【推荐2】Great painter Salvador Dali once said, “A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.” These words perfectly describe V Umapathy, an art teacher from Puducherry, India, who instills (灌输) the seeds of creativity in his students through arts and crafts.

Umapathy makes beautiful crafts out of biodegradable materials like bamboo, dried leaves, seeds, roots, branches, vegetable waste, and so on. In this way he promotes sustainability in his creations, leaving an everlasting impact on his students.

While growing up, Umapathy was inspired by his father, a teacher and expert weaver (编织者).

“He spent most of his evenings engaging in weaving. I would observe him and eventually developed an interest in design, colour, and the art,” recalls Umapathy.

In 2010, Umapathy joined a high school in Puducherry as their art teacher. It took him some time to excite the interest of the students. He experimented with different arts and crafts using a variety of materials. “One day I suddenly realized that most of the students at my school weren’t able to afford the materials or equipment to create craftwork. So I decided to opt for natural materials, which are as good as non-biodegradable materials and easy to find,” he says.

This move made the students more interested in the craft than before. Under his guidance, the students were convinced that they could make wonders even out of waste materials. Now the school exhibits over 300 pieces of artwork on its walls, all created by the students over the years.

Currently, over 20 students have chosen fine arts for their bachelors and are pursuing a career in it. Muruga, who currently works as a designer, says, “When I expressed my wish to pursue arts after college, Mr. Umapathy guided me. It was his encouragement and guidance that helped me throughout. Now he still helps me by referring to my name, whenever there is work or a project.”

【推荐3】The expressive quality of both the forms and gestures in the basically monochromatic composition of Guernica found its way into Picasso’s other work, especially in the intensely coloured versions of Weeping Woman (1937) as well as in related prints and drawings, inportraits of Dora Maar and Nusch Eluard (wife of Picasso’s friend, the French poet Paul Eluard), and in still lifes (Still Life with Red Bull’s Head, 1938). Those works led to the claustrophobic interiors and skull-like drawings (sketchbook number 110, 1940) of the war years, which Picasso spent in France with Maar as well as with Jaime Sabartes, a friend of his student days in Barcelona. Thereafter Sabartés shared Picasso’s life as secretary, biographer, and companion and more often than not as the butt of endless jokes (Portrait of Jaime Sabartes, 1939; Retour de Bruxelles, sketchbook number 137, 1956).

After the liberation of Paris, Picasso resumed exhibiting his work, notably at the Salon d’Automne of 1944 (“Salon de la Libération”), where his canvases of the preceding five years were received as a shock. At the same time, Picasso opened up his studio to both newand old writer and artist friends, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Reverdy, Eluard, the photographer Brassai, the English artist Roland Penrose, and the American photographer Lee Miller, as well as many American GIs.

Already in 1943 a young painter, Francoise Gilot, had presented herself at the studio, and within months she became Picasso’s mistress. In 1946 Picasso moved to the Mediterranean with Gilot (with whom he was to have two children, Claude in 1947 and Paloma in 1949). First they stayed near Antibes, where Picasso spent four months painting at the Château Grimaldi (Joie de Vivre, 1946). The paintings of that time and the ceramics he decorated at the studio in nearby Vallauris, beginning in 1947, vividly express Picasso’s sense of identification with the classical tradition and with his Mediterranean origins. They also celebrate his new found happiness with Gilot, who in works of that period was often nymph to Picasso’s fauns and centaurs.