Art Articles

Article by J. Danilo Garcés

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.

Article by Adrian Zain

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.

Article by Willie Jimenez

Digitally coloring rough sketches from the old masters of the renaissance

What I learned and How it changed my life.

THE BEGINNING

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.

Article by Jimena Escoto

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.

Articke by Jimena Escoto

No matter which era of the western history of art you study, mythological scenes are present. That is why a great way to navigate through the evolution of art is by studying the same subject as it has been depicted across time and space. One of the most popular deities of the Greco-Roman pantheon is Venus or Aphrodite, the goddess of love, sexuality, fertility, etc. She is the protagonist of a vast number of stories regarding the gods and the mortals. For example, the love triangle between her, Mars and Vulcan, her interference within the Homeric epics, and her manipulation of Dido and Aeneas.

Article by Jimena Escoto

Since the beginning artists have tried to represent those things which are abstract by transforming them into persons, thus allegories. We see rivers, mountains, feelings, and many other things acquire human forms with personalities. One of my favorite allegories is the “Four continents”, i.e. Europe, Asia, Africa, and America (Oceania haven’t been totally discovered, and those islands who were known weren’t considered as a different continent yet). During the seventeenth century, with the discovery of the American continent, artists were inspired to depict this “new” continent with its companions. The question is, how do you represent them? They’re not exactly abstract, as they do have a shape and location, but painters wouldn’t design just another map, would they?

Article by Jimena Escoto

The society and the educational system of today prepare us to be specialists. Either you are a doctor, or a mathematician, or an artist. Hardly, though not impossible, you’ll find someone with more than one college degree, especially in different areas of knowledge. However, in the 16th century, this was not the case; as a matter of fact, if you were dedicated only to one specialty, you were kind of average and not interesting at all. During the Renaissance, we find architects who also painted and sculpted masterpieces, such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. They were complete artists. We can say that Giorgio Vasari belongs to that exclusive group, he was a painter, architect, art historian and a writer.

Article by Jimena Escoto

It is well known that the Renaissance was a period of rediscovery of classical culture. As a result, artists started depicting mythological scenes, even though they never forgot Christian themes. With this new liberty and excitement to create, subjects that were formerly censured flourished. One particular theme that I have noticed frequently used in Italian Renaissance is that of Leda and the swans. One of the major subjects during this time was eroticism, of which Leda’s story belongs to.

Article by Jimena Escoto

Have you ever wondered how did we go from the sculpted columns in the Gothic cathedrals to Michelangelo’s David?

Article by Jimena Escoto

The Renaissance must have been a wonderful time to live in, if you were wealthy, of course. And to live in Florence at that time meant two things. The first one was that everybody knew who the Medicis were; and the second one, the streets were full of artists, architects, sculptors in hopes that the Medicis would commission them an artwork. Indeed, the Medicis were big fans of fine art and they spent as much as they wanted in expensive masterpieces of any kind.