Month: April 2015
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Eye Candy for Today: Johann Tischbein chalk portrait
Profile Portrait of Miss Wieling, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein Red chalk on paper, 14 x 10 inches (35 x 26 cm). In the Metropolitan Museum of Art This forceful but delicate profile portrait is made graphically strong by the artist’s use of dramatic value contrast between the face and background. His approach is precise, with…
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Raymond Berry
Virginia artist Ray Berry walks a line between representation and suggestion, his strongly seasonal landscapes reveal themselves on closer inspection to be strikingly physical applications of paint. He works both in oil and the difficult hot wax process of encaustic, the latter giving even greater leeway for producing a textural surface, to the point of…
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Eye Candy for Today: WT Richards’ Lago Avernus
Lago Avernus, William Trost Richards In the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Watercolor and gouache on blue paper, 4 1/2 x 9 1/9 inches (11 x 24 cm). Lago Avernus (“Lake Avernus”) is a lake in a volcanic crater in the Campania region of southern Italy. Once believed to be the mythical entrance to the Underworld,…
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Maxwell Doig
The most frequent subjects of UK artist maxwell Doig are isolated figures on wonderfully textural backgrounds. The figures seem isolated both in the compositional sense and in the feeling of emotional detachment; they are often absorbed in their own interests. Though obviously posed, frequently in repeated positions, they seem oblivious to both the artist and…
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Boris Bakliza
Boris Bakliza is an illustrator and visual development artist from Serbia, working in the publishing, gaming and animation fields. I enjoy his penchant for combining springy, cartoony drawing with textural rendering, particularly in his depiction of worn or weathered metal surfaces.
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Eye Candy for Today: Sargent’s Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose
Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose; John Singer Sargent Link is to a zoomable version on Google Art Project; downloadable, high-resolution file on Wikimedia Commons; original is in the Tate, Britain. One of my favorite paintings by Sargent (which is to say, one of my favorite paintings by anyone), this is something of an elaborately constructed fantasy…