Recent art that you liked

stlukesguild said:
I am rather fond of this sort of thing: impressionism without the garish colors.

I'm probably the opposite. I'm not overly fond of tonal painting. A lot of it ends up looking like mud. I love Rembrandt, Velazquez, and Courbet... but never in the sense that they inspired my own efforts. I lean more toward paintings that emphasize the linear, sculptural, and pattern and employ clean, saturated colors: The Renaissance, Rubens, Mannerism, Vermeer, Ingres, Degas, Vuillard, Bonnard, Klimt, Mucha, Japanese prints, Persian paintings, Matisse, Kirchner, Beckmann, Gauguin, Van Gogh, etc...
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Well, I like some of what you mention here too, though with Gauguin and Van Gogh, it seems to me their colors are not quite as bright as it appears at first glance. Plus, I also like Van Gogh's early works. :)
 
Long been a fan of the magical, mystical world of Jan Mankes (1889 - 1920):

Jan Mankes (1889 - 1920) - Hares.jpg


Kind of strange to think that he was an almost exact contemporary of Egon Schiele. Couldn't the bunnies at least be fornicating? :D
 
brianvds said:
She was Jewish, but was born in and lived in South Africa most of her life. As young woman she spent some time in Germany, where she came under the influence of the German expressionists, but when the Nazis came to power she returned to South Africa.

She did indeed travel extensively through Africa and the Middle East, and loved painting this sort of exotic subject matter. Nowadays she is sometimes accused of cultural appropriation, and that she used her subjects merely as exotic objects of decoration rather than attempting to really understand them or empathize with them.

The criticism may or may not be valid - I don't particularly care either way. I find her rich color and expressive brushwork quite seductive.
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Thank you for that.
 
There are many Iranian Jewish artists that are quite amazing...I should go look for them, but I'm too lazy. There are more Jews living in Middle Eastern countries than you'd think. I'm not saying she was one of them, but she may have had some heritage there and maybe it wasn't appropriation? I've painted people of other ethnicities too. I think that's odd that people would be "accusative" of cultural appropriation or any sort. But what do I know?
 
Artyczar said:
There are many Iranian Jewish artists that are quite amazing...I should go look for them, but I'm too lazy. There are more Jews living in Middle Eastern countries than you'd think. I'm not saying she was one of them, but she may have had some heritage there and maybe it wasn't appropriation? I've painted people of other ethnicities too. I think that's odd that people would be "accusative" of cultural appropriation or any sort. But what do I know?
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Oh, I pay no attention to the whole thing. You can't win - paint people of other cultures, and you're guilty of cultural appropriation. Don't paint them, and you're guilty of ignoring and marginalizing them. The whole concept is nonsensical.
 
stlukesguild said:
I don't know. "Illustrative" has been used as a pejorative for quite some time in certain circles. I can't count the number of times that something was dismissed as "merely illustration"... "oh! that's just illustration" in discussions over on WC. I never bought it. To me "illustration" is just one more genre of art... one of any number of purposes of art. There are good, bad, and mediocre examples of art found in every possible genre, form, etc...
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I believed I mentioned in your illustration thread that I had exactly this complaint lodged against me by a couple of professors when I was in school.

Every time I look at Manet anymore, all I can think of it this excellent essay: http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/54/worth.php
 
xie-kitchin said:
I believed I mentioned in your illustration thread that I had exactly this complaint lodged against me by a couple of professors when I was in school.
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As I noted before, those most vehemently critical of illustration (and photorealism, for that matter) are very frequently incapable of doing anything of the sort themselves. :)

Every time I look at Manet anymore, all I can think of it this excellent essay: http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/54/worth.php
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Very interesting essay! I was particularly glad to see I am not the only one struggling to copy from photographs - Delacroix's drawing of the guy's head and torso strikes me as rather awkward. :)

Well, representational art has always been an awkward compromise between a whole bunch of conflicting things: what we see, what we know, what we have learned from other artists, what is (often in quite unspoken way) demanded by convention. Photography introduces a further complication in that the camera introduces it's own set of distortions. People don't realize this, because they have become used to the notion of the camera as final arbiter of objective truth - until they try to take a photo of a painting and then, to their consternation, find that they cannot make the painting neatly line up on their cellphone camera's screen.

Another thing not nowadays often realized: impressionism was originally one attempt at greater accuracy, and to reproduce in a painting the way we actually see things: not the whole visual field is in focus, and of course, part of the point of doing it plein air was to accurately capture colors and fleeting light effects that would be difficult to do later in the studio.

The result of painting at breakneck speed to capture such fleeting effects was a rough, "unfinished" sort of painting. But once people got used to it, they began to enjoy the look of these paintings in themselves. And thus, nowadays, the bulk of impressionists work in their studios, from photos!

Something that has long struck me: when people are really impressed with a painting and want to compliment the artist, they say "wow, it looks just like a photo." And when they are blown away by a photo, they say "wow, it looks like a painting!"
 
Something that has long struck me: when people are really impressed with a painting and want to compliment the artist, they say "wow, it looks just like a photo." And when they are blown away by a photo, they say "wow, it looks like a painting!"

True!🤨
 
Something that has long struck me: when people are really impressed with a painting and want to compliment the artist, they say "wow, it looks just like a photo." And when they are blown away by a photo, they say "wow, it looks like a painting!"

Sadly, our investment in Art Education is minimal at best. I remember in school being taught how to talk about literature. We discussed theme, poetic form, setting, character, plot, narrator, point of view, style, etc... How many students learn to talk about art? If I'm lucky, I get a class twice a week for 40-45 minutes each time. At least two of these days (or more) will be lost due to the students being absent, the teacher being absent, field trips, rallies, special events etc... That doesn't give a teacher a lot of time to explore the art elements (line, shape, form, color, etc...) and principles of design let alone putting these all together and applying these to a work of art. And the kids would go insane if most of the actual time in art were not spent in the creation of art (and I agree).
 
ThomasEdwinMostyn.700.jpg

-Thomas Edwin Mostyn

The painting overall is very much traditional late 19th/early 20th century portraiture. I'm reminded of Eakins and Sargent. But there's something about the face that strikes me as quite modern.
 
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