artists

Johannes Vermeer has only a few peers and, I think, no superiors in the history of painting. Here’s an excellent web site that explores his work and times. It’s not very fancy, but keep clicking; there’s a lot of material and it’s all worth looking at.

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Miles Mathis has posted an extended commentary on some painting practices advocated by William Whitaker. He objects to some of Whitaker’s painting methods and materials, and I thought I would comment what he’s written.

Before I do, I should point out that Mr. Mathis is, so far as I can tell, a professional artist who supports himself with his very good paintings. I, by contrast, am no more than a wannabee. On that basis, he has and deserves far more credibility than I. He is, however, commenting on the practices of another professional artist of at least equal stature (and fairly similar artistic style). It is certainly true that some professional artists throughout history have used ill-advised materials and painting methods. In any event, either Mr. Whitaker is right or Mr. Mathis is right on any of these issues (or they are both wrong) and I, lowly hobbyist that I am, will attempt to compare one to the other against my own limited experience. (CONTINUED) ⇒

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It’s here.

He’s got lots of discussion of his process of watercolor painting and drawing. Good stuff. Check it out.

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He’s the original “painting a day” guy, although he doesn’t do one every single day anymore. Of the work currently on his website, I’m really fond of both “Odalisque” and “Two Plums and a Sunset.” His work is simple and evocative. I am particularly impressed by his sophisticated use of low-chroma color to create a contemplative mood.

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I didn’t see the Mel Gibson movie, “The Passion of the Christ.” I was disappointed, however, by a small moment in the preview. The makers made a big point of having the movie be in the original Latin and Aramaic. When Pontius Pilate parades the tortured Jesus before the Jewish crowds, he says, “ecce homo,” which means, “behold the man.” He is attempting to demonstrate to the potentially-rebellious Jews that Jesus is no divine Messiah, only a mortal man who can bleed, suffer, and be made to submit to Roman authority like anyone else.

My pedantic quibble is this: Pilate pronounces “ecce” wrong. He says, “eche.” I’m no Latin scholar, but it is my understanding that there are no soft “C” sounds in classical Latin. It should be pronounced “eke,” just as Caesar would have been pronounced “kaisar,” not “seesar” the way we say it today. The soft “C” pronunciation is from Medieval Church Latin, which did not exist circa 33 A.D. Any real scholars should feel free to correct me on this. (CONTINUED) ⇒

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Many landscape artists try for spectacular light effects. Mostly, they fail to make it look convincing. Georges Inness (American, 1825-1894) made it seem easy.

Not all of his paintings depend on special effects like this, but these are some of his best.

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Every time I hear it on my local public radio station, it annoys me. There’s an Edward Hopper exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. That’s good—I like a lot of his stuff.

The radio ad says that he painted the, “beauty of everyday things.” Grrr. I can understand why the ad copy is written that way—they think it will pull in more visitors. But I believe it completely misstates Hopper’s work. I don’t think he did that or tried to do that. He wasn’t really interested in beauty; if he had been, he wouldn’t have painted the way he did.

Hopper was trying to paint the way everyday things feel, which is by far a more difficult and worthwhile thing to do. He didn’t always succeed, but when he did (as in the brilliant “New York Movie,” for example) his paintings were fine indeed.

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Check out these details of “The Madonna and Cannon Van Der Paele” by Jan Van Ecyk. What’s particularly amazing to consider is how new this “Ars Nova” movement was when Van Eyck was painting. Almost no one had done anything like it before. And yet Van Eyck’s work is so stunningly fluent.

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“In art as in literature, ugliness rendered with compassion is beauty.”
—W. Joe Innis

This may be the 20th century painting I most admire. It’s “Adam,” an egg tempera painting by Andrew Wyeth. It depicts Adam Johnson, a poor farmer and a neighbor and friend of Wyeth’s. It was painted in 1963, the year I was born.

I think this is a great painting because it projects a sense of compassion. You feel Adam’s hard life, and you feel a sense of connectedness to him. He’s a real person, a human being with his own life, his own humanity, his own tragedy. You don’t know his story (although you can imagine a small part of it from the context), but there is a strong sense that there is one. Few paintings, even by great artists, manage this.

When I used this as an example of a great painting on an internet art forum awhile back, one poster didn’t get it. He said that the use of a poor black man in a painting was just another banal stereotype. The painting was kitsch, not art. I disagree. Wyeth knew this man. He wasn’t painting some symbol of underclass rural life, he was painting Adam Johnson, his friend.

I also think the composition is brilliant. The format is very wide, with Adam presented in three-quarter front view just slightly offset from center. The middle ground objects, and the background hills, curve downward to the right behind Adam, creating a sense of dynamic movement juxtaposed against the stasis of the obese Adam standing stolidly in the foreground with his eyes resolutely shut. The eye is stopped at the right by the fence post and at the left by the handles of the tools leaning against the wall, keeping us within the scene (it’s not easy to do that in such a wide-format painting). The sense of movement in the background is enhanced by the flock of birds in flight, an effect that would seem excessively melodramatic, but in the context of such a grounded picture it gives a sense of strangeness that speaks to another level of reality within world created by the painting.

It’s not a pretty picture, but it’s a deeply humane one.

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was one of the great Northern painters of the late Renaissance. Gossaert was born about 1478 and died in 1532. He was also called Jan Mabuse and Jennyn Van Henegouwe. In 1508 he traveled with his patron Phillip of Burgundy to Italy. His mature style became a brilliant synthesis of traditional Flemish tight realism, Italian Renaissance styles, and the innovations of Albrect Dürer. He was one of the first Northern artist to paint large-scale secular nudes as decoration for an Italian-style palace for his humanist master Phillip.

This painting is his last. It depicts Danaë as she is approached by Zeus as a beam of sunlight, just before the god impregnates her with the hero Perseus (Greek myths are like that). The subject was also painted by Titian and Rembrandt, but I am particularly fond of Gossaert’s version.

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was one of the great realist painters of all time. Born in 1400, he was one of the pioneers of early oil painting in Northern Europe, along with his teacher Robert Campin and contemporary Jan van Eyck. Most of his career as a mature painter (he lived until 1464) was spent in Brussels. His work was renowned in his own time and when he visited Italy in 1450 he was welcomed, given several prominent commissions, and apparently asked to tutor Italian artists in the methods of Flemish oil painting. Despite his great influence on later artists, after his death his name fell into relative oblivion, and it was a matter of scholarship in later centuries to identify his (invariably unsigned) work, recognize his amazing skill at high realism, and clarify his role in the development of modern painting.

This painting, “Lady Wearing a Gauze Headdress,” was probably painted around 1445. It is thought by some to be a portrait of his wife, Elizabeth Goffaerts. This theory is given support by the (then quite unusual) direct gaze of the sitter and a slightly softer style than was usual for van der Weyden.

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is the guy who invented “painting a day” blogs. You can see his here.

He has another blog for his thoughts on painting, and this one to document his progress on one particular painting.

All of those are worth checking out.

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Diego Velazquez was one of the great painters of all time. He was a wealthy court painter who traveled extensively and had access to the full range of pigments available in the 17th century. In my last post I noted that, by modern standards, artists before the 19th century had an extremely limited selection of available pigments. Velazquez chose to use only a subset of those. If you are interested in what is known of his painting methods, a great book to get is Velazquez: the Technique of Genius, by Jonathan Brown and Carmen Garrido.

Here’s Velazquez’ usual palette (which he seldom deviated from throughout his career):

White: lead white mixed with calcite (calcium carbonate).

Yellow: yellow ochre, lead tin yellow, and (rarely) Naples yellow.

Red: vermilion, a red earth (red ochre, burnt sienna, etc.), and a red lake (equivalent to alizarin crimson or madder lake).

Blue: azurite, ultramarine blue, smalt (a dark blue pigment made from ground glass).

Brown: brown earth, an umber (raw or burnt).

Green: mixtures of azurite and lead tin yellow.

Purple: mixtures of red lake and azurite.

That’s it. Often he used fewer colors; in Coronation of the Virgin he used only five pigments.

He probably had a mixture of calcite and oil on his palette that he would add to mixtures that he wanted to be more transparent. More opaque passages often show evidence of some sort of protein (probably either hide glue or egg yolk) added to the paint. He sometimes added a lot of oil to the paint, which has resulted in some yellowing (but not as much as you might expect).

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Here’s a great page of studies by the great American illustrator J. C. Leyendecker (you know, the guy who invented the modern image of Santa Claus), showing how he developed his compositions.

H/T: Charley Parker.

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has a lot to say about oil painting. He has a basic guide to painting, a lot of info on working with traditional oil painting materials, and a gallery of his own work.

Check out his site.

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