Month: June 2012
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Jakub Schikaneder
The muted, atmospheric landscapes, room interiors and nocturnes of Czech painter Jakub Schikaneder often seem steeped in melancholy, if not overt sadness, sometimes with lone figures almost blended into the soft darkness. Schikaneder appears to have taken some of the painterly brushwork and broken color of the French Impressionists and turned them in a different…
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Eye Candy for Today: Rijckaert
Landscape with Satyrs, attributed to Marten Rijckaert. In the National Gallery, London. Use controls at right of image to launch full screen viewer and zoom in.
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Jama Jurabaev
Jamashed Jurabaev is a concept artist an matte painter living and working in Tajikistan. I like that fact that next to the “Jama Jurabaev” heading on his website, he has the tagline: “is an ambitious concept artist”; an attitude I think will serve him well as he continues to take on challenging subjects. Jurabaev often…
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Piranesi’s Carceri d’invenzione animated
18th Century Venetian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi was famous for his set of etchings titled Carceri (“Prisons”), sometimes referred to as “Carceri d’invenzione“, or “Imaginary Prisons”. These were architectural fantasies that were more in keeping with grand imaginative stage sets than any real prisons, filled with arches, bridges, sculpture and elaborate stonework. Artist Grégoire Dupond,…
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Eye Candy for Today: Sorolla
La Siesta en el Jardin by Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, in a nice large image file on Wikimedia Commons. Title page here.
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Neil Hollingsworth (update 2012)
Looking at them in reproductions, some might be tempted to think of contemporary realist James Neil Hollingsworth’s refined still life paintings as photo-realistic, but I’ve never seen them that way. To my eye Hollingsworth’s paintings are about the exploration of surfaces — metallic, wooden, smooth, textured, reflective, refractive, polished and tarnished. His surfaces are always…