Art Academia

art enthusiast, sharing one piece of art a day

[yyyipes]

two linocuts from my first year of printmaking class

[draculelle]

The first place I’d like to visit when this lockdown is over. IG: draculelle

[lilblueorchid]

Colorful memories

All the paintings i have done for Nucleus Portland's annual postcard show opening on December 15th! The originals will be available to purchase there and then online (I'll link them to you once it's done) These paintings are memories from my summer. Lately I've grown quite tired of always painting sunny landscapes, so, i've tried to paint other mood as well. I hope you will enjoy them :)

[zegalba]

Leandro Erlich: Pulled by the Roots (2015)

[rudjedet]

downside: going to have to include a picture of the Giza pyramids in the slides for the lecture upside: i get to give people a crash course in why perspective matters in two frames, because

followed by

is such a funny sequence

[wine-dark-sea]

i find most people who haven't seen it in person don't know that cairo is RIGHT THERE

[teaboot]

I loved these perspectives so I took some of my own when I was in Cairo and yeah, they're literally just. Right there. Pass em on your way to work, nbd

[ophilosoraptoro]

No, y'all don't even understand.

There is literally a Pizza Hut across the street from the pyramids.

[rudjedet]

That Pizza Hut among other things is why Egyptologists laugh their asses off when we see another piece of media where the protagonists get "lost in the desert near the pyramids", because it's like... just turn around my dudes you're only a seven min walk away from the nearest fastfood shop

[interstellar-lamb-deactivated20]

Yall don't know how much I adore all of this

[arthist0rian]

I miei balli plastic

by Fortunato Depero

Oil on canvas, 1918

Among these experiments is the show by the artist Fortunato Depero entitled Balli plastici staged on April 14, 1918 in Rome at the Teatro dei Piccoli in Podrecca. The painted figures, in fact, recall the world of childhood and take on the appearance of toys.

My plastic dances dates back to 1918, an important date that marked the end of the First World War. After this date, in Europe and Italy, a trend referred to as Return to Order spread. The official culture thus banned the abstract experimentations of the historical avant-gardes and pushed the artists to re-propose figuration. In Italy, artists returned to be inspired by historical painting, especially from the pre-Renaissance era. The most representative reality that brought together the new proposals were the great exhibitions referred to as Novecento Italiano organized in the twenties by Margherita Sarfatti.

The composer Casella secured publicity for the show in his magazine entitled Ars Nova. The year after the release of the show, however, Casella himself wrote an editorial against Futurism. The composer in fact heavily criticized the aesthetics and vulgarity in propaganda actions. With this heavy criticism the possibility of experimenting with an Italian futurist musical current was lost.

The style of I miei balli plastici by Fortunato Depero

Fortunato Depero was an artist indicated by art historians as an important exponent of Italian Futurism. In addition, he was one of the promoters and signatories of the Manifesto of Futurist Aeropainting and protagonist of the Second Futurism. This later moment of Futurism was identified by the historian Enrico Crispolti in the late fifties of the twentieth century and later absorbed by convention by the History of Art.

The first Futurism is also called "Heroic Futurism", developed from 1909 to 1916 and founded by artists of anarcho-socialist orientation. The second Futurism instead spread after the First World War, conventionally following the death of Umberto Boccioni in 1918, Antonio Sant'Elia and Carlo Erba. Its adherents were mostly of fascist orientation. The second Futurism was inspired by the "Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe" by Balla and Depero. It was a true artistic and cultural program destined to condition the daily life of Italians.

Space

The complex representation of Fortunato Depero is distributed within an environment reminiscent of the stage of a theater. The scene is also the result of several interpenetrating spaces. The point of view in which the scene is proposed to the observer is higher.

Composition and framing

I miei balli plastici by Fortunato Depero is a square-shaped painting. The frame is wide and reproduces a theatrical scenography.

The compositional structure is ordered on an orthogonal grid within which the different groups of characters are placed. In addition, there are three main horizontal bands that have their own color. At the bottom is the widest green and blue zone. In the center then there is a thin band with warm colors. Finally, at the top is the gray and dark green area in which the puppets are observed.

[arthist0rian]

I like america and america likes me back by Joseph Beuys

a performance made in 1974, new york in a gallery in soho.

the artist lived for three days, eight hours a day with a coyote, protected only by a felt blanket and a copper walking stick. the felt blanket was made out of rabbit fur. The material used dated back on his usual material. The felt is comforting and healing for the artist, as when he fought in WWII a nomad balkan tribe helped him healing his wounds with animal fat and felt clothes/blankets. The copper stick has different meanings: it can be seen as a powerful object used to leads the flocks, taking up the imagery of the good pastor in the bible, but also can be seen as a magical object (magic and shamanism, a dowser who feel the invisible energies of the world).

Beuys thought the art was not only for personal but also collective and planetary salvation. he thought that the western culture was sick and in need for a cure, because said culture lead nature and human beings to a balance breakdown. and so the salvation can only be achieved through harmony with nature and even the most aggressive animals.

he did not gt injured by the coyote because they at last started to have trust between them (i also think they fed the coyote before and after the performance to keep it quite, but im not really sure about it, or used a coyote used to human presence, because i don't think no one sane will ever wanted to be put in a cage with a feral and hungry animal)

[juliaxyn]

Monet's pink paintings.

[elizabethanism]

“The entire British museum is an active crime scene” - John Oliver

[matyas-ss]

Untitled, Mark Rothko (1968). Pace Gallery in New York.

[learnelle]

Flower details

[ominouspositivity-or-else]

@dandelionsinthegarden

[happyheidi]

shades of green in Van Gogh’s paintings

(via)

[koyumavi]

[simena]

Dominique Louis Féréol Papety - The odalisque (detail)

[jdebbiel]

studies at the Musée D’Orsay

[theminimalisto]

[hymneminium]

Art snobs complain that using a different kind of paint "forever destroyed" the painting

Wikipedia hosts it as a 2-kilobyte SVG

[earlgraytay]

okay, I don't even fucking like modern art that much, but you're just plain wrong here. you don't know how much you don't know.

trying to capture a painting through photography is kind of a fools' errand. especially a huge painting like Who's Afraid Of Red, Yellow, and Blue. The things that make a painting like this impressive just do not photograph well. Furthermore, the things that made this particular painting impressive are impossible to see without seeing it in real life. (which, tragically, is no longer possible. fuck art vandals.)

let me give you an example with a more accessible painting. Let's look at Van Gogh's Wheat Field With Crows, one of his final paintings. It's widely considered to be a masterpiece.

Here's Wikipedia's png/svg image of it:

looks kinda flat, right? kinda meh? not particularly impressive? but look at this close-up image:

you see how the brushstrokes build on each other? how every stroke gives the painting more texture, almost like a wafer-thin sculpture?

now imagine the entire thing with a subtle glow, a shimmer that moves as you walk past the painting, capturing the light of a wheat field with scattering crows right before a storm. because of the way paint works, most paintings have a subtle shimmer to them. oil paintings have more of a shimmer, because they're varnished. acrylics, like Who's Afraid, have less, but it's still there. and that shimmer is impossible to photograph without making the image itself illegible. it just looks like glare.

and this is true of every painting. any photo you see of a painting is the flattest, deadest possible version of that painting. you can't see the way the artist pushed the paint to give it texture. you can't see the shimmer. you can't see the light reflected on the ground beneath. you can't move around and get a look at the different angles, or feel dwarfed by the immensity of a canvas that's two feet taller than you that just screams RED.

from what little I understand, the Who's Afraid paintings are mostly an exercise in technique. the entire point was getting the paint to have as smooth of a texture as possible.

which, uh, have you worked with acrylics? i have. let me tell you, acrylic paint wants to look like chicken scratch. getting it to look smooth is real fuckin' hard. painting over it? fucks with the texture. varnishing it? fucks with the texture bad, and makes it look oily and glowy in a way it wasn't supposed to. it takes that subtle sheen and makes it look slick.

what happened to this painting is the equivalent of someone putting 80s blue eyeshadow and bright red lipstick on the Mona Lisa. you can't get it off. you can't reverse it. the painting is destroyed, whether you like it or not.

the level of proud ignorance and anti-intellectualism you are showing here is, uh. it's on par with a made up guy saying "why are there so many different programming languages? can't you just write everything in assembly? that seems like it'd be easier." it's honestly kinda sickening.

like I said- I don't even like most modern art, it really doesn't do it for me. but you don't have to be an art snob to know why this is a bad thing, or to care about it.

[dragkingandreweldritch]

here's a great video that elaborates further on the history of this particular painting and also why hatred for modern art and fascism are intimately entangled

(OP has since clarified they were more making fun of Wikipedia displaying the painting as a vector, which flattens color, and that their original post was badly worded, and even if they didn't I'm not saying anyone who makes 'modern art is dumb' jokes is a fascist. but it's necessary to point out where this irratiinal hatred comes from.)

[logicallyyours]

As a student of art, let me tell you that not liking a particular artist or period of art is okay, but insulting it just because it isn’t your thing is not okay. Human expression is the heart of our existence.

I once had to unfriend someone I cared about because every time I posted something from Rothko, she would make snide comments, even after I dm’d her and asked her not to.

Her objection was that his stuff is “just boxes” and anyone can do that. But no, they can’t. The depth and complexity of how he painted immerses you in a field of color. Furthermore, each paining of his is an experiment in how that color makes you feel. For instance, this one i find calming:

While this one fills me with dread:

These paintings are big enough that if you stand two feet away, they fill your field of vision. The photographs don’t do them justice, but you get the point.

I’ve never seen the “Who’s afraid” paintings, but I second everything that @earlgraytay wrote.

[prismatic-bell]

I've said before of modern art that it's not my thing but it's someone's thing and therefore should exist, but there's something else I want to bring up in relation to the idea that art looks different on a computer screen:

I do not remember why I love La Vie.

That probably sounds hella cryptic or weird, but. When I was eleven, my mom took me to the Cleveland Art Museum, and I saw La Vie in person. I literally stopped dead in the middle of walking and gasped. Eventually she had to prod me to keep moving. I, a kid with badly-medicated ADHD who'd just skipped right by one of Monet's Water Lilies pieces like it wasn't there, stopped and stared at this painting for a good five or ten minutes.

Here it is. Or rather, here it isn't.

I don't remember what looked so different about it in person. That was over 20 years ago. But I remember that this? This would never have made me stop dead so quickly someone ran into me from behind. This--sorry, Picasso--is almost boring. This is not La Vie. Not the way it really looks. Someday I want to go back to the Cleveland Art Museum just to see it again (and maybe to actually pay attention to Water Lilies this time). Just to remember what it's actually like.

Now I have seen modern art in person and not liked it. But @earlgraytay is so extremely right that really, truly, many of these pieces you do indeed have to see in person to genuinely say whether you like them or not. I'm not saying you can't get an impression from digital images or prints. Certainly you can. I'm absolutely enchanted by The Persistence of Memory and often call it my favorite painting, and I've never seen it in person. (I want to. Someday, someday.) But do I actually know what it looks like? I mean, kind of, but not really.

Before you say a piece of modern art is downright stupid, see if you can find a local gallery and check out some of their art. Even if you come away still saying "this isn't for me," it may give you an idea of why people paint this stuff in the first place, and enrichment is good for the soul.