York critic said "The things and figures in her painting gravely turn about as if in some slow and harmonious joy. Not a hilarious joy nor a country dance. Something much richer and more contemplative than hilarity." At this time she wrote to her brother Jack "For the first time in my life I'm convinced that I am really an artist."
In 1935 Biala was given her first solo exhibition when "Paintings of Provence by Biala" appeared at the Georgette Passedoit Gallery, New York, from April 25 to May 9. The paintings came from illustrations she prepared for Ford's book, "Provence: From Minstrels to the Machine".
Mature style.
Along with Dickinson, Ford helped shape Biala's aesthetic vision by encouraging her spirit of experimentation, devotion to creative freedom, and the seeking of poetic truth in preference to literal facts. From both men she absorbed a passion for eliminating unnecessary detail. Dickinson emphasized areas of color, which he called "spots," as the starting point for a painting. He spoke of "two spots being pulled up together, which is, of course, necessary because there's no such thing as one color. They all exist in harmonious common relationships." In 1937 Biala enlarged upon this thought in a rare public statement on art. She said "The very first spot of paint you put on your canvas sets the note for everything that must follow. Just as in writing a novel ... no word or phrase must be there just because you happen to like it, so each spot of paint in your picture must lead up to some definite movement and must connect with every other spot of paint in the picture. Because red is not red itself, its full quality of redness only becomes apparent when it has green beside it or the full quality of green is brought out only when it has purple beside it and so forth. Then against the color you play your forms, lines, and texture." The occasion for the lecture was a visit to Olivet College in Olivet, Michigan, where Ford had been appointed writer and critic in residence. In January 1937 Biala had exhibited paintings and drawings at the Georgette Passedoit Gallery in New York. In August the show was mounted at the Denver Art Museum in Colorado, and in November she brought it to Olivet when Ford began his residency there.
She and Ford were back in France the following year where Biala was given her first French solo exhibition at Galerie Zack. That gallery presented Biala's paintings in a second one-person show in 1939. Ford died at Deauville, France, in 1939 and Biala became his literary executrix. With the outbreak of World War II she returned to New York where she spent the next five years. In 1943 she married a fellow artist, Daniel Brustlein, an illustrator who, using the pen name "Alain," made covers for the New Yorker magazine.
In successive years between 1941 and 1945 Biala was given solo exhibitions at the Bignou Gallery in New York and by that time there could be little doubt that she had succeeded in establishing herself as a professional artist. In 1947 she and Brustlein returned to live in France where she exhibited regularly at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher. While continuing to live in France she and Brustlein returned periodically to New York. She remained close to her brother Jack and, in consequence, became one of the few female artists associated with the New York School. While not herself an abstract expressionist, Biala fostered the movement, particularly through the support she gave Willem de Kooning. In the early 1940s she convinced her New York dealer to show some of de Kooning's paintings, Biala cared for him when he was ill, and Biala joined him in discussions at the abstract expressionist discussion group called Studio 35. Like Lee Krasner, Louise Bourgeois, Joan Mitchell, and others, Biala was not treated as an equal by the male artists of the New York School or by critics such as Harold Rosenberg. Despite her friendship with abstract expressionist artists, Biala retained a unique approach to her art in which no art movement showed dominance. As one critic put it, "she continued to paint exquisitely crafted canvases in a personal style that, even now, resists classification."
In the 1950s her work appeared frequently in solo and group exhibitions at New York's Stable Gallery and the Galerie Jeanne Bucher in Paris. Regarding a one-person show held in 1953, a critic praised the "harmonies of tone" and quality of draftsmanship in her work and said "the show is one of the most exhilarating and satisfying events of the whole season... Miss Biala's art strikes me as the happiest result of an abstract training governed by a humane concern with the values of the world about us." Describing shows held in 1955 and 1959, critics said her paintings showed a greater freedom than they had before and one said, "Where before Miss Biala constructed with clearly organized planes—using both color and form to create recession—now her brush moves out in freedom, allowing intrinsic rhythms to spring up and subside."
Later life and work.
During the 1960s and for the rest of her life, Biala's work was frequently exhibited in solo and group shows. Through the 1980s many of these shows appeared in Paris at Galerie Jacob and the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, Salles Wilson. Others appeared in New York at the Grüenebaum Gallery. In the 1990s she was given frequent solo exhibitions at the Kouros Gallery and after 2000 at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, both in New York.
In 1981, after six decades of painting, the quality of her work was as good as ever. A critic said as much regarding her one-person show at the Grüenebaum Gallery that year. He wrote, "The Structure of her pictures often looks quite simple, ... but is not simple at all. The difficulty and complexity have been refined into lean, direct gestures and a lyrical, concentrated economy of form." Of a solo exhibition in 1989, when she was 85 years old, a critic wrote that her work showed the vigor of a person 30 years younger. "Her painting," he wrote, "is a blend of realism and fancy. In her interiors, cityscapes, landscapes and portraits, some colors and shapes hover and run; others asset themselves suddenly and then stay put, fixing space in a way that is reminiscent of Bonnard and Hofmann."
Following Biala's death in 2000, another critic said of her paintings that they "seem touched by a tough ingenuousness — never sentimental or naïve, but slightly nostalgic in their playful intimacy. Suffusing them is the outlook of a painter who has found what she needs and knows what she wants to do. The results glow with a wondrous candor." Finally, in connection with a retrospective exhibition in 2013, the show's curator told an interviewer that "Biala was a painter of impeccable taste and remarkable intelligence, She had an intuitive feeling for composition and her orchestration of color was, at times, breathtaking."
Family life.
In 1903 Biala was born in Biała Podlaska, a small city in eastern Poland located near the border with Russia. At that time Biała Podlaska was within the Russian Empire. Long a trading center, the town's population then numbered about 13,000 people, half of whom—including Biala's family—were Jewish. With one exception resources do not give the month or day of her birth. The exception is the "Biala" web site which gives September 11 but does not indicate the source of this information.
Her father's name was Hyman and her mother's Esther. He was the son of Benjamin Tworkovsky and his wife Celia. In addition to Biala and Jack, their children were Celia, Aaron, Abraham, and Morris.
Hyman Tworkovsky was a tailor who worked for the Russian Army. He emigrated to New York some years before his wife and younger children and he worked in a tailor shop in New York's Lower East Side. The surname was changed to Bernstein to conform with the name of the sponsor. Although Biala and Jack changed their names from Bernstein to Tworkov when they became adults, Hyman and Esther retained the name Bernstein. Jack said his family's sponsor was his father's brother. He did not explain why his brother's surname was Bernstein.
During her life Biala went by quite a few names. Her birth name in Hebrew was Schenehaia Tworkovska. After immigration this became Janice Bernstein. As a young adult she became Janice Tworkov (as mentioned). During the 1920s she painted under this name or J. Tworkov. In the early 1920s she married a friend of Jack's, the painter, Lee Gatch. The marriage, which was not successful, ended in first in separation and, in 1935, divorce. She did not use the names Mrs. Janice Gatch or Mrs. Lee Gatch, and was infrequently called by either name. In 1930, at the suggestion of fellow painter, William Zorach, she chose a new name so as to avoid confusion with her brother, the other J. Tworkov. She chose Biala, the name of her birthplace. In the 1930s, while living with Ford Madox Ford, she was sometimes referred to as Mrs. Ford (though they were not married) or Janice Ford Biala. After her marriage in 1942 to Daniel Brustlein, she retained Biala as her name but was occasionally called Mrs. Brustlein. At least on one occasion she used his professional name, calling herself Janice ("Alain") Biala. In one news account she was called Janice Tworkov Ford Brustlein. She most frequently called herself Janice Biala or simply Biala but was also sometimes referred to as Janice T. Biala.
Until the 1940s Biala did not enjoy a steady income from any source. She worked odd jobs in the 1920s and her life with Ford Madox Ford was hand-to-mouth. After marrying Brustlein, however, his success in selling drawings to the "New Yorker" (for which he frequently produced cover art) and her growing reputation as a painter brought in a gradually increasing funds and by 1953 they were able to buy a small farmhouse in Peapack, New Jersey, for their use on their return to the United States from their residence in Paris. For both of them, Paris was "home." In the 1980s Biala told an interviewer that she fell in love with France when she first travelled there in 1930: "In some ways, it reminded me of the place I was born in. And when I came to France I felt as if I had come home. I smelled the same smells of bread baking and dogs going around in a very busy way, you know, as if they knew what they were about. It really was extraordinarily human." Having been naturalized in 1929, she never gave up her U.S. citizenship and maintained that she did not "have the feeling of nationality or roots," but "always had the feeling that I belong where my easel is."
The "Chronology" section of the Biala web site gives a full chronology of events in Biala's life.
Exhibitions.
This selected list of solo and group exhibitions from 1929 to 1945 comes from news accounts and internet sources.
This list of solo and group exhibitions from 1945 onward comes from the Biala web site.
Books by Biala.
Biala furnished cover art and illustrations for some of Ford's books and, in the 1950s she wrote children's books. This list comes from the WorldCat online catalog, the Library of Congress catalog, and other sources. It is in chronological order.
Further reading.
See the "Publications" section of the Biala web site.


Zbigniew Kupczynski

Zbigniew Kupczynski (born November 28, 1928) is a Polish-Canadian abstract expressionist artist known for his colorful portrait paintings of celebrities and children. His work has been the subject of hundreds of exhibitions throughout Europe, North America, Australia and Japan since the 1950s. Today, Kupczynski's works are held in private and corporate collections worldwide, including the estates of former US President Richard Nixon and Pope John Paul II.
Life.
Kupczynski was born in Wilno, Poland, the only child of an officer in the Polish army. He started drawing with crayons as a child and was introduced to painting by his father. At the age of 11, Kupczynski escaped to Warsaw with his mother during the Soviet invasion of Poland, while his father went to Britain to aid in the war effort.
While Kupczynski is known for his abstract and figurative works, he has experimented with a wide range of mediums. In the 1950s and 1960s, his paintings were predominantly oils on canvas. In the late 1960s, he experimented with metal compositions, which were exhibited in Poland, Sweden and Denmark. Acrylic paint has been his preferred medium since the 1970s, when he immigrated to Canada.
Described as "one of the wild boys of Polish art" by Harold Schonberg of "The New York Times", many of Kupczynski's portrait paintings are characterised by his unique personal style, use of bright colors on canvas, and trademark mini-scenes on the accentuated noses of his subjects.
Career.
In 1946, Kupczynski moved to Wroclaw to receive formal training at the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1952, Kupczynski became a member of The Association of Polish Artists, but the country's socialist realism policy barred his work from exhibition due to his tendencies towards expressionism and semi-abstract art.
A change in Poland's government in the mid 1950s precipitated new trends in abstract expressionism and rising interest in Kupczynski's work. In 1956, French artist Andre Pignon visited Kupczynski in Warsaw and was appalled by his living and working conditions. Pignon's intervention resulted in the Ministry of Arts and Culture in Poland allocating a studio to Kupczynski.
By the late 1950s, Kupczynski had attracted the attention of both Polish and Western critics, and he was featured in various publications, including "Tygodnik", "Stolica", "Przeglad Kulturalny", "Wspolczesnosc", "Po Prostu", "Munchen Merkur", and "Tagebuch". He was one of three artists featured in a documentary by The National Film Board in Poland, and he was awarded a government grant that enabled him to continue training in Paris. This led to an exclusive contract with the Galerie André Schoeller and further exhibitions in Poland, France, Austria, Switzerland, and the United States. In 1959, while on a trip to Warsaw, then-United Stated Vice President Richard Nixon purchased one of his paintings.
By the early 1960s, Kupczynski had been commissioned to paint the interior of a church in Kiełpino, Poland, as well as a mural in Oświęcim, Poland. He had exhibited works in both the United States and Europe, including a one-man show at the Miami Museum of Modern Art. In 1962, Kupczynski initiated the first outdoor modern art exhibition in Warsaw on the walls of Barbican in Kraków, evoking provocative cultural and political dialogue between artists and the hostile communist regime.
In 1963, Kupczynski's art was included in an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art alongside the works of Picasso, Georges Braque, Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, and Paul Klee. In 1964, Polish composer Tadeusz Baird chose Kupczynski's artwork for the album cover of "Modern Music Tastes".
In 1966, Kupczynski was included in Germany's most prestigious art encyclopedia, "Thieme-Becker", and the world's largest contemporary art exhibition, the Kassel documenta, as well as the Repertorium Artis.
In 1980, with his wife (tapestry artist Eva Kupczynski), Kupczynski opened the Kupczynski Studio Gallery in Vancouver. Kupczynski devoted much of the 1980s to commissioned work, including posters for the Vancouver Opera, a ceramic mural for British Columbia's Children's Hospital, and a poster entitled "Pax in Terra" to commemorate Pope John Paul II's visit to Canada.
Kupczynski has been featured in many art shows in Canada and has had numerous exhibitions abroad, at the Drian Galleries in London, UK, the Art Emporium Gallery in Seattle, the Carimor Gallery in New York, and the Bancho Gallery and Atagoyama Gallery in Tokyo.
In 2001 he returned to Poland for two exhibitions, in the Art and Forma Gallery and the Gallery of the President in Warsaw. In 2002, another exhibition of his work was held at the Historical Museum of Warsaw, and in 2007 at the Polonia House, Kraków, Poland.
Kupczynski has written and been the subject of several books, including "Journey to the Red Desert", "Three Hundred Years Of Kupczynski", "Art Warrior" and the ebook "The Worlds of Kupczynski".
In 2020, Kupcyznski was featured in the documentary "The Painter from Nowhere" by Christian Trineer.


Vicky Colombet

Vicky Colombet is a French-born American visual Artist. She lives in New York and Paris.
Life.
Born in Paris in 1953, Vicky Colombet grew up in Paris in a family that was artistic and intellectual on her father’s side and nomadic on her mother’s side. Her mother’s search for her ancestry led the family to travel often to Asia. The exposure to Asian Culture at an early age, has been a major influence.
An avid reader of poetry and philosophy Colombet began as a writer and wrote two essays in Les Temps Modernes “Les Femmes s’entêtent" Involved in the Feminist movement in Paris, she met Simone de Beauvoir in 1974 and co-founded with her, and , Annie Sugier and Annie Cohen “La Ligue du Droit des Femmes”. Vicky Colombet started a newspaper “Les Nouvelles Féministes” (1974 to 1977) with Simone de Beauvoir as the Editor-in-chief. The writer Christiane Rochefort (1917-1998) who became a close friend encouraged her to pursue an artistic career. The painter Henri Dimier (1899-1986) who was an iconoclast with an Asian approach to the practice of art became her mentor. And later, having the opportunity to meet with Agnes Martin in the last years of her life, Colombet was influenced by Martin’s rigor and her withdrawal from the world.
Work.
In 2001, Colombet moved to America and became a U.S. citizen in 2013. In many of her paintings and drawings, as well as in her major architectural work the sandblasted curved glass wall of Villa Nurbs, several elements (air, water, earth) merge to manifest the dynamic flux of the universe. "Breathing" is the character Colombet looks for in a work. Colombet never stopped drawing, as a vital exercise of hand and mind and as a record-like notes for the fiction she would unfold on canvas. Each of Colombet's paintings is the result of a long process that starts with the choice of the linen she handpicks in Spain or France. Colombet makes her own primer and grinds her own pigments. ""Her paintings… work both as pure abstraction and as studies of nature. They can manage to seem resolutely nonobjective while conveying the weight of a study of mountains or stone. In fact, her philosophy of form can be said to occupy a point where abstraction and nature meet. Colombet’s singular vision juggles the opposition of representation and abstraction. The notable intelligence of her art is, indeed, based upon an objective, nearly scholarly research into the relations between the two. Vicky Colombet extends our knowledge of art’s ability to communicate effects that are inherently mysterious but truly compelling as things to see.”"
Biography.
Recipient of the Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation award in 2001, the Pollok-Krasner Foundation grant in 2014. Vicky Colombet is a member of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts studio program since 2004. Her work has been exhibited extensively on both sides of the Atlantic and is in a number of important private collections in the US and in Europe. Notably, her two first solo shows in the United States were at Haim Chanin Fine Arts in New York and Evo Gallery in Santa Fe, both reviewed in Art in America. From 2005 to 2012, she collaborated with the Spanish architect to create a monumental glass work (150x 12 feet) inside the Villa Nurbs. From 2012 to 2015 she had several group shows at Bernard Jacobson gallery. In 2016 she was in a three-person show at the Museum of Fine Arts at St Petersburg, FL. The Albright-Knox Art Gallery purchased one of her large painting "Antarctica" series the same year. Vicky Colombet is the first Contemporary artist to be included in the Musée Marmottan Monet collection. Vicky Colombet is represented in New York by The Elkon Gallery and in Paris by the Galerie Baudoin Lebon .
Bibliography.
"Time Travel" at Leonard Hutton Galleries (Master Drawings New York 2017), White Hot Magazine, January 2017
"Measured Life", Creative Loafing Tampa, 2016
"Navigating Abstraction" Wall Street International
"A Philosophy of Form": In Vicky Colombet, Abstraction and Nature Meet on Equal Terms", Jonathan Goodman, artcritical, December 2014
“Coherent Surface, Radiant Light", at Bernard Jacobson Gallery, Art News, Barbara A. MacAdam, New York September 2012
Spanish TVE documentary "Continuara" 2012
"At Home With Town & Country" Sarah Medford, Hearst Books, 2010
On the Radar: ""Vicky Colombet: Terres de Brume / A New Geography" at Bleu Acier", Creative Loafing, Franki Weddington, 2009
“On Not Knowing Where to Stand” / "Mirando, Cayendo, Viajando" (catalogue), Galeria Fidel Balaguer, Barcelona, Spain. Lyle Rexer, April 2007
"Vicky Colombet at Haim Chanin Fine Arts", artforum.com's "Critics' Picks",T. Nikki Cesare, Sept 2007
"Art of Conversation", Creative Loafing, Tampa, Megan Voeller, 2006
"Nothing to see from the ground", Nena Tsouti-Schillinger, 2004
"Winds", Haim Chanin Fine Arts, 2004
"Canapé" February 2004 edition CUNY TV » City University Television
"Abstractions au Carré", Carré Sainte Anne, Montpellier,1997
Public Collections.
Albright-Knox Museum
Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris
Museum of Fine Arts (St. Petersburg, Florida)
Tucson Museum of Art (Arizona)


Knox Martin

Knox Martin (born February 12, 1923) is an American painter, sculptor and muralist.
Born in Barranquilla, Colombia, he studied at the Art Students League of New York from 1946 till 1950. He is one of the leading members of the New York School of artists and writers. He lives and works in New York City.
Early life.
Knox Martin is the oldest son of Lieutenant William Knox Martin, a Virginia-born early aviation pioneer and flyer, and his wife Isabel Vieco, who were married in the Canal Zone in Panama in 1921. Knox Martin Sr., painter, poet, early test pilot, was the first man to fly over the Andes mountains. Six years after his marriage, Martin Sr. was fatally injured in an automobile accident in Watertown, New York. His widow Isabel relocated with her three young sons from Salem, Virginia to New York City.
Early career.
After serving in the United States Coast Guard during World War II, Martin attended the Art Students League of New York on the G.I. Bill from 1946 to 1950, where he studied with Harry Sternberg, Vaclav Vytlacil, Will Barnet, and Morris Kantor. In 1954, Martin's friend Franz Kline placed a painting of his in the Stable Gallery Annual. Charles Egan of the Charles Egan Gallery saw Martin's painting at the Stable Gallery and asked him to show his work in a one-man show for the tenth anniversary of the Egan Gallery.
Work.
Knox Martin is best known for his repertory of signs and symbols that allude to nature and, in particular, to the female form. Flatly and freely painted in brilliant colors, his works have often been executed on a grand scale, as in the outdoor wall painting, "Woman with Bicycle", at West Houston and MacDougal Streets in Manhattan. He mostly creates painting, sculpture and wall paintings using media such as acrylic, collage, fresco, ink drawing (pen and ink), mixed media/multimedia, and oil.
One of his wall paintings in New York City is the twelve-story mural "Venus". Painted in 1970, it is located on the south side of Bayview Correctional Facility at 19th Street and the West Side Highway.
"Traditionally the goddess of love and fertility, Venus represents woman, erotic and supple, but it also conveys Martin's love affair with New York. Venus is his love poem to the city where he has always lived, a place that is part of his being. The feminine, curvilinear shapes of the image are in direct contrast with the straight forms that intersect the composition. The overwhelming size of this enormous mural only intensifies the experience of female shapes, the linear aspects of the painted composition, and of the surrounding architecture. In an era when art was reaching out to the masses with pop culture, this huge mural was Martin's way of touching a public that would never venture into an art gallery."
Collections.
Martin's work is included in the collections of Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Art Students League of New York, Brooklyn Museum of Art, National Academy of Design, National Arts Club, New York University, Addison Gallery of American Art, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Art Institute of Chicago, Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Baltimore Museum of Art, Berkeley Art Museum, Blanton Museum of Art, Boca Raton Museum of Art, Chrysler Museum of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, Hand Art Center, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Heckscher Museum of Art, Hofstra University Museum, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Ithaca Museum, Lowe Art Museum, George Washington University, Montclair Art Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Newark Museum, Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Portland Art Museum, Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Reading Public Museum, Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, Springfield Art Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Toledo Museum of Art, University of Kentucky Art Museum, University of Maine Museum of Art, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Wellesley College, William Benton Museum of Art, Israel Museum, Ludwig Museum in Budapest, and the Bibliothèque Nationale.
In 2002 Martin was named to the National Academy of Design.
Teaching.
Knox Martin gave a legendary master class at the Art Students League of New York for over 45 years, where he mentored generations of artists. Earlier he taught at Yale Graduate School of Art, first as visiting critic in art, invited by Jack Tworkov, and then as Professor of Art. He has also taught at New York University, the University of Minnesota, and the International School of Painting, Drawing and Sculpture in Umbria, Italy.
Recent work.
September 15 to November 13, 2010 Martin had a one-man show of his Black and White Paintings at Woodward Gallery in New York City.
October 6, 2012 to April 6, 2013, Martin had a solo exhibition of recent paintings, SHE, at the Sam & Adele Golden Gallery at Golden Artist Colors in New Berlin, New York.
September 13 to October 26, 2013: Knox Martin Exhibition SHE at LGTripp Gallery in Philadelphia
On November 14, 2016, France conferred the insignia of the Legion of Honour on Martin for his contribution to the liberation of France during World War II.
From May 2 to June 1, 2019, Martin had a solo show, Knox Martin: Radical Structures, at Hollis Taggart Galleries in New York City.
October 18 to December 7, 2019, Martin had a solo show, Knox Martin: New York 1962-2019, at Nancy Littlejohn Fine Art in Houston, Texas.
July 18 to October 11, 2020, Martin had a solo museum exhibition, "Knox Martin: Living Legend", at the Arlington Museum of Art in Arlington, Texas.
Knox Martin is represented by Hollis Taggart Galleries.


Korea Janggi Association

The Korea Janggi Association was founded in 1956 for the promotion of Janggi, or "Korean chess", and is based in Seoul, South Korea.


Lionbridge

Lionbridge Technologies, Inc is an American company that provides translation and localization solutions. Based in Waltham, Massachusetts, the company has operations in 26 countries.
History.
The company was founded in 1996. In 2005, they acquired Bowne Global Solutions, then the largest localization provider worldwide. They acquired Darwin Zone, a digital marketing services agency based in Costa Rica, and Clay Tablet Technologies, a content connectivity software firm, in 2014.
In 2015, they acquired Zurich-based CLS Communication, a translation services provider, and Geotext, a legal translation company. In December 2016, it was announced that Lionbridge entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by H.I.G. Capital. The deal was announced closed in May, 2017 and, subsequently, the company was delisted from Nasdaq. Lionbridge is now a privately-held company and part of the portfolio of H.I.G. companies.
In July 2017, John Fennelly was named Chief Executive Officer. The founder of the company, Rory Cowan, is Chairman of the Board of Directors.
In December 2018, Lionbridge fully acquired Tokyo-based Gengo, a crowdsourced translation and AI training data provider.
In November 2020, Lionbridge entered into an agreement with Telus International to sell AI division.
Operations.
Lionbridge provides translation and localization solutions in 350+ languages. Including its US headquarters, the company has offices in 26 countries.
Controversies/court cases.
A securities class action lawsuit involving the company was filed in July 2001 under "Samet v. Lionbridge Technologies, Inc. et al." in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.
In 2006, a Lionbridge employee was awarded noneconomic damages of USD 366,250 and economic damages of USD 221,433 due to failure by the company to fulfil its obligation to help the employee obtain a green card.
A 2008 court case involved an unfair dismissal claim by a former Lionbridge employee fired for union recruitment activities at the company's Warsaw office to protect employment conditions. Protests in support were held in Denmark, Spain, Poland, and Ireland.


Ihor Paliy

Ihor Paliy (Igor Palii, , born 10 May 1963) is a contemporary Ukrainian painter, specialized in abstractionism, a combination of Abstract art and Realism. The technique he mainly uses is Oil on canvas. He is a member of the Community of Artists of Ukraine.
Biography.
Igor Palii was born in 1963 in Drohobych, a regional center of Western Ukraine, in a family of musicians and child care workers. In 1986 he finished faculty of architecture at Lviv Polytechnic National University. After graduation he was involved in various architectural projects combined with canvas painting.
Sakhalin period.
In 1986, Igor Palii moved to Sakhalin island.
Polish period.
Moved back to Krakow, Poland in 1992. In 1998 Palii’s first personal exhibition in Krakow was organized. Actively participates in polish cultural life and charity campaigns. In 2004 Igor Palii participated in international Art auctions, where his oil-painted canvas “Bez Tytułu. 2001” (“Without A Title.2001”) was sold for 2,772 USD.
Turn to steel art.
Since 2002 Igor Palii turned to new art stream beginning to create his own works of art made of steel. The main cause of such turn was the need of three-dimensional figures as an addition to Palii’s paintings in a current project. In order to fulfill his new vision, Igor Palii establishes his own small enterprise of steel art production. The new turn resulted in such projects as decoration of trade center “Sophia” in the west of Ukraine, restaurant “Flamingo” in Stryi, Ukraine, “Museum of Beer”, “Aivengo” in Lviv, Ukraine. In 1999-2000 creates and implements the project of restaurant-branch “Egypt” (Stryi, Ukraine).


Richard Keyes

Richard D. (Dick) Keyes (October 19, 1930 – August 27, 2012) was an American painter associated with abstract expressionism, impressionist landscapes and the California Plein-Air Painting revival. Keyes was a Professor Emeritus at Long Beach City College, where he taught life drawing and painting for 30 years, between 1961 and 1991. He continued to teach, lecture and demonstrate throughout his retirement, with groups such as the Huntington Beach Art League.
Biography.
Richard Keyes was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1930. His parents, Richard and Estella,
encouraged his interest in art early on, and enrolled him in an art school at the age of
16. This propelled him to attend Highland Park Community College and Wayne State University in Detroit.
Keyes then served in the United States Air Force, during the Korean War. Upon his discharge from the Air Force and after returning to the United States, he attended the University of Michigan, earning his BA in Design in 1957. After marrying, he and his wife Carol moved to California, where he enrolled in the higher education program in Art at the University of California, Berkeley. While at Berkeley, he studied under artists David Park, Glenn Wessels and Erle Loran, and in 1958, he received his Masters in Painting. His style of painting at this time was Abstract Expressionist, and the Berkeley experience was very important to him, as he said it solidified his awareness and control of the abstract in visual art.
Within several years, Keyes' work shifted to abstracted landscapes. After a period of making
welded steel sculptures, he returned to painting, though in a more realistic, yet impressionistic
style. His most frequent subjects were the great rolling landscapes and seascapes typical
of California's Central and South Coasts, but he also painted in much of the Sierra Nevada Mountains of eastern California.
After his retirement, Keyes studied with California Art Club members Ken Auster, Roger Armstrong, Jeff Horn and Mario Mirkovich. He continued to be a member of several artists groups, such as the California Plein-Air Painters Association and Laguna Beach Plein-Air Painters Association. He exhibited his work every summer at the Art-A-Fair Festival, in Laguna Beach, California, only stopping these shows due to his declining health. He died at home of complications from heart failure at the age of 81.


Abdul-Tawab Yossef

Abdel-Tawab Yossef Ahmed Yossef (Arabic: ), an Egyptian author, translator and publisher of publications issued by the school and the university. He was born in the village of Shanra in Beni Suef Governorate in Egypt on October 1, 1928. He obtained a BA degree in political science from Cairo University. Then after graduating from the university, He worked as a supervisor for school radio programs at the Ministry of Education. Then he headed the Department of Journalism, Radio and Television. He works so until he devoted himself to writing for children since 1975. He had the idea of issuing the first Islamic magazine for children under the name of Paradise ( ALfirdaws) in 1969, and he established the first conference for child culture in 1970. He established the Children’s society, as well as the first to present work for children. He specialized in children’s literature and occupied a prominent position in this field. He was considered one of the most prominent pioneers in children’s literature and copied the standard literary production in the Arab world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
His writing was characterized by its sweetness, sophistication and accurate information. He was distinguished by his wide culture and concerns to present everything that is useful. Abdel Tawab's books were printed about 25 million copies between Egypt, Beirut, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar and Muscat. Some of his books have been translated into English, French, German, Persian, Indonesian, Chinese and Malaysian. While Joseph translated works for children, including The Birth of the Messenger in Anderson's Eyes .. A scene in Constantinople by the Danish writer and poet Hans Christian Andersen.
Among the most prominent prizes he received were the 2000 Bologna International Children's Book Fair for his book The Life of Muhammad in Twenty Stories; State Prize for Children's Literature in 1975; The State Prize of Appreciation for Child Culture in 1981; And the King Faisal International Prize for Arabic Literature in 1991; The Armed Forces Prize for Literature in October 1992; The first prize in the competition for the best children's writer in 1998; The Suzanne Mubarak Prize in 1999 and 2000; With the Order of Sciences and Arts, First Class; State Merit Prize for Children’s Literature in 1981; The Order of the Republic is of the second class; UNESCO World Literacy Prize in 1975. And the gold medal from the Arab Broadcasting Union. He passed away on 28 September 2015.
His life.
His birth, childhood and youth.
Sons of Abd al-Tawab Yusef, from the right: Issam, then Hisham, then Lubna.
Abdel Tawab Youssef was born in the village of Shanra, in the city of Al-Fashn, in the governorate of Beni Suef, on October 1, 1928. He received his primary and secondary education in the city of Beni Suef. He lived his childhood in the villages of Egypt and expressed this in his stories and creative works, as he used to rent novels and books to read and then repeat their story to his friends who are children. This is the reason that led to his uniqueness, later, in the way he wrote for children, as he imagined himself among children and spoke to them, which makes the reader participate in thinking and opinion in the story he read.
He moved to Cairo in 1945 to begin his university studies at the Faculty of Economics and Political Science at Cairo University until he obtained a bachelor’s degree in 1949. Six months after his graduation in January 1950, his father passed away, which posed a great challenge to him in his life, as he decided to move to Cairo With his mother and three sisters, between the ages of six and ten, to live, earn a living and educate his sisters. He obtained a master's degree in 1953.
His Marriage.
In 1956, he married Natila Ibrahim Rashid, former editor-in-chief of Samir Magazine and Crescent Books for Children, winner of the State Prize in Children's Literature in 1978 and the First Class Medal of Science and Arts. They gave birth to their three children, Lubna, in 1957, and she is a professor at the Department of English at the Faculty of Arts at Cairo University and the faculty vice-dean for postgraduate studies. Hisham in 1959, a diplomat and was the official spokesman and head of the office of the Secretary-General of the Arab League, and now he is the head of the relief unit in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; And Essam in 1965, where he was a managing director of the Egyptian International Company for Environmental Protection and is currently working as a general manager for Montana Studios for Film Production, and the author of two novels A Quarter Gram in 2008 and two officers in 2014.
Years of work.
Children's radio programs were the starting point in his career, as it gained him experience in the audio and audio field, and he worked hard to write works that combine pleasure and keep pace with circumstances, events and occasions, and this was in the sixties. His first children's work was broadcast on the Papa Charu program on December 19, 1950. Since then, he has written thousands of programs for children, which were presented on all Arab radio stations. He worked as a supervisor for school radio programs at the Ministry of Education after graduating from the university from 1950 to 1960. Then he headed the Department of Journalism, Radio and Television in them from 1960 to 1971; Then he headed the Culture Department from 1971 to 1975. In the early seventies, his first trips to the outside world was to Europe, and on this trip he got acquainted with new dimensions in the field of children's literature, then his interest in new dimensions increased when the Cairo International Book Fair was held, which allowed him to learn about the various schools and trends that interest children and write for him. In all its life stages.
And he chose to write in all areas of knowledge such as the religious aspect, nationalism, national values, educational attempts, science and its fields, the Arabic language, its nobility, ancient and modern, humanistic trends, recreation and entertainment, writing for the child and about the child and childhood. Until he devoted himself to writing for children since 1975, after a five-year break in political work. Despite what Abdel-Tawab wrote about children, he considers himself more a reader than a writer. He stated in one of his press interviews, saying: “He showed me more of a reader than I am a writer, and during my travels I bought thousands of books until I had a library that says those who visited it from the English And the Americans, it is the largest home library for children in the world. ” The large number of children's books that he bought for the greatest children's book in the world caused Youssef to buy an apartment in which he deposited 30,000 books for children, left 10,000 books in his house, and deposited 5,000 books in his son’s library.
Abdel Tawab Youssef has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Association of the Protectors of the Arabic Language since its inception and of the Children's Culture Committee of the Supreme Council of Culture since its inception, where he was its deputy rapporteur and the Family and Child Committee of the Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs, founder of the Egyptian Writers Union, and a member of the board of directors for twenty years. He served as Secretary-General for three years and witnessed the Federation’s symposium on children's literature in Damascus, Baghdad and Bani Ghazi. The writer is considered a record holder in his literary production, as he presented 595 books for children printed in Egypt, 125 books for children that were printed in the Arab countries, and 40 books for adults.
literary style.
His reading at an early age had a great and influential role in his collection of references, as he read about international thought and literature, which made him exceed his age, and this literary treasure, later, in the form of literature and children's stories, was taken out, where he considered caring for this type of literature as a civilized feature that means dealing with the future science and planning for it. The writer's literary production is a reflection of his upbringing, as Yusef lived his childhood in the villages of Egypt and spoke about it, and he expressed this clearly in his literary works, and he used to narrate that in his childhood he used to rent novels and books to read them and then return their story to his children friends, which made him a master storyteller and storyteller.
Abdel Tawab was unique in a style that he created for himself in writing for children, and no one preceded him, which is to imagine himself among the children and talk to them, which makes the reader participate in thinking and opinion in the story he read. The family climate in which he was raised played another role in his literary style, as he grew up in a middle class that made his writing influenced by the religious stories he presented in the form of hadiths for children. Abdel Tawab considered that the lack of creativity in some children's literature writers is the obstacle that stands in the way of the proliferation of literary production, as some writers are content with reformulating old stories only.
Youssef took an independent approach to writing, highlighting the focus on Islamic values and working on the merging of scientific and religious information at the same time. He says in this: “My methodology in writing for children begins with establishing a belief and then loving the Noble Qur’an for them. The children’s memorizing verses of the Qur’an elevate them to the noble and miraculous style of the Qur’an. In my stories, I focused on birds and animals mentioned in the Holy Quran, which total 30 birds and animals. I started with a story about the whale, so I said I am a whale that weighs 75 tons, even though my egg cannot be seen with the naked eye. ”
His relationship with Anis Mansour.
In 2002, Youssef wrote a letter to the late Anis Mansour in which he introduces him to himself and his literature, draws attention to his cartoon characters and corrects a mistake that occurred in him. Mansour published his message in his column, Mawaqif, which he used to write in Al-Ahram, and he responded by saying: Excuse me, dear friend, because I am not completely following children's books and their world, as in our family children I see them for some time and occupy them for moments. Everything returns to how it was, and I return to my world from books, reading, and the constant breeding of question marks and exclamations that wrap and fly around my brain and spoil sleep and food, distort the mind, and release black smoke in my eyes and buzzing in my ears.
Literary production.
Abdel Tawab realized, at an early age, that children are the hope, the widest door, and the most important path to the future of the nation, and he did not miss a moment to present to them his life as a writer and thinker, as he left a legacy full of creative works in the field of child literature, as he was considered one of the most prominent people concerned with writing about it in The Arab world, who left clear and influential imprints in what they presented to children. Abd al-Tawab realized that exposure to writing to a child requires a special awareness of the child, his world, his way of thinking, his understanding of what he sees and hears of speech, his understanding of the semantics of words, the level of language structures, what he loves and accepts him and what he is alienated from. The writer's writings were characterized by diversity, and he drew inspiration from world folklore, religious heritage and Arab history. He also employed Arab culture and Arab environments in his production. He has enriched the Arab Library with a total of 951 literary works; 595 children's books were printed in Egypt; And 125 children's books were printed in the Arab countries; And 40 books for adults; In addition to two writers about Muhammad’s life in twenty stories, of which 7 million copies were printed; In addition to the field fiction, which has printed 3 million copies.
Peoples Tales series.
• Ants Hill ... and other stories from Indonesia.
Tokinaro and other tales from Japan.
• The Yellow Butterfly ... and other stories from Africa.
• The White Peacock and Other Tales from Spain.
• Who wins and other stories from the Slavs.
• The Mayor and other stories from the Slavs.
Awards.
Abdel Tawab Youssef has received many awards and honors such as: The Bologna International Children's Book Fair 2000 prize for the book Muhammad’s life in twenty stories; State Prize for Children's Literature in 1975; The UNESCO World Literacy Prize 1975; The State Prize of Appreciation for Child Culture in 1981; The King Faisal Prize in Arabic Literature 1991; The Armed Forces Prize for Literature in October 1992; The first prize in the competition for the best children's writer in 1998; The Suzanne Mubarak Prize in 1999 and 2000; The Order of Sciences and Arts of the first class; The Order of the Republic is of the second class; And the gold medal from the Arab Broadcasting Union.
His efforts in the Arab world.
Abdul Tawab Yousef visited the United Arab Emirates 3 times to follow up on literacy efforts to improve the mind of the Arab child, in addition to his participation in seminars and activities to eradicate illiteracy for children in more than one Arab country. And Sharjah to attend the activities of the Children's Culture Festival and to attend the Dubai Symposium on Children’s Literature in 2004. An envoy from UNESCO visited Qatar three times and likewise to participate in seminars related to childhood; He visited Kuwait more than 10 times; He visited Bahrain 6 times, also Damascus, Sudan, Libya and Tunisia, 10 trips to Saudi Arabia, and one visit to Morocco and Algeria. He also visited England, France, Italy, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, America and Canada, and made 117 trips to the countries of the Arab world besides 40 trips to America, Canada, Europe and the Far East and founded and headed the Children's Culture Association since 1968.
Sayings about him.
Suheir Al-Qalamawi.
The writer is called the pioneer of children’s literature in the Arab world, but he always refused that, explaining that “I am not a pioneer and I do not like this name. The real pioneer is Kamel Kilani, and I followed the path of this man, and I consider him more important than Anderson because he did Creating 10 channels for children's culture. In the fun, he composed stories about Juha, composed religious stories, compiled stories about the Prophet’s biography in 30 books, and added sciences, but for the time when it was only living, he was interested in animals and plants only, so there was no physics, chemistry and technology as it is. The state of our time, and I believe here a famous saying by Bernard Shaw where he says: I do not look like Shakespeare, but I stand on his shoulders. Therefore, I developed after Kamel Kilani and between me and him 50 years. ”
As for the Arab world, he was called the Umda of Arab Children’s Writers, and he was praised by many Arab and international intellectuals and personalities. Suheir Al-Qalamawi said of him: “There are many people who write for children. But only a few have produced real literature, and Abdel-Tawab Youssef is at their forefront, in terms of quantity and quality. While Desan Roul, President of the International Association for Children's Books, said of him: “Abd al-Tawab Youssef’s library is the largest children's library in a household in all the world, and his books apply the same thing.”
His statements.
«The children's writer is a creature that has its own peculiarity arising from that he assimilates the personality of the young when he addresses him, and tries to simplify, and returns to the source from which he draws his material, and his topics while in the meantime searching for words included in the child's dictionary, bearing in mind his tendencies and desires, needs and motives, hoping to be enjoyable This is my childhood. '
His death.
The Egyptian writer Essam Youssef said that his father, the children's writer Abdel-Tawab Youssef, died on the afternoon of Monday 28 September 2015 at the age of eighty-seven, following a health crisis that afflicted him in August of the same year, leaving more than a thousand books for children, thus achieving a record for a writer in Egypt and the world. In a call with Reuters, Yusef added that his father had suffered from some diseases in recent months and that he had lost enthusiasm for everything since he stopped holding the pen about six months ago. The funeral took place at the Hosary Mosque in the 6th of October City.