I recently wrote an article about how taking photographs, along with travel, helped me with building a visual library. I feel it was a great way to learn composition and learn what makes a photo unique and interesting, by trail and error, without the time and effort it takes to do the same with a drawing and/or painting.
Michelangelo, is known by many across the world to be an incredible painter and artist, with him painting the Sistine Chapel and the Last Judgement, but at the same time it should be known, that first and foremost – Michelangelo thought of himself as a sculptor, and he was an extraordinary one, with him sculpting works such as ‘David’ and ‘Bacchus’.
In 1893, Monet was able to acquire the adjacent land to his property at Giverny (which was separated by the railway), where he gave life to an extravagant oriental water garden. For this lush project, not only he had to divert water from a branch of the Epte river, but he also had to stand against his neighbors, as they did not want the water to be contaminated by his exotic plants. Still, in the end, Monet got away with it and was permitted to carry out his plan. Inspired by the Japanese prints he avidly collected —his two hundred and thirty one Japanese woodblock prints are currently exhibited in the house—, he designed a green wooden footbridge over an artificial pond, surrounded by wisteria vines, bamboo, irisis and different varieties of newly bred water lilies.
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.