vince’s ear

It’s a beautiful sunny day with the yard work done and the dog walked. The birds are chirping, the breeze is coming in and a nice big porterhouse awaits the grill tonight. Of course here I am writing a post about death. Leave it to me to find the gloomy side of everything, with posts ranging from Death and Art, Scariest Paintings, Morbid Vanitas, etc. etc.(I may as well add the category “Death!”) You’d think I always wear all black and constantly play the funeral march on my Windows Media Player.

The truth is death can come at any time. So it behooves us to seize the day, live like it is your last day, and at the very least be aware that our days are numbered and our time on this planet is short. After death, who knows what happens?

It is this fear of the unknown which has fueled our fascination with death. We express, through art and music, our fear, grief, respect and wonderment of the afterlife. In the Middle Ages, when plagues and famines wiped out up to 70% of the population in some areas of Europe, people began to think philosophically about the tenure of their lives. The Dance of Death (or Danse Macabre in French) was a common allegory on the theme of death which stated that no matter what station you hold in life, you will surely die.

The term Danse Macabre comes form the artwork showing, as you can see in these examples, skeletons dancing around the living, taunting them.

I just watched The Seventh Seal about a knight and his squire traveling home from the Crusades. The knight is met by the personification of Death, who he challenges to a game of chess in order to buy time to see his wife before he dies. At one scene the knight confesses to a priest (who is really Death), and reveals his strategy to use a combination of knight and bishop. The knight loses his faith, and while witnessing the burning of a witch, he asks desperately if she could see Satan or God. When the girl can give no acceptable answer, the squire, the voice of reason, explains that all she sees is emptiness, because after life there is only emptiness. The movie is a masterpiece of existentialism. In the final scene an actor, who along with his wife are the only to “escape” Death, sees the Reaper leading the others hand in hand on a hillside in one final Dance of Death.

The painting above is called “Grandpa Genoa,” by Chris Griffith over at the Blog At Bree. On the site you’ll see his paintings from soup to nuts, step by step. You can learn a lot from his tutorials, complete with images of every step. Chris has allowed me to include this work here to help me show you an amazing painting technique.

The painting above is Chris’s grandpa Genoa Griffith, who served as a paratrooper in the U.S. Army in WWII. It is his first portrait, and a very fine one. What’s so amazing about this painting? All the color in the picture is painted entirely in multiple layers of thin glazes.

What Is Glazing?

We all know that the Mona Lisa is probably the most famous and viewed painting in Western art. But did you know her mysterious smile was painted in about 40 ultra thin layers? Special effects such as this are what make the art of glazing a highly versatile and useful technique. Colors can achieve their true potential with glazing, with effects not possible with regular opaque painting.

Glazing is generally an oil painting method. It starts out with a gray-scale (grisaille) and one by one adding thin layers of singular colors, which over time begin to blend in the viewer’s eye, rather than blended on a palette. Generally, it is not for the impatient as each layer must completely dry before adding another. The layers are small amounts of color added to a medium- a mixture of 5 parts turpentine, 1 part linseed oil. It is important to remember to paint fat over lean, as in the first layers, underneath, must have less oil (more turpentine, etc.) than the layers on top. This allows for a uniform drying and won’t crack later on.

In a nutshell,

• Preparation includes stretching and priming your canvas (if not using store bought), and finalizing your drawings and plans.
• A wash is applied (a thin, neutral color such as yellow ochre, raw sienna, etc.)
• A sketch is made on the canvas in pencil or charcoal.
• An imprimatura, or ground, is applied to the canvas in thin layers roughly outlining the subject.
• A gray scale, or grisaille, is painted being sure to get the correct tone with shadows and highlights.
• Initial layers of color are added. These colors can be changed where necessary by adding colors on top, which can be optically mixed to form new colors. For example, a blue applied over top an already dried yellow layer will make a green. In Grandpa Genoa, a thin layer of yellow ochre is added to the shirt, and a background is added.
• As each layer is added, the colors get darker (which can be helpful when painting backgrounds in a landscape), so adding white can lighten where necessary and also begin to make highlights. Shadows are also added, which begin to make the subject three dimensional.
• Highlights are last, and final details are made. Each layer, anywhere from 3 to 30, helps to make a well-blended and realistic painting.

Of course there is more to it. But don’t take my word for it. Check out Chris’s tutorials of Grandpa Genoa, and his new project (link to Color Stage 1), where you can get a more detailed look, and see what’s going on in each step.

Frida Kahlo is recognized today as one of the most important Mexican artists of the 20th century. She was married to Diego Rivera, the prominent muralist, and preferred to consider her art subordinate to his. However, since the 1980s her art has achieved a revival and heightened status and she now holds a top position in a list of great female artists as well as influential Hispanic painters. She has served as inspiration to many painters since.

Yesterday was the last day of the Frida Kahlo special exhibition yesterday at the Philadelphia Museum of Art showing photographs and about 40 paintings ranging in size and medium including the Mexican ex voto style (offering or thanks for prayers answered). Frida painted about 200 paintings, so this was a showing of almost a quarter of her total output. As usual, each ticket included an excellent audio tour with about 30 commentaries from the curators, directors and historians explaining in detail the works and events in Kahlo’s life. This show’s audio also had several commentaries from living contemporary artists of all sorts describing how they were influenced and inspired by Kahlo’s life and art.

Her work was considered Surrealism, though she commented that she didn’t know she was a Surrealist until she was told she was. She said she painted what she needed to paint. This includes deep insights into her own tragic life which gives her expression a dreamlike, and often nightmarish, look and feel to it. Being self taught, her style was somewhat akin to the French painter Henri Rousseau, who was also self-taught and often considered a Surrealist.

As an active Communist, much of Frida’s artwork is political in nature, often showing her experiences in Capitalist America, and her Communist heroes. These paintings show her heritage as well as modernity, with ancient gods and Mexican folklore sometimes making appearances. Her paintings showed a tragic life of a tumultuous marriage and divorce, spinal operations, and a miscarriage. She was heartbroken to find she could not bear children and this is clearly evident in many of her myriad self portraits, where we often see the significance of pets as in the one above. Some show her with her monkeys all around her, touching her, as she holds one of them like a child. This shows up in a later painting where she holds a baby Diego in one of the few showing him subordinate to her. In order to keep Diego, she said, she must treat him as a child.

My favorite piece of the show is the self portrait above called “Self Portrait With Hummingbird and Thorns.” We see a straight-on view of the artist staring at us with indifferent eyes as a cat stalks the dead hummingbird hanging at her neck. Meanwhile a monkey, perhaps being a little too playful, tugs on the twigs which wrap around her neck, thus forcing the thorns into her skin. The sight of blood is a common occurrence, sometimes coming from gashes, wounds, the miscarriage, a suicide, and even her own exposed circulatory system complete with her heart and arteries as she fruitlessly tries to stop the bleeding with surgical clamps.

Despite all her pain and hardships, her self portraits never seem to be a cry for help or attention but rather they are like log entries depicting the events of her life. We see almost the exact same unemotional expression in her face every time. Even in her photographs of lying in bed immobile from operations, we see the same plain look- not begging for help, never the tragic victim.

The Neomexicanismo art movement of the early 80’s helped to bring public awareness to Frida’s work and several movies and documentaries have since been made about life and work. In 2002, the movie Frida helped to show a young audience all about Frida, played by Salma Hayek, alongside Alfred Molina as Diego.

Regular videos are great for supplementing articles on art, so you can see the artwork, and hear commentary as well as interviews. Then again if it’s Andy Warhol we’re talking about, you don’t know what to expect.

I’m hoping to head over to the Frida Kahlo exhibition in its last day (chronic procrastination) today at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (if I’m lucky, they haven’t sold out yet), so I’ll be back tomorrow to hopefully fill you in.

If you can’t see the video click here

If you can’t see the video click here

If you can’t see the video click here

If you can’t see the video click here

If you can’t see the video click here

As you know, Vince’s Ear has never been an art news blog. In fact, if you look at the Artists page you’ll see that a great majority of the artists covered are deceased. I’d say it’s more of an “art history” blog, but that just sounds boring. It’s all about art from the past and present, including art ideas, themes, techniques, specific paintings, artist personalities and lives, and news when necessary. They say “today’s news is tomorrow’s fish-wrapper,” so forgive me if you’ve already heard these tidbits and have already wrapped your salmon in them.

Recession woes notwithstanding, there have been some record sales at Sotheby’s Auction this week with one of our favorite masters of the macabre Francis Bacon fetching $83 million for a triptych (seen above). The Irish-born figurative painter used the tri-paneled triptych frequently as a favorite method of conveying his creepy figures with nightmarish distortion. Each panel measures 6½ feet by 5 feet making this an unusually large and frightening Bacon, with his typical self expressed angst.

Takashi Murakami was pleased to see his My Lonesome Cowboy statue bring in $15.1 million, four times its expected value. Another copy of The Cowboy is also on view in Murakami’s retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum which opened last month. Takashi was present at the auction when his piece sold to a telephone bidder.

Yesterday’s post was about Robert Rauschenberg, who recently passed away, and how his unconventional methods (Erased De Kooning, etc.) had made him one of the most important American abstract and pop artists of the mid-20th century. Several Rasuchenbergs sold, one of which was expected to bring in $10 to $15 million and sold for $14.6, a record. After an artist dies, the work becomes more valuable (i.e. rare) because obviously there can be no more works created. Yet, soon after the artist’s death the art market is expected to be flooded with works, thus lowering the price. However, we can see there is an exception here for an exceptional American artist.

A Chelsea dealer who was seen leaving the salesroom commented on the success of the show, “Recession, what recession?”

Robert Rauschenberg was an important American abstract expressionist and pop artist who lived and worked in New York. He came onto the art scene in the 1950s with “combines”: arrangements of ordinary objects placed together in extra-ordinary ways in the forms of painting, sculpture and collages. His unorthodox methods and creativity have made him an international star, and he has enjoyed this success for over half a century. He died Monday of heart failure.

This interview is hilarious and had me cracking up several times. In it, Rauschenberg explains his famous “Erased De Kooning.” Don’t take my word for it, you have to see it to believe it…

If you can’t see the video click here.

Call me old fashioned, call me whiny, call me what you will (just don’t call me late to dinner). My question for you is this- is much of what is being paraded around as art, actually art?

I’ve talked before about Modern Art (Is It Really Art?) where we consider “contemporary art” anything after 1950, which include Pop artists such as Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, and abstract expressionists such as Wassily Kandinsky and Jackson Pollock (all who I admire). But to be fair, I’m mostly talking about the “Postmodernists” as a school of art, and of course not all contemporary artists share these views and styles. Post-modernists, like the Dadaists of the early nineteenth century, tend to challenge what we consider art.

Since “modern art” is constantly being redefined and even the term term “art” has so many definitions, the whole art situation can never be simple white and black observations. In any period of time not all artists were orthodox, with a few trailblazers and oddities with their respective publics not always going along with their shenanigans. I’m not always sure I understand the artist’s statements, and I know I’m not alone on this one. Some art is absurd, some is sickening, and some is downright infuriating (i.e.- a starving dog on a gallery floor- don’t get me started on this one). But I must say, perhaps these reactions are the artist’s desired effect (or not).

Postmodernism questions orthodox art views and critiques and claims that art is in the eye of the beholder. For example, a urinal with the added fictional signature of R. Mutt is placed in a museum gallery, therefore it is now considered a “sculpture.” Some interesting and anything-but-orthodox art of the 20th century include:

Fountain, by Marcel Duchamp

(Conceptual art)

Marilyn Silkscreen, by Andy Warhol

(Appropriation art)

Wrapped Coast, by Christo and Jean-Claude

(Installation Art)

Giant Curtain, by Christo and Jean-Claude

(Installation Art)

Spiral Jetty, by Robert Smithson

(Installation art)

Now some ultra Postmodernism can be downright ridiculous. In order for anything to be art, in my book it has to at least invoke something in the viewer-

• At the very least an appreciation of skill or talent of the artist
• Any kind of an emotional response- fear, sadness, empathy, anger, etc.
• A call to action- i.e.- anything political oriented, etc.

Some of the recent stuff you see simply doesn’t do any of these. I can’t argue against saying they don’t do anything at all. Art does not have to be representational as most of the pre-20th century art was, but at least we know most of the accepted fine art, i.e.the mainstream paintings and sculpture took effort and skill, as well as cerebral activity of some kind. Sometimes the paintings symbols were cryptic or hidden, and called for the intelligence of the viewer to unlock the mysteries, or “get” the painting. Do we much of this in today’s art? Maybe sometimes.

“For the Love of God” (really), by Damien Hirst- I think this is akin to those $1,000 pizzas, and $500 cups of coffee which come from beans which were defecated by cats (I can’t make this stuff up!). Maybe I just don’t get it.

Victimless Leather, by Oron Catts, and Ionat Zurr

Lullaby Spring, by Damien Hirst

Black Flag “Four Bars” by Raymond Pettibon

Humanity Asleep, by Julian Schnabel- Painted over glued broken glass and crockery.

(see top of page)

In conclusion I think most recent art is good and original. Only the good stuff isn’t original, and the original stuff isn’t good.

See also What Is Art? Amazing Abstract Art, and Is It Really Art?

The copy of David With Goliath’s Head is complete (except for the sword). There are minor differences between my copy and the original, but that is to be expected. Overall I think got the mood of the painting just right, though I need a little work on light and shadow before I tackle Sacrifice of Isaac.

Who Was Caravaggio?

* Michelangelo Merisi was born in the town of Caravaggio, trained in Milan, and moved to Rome in the 1590s. He is considered the first major artist of the Baroque period following the Renaissance and the greatest Italian painter of the 17th century.

* As part of the Baroque period, which began from the Counter-Reformation, the majority of his later works were religious in nature. However, much of his work was criticized for a lack of decorum and idealization in portraying holy subjects- figures such as the Mother of God as well as saints all resembled the common street people he used as models.

* Caravaggio is probably the first important painter to use tenebrism, a strong contrast between light and shadow, or chiaroscuro, attained by using artificial lighting which was borderline theatrical. Much of his works were composed of strongly lit figures set against a dark background.

* Prone to violence and fits of rage, the artist was often in trouble with the law. He regularly scorned his contemporaries who he saw as below him, and frequently got into fist fights and brawls with everybody from the rough and tumble crowd he hung out with, and the serving boys of taverns.

* Some of the documented complaints received from his victims help to shine light on Caravaggio’s character- His belongings were forfeit to his landlady so as retaliation he smashed her window; when ordering artichokes he asked which were cooked in oil and which in butter and when he didn’t get the answer he wanted he threw a fit, as well as the plate at the waiter; ultimately his rage would lead to the murdering of a tennis opponent and fleeing for his life- the last four years of his life he was on the run, sinking in despair, and losing his health (his downward spiral and his anxiety are evident in the last paintings).

* In Port Ercole, while loaded up on a small ship carrying several paintings intended to seek a patron’s good graces, and to ask for asylum for his crime, he fell ill with fever. When he lost his ship along with all his belongings, he wandered angrily along the coast of the port city in the July sun until he came upon a village where he became bedridden. Alone and abandoned, he died in 1610.

If you can’t see the video, click here.

Caravaggio included musical sheets as well as various instruments in several paintings. The music for the video above is a madrigal by Jacques Arcadelt, whose music was included in some of the musical pieces, particularly Lute Player.

The torso is almost complete. Hopefully I’ll have more to say (and show) tomorrow. I don’t want to rush on any part, no matter how seemingly insignificant. The maestro wouldn’t stand for that!

This is the second installment of the David With Goliath’s Head reproduction. I actually painted David’s face yesterday after Goliath’s head, but the hand I painted today. I also painted the rough draft of the torso, but I’m not done with it yet so I’ve excluded it.

I’m happy with David’s face and I think it resembles the original well. The face is a little weird looking but I think the same is true of the original. We know that Caravaggio used average looking street people for models, and this one is no exception. This particular one was possibly the artist’s assistant and friend. David’s expression differs here from the two earlier ones. The first shows a child David almost giddy having just felled the giant. The second shows a confident adolescent, chin up and celebrating his victory. The third and final one (possibly the final painting) shows an expression of compassion for his victim.

The next post should show a completed painting, done in oil on a 36″ x 24″ canvas, with the composition slightly cropped from the original, to fit in these dimensions.