Muqtada Haider turns the switches to transfer electricity to private homes in Baghdad, Iraq, Friday, September 10, 2021. In Iraq, electricity is a potent symbol of endemic corruption, rooted in the country’s sectarian power-sharing system. This contributes to chronic electrical outages of up to 14 hours a day in a major oil-producing nation with plentiful energy resources. (Photo by Hadi Mizban/AP Photo)

Israeli designer HIlla Shamia has found a way to mix “oil and water” or aluminum and wood – two materials I’ve never seen fused together. The product designer has created a novel way to meld both poured aluminum with irregular wood chunks to create modern tables and benches with a warm industrial feel. Old world and new world in one.

I would like to tell you why many artists, who like me, have painted portraits and landscapes in oils on canvas, worked with acrylics, watercolors, and pen and ink drawings, have turned to the art of gourd carving.

Maine-based Robert Dowling Jr. creates wonderfully whimsical stories with a slightly surreal touch. The self-taught artist, who works primarily in acrylics and oils, often paints characters with their faces covered or turned away. Love art like this that both children and adults can enjoy in their own unique way.

Elephants spray tourists with water in celebration of the Songkran water festival in Thailand's Ayutthaya province, about 80 km (50 miles) north of Bangkok, April 9, 2014. (Photo by Rungroj Yongrit/EFE)

An initiate sprays out his fan as he enjoys the view from atop his father's shoulders during the ceremony in Mae Hong Son, Thailand, April 2016. (Photo by Claudio Sieber/Barcroft Images)

A woman works in a rubber plantation in Yala province, southern Thailand, January 30, 2017. Thai rubber exporters say they have enough of the commodity in stockpiles to ensure only minimal disruption to scheduled shipments in the wake of deadly floods in key growing regions. (Photo by Surapan Boonthanom/Reuters)

Policewomen take a picture inside a tunnel under the Chao Phraya river at a Mass Rapid Transit subway station in Bangkok, Thailand, December 14, 2015. (Photo by Athit Perawongmetha/Reuters)