Monday, April 15, 2013

Significance of the World Art Day

There are so many special days we’ve to celebrate all through the year: Peace Day, Women’s Day, Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, Worker’s Day, Theater Day, Valentines’ Day, and so on. However, we didn’t have any special day for art, which would unite the realm of creativity. In April 2011, the 17th General Assembly of AIAP / IAA World, while holding a meet (World Art Associations formed in 1954) voted the proposal put forward by Turkey, co-signed by many of the world delegate countries to accept the Leonardo da Vinci’s birth anniversary (April 15) as the ‘World Art Day’.

The official WAD site notes: “Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) is one of the greatest men of all times. Although he is known as one of the three most important artists of the High Renaissance, he has been a contemplative and creative thinker, an inventor as much as an artist, a genius by any standards.”

The celebrations started on April 15, 2012. The idea was to help spread ‘art awareness’ throughout the globe. The International Association of Art, IAA/AIAP, is an NGO in operational relationship with UNESCO comprising artists, who practise  painting, sculpturing, printmaking and  other forms of creative work in the visual arts.

The Internet giant, Google, also joined the World Art Day celebrations. An official blog post noted: “It's about two years since we launched Google Art Project. The Internet brings paintings to life and it seems that The Starry Night by van Gogh is the one that visitors to Art Project admire the most. In the past six months, this was the most viewed painting in gigapixel—an extremely high resolution painting which allows viewers to zoom in to brushstroke level.”

Google Art Project has no less than 40,000 artworks, and some of the ‘perennial favorites’ in user galleries are:
•    Botticelli: The Birth of Venus
•    Rembrandt: Self Portrait Drawing at a Window
•    van Gogh: The Bedroom
•    Manet: In the Conservatory
•    Bruegel (the Elder): The Harvesters
•    van Gogh: Sunflowers
•    Holbein (the Younger): The Ambassadors
•    van Gogh: Field with Flowers near Arles
•    Böcklin: The Isle of the Dead
‘The Starry Night’ is the most frequently included painting in user galleries, wherein individuals create and share their own virtual art collections.

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