Showing posts with label painting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label painting. Show all posts

Friday, 11 October 2024

PAINTED SKY

The sky has always been a source of inspiration for artists and here is one of my paintings inspired by a sunset in the City. You can find more of my paintings in my Instagram account: @jammysevenk

This post is part of the Skywatch Friday meme


Sunday, 29 September 2024

MY MUSIC

Just taking an opportunity to blow my own trumpet (yes, pun intended - sorry!). Since May this year, I have been putting online some of my own musical compositions. If you like the classical music genre, you may like to have a listen. My handle is "Otidorchestre" and you can find me on these platforms:

Amazon, Anghami, MediaNet, Boomplay, Deezer, Instagram/Facebook, Adaptr, Flo, YouTube Music, iHeartRadio, Claro Música, Joox, Kuack Media, NetEase, Qobuz, Pandora, Saavn, Spotify, Tencent, Tidal and TikTok & other ByteDance stores!

This post is part of the My Sunday Best meme

Monday, 28 September 2020

MEMENTO MORI

 A Memento mori  painting I've just completed.

This post is part of the Mosaic Monday meme,
and also part of the Blue Monday meme,
and also part of the Seasons meme.


Wednesday, 1 January 2020

ZHUKOVSKY

Stanislav Yulianovich Zhukovsky (Polish: Stanisław Żukowski, Russian: Станислав Юлианович Жуковский) (1873–1944) was a Polish-Russian painter, and a member of Mir iskusstva.

Zhukovsky was born in Yendrikhovtsy (Jędrzychowice), Grodno Province. He was a student of Isaac Levitan and a graduate of the Moscow School of Painting. Zhukovsky became a celebrated landscapist working in a unique style which projected impressionistic methods and skills as well as his interpretation of the tradition of the Russian realist school. He established his own art studio in Moscow where he mentored students, including later to become a celebrated avantgardist Liubov Popova and a young Vladimir Mayakovsky who was then working as a poster artist.

As a painter, Zhukovsky left a legacy from capturing Russian landscapes and pre-revolutionary sites and the interior of Russian estate houses. His social predisposition left him skeptical of the Bolshevik revolution, and in 1923 he left Soviet Union for his ancestral homeland Poland, then already an independent country. After the German occupation of Poland, during the World War II he was arrested by the Nazis and held at the prisoner transit camp (Durchgangslager) at Pruszków where he eventually died in 1944.

This post is part of the Wordless Wednesday meme,
and also part of the ABC Wednesday meme,
and also part of the My Corner of the World.
"March Evening" (1912)

"The Past - Room in an Old House" (1912)

Wednesday, 11 December 2019

WATERHOUSE

John William Waterhouse RA (6 April 1849 – 10 February 1917) was an English painter known for working first in the Academic style and for then embracing the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's style and subject matter. His artworks were known for their depictions of women from both ancient Greek mythology and Arthurian legend.

Born in Rome to English parents who were both painters, Waterhouse later moved to London, where he enrolled in the Royal Academy of Art. He soon began exhibiting at their annual summer exhibitions, focusing on the creation of large canvas works depicting scenes from the daily life and mythology of ancient Greece. Many of his paintings are based on authors such as Homer, Ovid, Shakespeare, Tennyson, or Keats.

Waterhouse's work is currently displayed at several major British art galleries, and the Royal Academy of Art organised a major retrospective of his work in 2009.

This post is part of the Wordless Wednesday meme,
and also part of the ABC Wednesday meme,
and also part of the My Corner of the World meme.
The Lady of Shalott is a painting of 1888 by the English painter John William Waterhouse. It is a representation of the ending of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's 1832 poem of the same name. Waterhouse painted three versions of this character, in 1888, 1894 and 1915. It is one of his most famous works, which adopted much of the style of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, though Waterhouse was painting several decades after the Brotherhood split up during his early childhood. The Lady of Shalott was donated to the public by Sir Henry Tate in 1894 and is usually on display in Tate Britain, London, in room 1840.

This dramatic painting illustrates an episode from the journeys of the Greek hero Odysseus (in Latin, Ulysses) told in the poet Homer’s Odyssey in which the infamous Sirens lured unwary sailors towards perilous rocks and their doom by singing in the most enchanting manner. Odysseus wished to hear the Siren’s song and ordered his crew to lash him to a mast and block their ears in order to ensure their safe passage.

Waterhouse has depicted each Siren with the body of a bird and the head of a beautiful woman, which came as a surprise to Victorian audiences, who were more used to seeing these mythic creatures portrayed as comely mermaid-like nymphs. He borrowed the motif from an ancient Greek vase that he studied in the British Museum.

When Ulysses and the Sirens was first exhibited, at London’s Royal Academy in 1891, the painting was praised by most art critics of the day. MH Spielmann, writing for the Magazine of Art, declared it: ‘a very startling triumph … a very carnival of colour, mosaicked and balanced with a skill more consummate than even the talented artist was credited with … The quality of the painting is … a considerable advance upon all his antecedent work’. At the time of Sir Hubert von Herkomer’s purchase of this picture for the National Gallery of Victoria, in June 1891, the Ulysses was only the second work by John William Waterhouse to be acquired for a public gallery.

Wednesday, 6 November 2019

RENOIR

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, commonly known as Auguste Renoir (25 February 1841 – 3 December 1919), was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty and especially feminine sensuality, it has been said that "Renoir is the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to Watteau." He was the father of actor Pierre Renoir (1885–1952), filmmaker Jean Renoir (1894–1979) and ceramic artist Claude Renoir (1901–1969). He was the grandfather of the filmmaker Claude Renoir (1913–1993), son of Pierre.

Next to his "Self Portrait", c.1897, is "The Guitar Player" of 1896. This painting is in the National Gallery Victoria in Melbourne. Renoir often painted people enjoying quiet, private moments. Women were frequently the subject of these paintings, and were portrayed bathing, reading, sewing, or closely interacting with children. From the late 1880s onward, Renoir produced a number of intimate studies where the sitters are playing musical instruments. Curiously, very few of these works convey any sense of ‘performance’, or any suggestion that the music is meant for ears other than the player’s.

The painting below is the famous "Luncheon of the Boating Party" (1881; French: Le déjeuner des canotiers). It was included in the Seventh Impressionist Exhibition in 1882, and was identified as the best painting in the show by three critics. It was purchased from the artist by the dealer-patron Paul Durand-Ruel and bought in 1923 (for $125,000) from his son by industrialist Duncan Phillips, who spent a decade in pursuit of the work. It is now in The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. It shows a richness of form, a fluidity of brush stroke, and a flickering light. This is impressionism par excellence!

This post is part of the Wordless Wednesday meme,
and also part of the ABC Wednesday meme.


Wednesday, 9 October 2019

NATTIER & HIS BLUE

Jean-Marc Nattier (17 March 1685 – 7 November 1766), French painter, was born in Paris, the second son of Marc Nattier (1642–1705), a portrait painter, and of Marie Courtois (1655–1703), a miniaturist. He is noted for his portraits of the ladies of King Louis XV's court in classical mythological attire.

He received his first instruction from his father, and from his uncle, the history painter Jean Jouvenet (1644–1717). He enrolled in the Royal Academy in 1703 and applied himself to copying pictures in the Luxembourg Palace, making a series of drawings of the Marie de Médici painting cycle by Peter Paul Rubens. The publication (1710) of engravings based on these drawings made Nattier famous, but he declined to proceed to the French Academy in Rome, though he had taken the first prize at the Paris Academy at the age of fifteen.

In 1715 he went to Amsterdam, where Peter the Great was then staying, and painted portraits of the tsar and the empress Catherine, but declined an offer to go to Russia. Nattier aspired to be a history painter. Between 1715 and 1720 he devoted himself to compositions like the "Battle of Pultawa", which he painted for Peter the Great, and the "Petrification of Phineus and of his Companions", which led to his election to the Academy.

The financial collapse of 1720 caused by the schemes of Law all but ruined Nattier, who found himself forced to devote his whole energy to portraiture, which was more lucrative. He became the painter of the artificial ladies of Louis XV's court. He subsequently revived the genre of the allegorical portrait, in which a living person is depicted as a Greco-Roman goddess or other mythological figure.

Nattier's graceful and charming portraits of court ladies in this mode were very fashionable, partly because he could beautify a sitter while also retaining her likeness. The most notable examples of his straightforward portraiture are the "Marie Leczinska" at the Dijon Museum, and a group of the artist surrounded by his family,"The Artist Surrounded by His Family", dated 1730. He died in Paris in 1766.

Nattier blue (mass noun - dated): A soft shade of blue, especially in fine textiles. "She carefully chose the shade of delicate light blue of the curtains to match the fine Nattier blue of the silk upholstery of the armchairs in the morning room."
Origin: Early 20th century: After a colour much used by Jean-Marc Nattier (1685–1766),  the French painter.

This post is part of the Wordless Wednesday meme,
and also part of the ABC Wednesday meme.
L: Nattier - "The Comtesse de Tillières (1750)" Wallace Collection, London
R: Nattier - "Portrait of a gentleman in a blue coat"  The Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle.


Wednesday, 2 October 2019

MAGRITTE AT THE MUSEUM

René François Ghislain Magritte (21 November 1898 – 15 August 1967) was a Belgian Surrealist artist. He became well known for creating a number of witty and thought-provoking images. Often depicting ordinary objects in an unusual context, his work is known for challenging observers' preconditioned perceptions of reality. His imagery has influenced pop art, minimalist art and conceptual art.

The Musée Magritte Museum, located in the heart of Brussels, brings together the world's largest collection of art by René Magritte: 230 works and archives are displayed. The multidisciplinary space houses paintings, gouaches, drawings, sculptures and painted objects, as well as advertising posters, musical scores, photographs and films. The Museum also has the most important collection from the artist’s "vache" period.

The first image is "La saveur des larmes" (1948), which is exhibited in the Magritte Museum in Brussels. The artist's tongue-in-cheek photo mimics several of his canvases where men in bowler hats appear.

In the second image there are two works housed in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. "L'Éloge de la dialectique" (1937) and "Rose and pear" (colour etching and aquatint, printed 1968).

This post is part of the Wordless Wednesday meme,
and also part of the ABC Wednesday meme.


Wednesday, 14 August 2019

FAUVISM

Fauvism | ˈfəʊvɪz(ə)m | noun [mass noun]
A style of painting with vivid expressionistic and non-naturalistic use of colour that flourished in Paris from 1905 and, although short-lived, had an important influence on subsequent artists, especially the German expressionists. Matisse was regarded as the movement's leading figure.
DERIVATIVES
Fauvist noun & adjective
ORIGIN
French: Fauvisme, from fauve ‘wild beast’. The name originated from a remark of the French art critic Louis Vauxcelles at the Salon of 1905; coming across a quattrocento-style statue in the midst of works by Matisse and his associates, he is reputed to have said, ‘Donatello au milieu des fauves!’ (‘Donatello among the wild beasts’).

This post is part of the Wordless Wednesday meme,
and also part of the ABC Wednesday meme.
The artists, their work, their relationships, their achievements and the critical and commercial response to their work are discussed in this absorbing book by Sarah Whitfield, the first in many years to offer a reappraisal of Fauvism.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. "Street, Dresden". 1908 (reworked 1919; dated on painting 1907) - MoMA, New York.
In 2018, MoMA shared some of its collection with Australia when 200 works travelled to Melbourne for MoMA at NGV, an exclusive exhibition for the National Gallery of Victoria’s Winter Masterpieces series.

Wednesday, 24 July 2019

CANVAS

Canvas is an extremely durable plain-woven fabric used for making sails, tents, marquees, backpacks, and other items for which sturdiness is required, as well as in such fashion objects as handbags, electronic device cases, and shoes. It is also popularly used by artists as a painting surface, typically stretched across a wooden frame.

Canvas has become the most common support medium for oil painting, replacing wooden panels. It was used from the 14th century in Italy, but only rarely. One of the earliest surviving oils on canvas is a French Madonna with angels from around 1410 in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin.

Canvas is typically stretched across a wooden frame called a stretcher and may be coated with gesso before it is to be used; this is to prevent oil paint from coming into direct contact with the canvas fibres, which will eventually cause the canvas to decay. A traditional and flexible chalk gesso is composed of lead carbonate and linseed oil, applied over a rabbit skin glue ground; a variation using titanium white pigment and calcium carbonate is rather brittle and susceptible to cracking.

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (known as Camille Corot; July 16, 1796 – February 22, 1875) was a French landscape and portrait painter as well as a printmaker in etching. He is a pivotal figure in landscape painting and his vast output simultaneously references the Neo-Classical tradition and anticipates the plein-air innovations of Impressionism. A detail of his canvas of "Ville d'Avray", ca. 1867, (oil on canvas, Washington, D.C: National Gallery of Art) is seen below.

This post is part of the Wordless Wednesday meme,
and also part of the ABC Wednesday meme.


Sunday, 21 July 2019

IN THE GALLERY

In the National Gallery of Victoria, taking time to enjoy the art as this man is enjoying seeing "The Crossing of the Red Sea" (1632-4) by Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665).

This post is part of the My Sunday Best meme.


Monday, 29 April 2019

TETRAPTYCH

I've had a nice old wooden frame that is divided into four sections and I hadn't had time to draw or paint and use it. The last couple of weeks I had a seasonal cold and stayed inside for a few days. It was time to put the frame into good use and I took out my coloured pencils, watercolours and Faber-Castell PITT Artist Pens. Here is the result.

This post is part of the Mosaic Monday meme,
and also part of the Seasons meme,
and also part of the Blue Monday meme.