World Paintings

Art fascinates me, it takes my breath away. Hope this blog will touch your soul as well. All posts are originally compiled by me. If you reblog, please make sure you do not remove the original credits. Enjoy!

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Kees van Dongen Les Amies, circa 1922, oil on canvas, 74 x 59 cm, private collection.

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Olga Sacharoff

Woman leaning on table (Mujer acodada en mesa), 1915, oil on canvas, 72 x 80 cm, Colección Museo Arte Nouveau y Art Déco, Salamanca.

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Art should always make us laugh and frighten us a little, but never bore us.

Jean Dubuffet

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Jean Dubuffet Cortège, signed and dated 1961, oil on canvas, 119.4 x 92.7 cm, private collection.

Jean Dubuffet was a French painter and sculptor. He was notoriously resolute in his rejection of academic art-historical precedent. He was a founder of the Art Brut movement and purposefully steered his sphere of influence towards the art of children or the mentally ill, rather than the accepted Parisian salons of preceding decades. Cortège is an example of the artist pursuing the ideals of the Art Brut movement, rejecting academic methods and art world norms with his ebullient forms and saturated palette. Articulated in vivid colour and frantic brushwork, this painting conveys a sense of the thronging urban mass. 

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Vasily Kandinsky

Circles in a Circle, 1923, oil on canvas, 98.7 x 95.6 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art. 

For Kandinsky, the circle, the most elementary of forms, had symbolic, cosmic significance. He wrote that "the circle is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the excentric in a single form, and in balance." In a letter of 1931, he described Circles in a Circle as "the first picture of mine to bring the theme of circles to the foreground."

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"What is mastery? What would it be for you to recreate a masterful piece of art?”

Hikaru Miyakawa did just that and recreated Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper". Hikaru is an internationally exhibiting Japanese artist based in the US. As Leonardo da Vinci, whom Hikaru has followed since he was ten, he is a man of multiple expressions: art, music (opera), acting, writing, dancing, and teaching to name a few. As a writer and researcher, Hikaru is currently writing books/articles on several subjects including among others: Leonardo da Vinci, Old and New Testaments through Hebrew and Aramaic, Parzival / Holy Grail, Subconsciousness / Dream.

Last year Hikaru gave a TEDxBoulder talk on his artistic path, relationship with Leonardo’s works and thoughts on mastery. Enjoy!

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Vincent van Gogh

L'Allée des Alyscamps (with detail), 1888, oil on canvas, 91.7 x 73.5 cm, private collection.

This masterpiece by the Dutch post-impressionist was sold to a private Asian collector for a total of $ 66.3 million at a New York auction, becoming Van Gogh’s most expensive work sold since 1998. Van Gogh painted L'Allée des Alyscamps while working side-by-side with Paul Gauguin in Arles during their short-lived but intense collaboration. 

Plenty of that cash has been coming from China at auctions, where buyers purchased 22% of all global art last year.

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Henri Matisse considered his drawing to be a very intimate means of expression. The method of artistic execution — whether it was  pencil, charcoal, crayon, lithographic tusche or paper cut — varied according to the subject and personal circumstance. Some of his favorite subjects were the female form, the nude figure or a beautiful head of a favourite model.  "I have always considered drawing not as an exercise of particular dexterity… but as a means deliberately simplified so as to give simplicity and spontaneity to the expression, which should speak without clumsiness, directly to the mind of the spectator." - Henri Matisse

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extrapolated art

Dear Art Lovers, Just wanted to share this interesting project with you - Extrapolated Art. Paintings give us only a peek into a scene. New techniques in machine learning and image processing, however, allow us to extrapolate the scene of a painting to see what the full scenery might have looked like. Click on each painting to extrapolate it!

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Poetry has always inspired artists and vice versa. Ever since the Roman poet Horace put down in his Ars Poetica (c. 13 BC) "ut pictura poesis" ("as is painting, so is poetry"), the two arts have been bounded together. Poets and painters have turned to one another for inspiration, and the dialogue has been mutually beneficial. 

William Holman Hunt The Lady of Shalott, 1905, oil on canvas. Poem "The Lady of Shalott" (fragment) by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1842 version). Background: The character Lady of Shallot is based on the legendary Elaine, Donna di Scolatta from the 13th century. She has been cursed to view the world only as reflections in a mirror and to weave images in her tapestries. If she ever actually gazes outside her window, this will bring about the mysterious curse. Sir Lancelot rides past her window, she is enthralled enough to look directly at him, and the curse takes fatal effect.  She left the web, she left the loom, She made three paces thro' the room, She saw the water-lily bloom, She saw the helmet and the plume, She look'd down to Camelot. Out flew the web and floated wide; The mirror crack'd from side to side; "The curse is come upon me," cried The Lady of Shalott.

Gustav Klimt The Kiss, 1908-1909, oil on canvas. Poem ”More than a Kiss” by Isa Ampersand (2015). It’s more than a kiss. It’s a secret being shared between lips. It’s a light that only ignites when these two mouths collide. It’s a way to start a forest fire and a means of breathing underwater. It’s being born again and rekindling a desiring to live. It’s a dream and it’s an awakening. It’s how we connect to another person’s soul.

Pablo Picasso The Old Guitarist, 1903-1904, oil on panel Poem “The Man with the Blue Guitar” by Wallace Stevens (1937). I The man bent over his guitar, A shearsman of sorts. The day was green. They said, “You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are. ”The man replied, “Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar. ”And they said then, “But play, you must, A tune beyond us, yet ourselves, A tune upon the blue guitar Of things exactly as they are.” II I cannot bring a world quite round, Although I patch it as I can. I sing a hero’s head, large eye And bearded bronze, but not a man, Although I patch him as I can And reach through him almost to man. If to serenade almost to man Is to miss, by that, things as they are, Say that it is the serenade Of a man that plays a blue guitar. III Ah, but to play man number one, To drive the dagger in his heart, To lay his brain upon the board And pick the acrid colors out, To nail his thought across the door, Its wings spread wide to rain and snow, To strike his living hi and ho, To tick it, tock it, turn it true, To bang if form a savage blue, Jangling the metal of the strings… IV So that’s life, then: things as they are? It picks its way on the blue guitar. A million people on one string? And all their manner in the thing And all their manner, right and wrong, And all their manner, weak and strong? The feelings crazily, craftily call, Like a buzzing of flies in the autumn air, And that’s life, then: things as they are, This bussing of the blue guitar.

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The Prado Museum in Madrid launches an exhibition in which blind people can enjoy classical paintings by touching their texture and relief. We have never been given a chance to touch a painting in a museum, so this is definitely a unique experience – to be able to engage with replica pieces, including the Mona Lisa, through touch. The exhibition at Prado displays tactile versions of paintings by artists like Da Vinci and Goya. The paintings enable blind people to get a clearer vision of the artworks. The reliefs were created using a special technique called “Didu” that adds volume and texture to 2D art. The pioneering project will be in Madrid until the end of June.

Credits: All photos by Getty Images.

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Russian miniature artist Salavat Fidai is one of the most amazingly talented artists from around the world. Having mastered the art of pencil-head carving (check his Instagram account!), Salavat recently tried his hand at painting intricate artworks on the tiniest of canvases… pumpkin seeds! And if you’re going to try and do the impossible, why not paint the famous Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh?

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Norman Rockwell

What Makes It Tick? (The Watchmaker of Switzerland), 1948, oil on canvas, 26.25 x 26", private collection.

The works of Norman Rockwell, a well-known 20th Century American painter and illustrator, enjoyed a broad popular appeal in the United States for their reflection of American culture. Rockwell is best known for his cover illustrations of every day life scenarios he created for The Saturday Evening Post for four decades. He also created his work for the Boy Scouts of America, their publication Boy’s Life, calendars and other illustrations, including this wonderful illustration of a curious boy and a watchmaker.

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Vincent Van Gogh to come back to life thanks to Oscar-winning animation studio

A team of Oscar-winning producers is working on a film about the life and death of Vincent Van Gogh. Entitled ‘Loving Vincent’, it’s a feature-length hand-painted animation based on hundreds of paintings and letters by the artist. Herself a painter, the film’s director Dorota Kobiela says she was inspired by the artist’s own words: “In one of his letters…

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Gustav Klimt

Portrait of a Lady, en face (unfinished), 1917, oil on canvas, 67 x 65 cm, Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz.

The unfinished portrait belongs to the group of paintings left in Klimt’s atelier after his death.

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Me and the Starry Night Over the Rhone. Both real, both in Paris. Vincent van Gogh Starry Night Over the Rhone, 1888, oil on canvas, 72 cm x 92 cm, Musée d'Orsay.

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Mikhail Vrubel

The Swan Princess, 1900, oil on canvas, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia.