Tag Archives: sculpture

Day 360- Marcel Duchamp- You Cannot Define Art

It’s Day 360 and now I actually have 5 left to go.  I’ve been putting off today’s artist for a long time because he’s one of my favorites, but I was so nervous about tackling his style.  I’m glad that I waited until the tail end of my project because I feel like I’ve learned/experienced enough to mildly pull it off.  Please join me in honoring Marcel Duchamp today.

Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp

 

Marcel Duchamp, French  (July 28, 1887- October 2, 1968)

“You cannot define electricity. The same can be said of art. It is a kind of inner current in a human being, or something which needs no definition.”

Chess Players- Marcel Duchamp

Chess Players- Marcel Duchamp

Few artists can boast having changed the course of art history in the way that Marcel Duchamp did. Having assimilated the lessons of Cubism and Futurism, whose joint influence may be felt in his early paintings, he spearheaded the American Dada movement together with his friends and collaborators Picabia and Man Ray. By challenging the very notion of what is art, his first readymades sent shock waves across the art world that can still be felt today.

Duchamp’s ongoing preoccupation with the mechanisms of desire and human sexuality as well as his fondness for wordplay aligns his work with that of Surrealists, although he steadfastly refused to be affiliated with any specific artistic movement per se. In his insistence that art should be driven by ideas above all, Duchamp is generally considered to be the father of Conceptual art.
His refusal to follow a conventional artistic path, matched only by a horror of repetition which accounts for the

Parva Domus, Magna Quies - Marcel Duchamp

Parva Domus, Magna Quies – Marcel Duchamp

relatively small number of works Duchamp produced in the span of his short career, ultimately led to his withdrawal from the art world. In later years, Duchamp famously spent his time playing chess, even as he labored away in secret at his last enigmatic masterpiece, which was only unveiled after his death in 1968.

Coined by Duchamp, the term “readymade” came to designate mass-produced everyday objects taken out of their usual context and promoted to the status of artworks by the mere choice of the artist. A performative act as much as a stylistic category, the readymade had far-reaching implications for what can legitimately be considered an object of art.
Nude Descending a Staircase- Marcel Duchamp

Nude Descending a Staircase- Marcel Duchamp

Duchamp rejected purely visual or what he dubbed “retinal pleasure,” deeming it to be facile, in favor of more intellectual, concept-driven approaches to art-making and, for that matter, viewing. He remained committed, however, to the study of perspective and optics which underpins his experiments with kinetic devices, reflecting an ongoing concern with the representation of motion and machines common to Futurist and Surrealist artists at the time.

A taste for jokes, tongue-in-cheek wit and subversive humor, rife with sexual innuendoes, characterizes Duchamp’s work and makes for much of its enjoyment. He fashioned puns out of everyday expressions which he conveyed through visual

King and Queen surrounded by swift nudes - Marcel Duchamp

King and Queen surrounded by swift nudes – Marcel Duchamp

means. The linguistic dimension of his work in particular paved the way for Conceptual art.

Marcel Duchamp was raised in Normandy, in a family of artists. His father was mayor of Blainville and his mother raised their seven children and painted landscapes depicting the French countryside. Family time was spent playing chess, reading, painting, and playing music.
Fountain 1917, replica 1964 Marcel Duchamp 1887-1968 Purchased with assistance from the Friends of the Tate Gallery 1999

Fountain 1917, replica 1964 Marcel Duchamp 1887-1968 Purchased with assistance from the Friends of the Tate Gallery 1999

One of Marcel’s earliest artworks, Landscape at Blainville (1902), painted at age fifteen, reflected his family’s love of Claude Monet. Marcel was close to his two older brothers, and in 1904, after both had left home to become artists, he joined them in Paris to study painting at Académie Julian. His brother, Jacques Villon, supported him during his studies, and Marcel earned some income by working as a cartoonist. Duchamp’s early drawings evince his ongoing interest in visual and verbal puns.

After he withdrew from the art world, Duchamp remained a passive, if influential, presence in New York avant-garde circles until he was rediscovered in the 1950s by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Duchamp’s insistence that art should be an expression of the mind rather than the eye or the hand spoke to Minimalists and Conceptual artists alike.
It ushered in a new era summed up by Joseph Kosuth’s claim that “all art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in

Yvonne and Magdeleine Torn in Tatters- Marcel Duchamp

Yvonne and Magdeleine Torn in Tatters- Marcel Duchamp

nature) because art only exists conceptually.” The seminal concept of the mass-produced readymade was eagerly seized upon not only by Andy Warhol and other Pop artists who claimed Duchamp as their founding father but also, owing to its performative aspects, by Fluxus, Arte Povera and Performance artists.

Portrait of Chess Players- Marcel Duchamp

Portrait of Chess Players- Marcel Duchamp

Duchamp’s radical critique of art institutions made him a cult figure for generations of artists who, like him, refused to go down the path of a conventional, commercial artistic career.

Though his work was admired for its wide-ranging use of artistic materials and mediums, it is the theoretical thrust of Duchamp’s eclectic but relatively limited output that accounts for his growing impact on successive waves of twentieth-century avant-garde movements and individual artists who openly acknowledged his influence.

On his attitude about art: “It is paradoxical. It is almost schizophrenic. On one side I worked from a very

Portrait of Dulcinea- Marcel Duchamp

Portrait of Dulcinea- Marcel Duchamp

intellectual form of activity, and on the other de-deifying everything by more materialistic thoughts.”

On the readymade: “The readymade is the consequence of the refusal which made me say: There are so many people who make pictures with their hands, that one should end up not using the hand.”

On chess: “I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art, and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position.”

Biography is from The Art Story website.

I hope you enjoy my tribute to the great Marcel Duchamp today.  I had a surprisingly relaxing time creating it today!  I wanted to incorporate his love for chess.  I will see you tomorrow on Day 361…I’m going to try and have a relaxing rest of the day now. 🙂

Best,

Linda

Strategy- Tribute to Marcel Duchamp Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic & Crackle paint on Canvas

Strategy- Tribute to Marcel Duchamp
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic & Crackle paint on Canvas

Side-View Strategy- Tribute to Marcel Duchamp Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic & Crackle paint on Canvas

Side-View
Strategy- Tribute to Marcel Duchamp
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic & Crackle paint on Canvas

Close-Up 1 Strategy- Tribute to Marcel Duchamp Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic & Crackle paint on Canvas

Close-Up 1
Strategy- Tribute to Marcel Duchamp
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic & Crackle paint on Canvas

Close-Up 2 Strategy- Tribute to Marcel Duchamp Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic & Crackle paint on Canvas

Close-Up 2
Strategy- Tribute to Marcel Duchamp
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic & Crackle paint on Canvas

Close-Up 3 Strategy- Tribute to Marcel Duchamp Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic & Crackle paint on Canvas

Close-Up 3
Strategy- Tribute to Marcel Duchamp
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic & Crackle paint on Canvas

Day 350- Salvador Dalí- Overdose of Satisfaction

It’s Day 350 and I spent forever today painting and making sure I did a wonderful tribute to today’s artist since he’s been one of my favorite artists since high school!  Please join me in honoring Salvador Dali today.  I’m posting this kind of late since I was rushing around doing holiday stuff this evening!

Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali

Salvador Dalí Painter (1904–1989)

Spanish artist and Surrealist icon Salvador Dalí is perhaps best known for his painting of melting clocks, The Persistence of Memory.

Still Life Moving Fast- Salvador Dali

Still Life Moving Fast- Salvador Dali

Salvador Dalí was born on May 11, 1904, in Figueres, Spain. From an early age, Dalí was encouraged to practice his art and would eventually go on to study at an academy in Madrid. In the 1920s, he went to Paris and began interacting with artists such as Picasso, Magritte and Miró, which led to Dalí’s first Surrealist phase. He is perhaps best known for his 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory, showing melting clocks in a landscape setting. The rise of fascist leader Francisco Franco in Spain led to the artist’s expulsion from the Surrealist movement, but that didn’t stop him from painting. Dalí died in Figueres in 1989.

Salvador Dalí was born Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí y Domenech on May 11, 1904, in Figueres, Spain, located 16 miles from the French border in the foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains. His father, Salvador Dalí y Cusi, was a middle class lawyer and notary. Salvador’s father had a strict disciplinary approach to raising children—a style of child-rearing which contrasted sharply with that of his mother, Felipa Domenech Ferres. She often indulged young Salvador in his art and early eccentricities.

It has been said that young Salvador was a precocious and intelligent child, prone to fits of anger against his parents and schoolmates. Consequently, Dalí was subjected to furious acts of cruelty by more dominant students or his father. The elder Salvador wouldn’t tolerate his son’s outbursts or

The Persistence of Memory- Salvador Dali

The Persistence of Memory- Salvador Dali

eccentricities, and punished him severely. Their relationship deteriorated when Salvador was still young, exacerbated by competition between he and his father for Felipa’s affection.

Dalí had an older brother, born nine months before him, also named Salvador, who died of gastroenteritis. Later in his life, Dalí often related the story that when he was 5 years old, his parents took him to the grave of his older brother and told him he was his brother’s reincarnation. In the metaphysical prose he frequently used, Dalí recalled, “[we] resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections.” He “was probably a first version of myself, but conceived too much in the absolute.”

Salvador, along with his younger sister Ana Maria and his parents, often spent time at their summer home in the coastal village of Cadaques. At an early age, Salvador was producing highly sophisticated drawings, and both of his parents strongly supported his artistic talent. It was here that his parents built him an art studio before he entered art school.

The Burning Giraffe- Salvador Dali

The Burning Giraffe- Salvador Dali

Upon recognizing his immense talent, Salvador Dalí’s parents sent him to drawing school at the Colegio de Hermanos Maristas and the Instituto in Figueres, Spain, in 1916. He was not a serious student, preferring to daydream in class and stand out as the class eccentric, wearing odd clothing and long hair. After that first year at art school, he discovered modern painting in Cadaques while vacationing with his family. There, he also met Ramon Pichot, a local artist who frequently visited Paris. The following year, his father organized an exhibition of Salvador’s charcoal drawings in the family home. By 1919, the young artist had his first public exhibition, at the Municipal Theatre of Figueres.

In 1921, Dalí’s mother, Felipa, died of breast cancer. Dalí was 16 years old at the time, and was devastated by the loss. His father married his deceased wife’s sister, which did not endear the younger Dalí any closer to his father, though he respected his aunt. Father and son would battle over many different issues throughout their lives, until the elder Dalí’s death.

“Don’t bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.”
—Salvador Dalí
In 1922, Dalí enrolled at the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid. He stayed at the school’s student residence and soon brought his eccentricity to a new level, growing long hair and sideburns, and dressing in the style of English Aesthetes of the late 19th century. During this time, he was influenced

Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali

by several different artistic styles, including Metaphysics and Cubism, which earned him attention from his fellow students—though he probably didn’t yet understand the Cubist movement entirely.

In 1923, Dalí was suspended from the academy for criticizing his teachers and allegedly starting a riot among students over the academy’s choice of a professorship. That same year, he was arrested and briefly imprisoned in Gerona for allegedly supporting the Separatist movement, though Dalí was actually apolitical at the time (and remained so throughout most of his life). He returned to the academy in 1926, but was permanently expelled shortly before his final exams for declaring that no member of the faculty was competent enough to examine him.

While in school, Dalí began exploring many forms of art including classical painters like Raphael, Bronzino and Diego Velázquez (from whom he adopted his signature curled moustache). He also dabbled in avant-garde art movements such as Dada, a post-World War I anti-establishment movement. While Dalí’s apolitical outlook on life prevented him from becoming a strict follower, the Dada philosophy influenced his work throughout his life.

My Mother- Salvador Dali

My Mother- Salvador Dali

In between 1926 and 1929, Dalí made several trips to Paris, where he met with influential painters and intellectuals such as Pablo Picasso, whom he revered. During this time, Dalí painted a number of works that displayed Picasso’s influence. He also met Joan Miró, the Spanish painter and sculptor who, along with poet Paul Éluard and painter René Magritte, introduced Dalí to Surrealism. By this time, Dalí was working with styles of Impressionism, Futurism and Cubism. Dalí’s paintings became associated with three general themes: 1) man’s universe and sensations, 2) sexual symbolism and 3) ideographic imagery.

All of this experimentation led to Dalí’s first Surrealistic period in 1929. These oil paintings were small collages of his dream images. His work employed a meticulous classical technique, influenced by Renaissance artists, that contradicted the “unreal dream” space that he created with strange hallucinatory characters. Even before this period, Dalí was an avid reader of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories.

Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali

Dalí’s major contribution to the Surrealist movement was what he called the “paranoiac-critical method,” a mental exercise of accessing the subconscious to enhance artistic creativity. Dalí would use the method to create a reality from his dreams and subconscious thoughts, thus mentally changing reality to what he wanted it to be and not necessarily what it was. For Dalí, it became a way of life.

Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening- Salvador Dali

Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening- Salvador Dali

In 1929, Salvador Dalí expanded his artistic exploration into the world of film-making when he collaborated with Luis Buñuel on two films, Un Chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog) and L’Age d’or (The Golden Age, 1930), the former of which is known for its opening scene—a simulated slashing of a human eye by a razor. Dalí’s art appeared several years later in another film, Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), starring Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman. Dalí’s paintings were used in a dream sequence in the film, and aided the plot by giving clues to solving the secret to character John Ballantine’s psychological problems.

In August 1929, Dalí met Elena Dmitrievna Diakonova (sometimes written as Elena Ivanorna Diakonova), a Russian immigrant 10 years his senior. At the time, she was the wife of Surrealist writer Paul Éluard. A strong mental and physical attraction developed between Dalí and Diakonova, and she soon left Éluard for her new lover. Also known as “Gala,” Diakonova was Dalí’s muse and inspiration, and would eventually become his wife. She helped balance—or one might say counterbalance—the creative forces in Dalí’s life. With his wild expressions and fantasies, he wasn’t capable of dealing with the business side of being an artist. Gala took care of his legal and financial matters, and negotiated contracts with dealers and exhibition promoters. The two were married in a civil ceremony in 1934.

By 1930, Salvador Dalí had become a notorious figure of the Surrealist movement. Marie-Laure de Noailles and Viscount and Viscountess Charles

The Dream- Salvador Dali

The Dream- Salvador Dali

were his first patrons. French aristocrats, both husband and wife invested heavily in avant-garde art in the early 20th century. One of Dalí’s most famous paintings produced at this time—and perhaps the best-known Surrealist work—was The Persistence of Memory (1931). The painting, sometimes called Soft Watches, shows melting pocket watches in a landscape setting. It is said that the painting conveys several ideas within the image, chiefly that time is not rigid and everything is destructible.

The Temptation of St. Anthony- Salvador Dali

The Temptation of St. Anthony- Salvador Dali

By the mid-1930s, Salvador Dalí had become as notorious for his colorful personality as his artwork, and, for some art critics, the former was overshadowing the latter. Often sporting an exaggeratedly long mustache, a cape and a walking stick, Dalí’s public appearances exhibited some unusual behavior. In 1934, art dealer Julian Levy introduced Dalí to America in a New York exhibition that caused quite a lot of controversy. At a ball held in his honor, Dalí, in characteristic flamboyant style, appeared wearing a glass case across his chest which contained a brassiere.

In 1980, Dalí was forced to retire from painting due to a motor disorder that caused permanent trembling and weakness in his hands. No longer able to hold a paint brush, he’d lost the ability to express himself the way he knew best. More tragedy struck in 1982, when Dalí’s beloved wife and friend, Gala, died. The two events sent him into a deep depression. He moved to Pubol, in a castle that he had purchased and remodeled for Gala, possibly to hide from the public or, as some speculate, to die. In 1984, Dalí was severely burned in a fire. Due to his injuries, he was confined to wheelchair. Friends, patrons and fellow artists rescued him from the castle and returned him to Figueres, making him comfortable at the Teatro-Museo.

In November 1988, Salvador Dalí entered a hospital in Figueres with a failing heart. After a brief convalescence, he returned to the Teatro-Museo. On January 23, 1989, in the city of his birth, Dalí died of heart failure at the age of 84. His funeral was held at the Teatro-Museo, where he was buried in a crypt.

Partial biography is from biography.com.

I hope you enjoy my tribute today!  I will see you tomorrow on Day 351!

Best,

Linda

The Burning Elephants- Tribute to Salvador Dali Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

The Burning Elephants- Tribute to Salvador Dali
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Side-View The Burning Elephants- Tribute to Salvador Dali Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Side-View
The Burning Elephants- Tribute to Salvador Dali
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 1 The Burning Elephants- Tribute to Salvador Dali Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 1
The Burning Elephants- Tribute to Salvador Dali
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 2 The Burning Elephants- Tribute to Salvador Dali Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 2
The Burning Elephants- Tribute to Salvador Dali
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 3 The Burning Elephants- Tribute to Salvador Dali Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 3
The Burning Elephants- Tribute to Salvador Dali
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Day 347- Amedeo Modigliani- “When I know your soul, I will paint your eyes.”

It’s Day 347 and I’m honored to pay tribute to today’s artist.  I love his portrait paintings so of course I had to do another self portrait.  While researching him I kind of got a big crush.  Please join me in honoring Amedeo Modigliani today.

Amedeo Modigliani

Amedeo Modigliani

Portrait of Juan Gris- Amedeo Modigliani

Portrait of Juan Gris- Amedeo Modigliani

Amedeo Clemente Modigliani (Italian pronunciation: [ameˈdɛo modiʎˈʎani]; July 12, 1884 – January 24, 1920) was an Italian painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. He is known for portraits and nudes in a modern style characterized by elongation of faces and figures. His production is known for its nudes, which were not received well during his lifetime, but later found acceptance. Modigliani spent his youth in Italy, where he studied the art of antiquity and the Renaissance, until he moved to Paris in 1906. There he came into contact with prominent artists such as Pablo Picasso and Constantin Brâncuşi.

Modigliani’s oeuvre includes mainly paintings and drawings. From 1909 to 1914, however, he devoted himself mainly to sculpture. The main subject is portraits and full figures of humans, both in the images and in the sculptures. During his

The Beautiful Confectioner- Amedeo Modigliani

The Beautiful Confectioner- Amedeo Modigliani

life, Amedeo Modigliani had little success, but after his death he achieved greater popularity and his works of art achieved high prices. He died at age 35 in Paris of tubercular meningitis.

Modigliani was born into a Jewish family in Livorno, Italy. A port city, Livorno had long served as a refuge for those persecuted for their religion, and was home to a large Jewish community. His maternal great-great-grandfather, Solomon Garsin, had immigrated to Livorno in the 18th century as a refugee.

Modigliani’s mother (Eugénie Garsin), who was born and grew up in Marseille, was descended from an intellectual, scholarly family of Sephardic Jews, generations of whom had resided along the Mediterranean coastline. Her ancestors were learned people, fluent in many languages, known authorities on sacred Jewish texts, and founders of a school of Talmudic studies. Family legend traced the Garsins’ lineage to the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. The family business was believed to be a credit agency with branches in Livorno, Marseille, Tunis, and London. Their financial fortunes ebbed and flowed.

Reclining Nude from the Back- Amedeo Modigliani

Reclining Nude from the Back- Amedeo Modigliani

Modigliani’s father, Flaminio, hailed from a family of successful businessmen and entrepreneurs. While not as culturally sophisticated as the Garsins, they knew how to invest in and develop thriving business endeavors. When the Garsin and Modigliani families announced the engagement of their children, Flaminio was a wealthy young mining engineer. He managed the mine in Sardinia and also managed the almost 30,000 acres of timberland the family owned. A reversal in fortune occurred to this prosperous family in 1883. An economic downturn in the price of metal plunged the Modiglianis into bankruptcy. Ever resourceful, Modigliani’s mother used her social contacts to establish a school and, along with her two sisters, made the school into a successful enterprise.

Modigliani was the fourth child, whose birth coincided with the disastrous financial collapse of his father’s business interests. Amedeo’s birth saved the family from ruin; according to an ancient law, creditors could not

Portrait of Frans Hellens- Amedeo Modigliani

Portrait of Frans Hellens- Amedeo Modigliani

seize the bed of a pregnant woman or a mother with a newborn child. The bailiffs entered the family’s home just as Eugenia went into labour; the family protected their most valuable assets by piling them on top of her.

Modigliani had a close relationship with his mother, who taught him at home until he was 10. Beset with health problems after an attack of pleurisy when he was about 11, a few years later he developed a case of typhoid fever. When he was 16 he was taken ill again and contracted the tuberculosis which would later claim his life. After Modigliani recovered from the second bout of pleurisy, his mother took him on a tour of southern Italy: Naples, Capri, Rome and Amalfi, then north to Florence and Venice.

Portrait of Woman in Hat - Great Artist Amedeo Modigliani

Portrait of Woman in Hat – Great Artist Amedeo Modigliani

His mother was, in many ways, instrumental in his ability to pursue art as a vocation. When he was 11 years of age, she had noted in her diary: “The child’s character is still so unformed that I cannot say what I think of it. He behaves like a spoiled child, but he does not lack intelligence. We shall have to wait and see what is inside this chrysalis. Perhaps an artist?”

Modigliani is known to have drawn and painted from a very early age, and thought himself “already a painter”, his mother wrote, even before beginning formal studies. Despite her misgivings that launching him on a course of studying art would impinge upon his other studies, his mother indulged the young Modigliani’s passion for the subject.

At the age of fourteen, while sick with typhoid fever, he raved in his delirium that he wanted, above all else, to see the paintings in the Palazzo Pitti and the Uffizi in Florence. As Livorno’s local museum housed only a sparse few paintings by the Italian Renaissance masters, the tales he had heard about the great works held in Florence intrigued him, and it was a source of considerable despair to him, in his sickened state, that he might never get the chance to view them in person. His mother promised that she would take him to Florence herself, the moment he was recovered. Not only did she fulfil this promise, but she also undertook to enroll him with the best painting master in Livorno, Guglielmo Micheli.

Modigliani worked in Micheli’s Art School from 1898 to 1900. Among his colleagues in that studio would have been Llewelyn Lloyd, Giulio Cesare Vinzio, Manlio Martinelli, Gino Romiti, Renato Natali, and Oscar Ghiglia.

Marie Daughter of the People- Amedeo Modigliani

Marie Daughter of the People- Amedeo Modigliani

Here his earliest formal artistic instruction took place in an atmosphere steeped in a study of the styles and themes of 19th-century Italian art. In his earliest Parisian work, traces of this influence, and that of his studies of Renaissance art, can still be seen. His nascent work was shaped as much by such artists as Giovanni Boldini as by Toulouse-Lautrec.

Modigliani showed great promise while with Micheli, and ceased his studies only when he was forced to, by the onset of tuberculosis.

In 1901, whilst in Rome, Modigliani admired the work of Domenico Morelli, a painter of dramatic religious and literary scenes. Morelli had served as an inspiration for a group of iconoclasts who were known by the title “the Macchiaioli” (from macchia —”dash of colour”, or, more derogatively, “stain”), and Modigliani had already been exposed to the influences of the Macchiaioli. This localized landscape movement reacted against the bourgeois stylings of the academic genre painters. While sympathetically connected to (and actually pre-dating) the French Impressionists, the Macchiaioli did not make the same impact upon international art culture as did the contemporaries and followers of Monet, and are today largely forgotten outside Italy.

Jeanne Hebuterne with Hat and Necklace- Amedeo Modigliani

Jeanne Hebuterne with Hat and Necklace- Amedeo Modigliani

Modigliani’s connection with the movement was through Guglielmo Micheli, his first art teacher. Micheli was not only a Macchiaiolo himself, but had been a pupil of the famous Giovanni Fattori, a founder of the movement. Micheli’s work, however, was so fashionable and the genre so commonplace that the young Modigliani reacted against it, preferring to ignore the obsession with landscape that, as with French Impressionism, characterized the movement. Micheli also tried to encourage his pupils to paint en plein air, but Modigliani never really got a taste for this style of working, sketching in cafés, but preferring to paint indoors, and especially in his own studio. Even when compelled to paint landscapes (three are known to exist), Modigliani chose a proto-Cubist palette more akin to Cézanne than to the Macchiaioli.

While with Micheli, Modigliani studied not only landscape, but also portraiture, still life, and the nude. His fellow students recall that the last was where he displayed his greatest talent, and apparently this was not an entirely academic pursuit for the teenager: when not painting nudes, he was occupied with seducing the household maid.

Despite his rejection of the Macchiaioli approach, Modigliani nonetheless found favour with his teacher, who referred to him as “Superman”, a pet name reflecting the fact that Modigliani was not only quite adept at his art,

Amedeo Modigliani painting: Woman with Black Cravat

Amedeo Modigliani painting: Woman with Black Cravat

but also that he regularly quoted from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Fattori himself would often visit the studio, and approved of the young artist’s innovations.

In 1902, Modigliani continued what was to be a lifelong infatuation with life drawing, enrolling in the Scuola Libera di Nudo, or “Free School of Nude Studies”, of the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. A year later, while still suffering from tuberculosis, he moved to Venice, where he registered to study at the Regia Accademia ed Istituto di Belle Arti.

The Servant- Amedeo Modigliani

The Servant- Amedeo Modigliani

It is in Venice that he first smoked hashish and, rather than studying, began to spend time frequenting disreputable parts of the city. The impact of these lifestyle choices upon his developing artistic style is open to conjecture, although these choices do seem to be more than simple teenage rebellion, or the cliched hedonism and bohemianism that was almost expected of artists of the time; his pursuit of the seedier side of life appears to have roots in his appreciation of radical philosophies, including those of Nietzsche.

Partial biography is from wikipedia.

“When I know your soul, I will paint your eyes”
― Amedeo Modigliani

I hope you enjoy my tribute today!  I was about to take a reference photo of myself and then saw a cloche that I had sitting around and decided to use it for

My reference photo...

My reference photo…

my piece!  I felt that it was appropriate. 🙂  I felt chills while reading Modigliani’s quote above.  And realized that he hardly painted people’s eyes fully.  Just filled them in with blue, black or a solid color.  There’s only a few portraits where he fully painted the eyes.  Fascinating!  I will see you tomorrow on Day 348.  I can’t believe how fast the days are flying by.

Best,

Linda

Self Portrait in a Blue Hat- Tribute to Amedeo Modigliani Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Self Portrait in a Blue Hat- Tribute to Amedeo Modigliani
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Side-View Self Portrait in a Blue Hat- Tribute to Amedeo Modigliani Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Side-View
Self Portrait in a Blue Hat- Tribute to Amedeo Modigliani
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 1 Self Portrait in a Blue Hat- Tribute to Amedeo Modigliani Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 1
Self Portrait in a Blue Hat- Tribute to Amedeo Modigliani
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 2 Self Portrait in a Blue Hat- Tribute to Amedeo Modigliani Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 2
Self Portrait in a Blue Hat- Tribute to Amedeo Modigliani
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 3 Self Portrait in a Blue Hat- Tribute to Amedeo Modigliani Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 3
Self Portrait in a Blue Hat- Tribute to Amedeo Modigliani
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

 

Day 345- Joseph Cornell- Poetic Theater

It’s Day 345 and I finally got to do a shadow box.  I love today’s artist.  The crazy storm that hit the Bay Area has caused power outages and flooding everywhere, but I still did my piece!  I am posting now just in case the power goes out.  Please join me in honoring Joseph Cornell today.

Joseph Cornell

Joseph Cornell

Untitled (Swan Box)- Joseph Cornell

Untitled (Swan Box)- Joseph Cornell

Joseph Cornell (December 24, 1903 – December 29, 1972) was an American artist and sculptor, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage. Influenced by the Surrealists, he was also an avant-garde experimental filmmaker.

Joseph Cornell was born in Nyack, New York, to Joseph Cornell, a well-to-do designer and merchant of textiles, and Helen TenBroeck Storms Cornell, who had trained as a kindergarten teacher. The Cornells had four children: Joseph, Elizabeth (b. 1905), Helen (b. 1906), and Robert (b. 1910).

Both parents came from socially prominent families of Dutch ancestry, long-established in New York State. Cornell’s father died in 1917, leaving the family in strained circumstances. Following the elder Cornell’s death, his wife and children moved to the borough of Queens in New York City. Cornell attended Phillips Academy inAndover, Massachusetts, in the class of 1921, although he did not graduate.

Except for the three and a half years he spent at Phillips, he lived for most of his life in a small, wooden-frame

Untitled- Joseph Cornell

Untitled- Joseph Cornell

house on Utopia Parkway in a working-class area of Flushing, along with his mother and his brother Robert, whom cerebral palsy had rendered physically challenged.  Aside from the aforementioned period he spent at the academy in Andover, Cornell never traveled beyond the New York City area.

Cornell was wary of strangers. This led him to isolate himself and become a self-taught artist. Although he expressed attraction to unattainable women like Lauren Bacall, his shyness made romantic relationships almost impossible. In later life his bashfulness verged toward reclusiveness, and he rarely left the state of New York. However, he preferred talking with women, and often made their husbands wait in the next room when he discussed business with them. He also had numerous friendships with ballerinas, who found him unique, but too eccentric to be a romantic partner.

Pink Palace- Joseph Cornell

Pink Palace- Joseph Cornell

His last major exhibition was a show he arranged especially for children, with the boxes displayed at child height and with the opening party serving soft drinks and cake.

He devoted his life to caring for his younger brother Robert, who was disabled and lived with cerebral palsy. This was another factor in his lack of relationships. At some point in the 1920s, or possibly earlier, he read the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, including Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Cornell considered Eddy’s works to be among the most important books ever published after the Bible, and he became a lifelong Christian Science adherent.

He was also rather poor for most of his life, working during the 1920s as a wholesale fabric salesman to support his family. As a result of the American Great Depression, Cornell lost his textile industry job in 1931, and worked for a short time thereafter as a door-to-door appliance salesman. During this time, through her friendship with Ethel Traphagen, Cornell’s mother secured him a part-time position designing textiles. In the 1940s, Cornell also worked in a plant nursery (which would figure in his famous dossier “GC44”) and briefly in a defense plant, and designed covers and feature layouts for Harper’s Bazaar, View, Dance Index, and other magazines. He only really began to sell his boxes for significant sums after his 1949 solo show at the Charles Egan Gallery.

Cornell was a highly regarded artist towards the end of his career, yet remained out of the spotlight. He

Hotel Eden- Joseph Cornell

Hotel Eden- Joseph Cornell

produced fewer box assemblages in the 1950s and 1960s, as his family responsibilities increased and claimed more of his time. He hired a series of young assistants, including both students and established artists, to help him organize material, make artwork, and run errands. At this time, Cornell concentrated on making collages, and collaborated with filmmakers like Rudy Burckhardt, Stan Brakhage, and Larry Jordan to make films that were evocative of moving collages.

In 1967 the artist was reported in possession of two or three original drawings from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. The exiled Saint-Exupéry’s wife, Consuelo, was similarly an artist and sculptor.

Cornell’s brother Robert died in 1965, and his mother in 1966. Joseph Cornell died of apparent heart failure on 29 December 1972, a few days after his sixty-ninth birthday.  The executors of his estate were Richard Ader and Wayne Andrews, as represented by the art dealers Leo Castelli, Richard Feigen, and James Corcoran. Later, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation was established, which administers the copyrights of Cornell’s works and represents the interests of his heirs. Currently, the Foundation is administered by Trustees, Richard Ader and Joseph Erdman.

Medici Princess- Joseph Cornell

Medici Princess- Joseph Cornell

Cornell’s most characteristic art works were boxed assemblages created from found objects. These are simple shadow boxes, usually fronted with a glass pane, in which he arranged eclectic fragments of photographs or Victorian bric a brac, in a way that combines the formal austerity of Constructivism with the lively fantasy of Surrealism. Many of his boxes, such as the famous Medici Slot Machine boxes, are interactive and are meant to be handled.

Like Kurt Schwitters, Cornell could create poetry from the commonplace. Unlike Schwitters, however, he was fascinated not by refuse, garbage, and the discarded, but by fragments of once beautiful and precious objects he found on his frequent trips to the bookshops and thrift stores of New York. His boxes relied on the Surrealist use of irrational juxtaposition, and on the evocation of nostalgia, for their appeal.

Cornell never regarded himself as a Surrealist; although he admired the work and technique of Surrealists like Max Ernst and René Magritte, he disavowed the Surrealists’ “black magic,” claiming that he only wished to make white magic with his art. Cornell’s fame as the leading American “Surrealist” allowed him to befriend several members of the Surrealist movement when they settled in the US during the Second World War. Later he was claimed as a herald of pop art and installation art.

Cornell often made series of boxed assemblages that reflected his various interests: the Soap Bubble Sets, the Medici Slot Machine series, the Pink Palace series, the Hotelseries, the Observatory series, and the Space

Object Abeilles- Joseph Cornell

Object Abeilles- Joseph Cornell

Object Boxes, among others. Also captivated with birds, Cornell created an Aviary series of boxes, in which colorful images of various birds were mounted on wood, cut out, & set against harsh white backgrounds.

In addition to creating boxes and flat collages and making short art films, Cornell also kept a filing system of over 160 visual-documentary “dossiers” on themes that interested him; the dossiers served as repositories from which Cornell drew material and inspiration for boxes like his “penny arcade” portrait of Lauren Bacall. He had no formal training in art, although he was extremely well-read and was conversant with the New York art scene from the 1940s through to the 1960s.

His methodology is described in a monograph by Charles Simic as follows:

Untitled (Grand Owl Habitat)- Joseph Cornell

Untitled (Grand Owl Habitat)- Joseph Cornell

Somewhere in the city of New York there are four or five still-unknown objects that belong together. Once together they’ll make a work of art. That’s Cornell’s premise, his metaphysics, and his religion….Marcel Duchamp and John Cage use chance operation to get rid of the subjectivity of the artist. For Cornell it’s the opposite. To submit to chance is to reveal the self and its obsessions.

Cornell was heavily influenced by the American Transcendentalists, Hollywood starlets (to whom he sent boxes he had dedicated to them), the French Symbolists such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Gérard de Nerval, and great dancers of the 19th century ballet such as Marie Taglioni and Fanny Cerrito.

Christian Science belief and practice informed Cornell’s art deeply, as art historian Sandra Leonard Starr has shown.

Biography is from wikipedia.

I hope you enjoy my piece today!  I will see you tomorrow on Day 346.

Best,

Linda

Start New- Tribute to Joseph Cornell Linda Cleary 2014 Mixed-Media in a Shadow Box

Start New- Tribute to Joseph Cornell
Linda Cleary 2014
Mixed-Media in a Shadow Box

Side-View Start New- Tribute to Joseph Cornell Linda Cleary 2014 Mixed-Media in a Shadow Box

Side-View
Start New- Tribute to Joseph Cornell
Linda Cleary 2014
Mixed-Media in a Shadow Box

Close-Up 1 Start New- Tribute to Joseph Cornell Linda Cleary 2014 Mixed-Media in a Shadow Box

Close-Up 1
Start New- Tribute to Joseph Cornell
Linda Cleary 2014
Mixed-Media in a Shadow Box

Close-Up 2 Start New- Tribute to Joseph Cornell Linda Cleary 2014 Mixed-Media in a Shadow Box

Close-Up 2
Start New- Tribute to Joseph Cornell
Linda Cleary 2014
Mixed-Media in a Shadow Box

Close-Up 3 Start New- Tribute to Joseph Cornell Linda Cleary 2014 Mixed-Media in a Shadow Box

Close-Up 3
Start New- Tribute to Joseph Cornell
Linda Cleary 2014
Mixed-Media in a Shadow Box

Day 342- Odilon Redon- Ambiguous Realms

It’s Day 342 and I had a good time with today’s piece.  I was torn on what style I wanted to paint in because the artist did so many styles.  I decided to do a charcoal based piece because I wanted to experience charcoal a bit more before this project ended. 🙂  Thanks to my friend Mark Rachel for recommending today’s artist.  Please join me in honoring Odilon Redon today.

Odilon Redon

Odilon Redon

Cyclops- Odilon Redon

Cyclops- Odilon Redon

Odilon Redon (born Bertrand-Jean Redon; French; April 20, 1840 – July 6, 1916) was a French symbolist painter, printmaker, draughtsman and pastellist.

Odilon Redon was born in Bordeaux, Aquitaine to a prosperous family. The young Bertrand-Jean Redon acquired the nickname “Odilon” from his mother, Odile. Redon started drawing as a child and at the age of ten he was awarded a drawing prize at school. He began the formal study of drawing at fifteen, but at his father’s insistence changed to architecture. Failure to pass the entrance exams at Paris’ École des Beaux-Arts ended any plans for a career as an architect, although he briefly studied painting there under Jean-Léon Gérôme in 1864. (His younger brother Gaston Redon would become a noted architect.)

Back home in his native Bordeaux, he took up sculpture, and Rodolphe

The Winged Man (The Fallen Angel) - Odilon Redon

The Winged Man (The Fallen Angel) – Odilon Redon

Bresdin instructed him in etching and lithography. His artistic career was interrupted in 1870 when he joined the army to serve in the Franco-Prussian War.

At the end of the war, he moved to Paris, and resumed working almost exclusively in charcoal and lithography. He called his visionary works, conceived in shades of black, his noirs. It was not until 1878 that his work gained any recognition with Guardian Spirit of the Waters; he published his first album of lithographs, titled Dans le Rêve, in 1879.

The Eye- Odilon Redon

The Eye- Odilon Redon

Still, Redon remained relatively unknown until the appearance in 1884 of a cult novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans titled À rebours (Against Nature). The story featured a decadent aristocrat who collected Redon’s drawings.

In the 1890s pastel and oils became his favored media; he produced no more noirs after 1900. In 1899, he exhibited with the Nabis at Durand-Ruel’s.

Redon had a keen interest in Hindu and Buddhist religion and culture. The figure of the Buddha increasingly showed in his work. Influences of Japonism blended into his art, such as the painting The Death of the Buddha around 1899, The Buddha in 1906, Jacob and the Angel in 1905, and Vase with Japanese warrior in 1905, amongst many others.

Baron Robert de Domecy (1867–1946) commissioned the artist in 1899 to create 17 decorative panels for the dining room of theChâteau de Domecy-sur-le-Vault near Sermizelles in Burgundy. Redon had created large decorative works for private residences in the past, but his compositions for the château de Domecy in 1900–1901 were his most radical compositions to that point and mark the transition from ornamental to abstract painting. The landscape details do not show a specific place or space.

Only details of trees, twigs with leaves, and budding flowers in an endless horizon can be seen. The colours used

Portrait of Violette Heymann- Odilon Redon

Portrait of Violette Heymann- Odilon Redon

are mostly yellow, grey, brown and light blue. The influence of the Japanese painting style found on folding screens byōbu is discernible in his choice of colours and the rectangular proportions of most of the up to 2.5 metres high panels. Fifteen of them are located today in the Musée d’Orsay, acquisitioned in 1988.

Domecy also commissioned Redon to paint portraits of his wife and their daughter Jeanne, two of which are in the collections of the Musée d’Orsay and the Getty Museum in California. Most of the paintings remained in the Domecy family collection until the 1960s.

Le Silence- Odilon Redon

Le Silence- Odilon Redon

In 1903 Redon was awarded the Legion of Honor. His popularity increased when a catalogue of etchings and lithographs was published by André Mellerio in 1913; that same year, he was given the largest single representation at the New York Armory Show.

Redon died on July 6, 1916. In 1923 Mellerio published Odilon Redon: Peintre Dessinateur et Graveur. An archive of Mellerio’s papers is held by the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago.

In 2005 the Museum of Modern Art launched an exhibition entitled “Beyond The Visible”, a comprehensive overview of Redon’s work showcasing more than 100 paintings, drawings, prints and books from The Ian Woodner Family Collection. The exhibition ran from October 30, 2005 to January 23, 2006.

The Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland is showing a retrospective from February to May 2014.

Redon’s work represents an exploration of his internal feelings and psyche. He himself wanted to “place the visible at the service of the invisible”; thus, although his work seems filled with strange beings and grotesque dichotomies, his aim was to represent pictorially the ghosts of his own mind. A telling source of Redon’s

Little Flowers (Human Heads), 1880. Charcoal on paper- Odilon Redon

Little Flowers (Human Heads), 1880. Charcoal on paper- Odilon Redon

inspiration and the forces behind his works can be found in his journalA Soi-même (To Myself). His process was explained best by himself when he said:

“I have often, as an exercise and as a sustenance, painted before an object down to the smallest accidents of its visual appearance; but the day left me sad and with an unsatiated thirst. The next day I let the other source run, that of imagination, through the recollection of the forms and I was then reassured and appeased.”

The mystery and the evocation of Redon’s drawings are described by Huysmans in the following passage:

“Those were the pictures bearing the signature: Odilon Redon. They held, between their gold-edged frames of unpolished pearwood, undreamed-of images: a Merovingian-type head, resting upon a cup; a bearded man, reminiscent both of a Buddhist priest and a public orator, touching an enormous cannon-ball with his finger; a spider with a human face lodged

Head on a Stem- Odilon Redon

Head on a Stem- Odilon Redon

in the centre of its body. Then there were charcoal sketches which delved even deeper into the terrors of fever-ridden dreams. Here, on an enormous die, a melancholy eyelid winked; over there stretched dry and arid landscapes, calcinated plains, heaving and quaking ground, where volcanos erupted into rebellious clouds, under foul and murky skies; sometimes the subjects seemed to have been taken from the nightmarish dreams of science, and hark back to prehistoric times; monstrous flora bloomed on the rocks; everywhere, in among the erratic blocks and glacial mud, were figures whose simian appearance—heavy jawbone, protruding brows, receding forehead, and flattened skull top—recalled the ancestral head, the head of the first Quaternary Period, the head of man when he was still fructivorous and without speech, the contemporary of the mammoth, of the rhinoceros with septate nostrils, and of the giant bear. These drawings defied classification; unheeding, for the most part, of the limitations of painting, they ushered in a very special type of the fantastic, one born of sickness and delirium.”

Redon also describes his work as ambiguous and undefinable:

“My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.”

Biography is from wikipedia.

I was really drawn to Redon’s charcoal or “noir” drawings.  So I decided to focus on that style.  I hope you enjoy my piece for today and I’ll see you tomorrow on Day 343.

Best,

Linda

Chefs sur Arbres et de Fleurs- Tribute to Odilon Redon Linda Cleary 2014 Charcoal, Ink and Graphite of Canvas

Chefs sur Arbres et de Fleurs- Tribute to Odilon Redon
Linda Cleary 2014
Charcoal, Ink and Graphite of Canvas

Side-View Chefs sur Arbres et de Fleurs- Tribute to Odilon Redon Linda Cleary 2014 Charcoal, Ink and Graphite of Canvas

Side-View
Chefs sur Arbres et de Fleurs- Tribute to Odilon Redon
Linda Cleary 2014
Charcoal, Ink and Graphite of Canvas

Close-Up 1 Chefs sur Arbres et de Fleurs- Tribute to Odilon Redon Linda Cleary 2014 Charcoal, Ink and Graphite of Canvas

Close-Up 1
Chefs sur Arbres et de Fleurs- Tribute to Odilon Redon
Linda Cleary 2014
Charcoal, Ink and Graphite of Canvas

Close-Up 2 Chefs sur Arbres et de Fleurs- Tribute to Odilon Redon Linda Cleary 2014 Charcoal, Ink and Graphite of Canvas

Close-Up 2
Chefs sur Arbres et de Fleurs- Tribute to Odilon Redon
Linda Cleary 2014
Charcoal, Ink and Graphite of Canvas

Close-Up 3 Chefs sur Arbres et de Fleurs- Tribute to Odilon Redon Linda Cleary 2014 Charcoal, Ink and Graphite of Canvas

Close-Up 3
Chefs sur Arbres et de Fleurs- Tribute to Odilon Redon
Linda Cleary 2014
Charcoal, Ink and Graphite of Canvas

Day 339- Marc Chagall- Color is All

It’s Day 339 and I’m very happy about today’s artist.  Intimidated but happy.  Please join me in honoring the wonderful Marc Chagall today.

Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall Biography Illustrator, Painter (1887–1985)

Bonjour Paris- Marc Chagall

Bonjour Paris- Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall was a Belorussian-born French artist whose work generally was based on emotional association rather than traditional pictorial fundamentals.

Born in Belarus in 1887, Marc Chagall was a painter, printmaker and designer associated with several major artistic styles, synthesizing elements of Cubism, Symbolism and Fauvism. One work in particular, “I and the Village” (1911), pre-dated Surrealism as an artistic expression of psychic reality.

An early modernist, Chagall created works in nearly every artistic medium, including sets for plays and ballets, biblical etchings, and stained-glass windows. Chagall died in France in 1985. Today, he is widely regarded as one of the most successful artists of the 20th century.

Marc Chagall was born on July 7, 1887, in Vitebsk, Belarus (in the Russian Empire), and was raised in a devoutly Jewish environment with eight other siblings. His father worked in a fish

Circus- Marc Chagall

Circus- Marc Chagall

warehouse, and his mother ran a shop where she sold fish and sundry baking supplies. As a child, Chagall attended heder (Jewish elementary school) and later went to public school, where lessons were taught in Russian.

After learning the elements of drawing at school, from 1907 to 1910, Chagall studied painting in St. Petersburg at the Imperial Society for the Protection of the Arts, eventually under stage designer Léon Bakst. A characteristic work from this early period is “The Dead Man” (1908), a painting that depicts a violinist (a recurring image for the artist) amid a nightmarish rooftop scene.

Chagall moved to Paris in 1910, and then moved into a studio on the edge of town in a Bohemian area known as La Ruche (“the Beehive”). There, he met several writers and artists, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Delaunay and Albert Gleizes. In such artistic company, experimentation was encouraged, and Chagall quickly began developing the poetic and innovative tendencies that had begun to emerge in Russia at the time—tendencies that may not have previously been encouraged.

Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall

At the same time, he came under the influence of the Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Fauvist pictures he saw in Paris museums, and was introduced to Fauvism and Cubism. Before long, he was participating in the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne (1912), annual French exhibits, staging his first solo show in 1914 in Berlin to great adulation.

This period—during which he created several images of his childhood and hometown of Vitebsk—is considered Chagall’s strongest, artistically, and the style he developed would remain with him for the rest of his life. His works during this time include “Hommage Apollinaire” (1911-12), “The Fiddler” (1912) and “Paris Through the Window” (1913).

World War I

After the Berlin exhibition, Chagall returned to Vitebsk, Belarus, where he intended to stay long enough to

I and the Village- Marc Chagall

I and the Village- Marc Chagall

marry his fiancée, Bella. A few weeks later, though, he was stranded by the outbreak of World War I, as the Russian borders were closed indefinitely. Instead of despairing, Chagall embraced local scenes in his art, working at the time in an unusually realistic style. Paintings such as “The Praying Jew” (or “The Rabbi of Vitebsk”; 1914) and “Jew in Green” (1914) emerged during this period.

Chagall married Bella in 1915, and the flying lovers of “Birthday” (1915-23) and the playful, acrobatic “Double Portrait With a Glass of Wine” (1917) serve as testaments to the joyousness of the artist’s spirit during the early years of his marriage.

At first, Chagall was enthusiastic about the Russian Revolution of October 1917, and he decided to settle in Vitebsk. In 1918, he was appointed commissar for art, and then founded and directed the Vitebsk Popular Art School. Disagreements with the Suprematists (a group of artists primarily concerned with geometric shapes) resulted in Chagall’s resignation from the school in 1920, after which he

Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall

moved to Moscow, there undertaking his first stage designs for the State Jewish Chamber Theater. Chagall then left Russia for good. After a stop-over in Berlin in 1922, the artist returned to Paris in 1923 with his wife and daughter; his first retrospective took place there the following year, at the Galerie Barbazanges-Hodebert.

Chagall had learned engraving while in Berlin, and he received his first engraving commission in 1923, from Paris art dealer and publisher Ambroise Vollard, for creating etchings to illustrate a special edition of Nikolay Gogol’s novel Dead Souls. Over the next three years, Chagall completed 107 plates for the Gogol book, 100 gouaches for poet Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables, and a series of etchings illustrating the Bible; his career as a printmaker was in full swing.

During the 1930s, besides painting and engraving, Chagall traveled extensively: to the Netherlands, Spain, Poland, Italy and Palestine, where he stayed for two months, visiting the Holy Land to inspire his Bible etchings. In Palestine in 1931, Chagall immersed himself in Jewish life and history, and by the time he returned to France, he had completed 32 of biblical plates (he would create 105 in total).

World War II

With Hitler rising to power, a full-blown war was waged in Germany against artists, and, subsequently, anything

Birthday 1915- Marc Chagall

Birthday 1915- Marc Chagall

deemed modern or difficult to interpret being confiscated and burned (with some of Chagall’s works being singled out). The once-impressed German press now turned on Chagall, and in response, Chagall’s paintings struck a different tone, with terror and persecution taking on foreground roles.

In “Solitude” (1933), Chagall’s anxiety over the fate of humanity is represented by an atmosphere of despondency and in the figure of the huddled, pious Jew; in “White Crucifixion” (1938), Jewish and Christian symbols are mixed in a depiction of a Nazi crowd terrorizing Jews. The artist would be dealt another blow in 1939, when Ambroise Vollard died and Chagall’s various etching projects were put on hiatus. (Another publisher later picked up where Vollard had left off, issuing Dead Souls in 1948, La Fontaine’s Fables in 1952 and the Bible in 1956.)

Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall

With the outbreak of World War II, Chagall moved farther and farther south in France, as the Nazi threat became increasingly real for European Jews. A group of Americans ran a rescue operation smuggling artists and intellectuals out of Europe to the United States via forged visas, and Marc Chagall was one of more than 2,000 who escaped this way. He arrived in New York with Bella on June 23, 1941—the day after Germany invaded the Soviet Union—and spent most of the next few years in the New York area.

In New York, Chagall continued to develop his signature themes, but in 1942, a new commission came his way: to design the sets and costumes for a new ballet, Aleko, by Léonide Massine, which would stage Pushkin’s The Gypsiesand be accompanied by the music of Tchaikovsky. When Aleko—Chagall’s first ballet—premiered on September 8, 1942, it was a great success. Also during this period, Chagall designed the backdrops and costumes for Stravinsky’s ballet The Firebird (1945), another success.

The course of Chagall’s life and art was changed yet again in 1944, when his wife, Bella, passed away. Thereafter, depictions of memories of his wife recurred in Chagall’s work; she appears in several forms—a haunted weeping wife, an angel and a phantom bride—in “Around Her” (1945), and as a bride in “The Wedding Candles” (1945) and “Nocturne” (1947).

Before moving back to France for good in 1948, Chagall was honored with retrospective exhibitions at both the

Blue Violinist‏ by Marc Chagall

Blue Violinist‏ by Marc Chagall

Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Later Years

In 1948, Chagall settled again in France, on the French Riviera at Vence. During the 1950s, he forayed into painting and modeling ceramics, stone sculptures and mosaics. In 1958, Chagall designed the scenery and costumes for the ballet Daphnis and Chloe for the Paris Opera, from whom, five years later, he received a commission to paint a new ceiling for its theater.

The choice of artist, however, stirred controversy, as some objected to having a French national monument redesigned by a Russian Jew, while others disliked the idea of a modernist working on such a historic building. Nonetheless, the project went forward with Chagall at the helm, and when it was unveiled, it was a huge hit with all factions, surprising many and vindicating others, Chagall included.

The Bridal Pair with The Eiffel Tower by Marc Chagall

The Bridal Pair with The Eiffel Tower by Marc Chagall

Over Chagall’s decades-long career, his use of color captured the attention of viewers, and his varying projects in his later years were no different: In 1960, he began creating stained-glass windows for the synagogue of Hebrew University’s Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem—a project that became a spiritual journey for Chagall, once again linking him to his Jewish heritage. Chagall later took on more stained-glass projects, including at the United Nations building (1964); the Fraumünster Cathedral in Zurich (1967); St. Stephen’s Church in Mainz, Germany (1978); and the All Saints’ Church in the United Kingdom (1978).

Marc Chagall died in Saint-Paul de Vence, France, on March 28, 1985, leaving behind a vast collection of work in several branches of the arts, as well as a rich legacy as a major Jewish artist and a pioneer of modernism. Pablo Picasso famously once said of the artist, “When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is.”

Biography is from www.biography.com.

I hope you enjoy my tribute today!  I will see you tomorrow on Day 340!  25 left…

Best,

Linda

Blue Night Flight- Tribute to Marc Chagall Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Blue Night Flight- Tribute to Marc Chagall
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Side-View Blue Night Flight- Tribute to Marc Chagall Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Side-View
Blue Night Flight- Tribute to Marc Chagall
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 1 Blue Night Flight- Tribute to Marc Chagall Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 1
Blue Night Flight- Tribute to Marc Chagall
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 2 Blue Night Flight- Tribute to Marc Chagall Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 2
Blue Night Flight- Tribute to Marc Chagall
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 3 Blue Night Flight- Tribute to Marc Chagall Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 3
Blue Night Flight- Tribute to Marc Chagall
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Day 330- Roy Lichtenstein- Forming Art

It’s Day 330 and I was excited about today’s artist.  Join me in honoring Roy Lichtenstein today!

Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein

Illustrator, Painter (1923–1997)

Little Big Painting- Roy Lichtenstein

Little Big Painting- Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein was an American pop artist best known for his boldly-colored parodies of comic strips and advertisements.

American artist Roy Lichtenstein was born in New York City on October 27, 1923, and grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

In the 1960s, Lichtenstein became a leading figure of the new Pop Art movement. Inspired by advertisements and comic strips,

Girl In Mirror- Roy Lichtenstein

Girl In Mirror- Roy Lichtenstein

Lichtenstein’s bright, graphic works parodied American popular culture and the art world itself. He died in New York City on September 29, 1997.

Early Years

Roy Fox Lichtenstein was born on October 27, 1923, in New York City, the son of Milton Lichtenstein, a successful real estate developer, and Beatrice Werner Lichtenstein. As a boy growing up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Lichtenstein had a passion for both science and comic books. In his teens, he became interested in art. He took watercolor classes at Parsons School of Design in 1937, and he took classes at the Art Students League in 1940, studying with American realist painter Reginald Marsh.

Still Life with Cow Skull- Roy Lichtenstein

Still Life with Cow Skull- Roy Lichtenstein

Following his graduation from the Franklin School for Boys in Manhattan in 1940, Lichtenstein attended The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. His college studies were interrupted in 1943, when he was drafted and sent to Europe for World War II.

After his wartime service, Lichtenstein returned to Ohio State in 1946 to finish his undergraduate degree and master’s degree—both in fine arts. He briefly taught at Ohio State before moving to Cleveland and working as a window-display designer for a department store, an industrial designer and a commercial-art instructor.

Commercial Success and Pop Art

In the late 1940s, Lichtenstein exhibited his art in galleries nationwide, including in Cleveland and New York City. In the 1950s, he often took his artistic subjects from mythology and from American history and folklore, and he painted those subjects in styles that paid homage to earlier art, from the 18th century through modernism.

Lichtenstein began experimenting with different subjects and methods in the early 1960s, while he was teaching at Rutgers University. His newer work was both a commentary on American popular culture and a reaction to the recent success of Abstract Expressionist painting by artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

Girl with Tear I- Roy Lichtenstein

Girl with Tear I- Roy Lichtenstein

Instead of painting abstract, often subject-less canvases as Pollock and others had had done, Lichtenstein took his imagery directly from comic books and advertising. Rather than emphasize his painting process and his own inner, emotional life in his art, he mimicked his borrowed sources right down to an impersonal-looking stencil process that imitated the mechanical printing used for commercial art.

Lichtenstein’s best-known work from this period is “Whaam!,” which he painted in 1963, using a comic book panel from a 1962 issue of DC Comics’All-American Men of War as his inspiration. Other works of the 1960s featured cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and advertisements for food and household products. He created a large-scale mural of a laughing young woman (adapted from an image in a comic book) for the New York State Pavilion of the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City.

Melody- Roy Lichtenstein

Melody- Roy Lichtenstein

Lichtenstein became known for his deadpan humor and his slyly subversive way of building a signature body of work from mass-reproduced images. By the mid-1960s, he was nationally known and recognized as a leader in the Pop Art movement that also included Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist and Claes Oldenburg. His art became increasingly popular with both collectors and influential art dealers like Leo Castelli, who showed Lichtenstein’s work at his gallery for 30 years. Like much Pop Art, it provoked debate over ideas of originality, consumerism and the fine line between fine art and entertainment.

Later Career

By the late 1960s, Lichtenstein had stopped using comic book sources. In the 1970s his focus turned to creating paintings that referred to the art of early 20th century masters like Picasso, Henri Matisse, Fernand Léger and Salvador Dalí.

In the 1980s and ’90s, he also painted representations of modern house interiors, brushstrokes and mirror

Drowning Girl- Roy Lichtenstein

Drowning Girl- Roy Lichtenstein

reflections, all in his trademark, cartoon-like style. He also began working in sculpture.

In the 1980s, Lichtenstein received several major large-scale commissions, including a 25-foot-high sculpture titled “Brushstrokes in Flight” for the Port Columbus International Airport in Columbus, Ohio and a five-story-tall mural for the lobby of the Equitable Tower in New York.

Lichtenstein was committed to his art until the end of his life, often spending at least 10 hours a day in his studio. His work was acquired by major museum collections around the world, and he received numerous honorary degrees and awards, including the National Medal of Arts in 1995.

Personal Life and Death

Roy Lichtenstein. Portræt / Portrait, 1977

Roy Lichtenstein. Portræt / Portrait, 1977

Lichtenstein married twice. He and his first wife, Isabel, whom he married in 1949 and divorced in 1967, had two sons, David and Mitchell. He married Dorothy Herzka in 1968.

Lichtenstein died of complications from pneumonia on September 29, 1997, at the New York University Medical Center in Manhattan.

Biography is from www.biography.com.

I hope you enjoy my tribute today.  I’m trying to get a little ahead so that I can relax tomorrow on Thanksgiving.  I hope you all have a great holiday and I’ll see you tomorrow on Day 331!

Best,

Linda

Regret- Tribute to Roy Lichtenstein Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Regret- Tribute to Roy Lichtenstein
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Side-View Regret- Tribute to Roy Lichtenstein Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Side-View
Regret- Tribute to Roy Lichtenstein
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 1 Regret- Tribute to Roy Lichtenstein Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 1
Regret- Tribute to Roy Lichtenstein
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 2 Regret- Tribute to Roy Lichtenstein Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 2
Regret- Tribute to Roy Lichtenstein
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 3 Regret- Tribute to Roy Lichtenstein Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 3
Regret- Tribute to Roy Lichtenstein
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

 

Day 326- KAWS- Infusion

It’s Day 326 and I’m pooped…had a show last night and then heading out to rehearsal in a little while.  Please join me in honoring KAWS A.K.A. Brian Donnelly today.

KAWS Brian Donnelly

KAWS Brian Donnelly

kaws

kaws

Brian Donnelly (born 1974), professionally known as KAWS, is a New York-based artist and designer of limited edition toys and clothing. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

KAWS was born Brian Donnelly in Jersey City, New Jersey. He graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in illustration in 1996. After graduation, KAWS briefly worked for Disney as a freelance animator painting backgrounds. He also contributed to the animated series 101 Dalmatians, Daria and Doug.

He began his career as a graffiti artist growing up in Jersey City, New Jersey. Later moving to New York City in the 1990s, KAWS started subverting imagery on billboards, bus shelters and kaws aldrich invite-thumb-523x358phone booth advertisements. These reworked advertisements were at first left alone, lasting for up to several months, but as KAWS’ popularity skyrocketed, the ads became increasingly sought after. In addition to New York, KAWS has done work in Paris, London, Berlin and Tokyo.

In the late 90s, KAWS began to design and produce limited edition vinyl toys, “an instant hit with the global art toy-collecting community,” especially in Japan, where this genre is well respected and widespread. More toys and later clothing were made for Original Fake, a recent collaborative store with Medicom Toy, in the Aoyama district of Tokyo where an original limited edition product is released each week.

KAWS- The Nature of Need Exhibition

KAWS- The Nature of Need Exhibition

KAWS has also participated in other commercial collaborations with Nigo for A Bathing Ape, Jun “Jonio” Takahashi for Undercover, Michael “Mic” Neumann for Kung Faux, snowboard projects with Burton, and sneakers with Nike and Vans. His most recent collaboration was with Comme des Garçons. As of August 2010, it is reported that Kaws has designed a limited edition bottle for Dos Equis, a Mexican beer brand. The bottle was released in Mexico in early September 2010.

KAWS’ acrylic paintings and sculpture have many repeating images, all meant to be universally understood, surpassing languages and cultures. One of KAWS’ early series, Package Paintings, was made in 2000. This series, entitled The Kimpsons,subverted the famous American cartoon, The Simpsons.

KAWS explains that he “found it weird how infused a cartoon could become in people’s lives; the impact it could have, compared to regular politics.” In addition,

kaws toys

kaws toys

KAWS has reworked other familiar icons such as Mickey Mouse, the Michelin Man, the Smurfs, and SpongeBob SquarePants.

Recent solo exhibitions include Original Fake at the Bape Gallery in Tokyo (2003) where his sculpture “Wonderful World” sold for $400,000. KAWS has been periodically showing both paintings and products at Colette in Paris since 1999. His work is included in the traveling exhibition Beautiful Losers, which started at the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center and will be traveling through 2009 throughout the US and Europe, including his largest museum show to date, which will be held at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia.

kaws installation

kaws installation

KAWS’s “Companion,” a grayscale figure based on Mickey Mouse with his face obscured by both hands, was adapted into a balloon for the 2012 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade as part of the parade’s “Blue Sky Gallery” feature.

For the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards KAWS’s company redesigned the iconic moonman statue.

Biography is from wikipedia.

I hope you enjoy my tribute today for KAWS.  I love his work and it makes me want to design toys!  I also enjoyed fusing my favorite cartoon character Spongebob and his artwork today. 🙂  I will see you tomorrow on Day 327!

Best,

Linda

Oh My- Tribute to KAWS Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Oh My- Tribute to KAWS
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Side-View Oh My- Tribute to KAWS Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Side-View
Oh My- Tribute to KAWS
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 1 Oh My- Tribute to KAWS Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 1
Oh My- Tribute to KAWS
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 2 Oh My- Tribute to KAWS Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 2
Oh My- Tribute to KAWS
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 3 Oh My- Tribute to KAWS Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 3
Oh My- Tribute to KAWS
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Day 312- John Baldessari- No More Boring Art

It’s Day 312 and I’m still on a high from my improv show last night.  It was so much fun!  I am super tired today, but I had a great time doing today’s piece.  Join me in honoring John Baldesarri today!

John Baldessari

John Baldessari

John Baldessari

John Baldessari

John Anthony Baldessari (born June 17, 1931) is an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lives and works in Santa Monica and Venice, California.

Initially a painter, Baldessari began to incorporate texts and photography into his canvases in the mid-1960s. In 1970 he began working in printmaking, film, video, installation, sculpture and photography. He has created thousands of works that demonstrate—and, in many cases, combine—the narrative potential of images and the associative power of language within the boundaries of the work of art. His art has been featured in more than 200 solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe. His work influenced Cindy Sherman, David Salle, and Barbara Kruger among others.

Baldessari was born in National City, California to Hedvig Jensen, a Danish nurse, and

John Baldessari

John Baldessari

Antonio Baldessari, an Italian salvage dealer. Baldessari and his elder sister were raised in Southern California. He attended Sweetwater High School and San Diego State College. Between 1960 and 1984, he was married to Montessorian teacher Carol Ann Wixom; they have two children.

In 1959, Baldessari began teaching art in the San Diego school system. He kept teaching for nearly three decades, in schools and junior colleges and community colleges, and eventually at the university level. When the University of California decided to open up a campus in San Diego, the new head of the Visual Art Department, Paul Brach, asked Baldessari to be part of the originating faculty in 1968. At UCSD he shared an office with David Antin. In 1970, Baldessari moved to Santa Monica, where he met many artists and writers, and began teaching at CalArts. His first classes included David Salle, Jack Goldstein, Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler, James Welling, Barbara Bloom, Matt Mullican, andTroy Brauntuch. While at CalArts, Baldessari taught “the infamous Post Studio class”, which he intended to “indicate people not daubing away at canvases or chipping away at stone, that there might be some other kind of class situation.” The class, which operated outside of medium-specificity, was influential in informing the context for addressing a student’s art practice at CalArts. He quit teaching at CalArts in 1986, moving on to teach at UCLA, which he continued until 2008.  At UCLA, his students included Elliott Hundley.

Early text paintings

John Baldessari

John Baldessari

By 1966, Baldessari was using photographs and text, or simply text, on canvas. His early major works were canvas paintings that were empty but for painted statements derived from contemporary art theory. An early attempt of Baldessari’s included the hand-painted phrase “Suppose it is true after all? WHAT THEN?” (1967) on a heavily worked painted surface. However, this proved personally disappointing because the form and method conflicted with the objective use of language that he preferred to employ. Baldessari decided the solution was to remove his own hand from the construction of the image and to employ a commercial, lifeless style so that the text would impact the viewer without distractions. The words were then physically lettered by sign painters, in an unornamented black font. The first of this series presented the ironic statement “A TWO-DIMENSIONAL SURFACE WITHOUT ANY ARTICULATION IS A DEAD EXPERIENCE” (1967).

Another work, Painting for Kubler (1967–68) presented the viewer theoretical instructions on how to view it and on the importance of context and continuity with previous works. This work referenced art historian George Kubler’s seminal book, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. The seemingly legitimate art concerns were intended by Baldessari to become hollow and ridiculous when presented in such a purely self-referential manner.

Disowning of early work

In 1970 Baldessari and five friends burnt all of the paintings he had created between 1953 and 1966 as part of a new piece, titled The Cremation Project. The ashes from these paintings were baked into cookies and placed into an urn, and the resulting art installation consists of a bronze commemorative plaque with the destroyed paintings’ birth and death dates, as well as the recipe for making the

Tiger- John Baldessari

Tiger- John Baldessari

cookies. Through the ritual of cremation Baldessari draws a connection between artistic practice and the human life cycle. Thus the act of disavowal becomes generative as with the work of auto-destructive artist Jean Tinguely.

Juxtaposing text with images

Baldessari is best known for works that blend photographic materials (such as film stills), take them out of their original context and rearrange their form, often including the addition of words or sentences. Related to his early text paintings were his Wrong series (1966-1968), which paired photographic images with lines of text from an amateur photography book, aiming at the violation of a set of basic “rules” on snapshot composition. In one of the works, Baldessari had himself photographed in front of a palm precisely so that it would appear that the tree were growing out of his head. His photographic California Map Project (1969) created physical forms that resembled the letters in “California” geographically near to the very spots on the map that they were printed. In the Binary Code Series, Baldessari used images as information holders by alternating photographs to stand in for the on-off state of binary code; one example alternated photos of a woman holding a cigarette parallel to her mouth and then dropping it away.

John Baldessari

John Baldessari

Another of Baldessari’s series juxtaposed an image of an object such as a glass, or a block of wood, and the phrase “A glass is a glass” or “Wood is wood” combined with “but a cigar is a good smoke” and the image of the artist smoking a cigar. These directly refer to René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images; the images similarly were used to stand in for the objects described. However, the series also apparently refers to Sigmund Freud’s famous attributed observation that “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”, as well as toRudyard Kipling’s “… a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.”

In “Double Bill”, a 2012 series of large inkjet prints, Baldessari paired the work of two selected artists (such as Giovanni di Paolo with David Hockney, or Fernand Léger withMax Ernst) on a single canvas, further altering the appropriated picture plane by overlaying his own hand-painted color additions. Baldessari then names only one of his two artistic “collaborators” on each canvas’s lower edge, such as …AND MANET or …AND DUCHAMP.

Arbitrary games

Baldessari has expressed that his interest in language comes from its similarities in structure to games, as both operate by an arbitrary and mandatory system of rules. In this spirit, many of his works are sequences showing attempts at accomplishing an arbitrary goal, such as Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (1973), in which the artist attempted to do just that, photographing the results, and eventually selecting the “best out of 36 tries”, with 36 being the determining number just because that is the standard number of

John Baldessari

John Baldessari

shots on a roll of 35mm film. The writer eldritch Priest ties John Baldessari’s piece Throwing four balls in the air to get a square (best of 36 tries) as an early example of post-conceptual art. This work was published in 1973 by a young Italian publisher: Giampaolo Prearo that was one of the first to believe and invest in the work of Baldessari. He printed two series one in 2000 copies and a second more precious reserved to the publisher in 500 copies.

Pointing

Much of Baldessari’s work involves pointing, in which he tells the viewer not only what to look at but how to make selections and comparisons, often simply for the sake of doing so. Baldessari’s Commissioned Paintings (1969) series took the idea

John Baldessari

John Baldessari

of pointing literally, after he read a criticism of conceptual art that claimed it was nothing more than pointing. Beginning with photos of a hand pointing at various objects, Baldessari then hired amateur yet technically adept artists to paint the pictures. He then added a caption “A painting by [painter’s name]” to each finished painting. In this instance, he has been likened to a choreographer, directing the action while having no direct hand in it, and these paintings are typically read as questioning the idea of artistic authorship. The amateur artists have been analogized to sign painters in this series, chosen for their pedestrian methods that were indifferent to what was being painted. Baldessari critiques formalist assessments of art in a segment from his video How We Do Art Now(1973), entitled “Examining Three 8d Nails”, in which he gives obsessive attention to minute details of the nails, such as how much rust they have, or descriptive qualities such as which appears “cooler, more distant, less important” than the others.

Partial biography is from wikipedia.

I hope you enjoy my tribute today!  It was fun making it.  I will see you tomorrow on Day 313.

Best,

Linda

Me in Blue- Tribute to John Baldessari Linda Cleary 2014 Mixed-Media on Canvas

Me in Blue- Tribute to John Baldessari
Linda Cleary 2014
Mixed-Media on Canvas

Side-View Me in Blue- Tribute to John Baldessari Linda Cleary 2014 Mixed-Media on Canvas

Side-View
Me in Blue- Tribute to John Baldessari
Linda Cleary 2014
Mixed-Media on Canvas

Close-Up 1 Me in Blue- Tribute to John Baldessari Linda Cleary 2014 Mixed-Media on Canvas

Close-Up 1
Me in Blue- Tribute to John Baldessari
Linda Cleary 2014
Mixed-Media on Canvas

Close-Up 2 Me in Blue- Tribute to John Baldessari Linda Cleary 2014 Mixed-Media on Canvas

Close-Up 2
Me in Blue- Tribute to John Baldessari
Linda Cleary 2014
Mixed-Media on Canvas

Close-Up 3 Me in Blue- Tribute to John Baldessari Linda Cleary 2014 Mixed-Media on Canvas

Close-Up 3
Me in Blue- Tribute to John Baldessari
Linda Cleary 2014
Mixed-Media on Canvas

Day 300- Gary Baseman- Bittersweetness of Life

It’s Day 300!  I cannot believe this is my 300th painting.  I originally wanted to do Da Vinci today, but I ran out of time so I am pushing it back to another day.  I did have a blast painting today’s painting and he’s one of my faves.  Join me in honoring Gary Baseman today!

Gary Baseman

Gary Baseman

Gary Baseman-Open Wounds

Gary Baseman-Open Wounds

Gary Baseman (born September 27, 1960) is a contemporary artist who works in illustration, fine art, toy design, and animation. He is the creator of the ABC/Disney cartoon series, Teacher’s Pet, and the artistic designer of Cranium, a popular board game. Baseman’s aesthetic combines pop art images, pre- and post-war vintage motifs, cross-cultural mythology and literary and psychological archetypes.

Baseman’s art is frequently associated with the lowbrow pop movement, also known as pop

"For the Love of Toby"- Gary Baseman

“For the Love of Toby”- Gary Baseman

surrealism.

Baseman was born and raised in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles. He is the fourth child of Holocaust survivors from Ukraine. Baseman’s mother worked at the famous Canter’s Deli and his father was an electrician.  Baseman cites Warner Bros. cartoons, MAD Magazine, and Disneyland as early sources of inspiration. In junior high school, Baseman met Barry Smolin, who is now a radio host and musician, and Seth Kurland, a writer and TV producer. They remain close friends.

Baseman studied communications at UCLA. He graduated magna cum laude as a member of the Phi Beta Kappa society.

A Moment Ago Everything Was Beautiful Paintings- Gary Baseman

A Moment Ago Everything Was Beautiful Paintings- Gary Baseman

Baseman cites Yoshitomo Nara, Takashi Murakami, and the illustrator William Joyce as contemporaries.

Baseman coined the term ‘pervasive art’ as an alternative to the lowbrow art label. He has stated that his goal is to “blur the lines between fine art and commercial art.”  According to Baseman, pervasive art can take any medium, and need not be “limited to one world, whether [that] is the gallery world, editorial world, or art toy world.”

Baseman exemplifies pervasive art in that he works commercially and also remains an independent artist.  He creates products that are sold to a mass market, and also shows in museums and galleries, selling original artworks to collectors. Baseman employs traditional art practices such as painting, printmaking, sculpture, drawing, and collage.

From 1986 to 1996, Baseman worked as an illustrator in New York City. He earned several awards from American Illustration, Art

GARY BASEMAN “THE EXPLOSION OF DREAM REALITY”

GARY BASEMAN “THE EXPLOSION OF DREAM REALITY”

Directors Club, and Communication Arts. Baseman refers to his illustration work, and to his general process, as message-making.

Baseman’s drawings have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Clutter Magazine, Time, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times. He has had major independent and corporate clients such as AT&T Corporation, Gatorade, Nike, Inc., and Mercedes-Benz. Baseman illustrated the best-selling board game Cranium. After ten years in New York, Baseman returned to Los Angeles to explore opportunities in art and entertainment.

Gary Baseman

Gary Baseman

In 1999, Baseman exhibited “Dumb Luck and Other Paintings About Lack of Control” at the Mendenhall Gallery in Los Angeles. The exhibition established Baseman’s transition from illustration to fine art, during a time when many of his artist-friends, like Mark Ryden, the Clayton Brothers, and Eric White made similar moves. Since then, Baseman has shown in close to twenty independent exhibitions, notably, “Happy Idiot and Other Paintings About Vulnerability” at the Earl McGrath Gallery in New York City; “For the Love of Toby” at Billy Shire Fine Arts in Los Angeles; “I Melt in Your Presence” at the Modernism Gallery in San Francisco; and “Hide and Seek in the Forest of ChouChou,” also at Billy Shire.

Baseman has exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the US and in Brazil, Germany, Israel, Italy, Russia, Spain, and Taiwan. Baseman’s work is featured in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. and the Museum of Modern Art in Rome.

n 2009, Baseman added performance art to his oeuvre with “La Noche de la Fusión,” a mythical holiday festival. Over two thousand

The Contemplation of the Uga- Gary Baseman

The Contemplation of the Uga- Gary Baseman

attendees celebrated a melding of cultural practices and ideas. Along with games, live music, and dancers, the event featured live models in costume playing Baseman’s female characters Skeleton Girl, Hickey Bat Girl, Bubble Girl, and Butterfly Girl. Displayed at the exhibition was the Enlightened Chou, a new character inspired by Baseman’s international travels.

In June 2010, Baseman presented “Giggle and Pop!” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Live action costumed ChouChous played in the La Brea Tar Pits along with models dressed as Baseman’s Wild Girls, who were renamed “Tar Pit Girls” for the occasion. The characters performed a dance choreographed by Sarah Elgart, and the audience joined in with singer-songwriter Carina Round, who performed a song she composed for the event.

Partial biography is from wikipedia.

I hope you enjoy my piece for today!  I really enjoyed creating it.  He’s such a fun artist.  I love staring at his art and I wish I had more time to work on it.  I didn’t start painting until late this afternoon.  I will see you tomorrow on Day 301!

Best,

Linda

Let Me Show You My Dreams- Tribute to Gary Baseman Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Let Me Show You My Dreams- Tribute to Gary Baseman
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Side-View Let Me Show You My Dreams- Tribute to Gary Baseman Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Side-View
Let Me Show You My Dreams- Tribute to Gary Baseman
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 1 Let Me Show You My Dreams- Tribute to Gary Baseman Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 1
Let Me Show You My Dreams- Tribute to Gary Baseman
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 2 Let Me Show You My Dreams- Tribute to Gary Baseman Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 2
Let Me Show You My Dreams- Tribute to Gary Baseman
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 3 Let Me Show You My Dreams- Tribute to Gary Baseman Linda Cleary 2014 Acrylic on Canvas

Close-Up 3
Let Me Show You My Dreams- Tribute to Gary Baseman
Linda Cleary 2014
Acrylic on Canvas