Two years and a half passed since I got back to learning Japanese after a 10-year gap during which I let the desire to speak and write fluently in this language to simmer quietly in my brain. As I wrote in the first post from this series of updates (link here), my sense of aesthetic […]
Written by Anca Ioviţă and originally published on https://zexprwire.com/diamond-dust-poems-from-the-black-sea-a-book-series-of-poetic-marine-ikebana-compositions/ December 3, 2020, ZEXPRWIRE, Published on November 9th this year, Diamond Dust (Poems from the Black Sea) is the latest release authored by Anca Ioviţă. Diamond Dust (Poems from the Black Sea) is a series of 5 volumes and contains a collection of visual poems created in […]
Introduction The Black Sea doesn’t ship the most colorful or ornate seashells on its beaches, yet restrained in spines and threatening colors, such smooth seashells in muted colors form the pillars of this collection of designs. New life was blown into such pieces as they became the vases, the leaves, the flowers and the buds […]
It’s been more than a year since I first took Japanese learning seriously and I’m amazed that I haven’t given up. I’m not fluent yet but I understand it better and better and I think I’ll publish 1-year updates on my progress in learning this difficult language. I’m now somewhere between an absolute beginner and […]
Two months ago I took one my dreams seriously. It happened while doing sketches for the seashell art photobook project when I realized how influenced I am by the Japanese aesthetics. I’ve been interested in Japanese arts and crafts for years but since I couldn’t read, write or speak Japanese this was always a second-hand […]
Over the years I’ve pruned most of my print books in favor of ebooks since I needed space to live, ease of moving around and my reading habit didn’t seem to slow down as years went by. Yet there were a couple of them that I kept because of their beautiful photos. These books […]
I never thought I’d one day write a blog post on starting my journey into photography, mainly because I was resistant to the idea of photography as an art form for a long time. I knew photography was more than pressing a button, but since the content of any photo is made of objects or […]
Although I started this blog thinking I’d focus mostly on 3d printing, I changed direction as I realized I prefer to test out ideas through crafting and not while sitting at my desk trying to concoct ideas directly on my laptop. I love technology, but only for developing ideas and not when coming up with […]
A review of the best books on seashell crafts curated by Anca Ioviță, author of the “Diamond Dust (Poems From the Black Sea)” 5-volume photo book series, as well as three other books on gerontology. Going from arts to humanities to engineering to medicine, this polymath still reads career guides during adulthood, not so much to find the perfect career – which is different at each life stage anyway – but just to get inspired on new things to try and create.
True, collections can get out of hand. Collections can be a huge mess you leave behind. But collections can also make you appreciate art in a tactile way and they allow you to support the artists who made those pieces of artwork possible. For a long time, I was window-shopping art galleries and antiquities shops. […]