A fine art, film, history and literature site oriented to, but not exclusively for, the gay community. Please be aware that there is mature content on this blog. Information on images and links to sources will be provided if known. Enjoy your visit and please subscribe.
Jacques de l’Ange, “Chained Prometheus”, c. 1640-1650, Oil on Canvas 52 x 62 cm, Private Collection
Jacques de l’Ange or the Monogrammist JAD (fl. 1630 – 1650) was a Flemish painter and draughtsman known for his genre scenes and history paintings executed in a Caravaggesque style. The artist was only rediscovered in the mid-1990s as his work was previously attributed to other Northern Caravaggists and in particular those of the Utrecht School.
Pablo Picasso, “Dying Bull”, 1934, Oil on Canvas, 33.7 x 55.2 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Picasso’s father took him to see his first bullfight in 1889, when he was only nine years old. The spectacle so impressed him that he made it the subject of his very first painting that same year. In 1934 Picasso again took up the subject in an extensive series of drawings, prints, and paintings in which the choreography of the corrida became a metaphor for life and death. Here, Picasso focuses solely on the agony of the dying bull, eliminating the spectators, horses, and matador.
George Bellows, “River Front”, New York, Oil on Canvas, 1915
Graham Sutherland, “Estuary”, 1946, Oil on Canvas
A neo-Romantic inspired by the pastoral subjects of Samuel Palmer, Graham Sutherland’s haunting paintings captured the rugged beauty of the countryside and the oppressive forces of creeping industrialisation upon it.
For much of the 1930s he chose to paint the Pembrokeshire landscape, attempting to express ‘the intellectual and emotional’ essence of the place. By using dramatic shifts in light, unnaturalistic colouring and animal skulls, he would transform the countryside into a bleak, primordial world in which man and nature were at odds with one another.
Estuary (1946) was one of the last paintings the artist made before fleeing the sulphurous realities of post-war Britain for the sunny environs of South of France. His palette was already changing from the tempestuous greys and ochres of the Welsh countryside for the scorching yellows of the Riviera.
Francis Bacon, “Painting of a Dog”, 1952, Oil on Canvas
Wes Hempel, “Power Outage”, Oil on Canvas, 2014
Five Oil Paintigs by David Urban, Corkin Gallery, Toronto
Born in Toronto in 1966, David Urban studied poetry and painting at York University, earning a BFA in 1989. Urban received a Master’s degree in English Literature and Creative writing from the University of Windsor in 1991 (where he studied with Alistair MacLeod) and a second Master’s degree in Painting from the University of Guelph in 1993.
His work is represented in many private and public collections including the National Gallery of Canada. In 2002, Urban curated Painters 15, an exhibition of established Canadian painters which was presented at the Shanghai Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art.
Paul Cadmus, “Book Buff”, Oil on Canvas, 1994 (Jon Andersson)
Paul Cadmus, “Finistère”, Oil on Canvas, 1952, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Rodrigo Zuniga, “Boys at Play”, Oil on Canvas, 2005, 40 x 60 Inches
David Ligare, “The Cane Gatherer”, 2010-14, Oil on Canvas, 152.4 x 228.6 cm, Private Collection
David Ligare is an American contemporary realist painter. Since 1978, he has focused on painting still lifes, landscapes, and figures that are influenced by Greco-Roman antiquity. Chief among his stated influences are the aesthetic and philosophical theories of the Greek sculptor Polykleitos and the mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras, as well as the work of the 17th-century classical painter Nicolas Poussin. A resident of Salinas, California, his paintings often depict the terrain of the central Californian coast in the background.
Gunter Damisch, “ Querfeldflimmern (Cross Field Flickering)”, Oil on Canvas, 1996
Guido Reni, “Saint Sebastian”, 1625, Oil on Canvas, 76 x 61 cm, Aukland Art Gallery, Aukland
Born in November of 1575 in Bologna, a Papal State under Pope Gregory XIII, Guido Reni was an Italian painter of the Baroque period whose works show a classical influence. He primarily painted religious scenes, but also produced works of mythological and allegorical subjects. Reni became a prominent artist of the Bolognese School, headed by painter and etcher Lodovico Carracci, that rivaled Rome and Florence as the center of Italian painting.
Guido Reni painted the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian several times. There are three other similar posed canvases by Reni in the museums of Bologna, Paris and Puerto Rico. The Auckland Art Gallery’s circa 1625 “Saint Sebastian” is the closest painted to the pose drawn from Michelangelo’s marble statue “Rebellious Slave”. There are, however, differences in this particular canvas: Saint Sebastian’s left hand is shown, his loincloth is smaller, and the landscape contains figures not shown in the other canvases.
Notes: Guido Reni’s 1625 “Saint Sebastian” was originally in the private collection of the Dukes of Hamilton until its sale to the Aukland Art Gallery. The Duke of Hamilton, created in 1643, is the senior dukedom of the Peerage of Scotland, except for the Dukedom of Rothesay which is held by the Sovereign’s son. Since 1711, the title has been the Duke of Hamilton and Brandon in the Peerage of Great Britain.
Guido Reni worked on an almost identical copy from 1620 to 1639 but left it unfinished. This is one of many paintings he left unfinished before his death in August of 1642. The canvas, with its slightly different coloring and larger size of 1.7 by 1.31 meters, is now housed in London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery.
Max Ernst, “Euclid”, 1945, Oil on Canvas, 65 x 57.5 cm, Menil Collection, Houston, Texas
In Max Ernst’s 1945 “Euclid”, a surrealist portrait of the ancient Geometer is presented in abstract form with the figure’s head rendered as a geometric solid, resembling a pyramid. The wise man is clad in noble, velvet clothes, rendered using the decalcomania technique, and adorned with two white roses. He is surrounded by a geometric background of overlapping planes, intersecting straight lines and rhodonea – like curves, some of which extend over its face, contributing to the formation of its features. His owl – like eyes, formed on an inverted antefix with the design of the ancient Greek anthemion ornament, glow bright yellow betraying intense intellectual activity.
Paintings by Albert Handell
Albert Handell lives and paints in Santa Fe, New Mexico and teaches nationally and internationally. He has received grants from the John F. and Anna Lee Stacy Foundation and from the Elizabeth T. Greenshields Foundation, Montreal Canada. His paintings are in numerous private and public collections and museums. Albert Handell now exhibits with the Ventana Fine Art Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where, since 1987, he has had annual one-man shows.