Painters and Visual Artists

Here's a nice explanation from the MoMA's website:

 

And it's nice how he gets that blood red to flow from the top of the design in Medea's veil down through her cloak and then into the hair of her child in the bottom of the image. Everything in his posters has a beautiful and elegant flow to it.

Here's an interesting article about Mucha and printmaking, which in my opinion is underappreciated in its many forms (from woodblock to screen printing to lithography):

How Alphonse Mucha’s Sinuous Art Nouveau Posters Elevated Printmaking as an Art Form
https://mymodernmet.com/alphonse-mucha-art-nouveau-posters/



A truly exquisite print...

 

Speaking of printing, the Japanese master of wood block printing, Utagawa Hiroshige:





I actually did some woodblock printing in my youth and I marvel at Hiroshige's prints...

 

Oops. Just caught this after my previous comment about El Greco and Dali, et al.

You definitely can see that in Lepage's pieces - many of them have a very dreamy quality about them:



Particularly up close:

[/QUOTE]

 

Another thing I personally like about Lepage's work is the difference between how he renders the figure (very old-school conventional) and how he renders what's around and behind the figure (very Impressionistic and/or Expressionistic):





As is the case with a lot of great paintings, the impression you get from a distance can be quite different from the one you get when you stick your nose into the surface of the canvas.

 

Now this description, matches my idea of the Naturalist School:

https://www.pototschnik.com/the-naturalists19th-century-french-paintingdemise-of-naturalism/

<Snip>
The Naturalism movement swept through Europe and lasted for only a brief 20 years. It began in France in the late 1870′s and by the early 1890′s was already in decline. The godfather of the movement was the brilliant Jules Bastien-Lapage, who died at the young age of only 36, and yet he fathered a very amazing group of devotees throughout Europe.
<End>

Like I'd said, its leader, Lepage, is not one of those I am most taken with, but here are some of his works:

The Grape Harvest





Potato Gatherers



That's all I have, of him. I'm having a lot of trouble looking up this school of painters, without remembering the names.


This is another American painter I just came across, from the same time period, William Bliss Baker. I'm not sure if he was associated with the group I wish to focus on, since his are straight landscapes, and the Naturalists always put people in their scenes. It caught my eye anyway, because of how much it resembles the infrared film photo, from earlier:




Here are a couple more of his works, while I'm at it:

 

From your article:

I can't speak for all the Naturalists because it's a movement whose artists I am not thoroughly familiar with, looking at Lepage's paintings and brushwork in Posts #29 and #30 above (and elsewhere) I find those criticisms both ridiculous and unfair.

it gets me to thinking that perhaps the issue was with the different color palettes the Impressionists and Naturalists tend to work with. Whereas the Impressionists tended to use a lot of white and bright colors, which reflected their interest in the properties of white light, the Naturalists tended to work in earth tones and much more muted colors. However, if you look at Lepage's brushwork and use of color in the paintings above, you can see his technique was similar to that of many if not most Impressionists. I get that many people prefer the bright sunny light and colors you get in a Renoir over the subtle earthy colors you find in Lepage, but that doesn't make Lepage "out-of-step with new directions, regressive, obstacles to innovations, devoid of imagination, and lacking courage and initiative", it just makes the critic's opinions about color nothing more than a personal preference. As far as I'm concerned, I can see the beauty in both.

 

FWIW, my favorite Monet - Woman with a Parasol - and it illustrates the difference in the color palette the Impressionists tended to use:



To put it another way, and this is a perfect example, with the Impressionists you get a lot of sky and with the Naturalists you get a lot of earth:



...and sure, the features in Monet's painting are more diffused, but you'll find that when you compare Monet's work to other Impressionists:



Monet was always pushing towards abstraction - it's one of the things that made him and his work special.

 

To reinforce the point, compare this Lepage landscape to an Impressionist landscape and you'll see a lot in common, just not the palette:



Certainly different. Not necessarily better or less innovative...

 

To be fair, the historical background just said that the Naturalists were criticized (as in, generally) for being behind the times-- the avant garde, once it breaks past any initial resistance, always has more caché. And it must be admitted that what the Impressionists were doing, seemed more ground-breaking, and it soon led to pointillism, and so on. So I can see why people paid less attention to the Naturalists; the article explained that people looked at photography as being uninspired, uncreative. And there was a social consciousness, behind the Naturalists' special concentration on peasant scenes, of everyday life, which was not really appealing to what the new bourgeoisie had in mind, to spend their new resources on, in decorating their homes. But they were missing out on something, in a lot of the work. It achieved a really unique effect, which you had sort of commented on, about the photorealistic figure, w/in you'd said, an Impressionist background. Once I get more of these images, it will hopefully become clearer, how the scenes were both vividly realistic, and yet dreamlike. Some could be called hallucinatory. And some embodied an occult symbolism. You know when the world takes on that altered reality, for me? In the twilight before dawn. Everything is real, yet different from normal; one just senses an additional dimension, a distinct, esoteric character, behind the superficial truths.

At any rate, I did come up with a couple of these Naturalists' names. In fact this British one, LaThangue, was one of the stand-outs.







This painting, for example, is called Man with a Scythe. To my mind, that clearly symbolizes Death, coming for the sick child, which her mother cannot seem to wake. Notice that even the pillow, supporting the girl, has a winglike appearance.







Off To Work





This work is called "Going Home." Note the woman in the carriage, crying, and holding a box. The carriage driver seems emotionless, going about his work. Note that his whip is drooping, in the shape of a scythe, as well. So I take this painting, really, to be a symbolic representation of a funeral.
Unfortunately, the clarity of the background is not good, in this particular image, but I remember from having seen it, years ago, that there is a balancing symbolism, in the back left, in the stream. On this side are a number of ducks, swimming in the opposite direction from the carriage, just about to go under the bridge, where it goes from light, to sudden shadow, but then light once again, after passing through to the other side.








Going Out with the Cows (IIRC)






"The Last Furrow"






Plum Gatherers (IIRC)













I'm including this one, to show this common motif of a path, often straight ahead, right toward the viewer. Compare not just the previous painting, but the first four, as well.












I have a few more nice ones, for the next post (continued).

 

Henry LaThangue, continued:







Mushroom Pickers (IIRC)



















He had some real talent, don't you think?


Here is some work from a couple of others, who look to have been in the group.


Peder Severin Krøyer (Danish). Marie In the Garden






Jean-Eugène Buland. Marriage Innocent.





more Jean Buland

 

Interesting you mention that because I was contemplating the class thing myself. The bourgeois in Paris always had a condescending view of the people and life in the Provinces, from Voltaire sneering at the "dorks" in the countryside to Victor Hugo spitting on the Vendéans and Bretons in Quatrevingt-treize. It only goes to figure that this attitude, which surely prevailed amongst the bourgeois critics in Paris, would extend to the aesthetic. After all, the bourgeois in Paris were often the subject matter in Impressionist paintings, posters, etc., not the peasants the Naturalists depicted in their paintings.

Their loss....

Beautiful work - every bit as good as the Impressionists, if not better. From my experience, working in earth tones is much more challenging than working in bright, more primary colors.

Without question.

Mushroom Pickers is an excellent example of what I was talking about when I said that working in earth tones is more challenging than working in bright colors. Look at how vivid the color is in that painting. Truly remarkable, if not surreal in the sense you've mentioned. The quality of the light and color is what one would expect late in the day - Monet would have appreciate this.

The interplay of light and shadow throughout Kroyer's work is outstanding - even better than Renoir, imo:



He clearly straddled the line between Impressionism and Naturalism & Realism, and obviously the movements share a lot in common.

 

Here's an artist who painted a few pieces I like - This is Gustav Klimt's most famous piece, The Kiss:

 

...And Klimt's $135 million "Woman in Gold" - Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer I -



The mysterious muse of Gustav Klimt
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20160920-who-was-the-woman-in-gold

A movie was made about this painting several years ago, so The Kiss may no longer be Klimt's most famous painting.

 

When Klimt's Adele sold in 2006 it fetched the most money for a painting up to that time. Today, the highest a painting has ever sold for was $450.3 million (in 2017) for Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi:



Da Vinci's Mona Lisa is reputedly worth $900 million...

 

And now for a different medium - stained glass.

A friend of mine went to La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Spain recently (what a magnificent basilica!!) and shared some of the pictures he took of the stained glass and they were breathtaking.

Whether you're working in paint, photography, video or stained glass, you're dealing in color and light and how people perceive and react to them.

These aren't my friend's pics, but prepare to be blown away:



I'm not going to get into the architecture and sculpture, which are fantastic, but the stained glass is worth mentioning...



Beautiful and amazing and uplifting, as it was intended to be....

https://sagradafamilia.org/en/

I don't have a bucket list, but if I did, visiting the Sagrada Familia would be way up there.

Enjoy the virtual tour!

https://sagradafamilia.org/en/virtual-tour

 

My initial impulse was to add, "and probably a bit intimidating." When I saw the inside, on the virtual tour, I found out just how much truer that was, than I'd imagined. Actually, because the camera stays in the middle of the church, for the "inside" tour (I know, there are other options), the pictures of the glass in your post, are better than the sense one gets of it, on this part of the tour. Instead, it is really the towering height, of the many support columns, which makes this interior so stupendously impressive.

While I have been curious to see such Temples as at Angkor Wat, or the tall towering temples of Southern India, with sculpted forms adorning every inch of their exteriors, it is true that there is nothing about their inner architecture, to compare to these cavernously grand, Catholic churches. However, the jungles in Southeast Asia, as those encircling Cambodia's Angkor Wat complex, I hear, are on a breathtakingly gigantic scale, that dwarfs the Amazon rainforest.

 

@DEFinning

Everything you see is my work. And also a lot more that isn't seen, or shown..... I am a colorful individual... And I identify as such

 

Did this piece myself on my rib cage. At least 20 years ago... Obviously never finished it. Tickled real good

 

Damn! Cheetah's don't have so many markings!

They all do look very consistent; that is, they all blend together, seamlessly.

Nice work!

 

thank you.
They were done rather piecemeal over the years and then redone when they needed to be... Most of that was over about a six year period.

They're just part of the background now and I don't really think about getting anything else done.
Or doing it.

I always have my own story to look at when I get lonely I guess... If I was tossed into a cell naked no one could take it away from me... Unless they were willing to skin me..

I have over 60 pieces depending on how you count them but at least 60

 

Nice, and good to see no cast on that ankle.

I take it you transferred drawings onto your legs and then inked them?

 

For the most part but some of it was free hand. The back of my legs are the opposite of the front because there's no work there because I could not reach.
Me too!
The doctor told me to start putting weight on the ankle this Friday with a walking boot on.

It's going to be a process

 

I was wondering about that because everything on your legs would be upside down from your vantage point.

Patience is going to be a virtue, for sure.

I wish I could convey that to our pup. She got spayed two weeks ago and she's back to running around like a maniac. Yesterday I clocked her doing 27mph chasing my truck.