Scholten Japanese Art is presenting Captive Artist: Watercolors by Kakunen Tsuruoka (1892–1977), an exhibition featuring landscape paintings produced while the artist was confined to Poston Camp III, part of the Colorado River Relocation Center in Arizona and one of the ten camps to which Japanese-Americans were forcibly relocated during the Second World War. While the focus of the installation will be on Kakunen’s poignant paintings of the bleak and barren landscape surrounding the camp, the gallery will also offer a selection of Kakunen’s original paintings and four shin hanga-style limited-edition prints depicting subjects unrelated to his time at Poston. The entire collection of works by Kakunen are from the Estate of Haruno Tsuruoka (1924–2017), the artist’s daughter-in-law, and is being offered by members of her family who provided materials to supplement glimpses of his extraordinary li

The American artist Mark Rothko made huge abstract paintings that touch people’s souls. Some are even moved to tears. About this the artist said:[“The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them”. It is kind of special that an abstract work of art can evoke that sort of emotion, even though it may come across as fairly aloof. What is the power in this work? Usually, people show up in droves in museums to see his paintings. What would it be like to be the only one? Well, find out at the exhibition Rothko & me. You are welcome to enjoy one of his top pieces, the painting Grey, Orange on Maroon, No 8 of 1960, all on your own and without your mobile phone. Nothing will stand in the way of your intimate moment with the painting: this really is ‘Rothko and me’. Mark Rothko (1903-1970) was the first abstractionist to demonstrate the centrality of emotions with his intense colour areas. “If you are moved

The new MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, designed by 6a architects, opened to the public on 16 March 2019. The original MK Gallery was constructed in the late 1990s and is located at the top of Midsummer Boulevard, next to Milton Keynes Theatre. The new development retains the first structure and adds a new one, to more than double its size. The new MK Gallery reflects the natural world in its polished stainless-steel exterior surfaces inspired by the city’s original grid and the geometries of the adjacent Campbell Park. The completed development including both old and new structures provides five exhibition galleries, with a total of 500 sq metres of exhibition space; a large learning and community studio and The Sky Room, a flexible auditorium on the upper floor with 150 retractable seats and views over Campbell Park and the countryside. Integrated within the new scheme, artists Gareth Jones and Nils Norman were

Changes to the human diet prompted by Neolithic advances in agriculture played a role in human jaw evolution that allowed people to pronounce the consonants F and V, researchers say. Their work — which combines linguistics, speech science and paleoanthropology and appears in the Thursday edition of the US journal Science — indicates that language is not merely a random product of history but was also linked to biological changes at the time. The Neolithic era — spanning from 6,000 to 2,100 BC — was when wheat and barley-based farming took root and animals such as goats, sheep and cows, were domesticated. “Language is not usually studied as a biological phenomenon and it does not normally figure in, say, the curriculum of biology,” said Balthasar Bickel, a researcher at the University of Zurich. “If you think about it, however,