Tag: art history

Halloween Horror

Happy Halloween: Third and Final Chapter: Horror Manga

Japanese horror tends to focus on psychological horror and tension building and suspense, particularly involving ghosts and poltergeists, while many contain themes of folk religion such as: possession, exorcism, shamanism, precognition, and yōkai.

Recommended: Graphic horror works by Junji Ito ( “The Enigma of Amigara Fault” and “Uzumaki”) and “Jisatsu Circle” by Furuya Usamaru.

Recommended: Films:  “Jigoku”,1960 by director Nobuo Nakagawa; “Tetsuo: The Iron man”,1989, a cyberpunk horror film by Shinya Tsukamoto;  “Ringu”, the original Japanese version of the Americanized “The Ring”,1998, directed by Hideo Nakata.

Enjoy. Do not forget to turn off all the lights. No flashlights allowed. Happy Halloween to all of you.

Hugo Simberg

Hugo Simberg, “The Wounded Angel’”, Oil on Canvas, 1903

The “Wounded Angel” is a painting by Finnish symbolist painter Hugo Simberg. It is one of the most recognizable of Simberg’s works, and was voted Finland’s “national painting” in a vote held by the Ateneum art museum in 2006.

Like other Simberg works, the atmosphere is melancholic: the angelic central figure with her bandaged forehead and bloodied wing, the sombre clothing of her two youthful bearers. The direct gaze of the right-hand figure touches the viewer.

The procession passes through a recognisable landscape, that of Eläintarha, Helsinki, with Töölönlahti Bay in the background. In Hugo Simberg’s time, the park was a popular spot for leisure-time activities among the working classes. At the time, many charity institutions were located in Eläintarha park. In “The Wounded Angel” the healthy boys are carrying the injured girl towards the Blind Girls’ School and the Home for Cripples. She clutches a bunch of snowdrops, symbolic of healing and rebirth.

Simberg himself declined to offer any deconstruction, suggesting that the viewer draw their own conclusions. However it is known that Simberg had been suffering from meningitis, and that the painting was a source of strength during his recovery. This can also be read metaphorically: meningitis is known to cause neck stiffness, lethargy and light sensitivity, each of which is exhibited by the central figure.

Bruno Vekemans

Bruno Vekemans, “De Zwemmer (The Swimmer)”, 1995, Mixed Media on Paper, 85 x 115 centimeters

Bruno Vekemans was born in Antwerp on July 29, 1952. As a child and teenager he is constantly engaged in drawing and painting. Vekemans took one preparatory year of decoration and a two-year interior decoration course at the Technicum Institute, Londenstraat, Antwerp.

In 1971 Vekemans started experimenting with different techniques, experimenting with collages, églomisé and comics. In 1988 his art work was focused on linear works, mostly gouache on pattern paper. Vekemans later replaced the paper patterns with seventeeth century paper and started experimenting with oils on canvas.

Bruno Vekemans has been in several international exhibitions in Tokyo, New York, Paris, and Amsterdam, among others. Influenced by his travels, he has recently completed two thematic series on Africa and Cuba.

Image reblogged with thanks to https://thunderstruck9.tumblr.com

 

Antonio Lopez

Antonio Lopez, “Sink and Mirror”, 1967, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

López García studied art in Madrid in the 1950s and lived there after 1960, becoming an instructor at his alma mater, the School of Fine Arts of San Fernando. He has influenced generations of artists as a leader of the Spanish Realists, known for their unyielding depictions of their surroundings and for the long history of painting from which they have evolved. López García’s paintings and sculptures demonstrate not only his keen powers of observation, but also his extraordinary sensitivity to atmosphere and light.

Interior spaces are a recurring theme in López García’s work, particularly the interior of his own studio and bathroom. Though he was initially captivated by the emptiness of his new studio, in Sink and Mirror López captures traces of his own presence. The objects arranged on the shelf below the mirror serve as an autobiographical assemblage that stands in for the (absent) reflection in the mirror.

The artist’s near-obsessive attention to perspective, as hinted by the vertical and horizontal lines of the tiles, cause a rift in the painting’s composition. In order to avoid a terribly inclined perspective, López divided the scene into two views, keeping the traces of process as a mediating buffer in the center.

Albrecht Durer

Albrecht Durer, The Men’s Bathhouse”, Woodcut, 1496, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The Men’s Bath is an unusual print for its time since this is the only graphic image that was made for sale of naked men in such a scene.  Even more odd is the fact that these men are depicted naked in public, in a city that religiously regulated clothing down to the number of pearls allowed to be on any garment and where all the inhabitants needed to be fully covered.

It is believed that the figure with only a risqué codpiece covering his genitals and playing the flute is Dürer himself because he is bearded.  The two men in the foreground are believed to be the very sexually permissive  Paümgartner brothers, Stephen and Lucas, who Dürer depicted in the Paümgartner Altar.

Jean Michel Basquiat

Jean Michel Basquiat, “Fallen Angel”, Acrylic and Oilstick on Canvas, 1981

Dominated by the figure of a large angel, rendered in staccatoed red, yellow and black lines, floating against a luminous blue background, “Fallen Angel” is a supreme example of Basquiat’s early artistic output. Paramount to the painting is the rapacious creativity and unrepentant vigor contained within each brushstroke.

The vivacious tonal qualities of the work represent a radical fusion of street drawing onto the Modernist canvas. The colors are not those of easel painting, obtained while learning a craft and constantly worked on. They are lively, swift colors of the street, both vibrant and fading, affixed and opposing. The unsophisticated, complex layers of paint and line contain an unrestrained primitivism that eschews high artistic conventions.

Wolfgang Buttress

Wolfgang Buttress, “Lucent”, Fibre Optics, Mirror

Commissioned by Hearn for the John Hancock Center in Chicago, Lucent will be the focal point of the towers entrance.

Working with eminent astrophysicist Dr. Daniel Bayliss, from the Australian National University, Wolfgang has created a semi-spherical sculpture made up of thousands of nodes which accurately map the stars which can be seen in the Northern Hemisphere from the Earth with the naked eye.

Fibre optic lighting subtly pulsates over the day and throughout the seasons. Lucent is attached to a mirrored ceiling creating the illusion of a whole sphere. Beneath the artwork sits a polished black granite pool of water; this reflects the sculpture and suggests a sense of infinity

Lucent expresses and emanates light; the stars of the Southern Hemisphere are implied in it’s reflection. They are there but cannot be seen.

Gilbert and George

Gilbert and George, “Hope”, One of Four Paintings of the Series “Death Hope Life Fear”, 1984

Gilbert and George met in 1967 while students at St. Martin’s Art School in London. They began to create art together, developing a uniquely recognizable style both in their pictures and in their presentations of themselves as living sculptures. Over more than forty years, they developed a new format that created large-scale pictures, which are visually and emotionally powerful, through a unique creative process. Most of their pictures are created in groups and made especially for the space in which they are first exhibited.

The artists’ art, which is sometimes seen as subversive, controversial, and provocative, considers the entire cosmology of human experience and explores such themes as faith and religion, sexuality, race and identity, urban life, terrorism, superstition, AIDS-related loss, aging, and death.

Rufino Tamayo

Three Works by Rufino Tamayo

The top image is a lithograph entitled “Perro / Dog”, 1973,  from a series of 15. The middle image is an oil painting entitled “El Comedor de Sandias / The Watermelon Eater”, 1941, one of many works Tamayo did on the subject. The bottom image is an oil on canvas, painted on the eve of the United States entry into World War One, entitled “Animals”, 1941, now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Tatiana Blass

Tatiana Blass, “Penelope”, Loom, Red Yan

In 2011, Brazilian artist Tatiana Blass pierced the walls of a Sao Paulo chapel with large masses of red yarn, letting the bright material trail into the surrounding grasses, landscape, and trees. The installation, titled Penelope, was named after Odysseus’s wife in Homer’s Odyssey, a character who kept herself away from suitors while he was at war by weaving a burial shroud by day, and secretly taking pieces of it apart at night.

Inside the chapel the work continued with a 45-foot-long carpet leading to a loom into which it was stuck. Immaculate on one side of the loom and in pieces on the other, strings of the dismantled rug traveled outside of the chapel through preexisting holes that made their way into the yard. The piece, just like the epic poem, leaves us to wonder whether the work is in a state of construction or unraveling, if the carpet is being built, or slowly torn apart.

Francois Andre Vincent

Francois Andre Vincent. French, “Saint Sebastian”, 1789, Oil on Canvas, Musee Fabre, Montpellier

Francois Andre Vincent, a French Neo-Classical painter, was the son of the miniaturist François-Elie Vincent and studied under Joseph-Marie Vien. He was a pupil of École Royale des Éleves Protégés and studied from 1771-75 at the Académie de France. Vincent travelled to Rome, where he won the Prix de Rome in 1768 at the age of twenty-two..

After being awarded the Prix de Rome, Vincent spent the years of 1771 to 1775 in Italy, studying at the French Academy in Rome. It was there that he produced a series of witty and revealing portraits, along with paintings of ordinary people doing their daily activities, landscapes and a few drawings.

Francois Andre Vincent was installed at the Palais Mancini in Rome, where he painted numerous portraits, inspired by painterJean-Honoré Fragonard’s style. Vincent’s studies, such as his 1777 “The Drawing Lesson”, show him responding to Fragonard’s gentle and traditional Louis XV vocabulary of sentiment. At his first Salon of Paris exhibition in 1777, Vincent had fifteen pieces to show, of which three are now at the Fabre Museum in Montpellier. He also participated at the Salon in 1782, 1785, and 1787.

Francois Vincent was a leader of the neoclassical and historical movement in French art, along with his rival Jacques-Louis David, another pupil of Joseph-Marie Vien. Vincent maintained a successful career in France but always in the shadow of David, who was  the dominant artist of the day. His wide range of styles contributed to his obscurity, as people usually expected the same style in each painting from one artist. Vincent was a prolific artist whose work, produced in oil on canvas, pen and chalk drawings and watercolors, covered many themes.

In 1790 Vincent was appointed master of drawing to Louis XVI of France and two years later, he became a professor at the elite eighteenth-century French institution for art, The Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Having flourished under the ancient regime and weathered the chaos of Revolution, he survived to see authoritarianism return with a vengeance under Napoleon. A combination of ill health and disillusionment prevented Vincent from taking up the imagery of  Empire to any great extent.

Conrad Marca-Relli

Conrad Marca-Relli, “Summer Noon – L – 20”, 1968, Oil , Canvas and Burlap Collage on Canvas, 56 x 72 Inches

Conrad Marca-Relli was an American artist born in Boston who belonged to the early generation of New York School Abstract Expressionism. Along with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell, Marca-Relli was part of the leading art movement of the postwar era.

In 1930 at the age of seventeen, Marca-Relli studied for one year at the Cooper Union, a private arts and science college. He later worked at the Works Progress Administration (WPA) first as a teacher and then painting murals with the Federal Art Project division. After serving in World War II, he taught at Yale University during 1954 and 1955, later teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, during 1959 and 1960.

Marca-Relli’s early still lives, cityscapes and circus paintings are reminiscent of the surrealist work of Giorgio de Chirico. He created many large scale collages throughout his career, combining oil paint with collage, using intense colors, broken surfaces, and splatters of paint in an expressionistic style. His later works showed a simplicity with black or somber colors and more rectangular shapes with neutral backgrounds.

D. Baretto

D. Baretto, “Cycling Trivialities”, Computer Graphics, Animation Gifs

D. Baretto graduated from the School of Fine Arts/ Tufts in Boston in 2016 with a BFA concentrating in illustration, animation and digital installation. He works from his studio, “Studio Barro”, locatied in Guadalajara, Mexico. Baretto has been directing several animation videos for musicians and brand-name commissions.