Red.Yellow.Blue

TTFN - New Blog!

2012-02-10T18:54:00.001Z

http://theslowmuse.blogspot.com/ <<<For all of those who missed it, my new blog, sister to RedYellowBlue.

Self Portraying Self

2012-02-02T15:12:00.000Z

I think I have posted this before and then deleted it for some reason, so here it is again for those of you who have already seen it!

Artist Spotlight #22: Alice Neel

2012-02-02T10:37:00.000Z

Alice Neel was an American painter, best known for her portraits of her family, friends, poets, and painters.

Great Portriats #26

2012-02-01T12:33:00.000Z

Bit of an obvious choice, but this has to be the greatest portrait in the western world. I think it's even nicknamed the 'Mona Lisa of the North.'

Marcel Duchamp's Art Attack

2012-01-31T13:35:00.000Z

This is one of the best known of all Dada images. It attacks the art of the museum, and the political system of royal patronage that supported official taste. By putting graffiti on an Old master, he was making a sign of rebellion, a rejection of tradition and a loss of values. If Dada was becoming too anarchic to have real political force, this image continued the tradition of Dada humour with the growing Surrealist interest in repressed sexual drives. The abbreviation at the bottom, when pronounced in French, sounds like the phrase 'she has a hot arse'. This verbal game suggests Freud's belief that verbal mistakes and slips of the tongue were signs of unconscious wishes. While many a connoisseur wrote poetic comments on the meaning of Mona Lisa's smile, Duchamp gives us the code of silent feminine desire. She smiles because she is aroused.

Duchamp often assumed the role of the bored indifferent artist, yet his influence on Surrealism was substantial, even if not direct. Here he had used an existing high art image to play with erotic messages and reversals of sexuality. He raised many questions in this surprisingly simple work and also created a female alter-ego strangely named Rrose Selavay (Eros That's Life) to make a similar point about the bisexual nature of all human desire. His later work, particularly the sculpture such as Etant Donnes (1945-66) become more overtly erotic.

Magritte's The Red Model

2012-01-21T15:40:00.000Z

In his later life, Magritte often worked with the strange similarities between objects. This marked a change from the more common Surrealist method of placing dissimilar objects side by side. For this painting Magritte prepared drawings in order to find the best combination of subject matter. Only when the drawing was successful, did he turn to paint and canvas.

What he sought in these drawings was a sense of paradox. He asked like the philosopher Hegel, why every object exists as an idea in relation to some other object. Without rain, there would be no umbrella, without the sea there would be no ships. In this painting it would seem that the foot calls forth the idea of the shoe. Yet, in allowing the two images to penetrate each other, we can never be sure whether the foot calls upon the pure idea of the shoe, or the shoe calls upon the memory of the absent foot. Magritte makes his exploration of the unity of thought a humble and sometimes playful one. In this case, the shoes are working-man's foot wear, and recall the sad and expressive shoes painted by Van Gogh. Around this time, Dali was making a big impact on Surrealism with work such as the Burning Giraffe.

Looking Towards the Future

2012-01-18T15:03:00.000Z

The Lips of America

2012-01-15T11:13:00.001Z

In a hyper-sexualised fashion Warhol isolates the lips of a super star. Isolated and repeated like the soup cans and coke bottles that he painted in the 60's. As though Marilyn's lips were a product of endless consumption, an isolated consumer gift. Unlike the lips of the Mona Lisa for example - Marilyn's lips chatter like the mobile chattering teeth toy. Yet they are real; as real as realism gets. Painting hasn't seen a smile like this since the Mona Lisa, and hasn't raised a smile since Duchamp drew a moustache on the Renaissance icon. The isolated expression is repeated, like in the glamour magazines, which Warhol really kick started. The human form is reduced to a pair of lips, because that is all we require, Marilyn's face is so familiar to us, even now in the 21st Century, anyone familiar with Warhol will immediately recognise the lips as hers.

The lips of America (not the lips of Russia), have become a commodity, a sex symbol, a major smile in mainstream art. As smiling in painting was not encouraged as it distorted the face, and was difficult for painters to paint the distortions which the smile produced. Marilyn Monroe the Mona Lisa of the Sixties, gave us the lips of America as Warhol gave us the obsession with celebrity. Together they are powerful, alone they are iconic. This Kodak moment can be replayed over and over with some slight variation, to the tunes of the sixties, when sexual liberation was rife, when lips were painted red.

Portrait of a Man #10

2012-01-14T14:21:00.000Z

The Legislative Belly

2012-01-14T14:11:00.000Z

The art of caricature needs an exacting fund of information with which to play out the extremes of exaggeration and grotesquerie. In his gallery of rascals, knaves, and black-guards, Daumier is savage and vitriolic. But whatever his temper, he never lets his craft lose discrimination or self-possession. His art, though it renders the gross and obnoxious, can not be incautious or careless. Treading close to absurdity, he is always scrupulous in his control of form. He provokes laughter at his victims while the artist goes unscathed.

Artist Spotlight #21: Istvan Sandorfi

2012-01-10T13:39:00.001Z

Istvan Sandorfi was a Hungarian Hyperrealist painter.

Miro and the King's Madness

2012-01-08T11:44:00.000Z

While some critics have been of the view that Miro's paintings were primitive and childlike, the work of a simple mind. Others have argued the opposite view - that his work was extremely complex. If his work seems childlike it is because he attempted to express basic levels of human sensibility.

In the year he painted The King's Madness, Miro wrote, 'I escaped onto the absolute of nature. I wanted my spots to seem open to the magnetic appeal of the void, to make themselves available to it.' The 'spots' in this picture were made by pushing paint across the canvas with a rag. He expressed a fascination with the idea of a void, a 'perfect emptiness.' The shapes painted on the top of the void were symbolic of his dreams. Later in his career, in 1962, Miro said that he 'painted without premeditation, as if under the influence of a dream.' He wrote of his attempts to combine 'reality and mystery in a space that had been set free'.

The King's Madness owed much to the Dadaists. It was painted at a time when Miro's work was still deeply influenced by his dreams; this was reversed in his later work.

Great Portraits #25

2012-01-08T10:41:00.000Z

Painting by Andrew Wyeth

In the Studio With Fiona Rae

2012-01-01T10:03:00.000Z

Francis Bacon A Terrible Beauty

2011-12-27T14:40:00.000Z

This is a video documenting the recreation of Bacon's London studio in a Dublin art gallery.

Friedrich Nietzsche Aphorism

2011-12-26T13:03:00.001Z

I love this aphorism, which is from his book Human, All Too Human. The aphorism comes from the section on art and artists. I love it that much that I wanted to share it here with you.

'The slow arrow of beauty. The most noble kind of beauty is that which does not carry us away suddenly, whose attacks are not violent or intoxicating (this kind easily awakens disgust), but rather the kind of beauty which infiltrates slowly, which we carry along with us almost unnoticed, and meet up with again in dreams, finally, after it has for a long time lain modestly in our heart, it takes complete possession of us, filling our eyes with tears, our hearts with longing. What do we long for when we see beauty? To be beautiful. We think much happiness must be connected with it. But that is an error.'

Portrait of a Woman

2011-12-24T10:13:00.000Z

Salvador Dali's The Burning Giraffe

2011-12-23T14:38:00.000Z

Dali made a considerable impact on Surrealism around 1935, with the introduction of his 'paranoid-critical method'. He regarded automatic drawing like that of Miro in Dutch Interior (1928) as too passive: inner dreams and reveries were valuable and interesting, but automatic drawing lacked the commitment and means to realise inner imagery fully.

Besides this, Dali also argued that Surrealist art should be more assertive in forming its pictures of the unconscious, to be more ordered and systematic in its methods - even the artist could not verify the meaning of an automatic drawing.

This called for a new understanding of automatism. It needed to become a lyrical and even violent vehicle for changing reality, it required the artist to avoid private art works and to make a more public display and effort. Dali took private sexual imagery and, like an exhibitionist, went out into the public. His works raised the debate over the value of automatic drawing, which by 1935 seemed an exhausted method. Could a method so dependant on passivity and chance be made into a calculated and methodical art? Certainly Breton disagreed, and he expelled Dali on the grounds that his fascination with Hitler, paranoid and apolitical as it may have been, was unacceptable.

Another Ink Drawing

2011-12-18T14:41:00.000Z

I think this one looks a little like George Bush!

Great Portraits #24

2011-12-18T13:30:00.000Z

I love all of Frank Auerbach's portraits (as with Lucian Freud's). So it was difficult to choose one, but this one in particular stood out for me, the angle of the head, and those giant brush marks make this portrait great.

Picasso's Nude Woman in a Red Armchair

2011-12-18T10:24:00.000Z

At the end of the First World War, Picasso abandoned his Cubist style for a more traditional, almost Classical style. However, during the 1920s and the 1930s he did produce some paintings which clearly belong to the Surrealist movement, even if the majority of his work did not. Picasso enjoyed the company of the Surrealists, looking to them for ideas and energy. Above all, he made many Surrealist erotic etchings, some recounting the adventures of a lusty minotaur.

This seated nude seems to be influenced by his ideas of nymph-like women who arouse the Minotaur's curiosity, tenderness and violent passion. Picasso has used the rounded forms found often in Jean Arp's work rather than the crisp straight lines of his Cubist canvases. To this, he has added a flat, pale blue to indicate shadow and rounded form. He used his wife as the model for this dream woman; the sensuous curves of her form, the linear arabesque of the chair handles, and the flat planes of colour demonstrate his technical mastery. Some critics have noted a creeping decadence and excessive luxury in his work that were not in keeping with Picasso's reputed left-wing politics.

Marlene Dumas in the Studio

2011-12-16T18:57:00.001Z

Part of my in the studio series, here it is interesting to see how Dumas approaches her painting.

Portrait of a Man #9

2011-12-14T10:20:00.000Z

Henri Rousseau's Sleeping Gypsy

2011-12-11T14:38:00.000Z

Rosseau has depicted a desert scene in which a sleeping gypsy musician is visited by a curious lion. Lit by the moon, the landscape is painted in smoothly graded shades of grey. In the foreground, the richly coloured stripes of the gown have been subdued by darkness. To keep the forms clear in such light, the artist has given each one a clear, sharp outline. Overall, the style recalls a medieval Italian religious icon. His composition, with its linear rhythm, consistent modelling and dim light, was self-taught. Although Rousseau's art was unsophisticated, indeed naive, the Surrealists enjoyed his work for its imitation of prehistoric art, as though he himself represented a living example of a primitive artist. In this painting, Rousseau recalls a tradition of exotic fantasy painting. Not only has he painted a dream of a far-away land in which man and nature live in suspense and harmony, he also depicts an inner experience which the Surrealists could interpret using Freud's technique of dream analysis.

Portrait of Tom Waits

2011-12-09T09:54:00.000Z

I love the angle of the head on this one, reminds me of this Lucian Freud portrait.

Still on target for a post a day this month! Continue to read my blog, and support it by sharing what I post, commenting, hitting the like button and so forth, thankyou.