Category: Gallery and Museum Art

Marcia Burtt is a plein air painter who has chosen to work in acrylic, a medium more often associated with studio painting, photographic realism and illustration than the immediacy of plein air. Her approach, however, makes it seem a natural choice; with fresh, bright colors and a distinctly painterly feeling, she captures scenes of waterways…

I love nativity scenes like the one at top (with details below it), Adoration of the Shepherds by 17th century painter Gerrit van Honthorst, in which the infant is not just bathed in light, but seems to be a source of light, as if incandescent with the Holy Spirit. In this case the child appears…

Also in keeping with the Winter Solstice (see my previous post), the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has mounted an exhibition of 19th Century Dutch paintings of winter that will be on exhibit at the Amsterdam Airport Schiphol from 21 December 2011 to 26 March 2012. The museum’s page for the exhibition doesn’t directly link to the…

Though he also painted landscapes, interiors and figures, 19th Century French painter Antoine Vollon was best know for his lushly painted still lifes. Vollon was greatly influenced by the superb still life painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, and followed in his love of simple food and kitchen related genre subjects. At his most expressive, Vollon’s thick, fluid…

I’ve suggested on several occasions that prior to the invention of movies as we know them, painters were the special effects wizards of their day, wowing the faithful (and cowing the doubtful) in church altarpieces and murals, and, in the 19th Century, displaying their detailed large scale works in theatrical settings, in some ways anticipating…