Tag: art history

Joachim Patinir

Joachim Patinir, “Landscape with Charon Crossing the Styx”, 1515–1524, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain

“Landscape with Charon Crossing Styx” fits into common Northern Renaissance and early Mannerist trends of art. The 16th century witnessed a new era for painting in Germany and the Netherlands that combined influences from local traditions and foreign influences. Many artists, including Patinir, traveled to Italy to study and these travels to the south provided new ideas, particular concerning representations of the natural world. Patinir’s religious subjects, therefore, incorporate precise observation and naturalism with fantastic landscapes inspired by the northern traditions of Bosch.

Patinir utilised a Weltlandschaft (“world landscape”) composition with a three-colour scheme typical of his work, moving from brown in the foreground, to bluish-green, to pale blue in the background. This format, which Patiner is widely acknowledged as popularising, provides a bird’s-eye view over an expansive landscape. Furthermore, the painting uses colour to visibly depict heaven and hell, good and evil. To the viewer’s left is a heavenly place with bright blue skies, crystal blue rivers with a luminous fountain and angels accenting the grassy hills. On the far right of the painting is a dark sky engulfing Hell and the hanged figures on its gate. Fires blaze in the hills. The foreground of the painting consists of brown rocks in Heaven and brown burnt trees in Hell.

In the middle-ground is the river and the grasslands in bright hues of blue and green. The background, which is cut off by the horizon line of the darker blue river, is a pale blue sky highlighted with white and gray clouds. This compositional form is applied here by the crowded left and right sides bracketed by hills, which pushes the viewer’s eye into the open space in the middle and reinforces that the men in the boat are the main focus of the painting.

Enric Adrian Gener

 

 

Enric Adrian Gener, Unknown Title, (Horse and Rider in Water)

Born on Menorca, one of the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Enric Adrian Gener is a freelance photographer who is passionate about the sea, the ocean, and photography. The vast majority of his minimalist work comes from real life underwater scenes. His photography project 27 MM can be located at: https://www.27mm.net/featured-photography

Reblogged with thanks to https://exercicedestyle.tumblr.com

Kurt Schwitters

 

Kurt Schwitters, “The Spring Door”, 1938

Kurt Schwitters was born Herman Edward Karl Julius Schwitters on June 20, 1887, in Hannover. He attended the Kunstgewerbeschule in Hannover from 1908 to 1909 and from 1909 to 1914 studied at the Kunstakademie Dresden. After serving as a draftsman in the military in 1917, Schwitters experimented with Cubist and Expressionist styles.

In 1918, he made his first collages and in 1919 invented the term “Merz,” which he was to apply to all his creative activities: poetry as well as collage and constructions. Schwitters’s earliest “Merzbilder” date from 1919, the year of his first exhibition at Der Sturm gallery in Berlin, and the first publication of his writings in the ‘Der Sturm’ periodical. Schwitters showed at the Société Anonyme in New York in 1920.

At the Kongress der Konstructivisten in Weimer, Germany, in 1922, Schwitters met Theo van Doesburg, whose ‘De Stijl’ principles influenced his work.  About 1923, the artist started to make his first “Merzbau”, a fantastic structure he built over a number of years; the structure grew to occupy much of his Hannover studio.  In 1932, Schwitters joined the Paris-based Abstraction-Création group and wrote for their publication of the same name. He participated in the Cubism and Abstract Art and Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibitions of 1936 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The Nazi regime banned Schwitters’s work as “degenerate art” in 1937. This year, the artist fled to Lysaker, Norway, where he constructed a second “Merzbau”. After the German invasion of Norway in 1940, Schwitters escaped to Great Britain, where he was interned for over a year. He settled in London following his release, but moved to Little Langdale in the Lake District in 1945. There, helped by a stipend from the Museum of Modern Art, he began work on a third “Merzbau” in 1947. The project was left unfinished when Schwitters died on January 8, 1948, in Kendal, England.

James Henry Daugherty

James Henry Daugherty, “Construction Workers”, Black and Sepia Conte on Paper, 1936

james Henry Daugherty lived in Indiana, Ohio, and at the age of 9 he moved to Washington, D.C., where he studied at the Corcoran School of Art. Later, he went to London and studied under Frank Brangwyn. During World War I, he was commissioned to produce propaganda posters for various US Government agencies, including the United States Shipping Board.

In September 2006, controversy erupted at Hamilton Avenue School, an elementary school in Greenwich, Connecticut, over Daugherty’s depiction of Bunker Hill hero and Connecticut native Israel Putnam in a mural commissioned by Public Works of Art Project for the town hall, and installed in the school in 1935.

The mural was restored, and revealed a scene, filled with violent and richly-colored imagery, including snarling animals, tomahawk-wielding American Indians, and a half-naked General Putnam strapped to a burning stake. School officials objected to the violent imagery, and ordered the mural removed to the Greenwich Public Library.

This was a study for a mural in the Social Room of Fairfield Court in Stamford, Connecticut.

Ed Thompson

The Unseen Series: Photography by Ed Thompson

Ed Thompson is a British photographer, artist and lecturer. His own photographic work has focused on various subjects over the years from covering environmental issues, socio-political movements, subcultures and the consequences of war. He lives in the South-East of England working on regular assignments both in the U.K and worldwide.

He developed a distinctive style from an early apprenticeship with the Russian photographer Sergey Chilikov, whom he met at the Arles Photography Festival in 2002. That summer he stayed with Sergey in Paris and learnt the value of shooting everyday life, Sergeys friend, Gueorgui Pinkhassov, told him how the everyday can allow you to touch at something great. His first job after graduating was working at a chain of static caravan holiday camps in the South-East taking portraits of children sitting on the knee of a giant rabbit.

Tierney Gearon

 

Tierney Gearon, “Manhattan Bridge, New York”

Tierney Gearon is an photographer, born in Atlanta, Georgia, who had no formal art training. She was a model for five years, during which time she began taking Polaroid pictures. This developed into full time fashion photography for magazines and Times Square billboards. Her photographic work was included in the “I am a Camea” exhibition at Saatchi Gallery. Gearon also had an exhibition called “The Mother Project” which consisted of photographs of her mother and later a book published called “Daddy, Where Are You?”

A documentary film by Jack Youngelson and Peter Sutherland entitled “Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project” was released in 2007. It follows the artist as she photographs her mother and covers the controversy surrounding the photographs of her children which she included in the “I am a Camera” exhibition.

Suzanne Moxhay

Interiors: Photography by Suzanne Moxhay

Born in Essex in 1976, Suzanne Moxhay studied painting at Chelsea College of Art before going on to the Royal Academy Schools where she graduated with a Post Graduate Diploma in Fine Art in 2007. She was then selected for a year long residency at the Florence Trust Studios, London where she developed the ‘Borderlands’ series.

Despite their unsettling nature, Moxhay’s dreamlike scenes have a deep narrative that leaves the viewer thinking about what has been and what’s to come. Whether they’re intending to be a metaphor for life and our existence, a comment about the environment and the state of our planet or just images of an imagined world, they speak out, which is what, paired with their excellent execution, validates them as complex and intelligent photographic works. Created by building and photographing miniature scenes and then digitally blending them with found images, printing with a soft edge is one of the processes used to create the all-important sense of distance.

Kris Kuksi

Sculptures by Kris Kuksi

Born March 2, 1973, in Springfield Missouri and growing up in neighboring Kansas, Kris spent his youth in rural seclusion and isolation along with a blue-collar, working mother, two significantly older brothers, and an absent father. Open country, sparse trees, and alcoholic stepfather, all paving the way for an individual saturated in imagination and introversion. His propensity for the unusual has been a constant since childhood, a lifelong fascination that lent itself to his macabre art later in life. The grotesque to him, as it seemed, was beautiful.

“A post-industrial Rococo master, Kris Kuksi obsessively arranges characters and architecture in asymmetric compositions with an exquisite sense of drama. Instead of stones and shells he uses screaming plastic soldiers, miniature engine blocks, towering spires and assorted debris to form his landscapes.

The political, spiritual and material conflict within these shrines is enacted under the calm gaze of remote deities and august statuary. Kuksi manages to evoke, at once, a sanctum and a mausoleum for our suffocated spirit.” – Guillermo del Toro

Jim Edwards

Eight Paintings by Jim Edwards

Edwards’ cityscape paintings are not studies from life, nor is he trying to capture a particular viewpoint or moment in time. His paintings have their origin in memory, how he remembers the workings and landmarks of the city, rather than a straightforward representation. The compositions evolve from a combination of imagination and selective memory, which are then altered and exaggerated. Certain buildings are forgotten, or simplified, creating a personal view of the city.

This personal impression of cityscapes often runs into his more abstract work, where the block shapes he paints represent manmade forms, rooms and human spaces. These combine with connecting lines, suggesting marks within a landscape, pathways linking separate constructs.

Chiharu Shiota

Installation Sculpture by Chiharu Shiota

Born in 1972 in Osaka, Japan, Chiharu Shiota lives and works in Berlin where she was a student of Marina Abramović and Rebecca Horn. She will represent Japan at the 56th edition of the Venice Biennale. His artistic creation combines both contemporary inspirations and Japanese heritage. . His drawings to installations and performances, the artist deals with many apprehensions, by a confusing effusion.

The objects she uses are mainly of old suitcases, letters, old pianos, ghostly robes, and all call a flashback. But the peculiarity of his work lies in the recurrent use of woven son, cables, metal rods, which transform the space into a gigantic spider web. Many place the body as the main subject of his work, but indirectly we distinguish being in this web of messages. The shapes become shadows, envelopes are empty and the majority of its installations, objects are searched by this son of entanglement, which we do not distinguish the borders.

A J Fosik

Wood Sculptures by AJ Fosik

AJ Fosik was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. In 2003, he received a BFA in Illustration from Parsons School of Design in New York City. He is currently based in Portland, Oregon. Fosik’s work has been exhibited in galleries across the country including New York, Philadelphia, Miami and San Francisco. He has been featured in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The Brooklyn Rail and Tokion. In 2011, Fosik was commissioned by Mastodon to create artwork for the cover of their album, The Hunter. The band’s music video featured the artist working in his studio on the piece.

Maskull Lasserre

Sculptures and Wood Carvings by Maskull Lasserre

Maskull Lasserre was born in Canada in 1978, and spent his early childhood in South Africa. He has a BFA from Mount Allison University (Visual Art and Philosophy), and an MFA from Concordia University in sculpture.

Lasserre’s drawings and sculptures explore the unexpected potential of the everyday through allegories of value, expectation, and utility. Elements of nostalgia, accident, humor, and the macabre are incorporated into works that induce strangeness in the familiar, and provoke uncertainty in the expected.

Lasserre is represented in the collections of the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, and Government of Canada amongst others. He has exhibited across Canada, in the United States and in Europe, including at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, and the GRASSI Museum in Germany. He is also a recent participant in the Canadian Forces War Artist Program in Afghanistan.

Fontana dell’ Amenano

Tito Angelini, Fontana dell’ Amenano, Detail, 1867

The Fontana dell’ Amenano is a carrara marble monument which seperates Piazza del Duomo on the north side from the rough and tumble La Pescheria marketplaceon the south side. It was built in 1867 by Tito Angelini and is a tribute to the River Amenano, which once ran overgroound and on whose banks the Greeks founded the city of Katáne. Behind the fountain is the stone staircase doorway that leads to the fish market, one of the major attractions of Catania.

Image reblogged with thanks to ganymedesrocks: