Who could be more fair to judge Claude Monet’s oeuvre than the French artist himself? Acknowledged by the father of Impressionism as his ‘most beautiful masterpiece’, the garden at Giverny —to which he dedicated half his life— was not only a living canvas in which he used flowers instead of paints, but also the most important subject of his late years’ paintings.
Aurore Dupin did not behave as other women did. She liked to wander through the Parisian salons dressed like a man, smoking cigars and since her divorce, she had taken several lovers. When George Sand, the pen name by which she is best known, laid her eyes on pianist and composer Frédéric Chopin, she set out on a mission to possess him.
Not much is left from Claude Monet’s first wife, Camille Doncieux: just one photograph, official French documents and the paintings that have immortalized her. After her premature death at only 32 years old (it is unknown whether the reason was a malpracticed abortion or cervix cancer), the painter destroyed her family photographs and all the correspondence she had ever written or received. The surviving photograph had been taken in Amsterdam in 1871, and it was saved only because Monet did not know about its existence. Nothing else was left from the woman he had married in spite of his family’s disapproval; the woman that had given him two sons. According to the art historian Daniel Wildenstein, his second wife, Alice Hoschedé, consumed by jealousy, was the one to blame for the damnatio memoriae (condemnation of memory) that was imposed on Camille.
I thought about this one a lot. When so much has already been said, when almost every corner and detail of a subject has already been study so thoroughly as the life and work of Vincent van Gogh has been, is really hard to just start writing without thinking that whatever you’re about to say probably has been told a thousand times already and you don’t even know if the way you are going to tell it will be worth reading at all. As a result of these thoughts I found myself looking in doubt to the empty page for minutes at a time before closing it and giving up to the incapability of creating for another day. Days passed on like this and I was about to quit trying to write about Van Gogh.
Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida was born in Valencia in 1863, at the time in which Impressionism was starting to thrive in France. As his parents died from cholera when he was two years old, he was raised by his aunt and her husband. His uncle, a locksmith, wanted him to follow his profession, but Sorolla took on studies at the Saint Charles Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Valencia instead, where he met Impressionist painter Ignacio Pinazo, from whom he would take the influence of painting en plein air (outdoors).
This article is about the years I spent traveling across Europe while in the Navy and how that experience effected me and my art. How I picked up photography and got better along the way in both taking picture and digital painting because of it.
We all know artist can be reclusive, at least that’s the romantic stereotype people seem to assume. To an artist all that matters is the work and will forgo everything else in pursuit of creating that next great masterpiece. But you know what is also a stereotype… artist block.
In the book “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron, she talks a lot about the “the artist date”. Basically to have good art come out of you, you need inspiration coming in. So it’s important to refuel and recharge routinely. I’ve personally found traveling and taking photos to be both very rewarding and refreshing.
It’s the end of the 19th century and you’re walking with no destination through the city of Paris, electricity is something new and the street lamps no longer illuminate the buildings with the dim light of burning gas. Just imagine how it felt to live that moment in which every corner of the world suddenly seemed to turn brighter. Think about Paris; think about where would you like to go, a museum, to a café, maybe the theater? Or just walk through the streets at night looking at the light reflected on the stone of the buildings and on the faces of every person walking by, until you find yourself lost. You end up at Montmartre one of those districts where there’re open doors everywhere and you can hear music and laughter coming from inside of each one. And there it is, the Moulin Rouge.
Raphael, starting in June 1511 would begin to work on one of his most famous and revolutionary paintings, the Portrait of Pope Julius II, this painting would be unlike any other portrait of a pope, and for the most part, portraiture in general at the time.
What I learned and How it changed my life.
I was a comic book colorist for years when I had decided to join the navy and I was living in Italy for three years with lots of time on my hands. I really had little interesting the drawings and paintings of the renaissance at the time. I was fan of comics and cartoons. I never really saw why I had to learn all that stuff if thats wasn’t what I wanted to do. But living in Italy I got to travel a lot and visited a lot of museums and slowly this idea started to build in my head.
As I traveled to different museums around Europe I slowly noticed I gravitated towards old sketches and etchings. This crazy idea of taking them and painting them in with photoshop really started with me buying a high quality print of Michelangelo’s sketch, known as the fury, it was such a beautiful and powerful sketch. I decided to scan it and color it in. As a comic colorist I’ve taken pencil sketches and done similar things before and I just loved the way it turned out. So I wanted to do more.
The nineteenth century was a period of constant change, revolutions, wars, endings and new beginnings. These turbulent times affected artists who began to express themselves in more than one way. Indeed, when we study the 1800s art, we have at least four movements that really transcended and made an impact in the History of Art: Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, and the origins of Cubism. In this article I want to talk about one of the greatest Romantic painters and possibly one of the last Old Masters, Eugène Delacroix.