Discovering the Greek Museum of Cycladic art in a 3 minute video

After completing my Universities exams, I returned to Greece to spend my summer vacation and I decided to look for an internship for a couple of months. I felt extremely lucky and excited when I finally  got an internship at my favourite museum in Athens, the Museum of Cycladic Art.

The Museum of Cycladic Art  (MCA) is dedicated to the study and promotion of ancient cultures of the Aegean and Cyprus, with special emphasis on Cycladic Art of the 3rd millennium. Today in the galleries of the Museum, the visitor can approach three major subjects. The permanent collections of  Cycladic Art, Ancient Greek Art and Ancient Cypriot Art.

Besides the permanent collections, the Museums temporary exhibitions constitute one of the most fruitful activities, constantly renewing the museum’s interaction with the public. The numerous archaeological exhibitions are meant to introduce the public to important aspects of ancient Greek art as well as of other Mediterranean cultures, with loans from other Greek and foreign museums. Apart from archaeology, the temporary exhibitions of the museum frequently focus on modern and contemporary art, aiming to introduce the public to important 20th century artists and explore the links between ancient cultures and modern artistic creation.

The following video, is a great opportunity  to become familiar with the beauty of the Museum

Let me know your thoughts and feelings after watching the video and  If you find yourself in Athens, make sure you visit the Museum of Cycladic Art.

Important links for information and news

www.cycladic.gr
https://www.facebook.com/CycladicArtMuseum
http://instagram.com/cycladic_museum#
https://twitter.com/cycladic_museum

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Sweet Escape

There is something about nature that in my mind is highly connected with art. I am not the kind of person that believes that ‘everything around us is art’ or that whatever we see and touch could be considered a form of art, but there are places in the world that I find very artistic.

I have a summer house in Greece and more specifically in Mani, a village that has amazing beaches on the one side, and beautiful high mountains on the other. I go to Mani every summer since I was born but I have truly understood its beauty the last couple of years. Through photography, I have managed to see the beauty in a place that I considered to be ordinary when I was younger. For the first time that I can remember, I visited my summer house in the winter. My father suggested that it would be a sweet escape for the weekend and that I would not regret going.

      

I took my dad’s advice and decided to leave my house in the city of Athens and go for a weekend to my summer house in Mani. It was raining the entire first day and I was hoping that I would wake up to a clear sky the next morning, and so did I. The village was empty, so the beaches, but the view from my house was exactly the way it is during summer time, even though it was almost January. The sky was clear and blue and everything was very peaceful. I decided to take pictures of the day and then see how the sky and the sea change and adapt based on the suns position.

I was amazed by the beauty that can be created just from the sun. As the day was passing, the sea and the sky would change in the most beautiful ways. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I am sure that I have never seen such beautiful sun set in my life. The colours were unreal and all of the pictures have not been edited at all.

After a while, when it got too dark to be outside, I went inside the house and transferred the photographs to my computer, in order to see them better. Firstly, I could not believe that my iPhone could take such good quality photographs, and I could not believe that in all these years, this was the first time I truly saw the beauty of my summer house’s view. I looked at the photos over and over again, thinking that they look like the photos you find on the internet when you google ‘amazing photos’ or like the screen-savers a new computer has saved when first bought.

                                                                           

What I truly find interesting about these images, is how amazing a simple photograph could be. I only needed my iPhone 5 in order to take these shots. The rest was all pure nature. I did not have to create a set, get props or work on the background. No light was needed, no flash, or anything. All of the colours and shadows were ‘real’. Real in the sense that they were not edited and not set up. Everything was there just for a second, and every photograph was different from the previous one, because of the natural wind that simply moved the clouds, and the sun that slowly changed position. These photographs are unique and one of a kind, and even if I go there at the same spot, at the same time, nothing will be the same. And in my opinion, that is the art of nature. 

Ps: To view the images in a larger size, simply click on them