On 18 Apr, 2014 With
Article from Coco Depink
Ovid in his Metamorphoses tells the story of Andromeda, the daughter of King Cepheus and Queen Cassiopea of Ethiopia. The mother’s claim to beauty so agreed the Nereids that Neptune sent a sea monster to ravage the kingdom.to free the country from his scourge, Chepheus was forced to sacrifice Andromeda. Anthony van Dyck depicted the moment of sacrificed Andromeda, chained to a rock near the monster lair, is rescued from her faith by Perseus, who flies above from his winged horse, Pegasus. The sea monster can be seen thrashing about in the waves below. The subject was a popular one among artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Offering the challenge of portraying the female nude in distress. Both Rubens and Rembrandt painted the story of Perseus but this is the only example of van Dyck, who rarely painted mythological pictures…
Read More
On 16 Apr, 2014 With
Article from Luca Molnar
From time to time we all experience creative blocks, these can be some of the hardest times for an artist and it happens to all of us. Even if you don’t have such a problem at the moment, you might have in the future but either way being more creative can’t hurt. In this article I will show you 5 methods to be more creative and get back to creating right away…
Read More
On 16 Apr, 2014 With
Article from Sophy Laughing
Sophy Laughing (Soph Laugh) is a California-born artist who specializes in the conservation, preservation, and restoration of antiquities. Laughing began making studies of portrait drawings after visiting the Maastricht Fine Art Fair. Inspired by masterpieces held in institutions and in private collection, Laughing began exploring drawings of the Old Masters.
Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones’ Study for a head for the painting THE CAR OF LOVE (1895) is one of Laughing’s favorite drawings. The drawing is a preliminary study for the head of a central female figure dragging the CAR mounted on huge wheels through the narrow streets of a city resembling Siena, which Burne-Jones visited in 1871. The male figures in the drawing are reminiscent of Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, where Burne-Jones spent many hours studying and copying Michelangelo’s male figures. While the painting remained unfinished at the artist’s death in 1898, the features found in this beautiful head study became Laughing’s muse, shaping her perspective of ideal female beauty, as portrayed in pencil. So entranced by her face, as well as by the illuminated faces painted by Raphael, Laughing has since studied portrait drawings of the Old Masters…
Read More
On 16 Apr, 2014 With
Article from Coco Depink
When Giambattista Tiepolo was called from his native Venice in 1730 by the Archinto family to decorate their palace in Milan, he was embarking on a career that would establish him as Europe’s foremost decorative painter. Tiepolo studied with Giorgio Lazzarini, but it was the vast ceiling paintings by Paolo Veronese, the sixteen-century master, and the impressive altarpieces of Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, Tiepolo’s contemporary, that had the most profound effect on his art. As early as 1726 Tiepolo was referred as ‘celebre Pittor’ (by the Udine town council) and his fresco decorations along with his sketches and easel paintings, where soon in high demand throughout Europe. He would enjoy an illustrious international career, working for the courts of Wurzburg and Madrid before dying in Spain in 1770.
Apollo and Phaethon is an extremely important record of Tiepolo’s painting cycle at the palazzo Achinto, which was destroyed by bombs in 1943. Unpublished and unknown to the scholarly community before it appeared at auction in 1985, the painting is directly related to a fresco that decorated the ceiling of one of the four reception rooms in the palace. It tells the story of the semi divine Phatheon who sought to prove his mother’s assertion that he was the son of the god Apollo. He did this by coaxing Apollo’s permission to allow him to drive the Charriot of the Sun, which the sun-god guided across the zodiac to usher in each new day. Apollo, who actually was Phaethon’s father, reluctantly agreed, but the young man, unable to control the feisty stallions in their charge across the sky, flew too close to earth, scorching it and creating the desert of Africa. The planet was spared total immolation by Jupiter, who halted Phaethon’s ill-advised ride by rocking him from the chariot with a thunderbolt…
Read More
On 15 Apr, 2014 With
Article from Coco Depink
Paul Cézanne (Aix-en-Provence 1839–1906) was a Post-Impressionist painter whose work set the roots of the shift from the 19th-century idea of artistic endeavor to an innovative and drastically altered realm of art in the 20th century. Cézanne’s frequently repetitive, experimental brushstrokes are decidedly distinctive and undoubtedly identifiable. He adopted planes of color and minute brushstrokes that shape up to create intricate themes. The paintings deliver Cézanne’s passionate analysis of his subjects.
For many years Cezanne occupied himself with the theme of male or female bathers in a landscape, its apotheosis being the three large compositions with bathing women in London, Philadelphia, and Merion, Pensylvania. In addiction to these paintings, Cezanne created many watercolos and numerous sketches in pencil and black chalk relating to this theme. In fact, representations of bathing figures are known among the artist’s earliest works, and his correspondence with Emile Zola constantly indulges in reminiscences of their joint excursions along the brooks in the countryside around Aix-en-Provence.
From the 1870 on Cezanne explored this theme in dept. He was probably inspired by the paintings of nudes in nature by old masters like Giorgione, Titian, Peter Paul Rubenz, and Nicolas Poussin; but also by those of a direct predecessor like Goustave Coubret, or a contemporary artist like Eduard Manet. Clearly, Cezanne did not aim to render solely the nude, but rather to combine nude figure with nature…
Read More
On 15 Apr, 2014 With
Article from Coco Depink
Rutilio Manetti was one of those busy and reliable provincial painters whose manner was derived from the innovations of more important artists in major artistic centers and who, in certain works, brought an injection of metropolitan excitement to the art of his hometown. He fulfilled a purely local demand for altarpieces, decorations, and history paintings in styles reflecting several of the fashions of the day, some reminiscent of Caravaggio, others of the Gentileschi, and so on. Manetti has benefited from the stimulating resurgence in Italy in the last twenty years of local interest in native talent, even thought he was not one of the innovators in the history of Italian painting not even one of those artists with a quirky and appealing poetry who sometimes emerges despite a provincial heritage.
If Siena, where Manetti was born in 1571 and where he spent most of his life, was a less significant city under the late Medici rule in the seventeenth century that it had been as an independent city-state in medieval times, it still was quite an important religious center and there was a lively demand for a good painter or two to serve the church, city and private patrons. Little is known of his early career. After completing the altar piece of the Death of the Blessed Anthony Patrizi ( Sant’ Agostino Monticiano) in 1616 a painting that betrays some knowledge of the advanced art of Artemisia Gentileschi who was active in Florence at that time, Manetti likely went to Rome…
Read More
On 10 Apr, 2014 With
Article from Chris Crombé
We all know, almost without thinking, famous male painters like, Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dijck, Cézanne, Van Gogh etc. But if we have to cite a female one our memory fails. And still they were there. In one of my articles I will try to explain the raison of this phenomena. But I start as a trigger with one of an not very well known, but exceptional talented animal painter. Cats have been a favorite subject of artists for many decades, and many big names in the art world have produced impressive works. One of them is Henriette Ronner-Knip. HENRIËTTE RONNER-KNIP (1821 – 1909) Henriette Ronner, born KNIP, was born on the 21st of may 1821 in Amsterdam. Her father, grand-father , uncle and one of her aunts, where fine artists too. All four of them had…
Read More
On 8 Apr, 2014 With
Article by Luca Molnar
We as human beings often would like to have everything right away. We want to be successful, happy, we want to draw and paint like Michelangelo, be thinner or prettier and we want all of these things by tomorrow. If it doesn’t happen quickly enough (and it doesn’t), we loose faith and move on to our next goal. However things take time in this universe of ours…
Greatness is not given easily or quickly. Salvador Dali or Hieronymus Bosch didn’t become the artist we know them to be today overnight, nor did they paint their masterpieces in 2 hours. They studied and practiced, failed and tried again more times than anyone could count. What they did differently from most of us is that they kept trying and believed in themselves even when no one else did. Just remember how Dali barely had something to eat for years and no one seemed to like his paintings. Or look at the earliest works of some of the most talented artists, those paintings simply aren’t good, in some cases we can even say that they are terrible. However these artists were patient with themselves and kept studying until they became the very best of their time…
Read More
On 6 Apr, 2014 With
Article by Luca Molnar
If you are an art lover, just like me then you have probably realized that having a great technique has somehow became an old-fashioned thing. At the same time everything that is ‘shocking’ or ‘strange’ has been labeled as ‘creative’. One may find oneself confused and lost about which way to go as an artist and it is surely a reasonable question. In order to find answer to our question, let’s take a closer look at ‘creativity’ and ‘technique’ and what these words really mean.
Through centuries and probably ever since humans started painting and expressing themselves through arts, artists have been thriving for a greater knowledge regarding technique. This was the main reason why painters were also scientist for hundreds of years. The old masters were restlessly searching for more vibrant colours and were perfecting…
Read More
On 3 Apr, 2014 With
Article by Luca Molnar
Have you ever heard of William-Adolphe Bouguereau? Or the old technique of glazing? I don’t blame you if you haven’t yet.
Bouguereau was a famous Franch painter in the 19th century, who died more than a hundred years ago in 1905. He studied the academic style (the technique of the great renaissance masters) for years as a young artist, and perfected his knowledge in the almost forgotten, mysterious technique of the renaissance masters. He became one of the best and most celebrated painters of his generation; and a true master of his profession at a very young age. In 1850, at the tender age of 26 Bouguereau completed his famous painting, Zenobia Found by Shepherds on the Banks of the Araxes, which clearly shows his amazing talent and unmatchable skills and knowledge. An art critic stated at the time “Bouguereau has a natural instinct and knowledge of contour. The eurythmie of the human body preoccupies him, and in recalling the happy results which, in this genre, the ancients and the artists of the sixteenth century arrived at, one can only congratulate Bouguereau in attempting to follow in their footsteps … Raphael was inspired by the ancients … and no one accused him of not being original.” But what was this technique? What was the secret behind his larger than life paintings?…
Read More
