new information on Caravaggio

Recently restored police reports:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12497978

Willem deKooning

Bridget Riley

Riley was one of the pop artists who used purely geometric optical effects in paint.  The work is tremendous.  Look carefully at the slight variations in line weight and width, and the slight value changes that create the sense of movement.  Hold your hands over most of the painting and reveal only a small part to really understand the construction.  Think about how you would execute a painting at this scale.

Hieronymus Bosch

Click on these images and let yourself wander through the imagery.  Don't you think the pictures are weirdly engaging and convey the feeling that even though horrific scenes are depicted, it might be fun to touch the glistening fruit or test the ear-handled sharp blade or to climb the delicate ladder into the eggshell behind of the giant person? 

Sometimes an artist can say what is not expected by manipulating how the paint itself appears.  Think about Pearlstein's nudes. (pictures below)  They are too smooth, too naked and appear to have flesh that is around 45 degrees.  Horrific.  

Gerhardt Richter

Gerhardt Richter is a great role model to painters.  He has consistently worked for many, many years in many, many styles.  His "Atlas" is a collection of photographic references he has maintained as source material.  I can't encourage you enough to start one for yourself.
http://www.gerhard-richter.com/art/atlas/

Miniature Paintings from India

These paintings are so beautiful, so subtle and so strangely designed.
Look at how space is conveyed by stacking shapes.  There are no spaces in these paintings that look half-baked or hastily resolved-just to get it done.  It appears as if the design, the space and the subject all came into being at the same time.  Samantha, especially you look at the horizon line below.  The pale salmon glow and the muted olive of the foliage is like a gorgeous after-tone left at the end of a beautiful piece of music.  That was what was beginning to happen in your little painting.  Look for moments like this in all your paintings.

Philip Pearlstein

Here is a link to an article that contrasts John Currin's work (see below) with Pearlstein.
http://artcritical.com/2004/01/29/philip-pearlstein-recent-paintings-at-robert-miller-gallery/
I agree with the article that the overt grotesquerie of Currin is crowd pleasing and funny and that Pearlstein is more difficult, and thus more interesting because we do not know if he is joking, or sinister or sincere.  Sometimes a straight face is more enigmatic than any other.  The great message from Pearlstein is "get to work and don't slow down."

Giorgio Morandi
Here is a link to the show at the Met
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/giorgio_morandi/images.asp
We spoke about his quiet, repetitive, meditative paintings today in class.  Look at the small variations of line weight, color, paint application and arrangement of mass in the different paintings.  Tiny variations in placement and value, hue or texture, convey quite different messages.  The paintings are really beautiful.
Don't you imagine that there was not an atom of drama queen in his personality?  Or instead, do you see intense oceans of repressed feelings?

Gauguin, Van Gogh

Self portraits by Van Gogh and Gauguin.
Gauguin and Van Gogh rented a place in Arles where they developed the ideas about authenticity and primitivism in art that ultimately drove Gauguin to the south seas where he lived and painted.  There he wrote the book, "My Life as a Savage."  It is pretty interesting reading.

Below are three paintings from Gauguin and four paintings from Van Gogh.

Van Gogh shared Gauguin's interest in saturated color and decorative shapes within the composition.
At this time in Europe Japanese decorative art was experiencing a great popularity.  If you compare some of the color harmonies and compositional devices in Van Gogh and Gauguin paintings with Shoji Screens, you can see definite influence.

 A link to a letter from Van Gogh to his brother regarding this landscape painting.
http://www.artquotes.net/masters/vangogh/vangogh_landscape.htm

A link to new information about the famous "cut off ear and prostitute incident."
http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/entertainment/2009/may/Van-Gogh-or-Gauguin--Who-Really-Cut-off-the-Infamous-Ear-.html

List of artists for beg. painting class

First, you should bookmark Google Art Project.
http://www.googleartproject.com/
You can visit museums all around the world and see works in very close detail.  Nothing is more fun than getting as close as you can to the brushstrokes of a master.  Please take advantage of this great tool.
Look at the paintings with an eye to how you apply your paint.

We discussed some random painters you should be familiar with on Monday this week in class.  I promised a slide show which is still developing.  Until then, the following images-in no particular order- should give you an idea of how widely varied painters and images are.

Chuck Close

 

Chuck Close grew up with a disorder preventing him from recognizing faces.  Recently there was an interview on NPR in which he discussed Synesthesia.  (tasting color, hearing temperature, etc.)

Some say Kandinsky suffered the same condition.  The work Close does is tremendous considering he still does large scale paintings even though he is confined to a mechanical wheelchair after losing fine motor control of his hands following a debilitating illness.  When you feel like complaining, think of the legendarily kind and strong Chuck Close.  His work pre-dated the digital age, using the same "bit" information system as computer imaging does.  

Dana Schutz (contemporary) is a young painter of primarily figurative work.  Her work was featured in the Site Santa Fe Biennial Robert Storr curated a few years ago.  The paintings were giant.
Here is a link to the Saatchi website:
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/dana_schutz.htm
Charles Saatchi is a wealthy collector of contemporary art, not without controversy over his influence (see Clement Greenberg below)  on recent art market valuations.

 

Franz Kline

1910-1962

Kline was an American Abstract Expressionist most notable for his large monochrome gestural paintings.  He emphasized the capacity of a work to communicate feeling over all else.  Kline described the first strokes of a painting as "the beginning of the situation."  He used a projector to enlarge bits of drawings-often of recognizable still life subjects.

He was an influential regular at the Cedar Bar in NYC and was a contemporary of Pollock, DeKooning and Motherwell.

A link to his works online:

http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/kline_franz.html

BLU-street artist (contemporary)  maybe not quite the caliber of the other artists on this list, but a very interesting and fun painter, painting in a way not common.

This is a link to MUTO, a very large scale animated work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuGaqLT-gO4

Renoir  1841-1919

Renoir was an impressionist, most noted for his brilliant, light dappled color and evocative images of women and the residents of the streets of Paris.  Like BLU, he painted outside on the streets. 

"Why shouldn't art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world."

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Peter Doig (contemporary)
He's very current, though I have reservations about his work.
Here is a link to more information:
http://artobserved.com/2009/01/ao-on-site-peter-doig-new-paintings-saturday-january-17th-2009-on-until-march-14th-2009-at-gavin-browns-enterprise-and-michael-werner-gallery-new-york/
Check the links on the right side of this page for links to more living artists.

Velasquez  1599-1660

If you can get Google Art Project to find you a Velasquez painting, zoom in on the paint marks.  They are so confident, and strange.  Aesop (the painting below) is one of my very favorite paintings, for the compassion and tenderness and clear eyed observation Velasquez exhibits.  His reputation is quite other than tender or compassionate, yet the evidence is here.

Las Meninas, the painting of the royal family (Velasquez was court painter) is so complex spatially and so beautiful in color it seems to be inhabited by spirits.  Look at the far background, and the color of the dress in the foreground.  Amazing.

Exhibiting none of the compassion in Aesop, the painting above is razor sharp.  The disdain it is painted with is palpable.

John Currin  (contemporary)  

Born in Boulder, CO, now working in NYC,  John Currin was influential in the recent revival of figurative  work.  Here is a link to Gagosian Gallery in NYC: 

http://www.gagosian.com/artists/john-currin/

He may not last as a giant in art history, but he uses humor in his work-something I admire.

  

Jackson Pollock  1912-1956

Famously hard drinking, depressed and dysfunctional, Pollock moved beyond the hybrid-image-abstraction "Guardians of the Secret" shown below in color to pure paint-pure abstract gesture.  When I was an art student I visited "Guardians" many times on my way home from school.  It is a perfect illustration of the liminal state a painting can enter when caught between image and abstraction.  It might not be the most beautiful, or successful painting, but it has "heat" for sure.  I took it as a signpost for a young painter admonishing me to "Chose well your direction." 

He was championed by critic Clement Greenberg as a pure abstract painter, concerned only with the physical material of paint and the physical movement of the painter, not content.  Clement Greenberg established a timeline of the evolution of painting from the French (Renoir et. al) to American Abstract painters of the 1950's that is now somewhat blotted by his extreme conflict of interest in being both an advisor to the artists themselves and a critic and advisor to curators and collectors.  He bought paintings from the artists he championed and (see Saatchi) exerted a great influence over which paintings entered which collections for how much.  The story of Pollock drunkenly peeing in Peggy Guggenheim's fireplace is legendary.  

  

Mark Rothko  1903-1970

Rothko was also known as a depressed abstract painter.  I think he was more a genius mystic.  He committed suicide in 1970.

His son recently published a text Rothko wrote but never published as an instructional text for painters.

His reputation is one for stiffness and formality, but the book belies a very soft side and a warmth not usually talked about. 

A friend of mine, a photographer who is prickly and sarcastic burst into tears in the Rothko Chapel in Houston-much to his horror.  Years later, he still talks about the wave of emotion that engulfed him.

Rothko's paintings are thin, breaths of dry pigment and complex equations of color interactions that seem to inhale and exhale like beings. Reproductions don't begin to convey the beauty and sense of ensouled paint evident in person.

David Park  1911-1960

A tremendously influential West Coast figuration painter not well known outside Northern California.  

His figures were described as "not paintings of people, but paint-people."  You can see not a little influence in the paintings of Dana Schutz.  He was good friends and drew weekly from life with Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff.  Look at the quality of reflected light in "standing male nude in the shower."  He died of cancer when he was 49.  When I feel timid, I look at David Parks.

Jay DeFeo 1921-1989

http://www.jaydefeo.org/

Her painting "The Rose"is notorious because she worked on it for eight years, finally having to remove a wall in the building where she worked to move it out because it was so enormous.  For years, it was walled up in the San Francisco Art Institute.  It was revealed again for the Whitney Show in the 90's.  The painting weighs over 2000 lbs. and is a little more than ten feet tall.   The 3-dimensionality you see is entirely paint.  It is stunning.

My friend Tim was her assistant during her last years.  He loved her.