Category: Gallery and Museum Art
-
Ivan Aivazovsky
Ukrainian/Russian painter Ivan Constantinovich Aivazovsky (Hovhannes Aivazian) was born in Crimea, an island-like peninsula that extends the southern part of Ukraine into the Black Sea. In a career that spanned a good deal of the 19th Century, he painted nearly 6,000 canvases, over half of which were seascapes. He painted the sea at rest and…
-
Frank Brangwyn, R. A.: The Way of the Cross
When I first wrote in 2006 about Frank Brangwyn, the superbly accomplished painter, muralist, watercolorist, illustrator and printmaker, there were only a few scattered resources on the web, and very little in the way of available books or other printed material. Since then, more resources have become available on the web, and I’ve listed some…
-
Ralph Oberg
As much as I happen to enjoy paleontological reconstruction art, which is essentially paintings of no longer extant animals, I have to say that I usually don’t respond well to contemporary wildlife art. Too often it feels staged and artificial, and seems to lean on over-rendering and sentimentality in place of more solid artistic concerns.…
-
Wojtek Siudmak
Wojtek Siudmak is contemporary Polish born artist who studied at the College of Plastic Arts and Adacemy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He now resides in France. Siudmak is a leading proponent of fantastic realism (sometimes called “magic realism”), a branch of fantastic art with one foot in…
-
Marie-Denise Villers (update)
A question from a reader prompted me to revisit my 2006 post on Marie-Denise Villers, a talented but little known French portrait painter whose “one-hit-wonder” claim to fame was that her painting, now called Young Woman Drawing (detail, above), was for some time attributed to Neo-classical master Jaques-Louis David (also here). The painting, which I…
-
Brian Despain (update)
Brian Despain’s world-weary and weather-beaten robots may be the “every robot” in all of us. At times active and engaged, at other times forlorn and seemingly lost, his dented and roughly textured copper-skinned automatons carry a darkly humorous portrayal of our own place amid the natural world. I first wrote about Brian Despain back in…