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Venezuelan artist brings new value to discarded banknotes

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Venezuelan artist and medical student Elianni Di Gregorio is using old bolivar notes as canvas for her paintings as she strives to give them new value after rampant hyper inflation and successive overhauls saw them discarded.

Di Gregorio, 24, decided to paint on bolivar notes thrown away in the trash to restore some of the currency’s former glory.

Three monetary overhauls since 2008 have cut up to 14 zeros from the currency, pushing vast quantities of notes out of circulation. The most recent overhaul took place in October, when Venezuela’s central bank wiped six zeros from the bolivar.

“I could see how they were throwing incredible amounts of paper money in the trash, which affected me greatly, which is why I decided to reuse them for a different purpose and began to paint on them,” said Di Gregorio, who has used the banknotes as her main canvas since 2017.

In one of her paintings Di Gregorio used a pink 20-bolivar note to reproduce La Fornarina, which depicts a semi-nude woman in one of renaissance artist Raphael’s most important works.

The replica painting will go on show in a virtual exhibition in New York this December after Di Gregorio entered it in a competition, where it was selected alongside nine other works.

“I surprised myself when I managed to do it on something so small,” she said, adding that the Italian Raphael is one of her favorite artists because of his extreme precision.

The paintings let people see the banknotes more positively, instead of the negatives of the economic crisis that has destroyed their value and leading to de facto dollarization, she said.

“This is my way of building the Venezuela I want in the future, restoring value to banknotes that are no longer useful,” Di Gregorio, who also plans to paint on banknotes from other countries, said.

Hyperinflation also prompted artists in Zimbabwe to turn worthless Mugabe-era banknotes into paintings.

 

(Reporting by Johnny Carvajal and Deisy Buitrago; Writing by Oliver Griffin; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

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40 Random Bits of Trivia About Artists and the Artsy Art That They Articulate – Cracked.com

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40 Random Bits of Trivia About Artists and the Artsy Art That They Articulate  Cracked.com



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John Little, whose paintings showed the raw side of Montreal, dies at 96 – CBC.ca

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John Little, whose paintings showed the raw side of Montreal, dies at 96  CBC.ca



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A misspelled memorial to the Brontë sisters gets its dots back at last

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LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.

More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.

The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.

They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.

“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”

It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.

Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”

Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.

“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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