- light and dark very baroque all fruit lit in the middle with edges vignetted, makes a border on the central image, unrealistic in laws of litht but more effective in the painting. allow self to reduce realism for visual effect
david vinckboons, country fair
clara peeters, still life with cheese almonds and pretzels - could be cool to recreate with my connection to both pretzels AND more recently cheese.
rubens, woman and boy with candles, 1616-17
- style of caravaggio
- unrefined
- brushstrokes allowed to stand and be mottled
- 'unpolished naturalism'
JAN BRUEGHEL I AND HANS ROTTENHAMMER, CHRISTS DESCENT INTO LIMBO
use images for depiction of circles on big blue painting? if continuing ..
jan provoost, triptych with the virgin and child, john the evangelist and mary magdalene
lucas cranach I
hans holbein II portraits
joachim beuckelaer again?? a detail study maybe
gerard de lairesse, achilles discovered among the daughters of licomedes
johannes moreelse, democratus the laughing philosopher - shadow and light on the face, perfect expression snd movement captured
jan lievens, tronie of an old man (tronie = imaginary composition of a portrait)
- blended blurred smooth bright face and hair
- dark defined pupils
- glowing almost, vibrant, outlined form draws in the eye
rembrandt, simeon's song of praise
- dark grey at the edges, saturation and brightness increases in the middle
- background mostly tonal ochre apart from grey edges
- robes heavily shadowed and defined, draws the viewer in
rembrandt, saul and david
- uses such loose and sparing brushstrokes snd still realistic
- david's eye captures viewers , face behind curtain
jan verkolje, the messenger (times change)
- rose tinted colours?
- surprise and intrigue at the messenger even from the dog
faveau (first name??) - street scenes, palette knifing, plein air??
ESCHER IN HET PALEIS
alongside the work of maura biava - sculptor, organic forms, feminine shapes - the mathematical form of nature. underwater photography!
beautifully curated, works by both artists complemented one another - eg entanglements #02 echoes drawing hands
photography of hands shows the patterns/kaleidoscoping/fractal nature of the body.
early works more representational, less illusionistic than later. lithographs, mostly. wood carvings also featured. interest in tessellation and mathematical perfections.
Never heard of this before, but Michael Raedecker was talking about it on A Brush With...
'The Beanery is a life-size, walk-in artwork created in 1965 by the American artist Edward Kienholz; it has been referred to as his greatest work, and "one of the most memorable works of late 20th-century art". It represents the interior of a Los Angeles bar, Barney's Beanery.
Modelled at two-thirds the size of the original Beanery, it features the smells and sounds of the bar, and models of customers, all of whom have clocks for faces with the time set at 10:10. Only the model of Barney, the owner, has a real face. Kienholz is quoted as saying "The entire work symbolizes the switch from real time (symbolized by a newspaper) to the surrealist time inside the bar, where people waste time, kill time, forget time, and ignore time".' (Wikipedia)
Surprise surprise, who woulda thunk it? This time I'm going to den Haag babyyyy which means I'm going to Kunstmuseum den Haag. (I've been to the Rijksmuseum four times I've had enough for a while sorry)
Michael Raedecker is there. I'm going to scream he's so cool. He studied fashion and apprenticed in Maison Margiela, he started adding thread and textiles to his paintings.
He got shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2000, after winning first prize in the John Moores Prize Exhibition at the 1999 Liverpool Biennale. Sick.
Listening to him in a podcast, he is such a down-to-earth painter. He is interested in painting. He wants to figure out what painting means, how he can change it and play with it, but not to revolutionise it or do something groundbreaking, he's just fascinated by the craft. His work does not try to spoonfeed anyone, he's exploring imagery and allowing us to do the same.
L: Room 4, 1997, oil, acrylic, veneer and thread on linen.
R: Destructive Superstition, 2004. Acrylic and thread on linen.
Frisson, 1997, acrylic and thread on linen.
'Michael Raedecker’s paintings engage with craft tradition in a sophisticated way. Self-consciously bordering on kitsch, frisson personalises the genre of epic landscape painting. His vast mountains, created through layers of generously poured paint possess an icing-like texture; the trees are made of thick wool, stitched with rustic gusto. The sparkling highlights glitter in the snow from embedded lengths of metallic twine. Through his folksy technique, Michael Raedecker draws intimate connotation to his sublime theme: he portrays this vast emptiness with the cold comfort of homeliness.' - Saatchi.
Michael Raedecker’s work seeks to make sense of the symbiotic and often parasitic relationship between nature and humanity – to understand o
Has a concurrent exhibition in the city centre, unsure what I'll get to see in den Haag. Won't have time for both as my trip is quite short this time, but I'm glad I'll get to see any of his work.
Ins and Outs, 2000, acrylic and thread on canvas.
Deep, 1998. Acrylic and thread on linen.
PODCAST: A Brush With Michael Raedecker
Notes:
SEES HIMSELF AS AN OUTSIDER FROM PAINTING as someone trained in fashion. Used as an advantage. Earliest works informed by work of Winston Churchill – an ‘unpretentious Sunday painter’ who wrote Painting as Pastime. Laser printed reproductions of churchill’s work, pigment transfer technique onto canvas, added thread. Used knowledge of architecture and surroundings. Modern landscapes emerging from empty cold gloom. Idealistic images from interior magazines, with strange architectural anomalies. Explored portraits, still lifes, and all manner of paintings. Humdrum/lightweight subjects, imbued with psychological tension – done for fun, as an outsider. Images transferred and fragmented across canvases. Scenes steeped in cinematic ambience and aura. ‘The liquid uncertainty of paint.’ Intention and accident.
Thinking ahead like a chess player, an idea that becomes a sketch, but a layer of unpredictability should make you adaptable, use your intuition and be in a flow, to adjust into a new painting that hasn’t been made before.
Printed elements hitting thread, hitting painting elements. More depth in his work simply from the amount of workings used.
Plays with chromakey greens or blues.
Plays in photoshop – what looks good on screen may not look so well on the painting. Lo-fi techniques in printing – two layers on top of each other- won’t know intensity and saturation of colour – so he makes demos – works with these demos later, they’re essentially sketches – but they still get displayed. Smaller versions of the ‘real’ paintings. What is a real painting? A painting is supposed to be unique, here we have two versions of the same thing, up to the viewer to decide which is the better one …
Different painting languages in the same painting – flat colours, covered in texture. Thick passages of paint in some areas.
Thread contrasting flat sky.
Fake fur used, cut with fibres falling into the canvas, painted over – placed in a timeless space. Distressed appearance of the canvas.
Radiate, 2024. Laser printer pigment transfer, dispersion, acrylic and thread on canvas.
Modernist architecture ideal – houses have been around for a long time, though they are still part of today’s culture. Timeless. Sufficiently generic to engender all sorts of meaning. Trusts the viewer to add meaning to the work, or take from it what they want.
Instead of direct references to known architectural places. Familiarity lures in a viewer, and then they’re left to their own devices. ‘You need to leave blanks and open spaces.’ Note: stop spoonfeeding the viewer.
Using thread and embroidery – penetrating the canvas, and then you have to come out elsewhere – it’s easy to make straight lines – ideal for architecture. a 'stupid' technique - straightforward and uncomplicated. Makes painting more than just paint on canvas. Investigated painting as a historical medium, in relation to a sunday painter's approach, where there is no agenda, and one creates for the love of painting. Raedecker created a corner to paint in, introduced this 'wrong' non-art technique in combination with paint, and like sunday painting, it didn't have an ideology or agenda.
Deliberate perversity, a wedding cake painted, imbued with a sense of dread. Testing his own ability to make a painting out of something so familiar, or saccharine things. Connection and connotation with a wedding cake, for example, what do you imply by making it look like its past its sell-by date?
Michael Raedecker Exhibitions: Michael Raedecker, back on earth, 30 May - 20 Jul 2024; Michael Raedecker, material worlds, 13 Apr - 11 Aug 2
His great grandfather created the WW2 monument on Dam Square.
In one of Europe’s last remaining wildernesses, Romania’s brown bears and the local population share an uneasy coexistence
Romania has the largest population of brown bears in Europe (about 60%). This is because of Nicolae Ceausescu's communist rule. He created feeding stations, dumping cattle carcasses in the forests of the Carpathian mountains to increase bear populations. And it worked. Now there is an overpopulation, and deforestation is pushing these animals to search for food in Romanian towns.
Three men die in little over a month in Romania, home to Europe's biggest brown bear population.
They cannot avoid towns and settlements in their trekking across Romanian landscapes in search for food.
Unfortunately, people think the solution is extermination - it may be the only thing that is done about it - it's too late. Forests are gone, the balance of nature has been played with too much. Animals are pushed out of their homes and persecuted for it.
“I’m very interested in like power, moments where you might feel powerful or powerless and the moments when that changes,” said Klein. “Now, I’m trying to say more with less. Can I just say one thing? Can this curtain have just as much power as my previous work?” - ArtNews
Rae Klein is a young painter with a big Instagram following. Having never gone to grad school, or moved to a big city, she landed a solo sho
As I've explored in my little yellow sketchbook, I like the idea of reclaiming my lack of identity as a positive. I live in between and outside of Romanian and Irish tradition in a way. I see both as novel and curious, which is a great position to be in as an artist. I see the extraordinary in things that are commonplace to most people born and raised in either Ireland or Romania. I am welcomed in both cultures, its not a matter of exclusion, but I don't truly feel part of either. It's a strange in-between that I think would be fun to explore through paint.
Klein's visual language is appealing, obscure, yet clearly readable and she is a young artist who made her way into the art world without grad school. (always inspiring to see).
I like looking at sketchbooks and seeing into the minds of artists, but also seeing how accessible their starting points are. Instead of focusing so much on the finished works of great artists which is quite daunting, it can be much more motivational to just look at their methods of getting started.
JMW Turner / landscapes, quick light marks
William Blake / note writing up the side of the page ?
"I think that that's an interesting way to begin a painting, in that it's something that's either difficult to depict or the painting is itself talking about a problem. I don't see that the painting offers a solution but that it begins to become a place where these problems can play out."
Helen Westgeest, Slow Painting. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.
Notes on propaganda in art were very interesting to me. What isn't propaganda today? All art can be deconstructed, redefined, reconstrued, especially in times of sociopolitical tension, as we have seen for a prolonged period recently.
Wang Guangyi's Great Criticism painting series criticises the aesthetics of Chinese social realism as well as Western commercialism.
(Work of Wang Guangyi)
The contrast of traditional images of Chinese communist propaganda against current dominant brands in the realm of consumerism create a striking visual image while leaving adequate space for contemplation - although the subject matter isn't at all elusive, it's still fun to look at. We are urged to question the propaganda we are fed every day in the form of billboards, posters and advertisements.
While painting my current work in progress, its resemblance to the second circle of hell was pointed out to me. I thought I'd research a bit of the Divine Comedy, particularly the Inferno to learn more about the subject. The second circle of hell represents lust, with a constant tempest buffeting those who gave in to carnal temptation.
Jean-Jacques Feuchère, Dante Meditating on the "Divine Comedy", 1843. https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.91288.html
Made with pen and a brown ink wash. Visual movement of his imagination through the space. His own battle between virtue and vice?
William Blake, The Circle of the Lustful: Paolo and Francesca, 1827. https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.8317.html
Rich allegory within the story, of course. What interests me about this story is its focus on knowing evil to be able to know good - couldn't climb the mountain of purgatory into heaven before going through hell. Then considered the circle of gluttony, how that links with ideas of excess and food and enjoyment, but I think that actually deviates more from my use of food than the second circle would. In my painting I have a figure eating whatever it has found, some ambiguous fruit. It started that way and I enjoy it, and I think it might take on some meaning in future, when the work is more resolved. For the moment, the figures are all crawling aimlessly, scavenging in vain for a life they'll never live again.
Gustave Doré, Dante and Virgil in the Ninth Circle of Hell, 1861. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Gustave_Doré_-_Dante_et_Virgile_dans_le_neuvième_cercle_de_l%27Enfer.jpg
I'm going back in history with my source material and it's far more exciting to me than contemporary research, just at the minute. I consider the fact that a lot of contemporary artists have sourced their inspiration in centuries-old art, and I think it's a valid thing to learn about before venturing back to modernity. That said, Francis Bacon has been a notable influence on me.
Eadweard Muybridge, Child with infantile paralysis walking on hands and feet, 1887. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Child_with_infantile_paralysis_walking_on_hands_and_feet_%28rbm-QP301M8-1887-539a~8%29.jpg
Francis Bacon, Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours (from Muybridge), 1961. https://www.francis-bacon.com/artworks/paintings/paralytic-child-walking-all-fours-muybridge
Bacon's use of paint and abstraction of the figure have been a source of consistent fascination and inquiry for me in my painting practice. This is currently coming together with the work of Dante, biblical stories, the poetry of Ted Hughes and others, and my focus on food as an allegorical device.
I love music and I've already been discussing food, so this just makes sense to me.
MF DOOM's fifth album MM...FOOD is not just an anagram of his name, but acts as a signifier of the double entendre and food-related samples that proliferate the record.
There are plenty food related songs out there; mostly just title-wise (Frank Zappa's Watermelon in Easter Hay, Mayonaise by the Smashing Pumpkins, Rotten Apple by Alice in Chains, to name a few), but this album works with food-based sounds to formulate a cohesive collection of songs that don't necessarily base all their meanings in food, but grow from this rather simple source. There is definitely more out there that I plan to scout out.
Perhaps a discussion lies within this work, of theme as a method of producing work; which might be something to learn from as a painter - sometimes I feel very tied to a 'theme' or idea, forgetting that it's a springboard for future ideas to emerge from. This album is a stellar example of that free and permitted emergence.
"Bay Area artist Wayne Thiebaud worked first as a graphic designer and cartoonist before beginning his painting career in the mid-1950s. He combined a number of interests then current in American art: thick, gestural brushwork, everyday subject matter, and commercial imagery.
Thiebaud is best known for his paintings of cakes, pies, and candies arranged in classic diner or cafeteria style. Thiebaud depicts these objects as commodities, their emphasis on appearance as much as taste. He achieved this effect through serial repetition, synthetic colors, and, famously, by painting with a knife, as if he were spreading the "frosting" onto his cakes. By focusing on sugary foodstuffs, Thiebaud updated the traditional still-life genre for the age of mass production and consumption." SFMOMA
Such a simple gesture as organising food aesthetically and commercially, and painting it, has proven to be a source of fruitful subtext and reflection. The still-life has moved on from what was then coveted; lobster; baskets overflowing with fresh bread; silver dishes laden with cheese and exotic fruits, to sugary confection.
Thiebaud brings attention to our shifting perspectives and treats our caloric fancies with the same reverence as the old Dutch Masters, with a typical mid-century American hand of heavy, loose brushstrokes and bright, sunlit colours.
