Monday, September 27, 2010

Spring Morning in the Han Palace


China, Japan and Korea have a strong tradition in painting which is also highly attached to the art of script and printmaking.

Far east traditional painting is characterized by water based techniques, less realism, "elegant" and stylized subjects, graphical approach to depiction, the importance of white space (or negative space) and a preference for landscape as a subject. Beyond ink and color on silk or paper scrolls, gold on gloss was also a common medium in painted East Asian artwork.

Although silk is somewhat so expensive medium to paint upon in the past, the invention of paper during the 1st century AD by the Han court eunuch Cain Lun provided not only a cheap and widespread medium for writing, but also a cheap and widespread medium for painting.

The earliest examples of Chinese painted artwork date to the Warring States Period (481 - 221 BC), with paintings on silk or tomb murals on rock, brick, or stone.
They were often in simplistic stylized format and in more-or-less elementary geometric patterns. They often depicted mythological creatures, domestic scenes, labor scenes, or palatial scenes filled with officials at court.

Artwork during this period and the subsequent Qin Dynasty (221 - 207 BC) and Han Dynasty (202 BC - 220 AD) was made not as a means in and of itself or for higher personal expression.

Rather artwork was created to symbolize and honor funerary rights, representations of mythological deities or spirits of ancestors, etc. Paintings on silk of court officials and domestic scenes could be found during the Han Dynasty, along with scenes of men hunting on horseback or partaking in military parade.

There was also painting on three dimensional works of art on figurines and statues, such as the original-painted colors covering the soldier and horse statues of the Terracotta Army.

During the social and cultural climate of the ancient Eastern Jin Dynasty (316 - 420 AD) based at Nanjing in the south, painting became one of the official pastimes of Confucian-taught bureaucratic officials and aristocrats.

Painting became a common form of artistic self-expression, and during this period painters at court or amongst elite social circuits were judged and ranked by their peers.

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

The Art of Chic ester canal’s


Turner's talent was recognized early in his life. Financial independence allowed Turner to innovate freely; his mature work is characterized by a chromatic palette and broadly applied atmospheric washes of paint.
For example, Chic ester canal’s is one the best art making paintings in the world.

Suitable vehicles for Turner's imagination were to be found in the subjects of shipwrecks, fires natural catastrophes, and natural phenomena such as sunlight, storm, rain, and fog. He was fascinated by the violent power of the sea, as seen in Dawn after the Wreck (1840) and The Slave Ship (1840).

Turner's major venture into printmaking was the Libber Studio rum (Book of Studies), a set of seventy prints that the artist worked on from 1806 to 1819. The Libber Studio rum was an expression of his intentions for landscape art.

Loosely based on Claude Lorrain's Libber Veritatis (Book of Truth), the plates were meant to be widely disseminated, and categorized the genre into six types: Marine, Mountainous, Pastoral, Historical, Architectural, and Elevated or Epic Pastoral.

His printmaking was a major part of his output, and a whole museum is devoted to it, the Turner Museum in Sarasota, Florida, founded in 1974 by Douglass Montrose-Graeme to house his collection of Turner prints.

Turner placed human beings in many of his paintings to indicate his affection for humanity on the one hand, but its susceptibility and vulgarity amid the 'sublime' nature of the world on the other hand.

'Sublime' here means awe-inspiring, savage grandeur, a natural world unmastered by man, evidence of the power of God–a theme that artists and poets were exploring in this period.

The significance of light was to Turner the emanation of God's spirit and this was why he refined the subject matter of his later paintings by leaving out solid objects and detail, concentrating on the play of light on water, the radiance of skies and fires.

Although these late paintings appear to be 'impressionistic' and therefore a forerunner of the French school, Turner was striving for expression of spirituality in the world, rather than responding primarily to optical phenomena.

Monday, September 13, 2010

The Techniqes of Impressionist


Prior to the Impressionists, other painters, notably such 17th-century Dutch painters as Jan Steen, had focused on common subjects, but their approaches to composition were traditional.

They arranged their compositions in such a way that the main subject commanded the viewer's attention.

The Impressionists relaxed the boundary between subject and background so that the effect of an Impressionist painting often resembles a snapshot, a part of a larger reality captured as if by chance.

Photography was gaining popularity, and as cameras became more portable, photographs became more candid.

Photography stimulated Impressionists to capture the moment, not only in the fleeting lights of a landscape, but in the day-to-day lives of people.

The rise of the impressionist movement can be seen in part as a reaction by artists to the newly established medium of photography.

In spite of this, photography actually inspired artists to pursue other means of artistic expression, and rather than competing with photography to emulate reality, artists focused on the one thing they could inevitably do better than the photograph – by further developing into an art form its very subjectivity in the conception of the image, the very subjectivity that photography eliminated".

This allowed artists to subjectively describe what they saw with their "tacit imperatives of taste and conscience".

Photography encouraged painters to exploit aspects of the painting medium, like color, which photography then lacked; "the Impressionists were the first to knowingly offer a subjective alternative to the photograph.

Another major influence was Japanese art prints which had originally come into France as wrapping paper for imported goods.

The art of these prints contributed significantly to the "snapshot" angles and unconventional compositions which would become characteristic of the movement.

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

The White House at Night


The White House at Night shows a house at twilight with a prominent star surrounded by a yellow halo in the sky. Astronomers at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos calculated that the star is Venus, which was bright in the evening sky in June 1890 when Van Goth is believed to have painted the picture.

More or less acquainted with Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist techniques and theories, Van Goth went to Aries to develop these new possibilities.
But within a short time, older ideas on art and work reappeared: ideas such as series on related or contrasting subject matter, which would reflect on the purposes of art.

As his work progressed, he painted a great many Self-portraits. Already in 1884 in Niemen he had worked on a series that was to decorate the dining room of a friend in Eindhoven.

Similarly in Arles, in spring 1888 he arranged his Flowering Orchards into triptychs, began a series of information that found its end in The Rollin Family, and finally, when Gauguin had consented to work and live in Arles side-by-side with Van Gogh, he started to work on the .

Most of his later work is involved with elaborate on or revising its fundamental settings. In the spring of 1889, he painted another, smaller group of orchards.
In an April letter to Theo, he said, "I have 6 studies of spring, two of them large orchards. There is little time because these effects are so short-lived.

The art historian Albert was the first to show that Van Gogh—even in seemingly fantastical compositions like Starry Night—based his work in reality.
The paintings from the Saint-Remy period are often characterized by swirls and spirals.

The patterns of luminosity in these images have been shown to conform to Kolmogorov's statistical model of turbulence.