I always like to know why someone likes the art/artist that they do. What is it about that type/style of art that makes you want to keep looking at it?
I am a huge fan of Josephine Wall. Her paintings are so intricate and it's always amazing how many different scenes she can fit in one picture and still have it flow.
Hmm. I really don't know a lot about art-- I'd like to know more-- but I'm fond of the French Academic and British Neoclassical painters: William Bouguereau, Jean-Leon Gerome, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and especially John William Godward.
sherry, i'm always interested in other's choices of artists and why. sometimes i end up finding an artist i either didn't know about or knew little about and now find i can appreciate it more as a result.
I am intrigued that James Ciriaco supports and defends the European Academic tradition in Art.
Here is an illustration of the work of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema.
It is called, "Preparation For The Festivities". The work is owned by the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass - from whose website I copied this image.
I like Georgia O'Keefe. I can't say I have just one favorite. Everything about her paintings "gets" to me - the subject, the colors, the beauty, and the "subject behind the subject," in her case. I love the desert, would live there always if I could, and her art is just so wrapped up in the high desert.
thanks Peter for that link to the museum. i am just now seeing James' comment. way to go for the notification gather and i'm not sure how i overlooked it yesterday.
there is nothing wrong with the romantic painters of that time period, in fact, i think that a good majority of people, while not normally art lovers will find themselves attracted to the work of William Bouguereau, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Waterhouse.
i happen to love historical romantic fantasy when i read, so naturally i am drawn to that in art also, but the way they so skillfully created those works makes them hard to not love.
Vicky, O'keefe is one of the few women that have managed to achieve high recognition in a mostly male dominated profession. her work has wonderful lighting and while often simple in composition, very complex in statement. she also worked fairly large, so the increased focus on a small object takes on a new dimension and meaning.
I loved Michaelangelo . . . mostly I think because of the variety of skills; he was insanely talented. I also like impressionism, Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, Monet, and CC Miranda. :)
I'm crazy about Durer. He's one of the things my wife and I agree on totally. One of our first dates was going to a Durer etching show. I like the Northern Renaissance artists in general but I think Durer had the greatest combination of technique and ideas. I like Pop Breughel a lot too. I also like a lot of the stuff from the late Middle Ages where symbolism that I know next to nothing about was an important component. From what I've read they knew a lot more about perspective than it seemed. They wanted the paintings to look flat and weirdly scaled.
There's a particular shade of blue in a lot of the late Middle Ages stuff that drives me crazy. I like a lot of paintings just because they use it.
Doyle, Michelangelo was amazing, and didn't die until 89 years old, which was almost unheard of at that time. only thing was he made his women have masculine muscle structure. could he have been a closet transvestite?
I love the pre-renaissance Italians with Sasseta being my favorite of the bunch, but my all time favorite artist is Pieter Bruegel. His paintings of the seasons are incredible and I feel blessed to be able to go to the Met for a look at just "The Harvesters". I also love all of his allegorical imagery and the complexity of his paintings.
There is a novel by Michael Frayn called "Head-Long" which I enjoyed very much. It is a fiction involving a painting thought possibly to be another in this series of the seasons. It is intelligent and entertaining.
"...and didn't die until 89 years old, which was almost unheard of at that time." Particularly when you consider the chemicals and vapors in the paints that must have caused more than one early demise. So the women had masculine muscle structure? I never really noticed that . . . Ok, Fine! I'll throw in Rubens and balance it out. :)
and i can spend a lifetime in the Met and never see everything. Brugel is great, and The Harvesters is a wonderful work of art. i've stared at it many a time.
Doyle, exactly, which is why i believe that artists don't die until they are "done speaking".
but if you look at his women compared to Ruben, there is a squared, bulkiness to Michelangelo's women that aren't in Rubens who's women are soft and rounded. that's the difference of female body structure compared to male body structure. every now and again you find a person who crosses those boundries, but for the most part there is a set anatomical difference between the two sexes.
doug, no, picasso purposefully skewed the proportions and perspective. you can tell by looking at his earlier realistic works that he knew the correct proportions of a female body, he just no longer felt the need to realistically portray that.
Rene Magritte, Dali and Normal Rockwell. Why, yes -- yes, I am a crackhead. Thanks for noticing. My ex-boyfriend/best friend Richard owns an antique store and art galelry in Pittsburgh where I worked after the AmEx fiasco, and it was the best therapy ever/i>. There I was, enraged at the world and convinced all people were lying b-tards, but I was surrounded by Dali's twisted pain and Magritte's pretty azures.
Norman Rockwell I've loved since I first visited the Rockewell Museum in Stockbridge, MA. His work is HUGE (physically,) but his studio was tiny.
Other artists working currently but not necessarily in the manner of the commonly conceived methods & means of "artist,": Jeff Jones, Alex Ross, Jill Thompson, Brian Stelfreeze, Scott Thompson, Dick Giordano and Frank Miller. (and those are in no particular order.)
F*** -- screwed my HTML. Deal with it; I'm seeting. I need to go write my letters and not get sucked into any more commenting activities. I'll be back.
John O, Wyeth does give that sense of stark loneliness. i'm not sure if it's just his muted palette or his composition, or both together, but that was a good way to describe his work.
CC, Do you like Surrealism in general? Dali has had his share of ups and downs in terms of how the world views him.
Joy, Interesting trifecta of favorites... two surrealists and Rockwell. Interesting to me because Rockwell is sooo realistic that he almost turns the corner into something else, were it not for the nostalgia.
okay Joy, we will see you in a bit. i know i've got to do some studio stuff today too, so i'm limiting my commenting to eating times only.
Magritte is a cool one also. He, like Dali have a way of making the unreal seem perfectly natural and plausable. Dali went more complicated while Magritte went with the basics proving that simplicity also can be complex in it's statements.
thanks also for mentioning current working illustrative artists. i do find it sad that so much good art is often overlooked just because of the label of illustration.
then again, Maxfield Parrish and Norman Rockwell were also illustrators who have been transfered by the Art World Elite Gestapo into fine artists, and all the old masters were usually hired by the church to "illustrate" the stories in the bible, therefore making them technically illustrators in their own time period. i think that is something that most people don't realize and forget about when comparing art types today.
Doug, not all surrealism, although i do find it most intriguing. i am definately drawn to all types of realism over modern work, with the exception of the surreal (as it's basis is in realism).
funny thing is the more i work on my own art, the more i drift into the abstracted surrealism without trying consciously, despite my distinct dislike of abstraction.
I forgot to mention Utamaro. Shame on me. I love his Floating World prints. They have a lot of energy that breaks out of the Japanese painting conventions.
ah yes nippy, that would be more of the Lapis Lazuli Blue than the Azure, which has a bit more of a green tint.
Cobalt blue has replaced the Lapis in today's paints as it's a lot cheaper to produce than the Lapis, although i find the Cobalt to have a bit of a white filler added to it so it's not as intense, something that i correct with a glaze of Ultramarine or Pthalo Blue.
CC, Speaking of the Art World Elite Gestapo, one has to virtually look at the 20th century to find that establishment paying any attention at all to women artists. Even today, (and I know I don't need to tell you any of this), women get short shrift. I miss Elizabeth Murray.
Nippy, yes, i love the energy of the Japanese works. the movement in the clouds and water always draws me in and makes me realize the power of the forces of nature.
Doug, while there are more women artist known today, you are correct in that it still is a fight for women to become known on the masters level. the few that have gotten recognition have done so more on shock art value than on technical ability and skill.
that's just my opinion, before someone comes in jumping down my throat about it, based on what i've seen in the career field i work in.
"funny thing is the more i work on my own art, the more i drift into the abstracted surrealism without trying consciously"
I've been looking at your images and I like them a lot. It makes sense to me seeing your work that it would be natural to slip into abstraction. Especially when you are working on complex pictures with dozens of faces and trying to make it all connect. I like the result when an artist successfully combines realism with abstraction. Painting is a fairly abstract thing to do even if you are painting a portrait and trying to get a perfect likeness.
As a general rule, I don't go for a particular artist. I like things that "look" real but aren't necessarily a realistic picture. Well rended pictures of fantastic elements like dragons/faeries and the like are an example. For instance, I tend to like Boris Vallejo. I like a lot of computer generated fantasy images, though I tend to be drawn to images with strong colors, particularly of the cool (purple/blue/green/black) variety. It's not a school and it's probably not cultured, but that's the sort of thing I like.
I also like a lot of 3-d art, such as sculptures which is why, if I had to pick a favorite artist, I would have to go with Michelangelo just like Doyle.
(As for why the muscles structure tended to be male, I've read that Michelangelo (like da Vinci) had the opportunity to dissect a cadaver, a definite no-no in that time. If he only had access to one opportunity and it was male or if all his opportunities were limited to males, it could explain why he did what he did. Just thinking out loud.)
CC, you hit on one of my hot buttons. I doubt that the old masters made a distinction between artist and illustrator in the way we do today. Art was a trade that had a lot more jobs before the 19th century. People got into art through apprenticeship. I know the old masters made a distinction between good and bad. :)
One thing the Industrial Revolution did that I don't like is that it eliminated jobs in the arts. Recorded music, sophisticated printing, movies, TV all allow the top talents much broader exposure than ever in history. Photography wiped out illustration in newspapers and magazines, both editorial content and advertising. Don't get me started on live music. :)
Stephanie, there is no such thing as an art idiot in my book.
you are correct in that Michelangelo got to sit in on autopsies as gross as that is to me, and while he may have only had the chance to study that structure on a male corpse, as an artist, he should be able to look at a model and notice that structure is different. Ingres did a similar thing, but not as much to the masculine as did michelangelo, with his women.
if you like Boris, look at the work of Franzetta and compare the two. you will notice that Boris' pics are very static and posed compared to the action/movement found in Franzetta's work.
don't be embarassed to like fantasy art over any other type of art, there is still mad talent in those artists as well. besides, have you ever noticed how many winged creatures are in the old masters works? they did fantasy art too, it just wasn't classified as such.
Nippy, you are totally correct. there was no distiction until after the advent of photography. this however also gave artists the freedom to explore their mediums and their mind's limits as they were no longer relagated to just trying to record life accurately.
i'm not sure when the pigeonholes came into place, but it seems that someone felt the need to catalogue artists into neat little sections. an artistic segregaton so to speak and lord help you if you try to cross over into another genre, you suddenly find yourself shunned and having to start over from the ground up to gain back your notoriety.
i've had people try to pigeonhole me a few years ago. they "suggested" that i find one style and stick with that and don't show anything but that if i want to be "collectable".
i told them everything i do is related to each other in it's own little way. while it may seem traditional and realistic, there are still the faces hidden there to tie them into the other more abstract work, but why would i want to not only shove away someone who might like the more traditional of my work or vice versa and what right does anyone have to say i can't do the type of art i want to, regardless of what it looks like? i refuse to stop my hand from enjoying what it does.
I should also mention that I don't enjoy Vallejo's work as much as I used to. Too much of it looks (a) the same and (b) painted into something it wasn't meant to be in (i.e. commercial and contrived). Don't get me wrong, the man's gotta eat. I just don't enjoy it as much when it's not a whole integrated piece. Plus, his color pallette isn't my favorite.
Alphonse Mucha. His women are so beautiful, his settings are amazingly lush, and he seems to have been in love with redheads, all of whom have my hair. So I'm probably a touch biased.
Pablo Picasso at least to me was one of the greatest artist in all recorded history. I look at the colors and fluity of the brush at is makes me feel so small in this universe.
Awesome -- Goldsworthy has been mentioned. My son also introduced me to graffiti artist Banksy, who is marvelously creative. Both of them look at the world around them and enhance it.
I'm a huge fan of Magritte and Duchamps. They have a way of painting that unsettles the viewer without threatening; something is just shifted, just to the side, just off the edge of the canvas, or behind it. I like a picture that demands my active imagination.
Finally, there was an art collection at my college in the North Country, and one painting that was up in Brainerd Hall looked like a futuristic wasteland of greys, browns, blues and blacks. In it, I could see an old steam locomotive that had fallen into disrepair and rust, and was since becoming part of the landscape, almost unrecognizable as the machine it once was. I haven't laid eyes on that painting in 30 years, but I can still see it clearly in my memory -- I loved that painting, and I have no idea who the artist was. Of all the works in the campus-wide collection, that was the only iece like it. The rest were more glaringly colorful and geometric.
I recently read a piece in the NYer about Banksy, fascinating. My favorite artist is Walter Inglis Anderson, a gulf coast original from Ocean Springs. I love his watercolors and the structures he worked in. A nature artist mostly, a recluse and a genius.
Kris, i'm wondering if there is more than one retailer selling it. that was just the first one i came across. i've got the book called "The Secret Art of Dr. Seuss" which is how i found out about it.
I'll probably get laughed at for this, but I love some of the cover illustrators of scifi and fantasy novels. I have Michael Whelan's "Snow Queen" and "Summer Queen" in my living room, and I love Tom Canty's work too -- it's just that the Joan Vinge novels Whelan did the covers for are personal favorites, and he included several elements from the books in his cover art.
Kris, no one should laugh at you for that. i buy most of my books based on the cover art which is the first thing to attract me to it. kinda like the labels on wine. the label catches my eye first, then i figure out if the contents might be worth my trying.
Anyone who doesn't appreciate comic books needs to be walloped upside the head with "A Doll's House." Possibly the hardcover. Kris M., Apr 29, 2008, 5:44pm EDT
I can think of thicker ones, but Maus would work just as well...
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It is the greatest collection of under-appreciated Academic art in the western hemisphere.
http://www.daheshmuseum.org/index.php
I am going to post a copyright-free image from Colliers magazine.
Here is an illustration of the work of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema.
It is called, "Preparation For The Festivities". The work is owned by the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass - from whose website I copied this image.
there is nothing wrong with the romantic painters of that time period, in fact, i think that a good majority of people, while not normally art lovers will find themselves attracted to the work of William Bouguereau, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Waterhouse.
i happen to love historical romantic fantasy when i read, so naturally i am drawn to that in art also, but the way they so skillfully created those works makes them hard to not love.
Regards,
Doyle I <~~~~~
There's a particular shade of blue in a lot of the late Middle Ages stuff that drives me crazy. I like a lot of paintings just because they use it.
Durer was a master of hands. in the pic you used, his hand is in that rather awkward position just so he could practice doing hands.
I love the pre-renaissance Italians with Sasseta being my favorite of the bunch, but my all time favorite artist is Pieter Bruegel. His paintings of the seasons are incredible and I feel blessed to be able to go to the Met for a look at just "The Harvesters". I also love all of his allegorical imagery and the complexity of his paintings.
There is a novel by Michael Frayn called "Head-Long" which I enjoyed very much. It is a fiction involving a painting thought possibly to be another in this series of the seasons. It is intelligent and entertaining.
Particularly when you consider the chemicals and vapors in the paints that must have caused more than one early demise. So the women had masculine muscle structure? I never really noticed that . . . Ok, Fine! I'll throw in Rubens and balance it out. :)
And stay out of Mickey's closets. LoL!
Regards,
Doyle I <~~~~~
they would have been using either a form of Azure blue (Azurite) or Lapis Lazuli Blue.
however since the colors were layered on in thin glazes, it's hard to say what the exact mix of colors it was.
and i can spend a lifetime in the Met and never see everything. Brugel is great, and The Harvesters is a wonderful work of art. i've stared at it many a time.
Do you think Picasso did the same thing?
but if you look at his women compared to Ruben, there is a squared, bulkiness to Michelangelo's women that aren't in Rubens who's women are soft and rounded. that's the difference of female body structure compared to male body structure. every now and again you find a person who crosses those boundries, but for the most part there is a set anatomical difference between the two sexes.
Who is your favorite artist, CC?
Rene Magritte, Dali and Normal Rockwell. Why, yes -- yes, I am a crackhead. Thanks for noticing. My ex-boyfriend/best friend Richard owns an antique store and art galelry in Pittsburgh where I worked after the AmEx fiasco, and it was the best therapy ever/i>. There I was, enraged at the world and convinced all people were lying b-tards, but I was surrounded by Dali's twisted pain and Magritte's pretty azures.
Norman Rockwell I've loved since I first visited the Rockewell Museum in Stockbridge, MA. His work is HUGE (physically,) but his studio was tiny.
Other artists working currently but not necessarily in the manner of the commonly conceived methods & means of "artist,": Jeff Jones, Alex Ross, Jill Thompson, Brian Stelfreeze, Scott Thompson, Dick Giordano and Frank Miller. (and those are in no particular order.)
Joy, Interesting trifecta of favorites... two surrealists and Rockwell. Interesting to me because Rockwell is sooo realistic that he almost turns the corner into something else, were it not for the nostalgia.
Magritte is a cool one also. He, like Dali have a way of making the unreal seem perfectly natural and plausable. Dali went more complicated while Magritte went with the basics proving that simplicity also can be complex in it's statements.
thanks also for mentioning current working illustrative artists. i do find it sad that so much good art is often overlooked just because of the label of illustration.
then again, Maxfield Parrish and Norman Rockwell were also illustrators who have been transfered by the Art World Elite Gestapo into fine artists, and all the old masters were usually hired by the church to "illustrate" the stories in the bible, therefore making them technically illustrators in their own time period. i think that is something that most people don't realize and forget about when comparing art types today.
I have the most amazing book or color plates of the Limborg Brothers book of hours that you posted. I love those paintings!
funny thing is the more i work on my own art, the more i drift into the abstracted surrealism without trying consciously, despite my distinct dislike of abstraction.
Cobalt blue has replaced the Lapis in today's paints as it's a lot cheaper to produce than the Lapis, although i find the Cobalt to have a bit of a white filler added to it so it's not as intense, something that i correct with a glaze of Ultramarine or Pthalo Blue.
Et la vie longue la différence ! ;P
Regards,
Doyle I <~~~~~
that's just my opinion, before someone comes in jumping down my throat about it, based on what i've seen in the career field i work in.
I've been looking at your images and I like them a lot. It makes sense to me seeing your work that it would be natural to slip into abstraction. Especially when you are working on complex pictures with dozens of faces and trying to make it all connect. I like the result when an artist successfully combines realism with abstraction. Painting is a fairly abstract thing to do even if you are painting a portrait and trying to get a perfect likeness.
I also like a lot of 3-d art, such as sculptures which is why, if I had to pick a favorite artist, I would have to go with Michelangelo just like Doyle.
(As for why the muscles structure tended to be male, I've read that Michelangelo (like da Vinci) had the opportunity to dissect a cadaver, a definite no-no in that time. If he only had access to one opportunity and it was male or if all his opportunities were limited to males, it could explain why he did what he did. Just thinking out loud.)
Sorry, I'm an art idiot.
One thing the Industrial Revolution did that I don't like is that it eliminated jobs in the arts. Recorded music, sophisticated printing, movies, TV all allow the top talents much broader exposure than ever in history. Photography wiped out illustration in newspapers and magazines, both editorial content and advertising. Don't get me started on live music. :)
you are correct in that Michelangelo got to sit in on autopsies as gross as that is to me, and while he may have only had the chance to study that structure on a male corpse, as an artist, he should be able to look at a model and notice that structure is different. Ingres did a similar thing, but not as much to the masculine as did michelangelo, with his women.
if you like Boris, look at the work of Franzetta and compare the two. you will notice that Boris' pics are very static and posed compared to the action/movement found in Franzetta's work.
don't be embarassed to like fantasy art over any other type of art, there is still mad talent in those artists as well. besides, have you ever noticed how many winged creatures are in the old masters works? they did fantasy art too, it just wasn't classified as such.
i'm not sure when the pigeonholes came into place, but it seems that someone felt the need to catalogue artists into neat little sections. an artistic segregaton so to speak and lord help you if you try to cross over into another genre, you suddenly find yourself shunned and having to start over from the ground up to gain back your notoriety.
i've had people try to pigeonhole me a few years ago. they "suggested" that i find one style and stick with that and don't show anything but that if i want to be "collectable".
i told them everything i do is related to each other in it's own little way. while it may seem traditional and realistic, there are still the faces hidden there to tie them into the other more abstract work, but why would i want to not only shove away someone who might like the more traditional of my work or vice versa and what right does anyone have to say i can't do the type of art i want to, regardless of what it looks like? i refuse to stop my hand from enjoying what it does.
By the way, you said you liked to read historical romance novels. Have you read any Heyer?
Favorite artwork of all time: Michelangelo's Pieta.
haven't read any Heyer that i know of.
(Interesting comments about Boris Vallejo by the way).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Goldsworthy
speaking of cats, did you ever see Dr. Seuss's "A Plethora of Cats"?
see what happens when i try to think after inhaling varnish?
* Though Dürer was half Hungarian.
this is one of his private works never published until after his death. he spent 30 + years on this one piece of art
As someone who used to work in the industry, there are two phrases that enrage me:
"Comic books aren't real art." and
"Somebody actually writes those things?!"
I'm a huge fan of Magritte and Duchamps. They have a way of painting that unsettles the viewer without threatening; something is just shifted, just to the side, just off the edge of the canvas, or behind it. I like a picture that demands my active imagination.
Finally, there was an art collection at my college in the North Country, and one painting that was up in Brainerd Hall looked like a futuristic wasteland of greys, browns, blues and blacks. In it, I could see an old steam locomotive that had fallen into disrepair and rust, and was since becoming part of the landscape, almost unrecognizable as the machine it once was. I haven't laid eyes on that painting in 30 years, but I can still see it clearly in my memory -- I loved that painting, and I have no idea who the artist was. Of all the works in the campus-wide collection, that was the only iece like it. The rest were more glaringly colorful and geometric.
eeeek!
Kris M., Apr 29, 2008, 5:44pm EDT
I can think of thicker ones, but Maus would work just as well...
i really have to not type on days i'm varnishing paintings.