Your favourite artist and Painting

[Kyriakos]

Do you think the boys in the boat are aware of the sinister face lurking above? The one boy with arms raised may be and in fact taunting it.

I hadnt noticed the face, but it seems that the boy is not looking at it, but at something considerably to the east of it, at least to me

Kittelsen has many horror-themed images, and others where on the surface it seems that there only is nature and an observer of it.

[prendrelemick]

Last year I was lucky enough to visit the Kroller Muller at Arnhem. In a room full of Van Goghs this one really lept out at me. Its so excessive.






The picture on here doesn't do it justice, it is seriously yellow! The sky is fantastic.

[Emil Miller]

Last year I was lucky enough to visit the Kroller Muller at Arnhem. In a room full of Van Goghs this one really lept out at me. Its so excessive.
The picture on here doesn't do it justice, it is seriously yellow! The sky is fantastic.

Yes, van Gogh used a lot of yellow, but a word of caution. For some while I worked as a technician in a large printing ink company. One of the problems that we had was the fact that yellow pigments used in printing ink fade much faster than the other colours used in printing. We used to do light tests to try to find the best pigments to use but yellow always faded regardless.
The reason I mention it is because, like many others, I had bought reproductions of paintings and over a period of time they started to look washed out because the greens, which are a mixture of yellow and blue, lost their yellow. Because the change is gradual, we don't notice it until we see a recently printed copy in a shop or a book and it strikes home. A few years ago, I wanted to buy a copy of a Raoul Dufy painting of a cornfield but I decided against it because, like the van Gogh you have shown, it was virtually entirely in yellow.

[prendrelemick]

Thats interesting Brian. If the same applies to yellow oils, the painting must have been even yellower when it was fresh. I imagine very few paintings we see in a gallery or museum are as the artist left them. Time must take its toll

[Emil Miller]

Thats interesting Brian. If the same applies to yellow oils, the painting must have been even yellower when it was fresh. I imagine very few paintings we see in a gallery or museum are as the artist left them. Time must take its toll

Well we must make a distinction between oil painting and printing. Although modern day printing uses varnish which is similar to the linseed oil used as a medium for dispersing pigment as used by painters, today there is much use of acrylics; which adds another dimension to painting. You are probably right in assuming that many of the paintings we see in galleries are not as they were originally. However, much is known about about the deleterious effects of direct sunlight and different temperatures on pictures, and those that are susceptible to adverse ambient conditions are kept in strictly controlled galleries. It is interesting to note the deterioration in some of Rembrandt's paintings, which are now so dark that they are obviously not as he painted them. They adorn the walls of the National Gallery in London almost like black holes, although, strangely, there are renaissance paintings that are amazingly fresh in comparison.

[JuniperWoolf]

My favourite is Landscape with the Fall of Icarus



I love how you can just see his little legs sticking out of the water, and no one seems to notice or care.

Klimt; who painted some of the greatest depictions of eroticism and romantic love:

It feels more like parental love to me. It looks like she's sitting in a womb.

[MarkBastable]

If I made a list of my favourite twenty paintings, I suspect that Picasso and the preRaphaelites would account for about eighteen of them...

This would undoubtedly make the top five....

[Olga4real]

The following picture IMPRESSED me much when I visited the exhibition in Albertina museum in January.



Gustave Caillebotte
Laundry Drying on the Bank of the Seine, circa 1892

[DanielBenoit]

Some more recent collections I've gathered:

Cezanne

Immersive and iconic.



That said, it's in his still life's do we find his mastery of total sublimity. There is something very Taoist about his paintings, a 'limitless objectivity' as Rilke would call it.






Illustration from The Divine Comedy



My favorite of Degas's early works:



And then escasy of the human form in his later ones matched only by the gravity-less grace of his ballet paintings:














Some good ole' Hopper:



Truly one of the great illustrators of the life and attitude of America in the 20th century:

[The Comedian]

I know it's total cliche, but I'm a sucker for almost any painting of Niagara Falls

Here's one by Edwin Church that I really like a lot because we mostly see the top of falls, not much of the descent, and the blue-green color of the water is meditative.

[DanielBenoit]

And just as the icing on the cake, if there were any two obvious and undeniable masterpieces of Western art, these two would be it:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...Resolution.jpg

http://www.netpagz.com/bryce/sistine...tranceWall.jpg

Knowing as little as I do about Eastern and Mid-Eastern art, what would you say is the Sistine Chapel ceiling of non-Western art? Deer Scrolls? The illustrations inspired by the Shahnameh?

[prendrelemick]

Also at Arnham was this, by Isaac Israels - "Transport to the Colonies."




I couldn't find a decent study of it on Google. It is practically life sized and is full of little dramas going on within it. A hundred stories in one painting.

[prendrelemick]

Some more recent collections I've gathere







Some good ole' Hopper:



Truly one of the great illustrators of the life and attitude of America in the 20th century:

He seems to be studying loneliness.

[Emil Miller]

This is probably Gustave Caillebotte's most well-known painting, I was surprised by the difference between it and that posted by Olga4Real's picture of the Laundry by the Seine painting, because the style is so different.

[Olga4real]

This is probably Gustave Caillebotte's most well-known painting, I was surprised by the difference between it and that posted by Olga4Real's picture of the Laundry by the Seine painting, because the style is so different.

Yes it's pretty different, but if you look at dates you discover that the laundry was created 15 years later.

Here is another laundry-drying painting created by him:



His style changed a lot as does the stile of the most impressionists during long years just compare the following works:



created in 1875

and

these two he painted later:




1888,

and



1894