Sunday, December 31, 2017

Precious unreality on New Year's Eve - details from seven new paintings


As you'll note from the specified sizes of the full images (posted below), these details are quite enlarged from the original, some very much so.

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Roped - acrylic on panel - 12x12 - 2017.
Lady - acrylic on panel - 12x12 - 2017.
Savor - acrylic on panel - 12x12 - 2017.
Twist - acrylic on panel - 12x12 - 2017.
Loot - acrylic on panel - 12x12 - 2017.
Connoisseur - acrylic on panel - 16x12 - 2017.
Taste - acrylic on panel - 12x12 - 2017.

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Finally, I want to thank all of you who visit this blog of mine. It gives me great joy to share the things I collect here, and gives me that much more to know that there are others out there who share some of the same sensibilities. I am very grateful. This been a horrible year in so many ways, for this country, for the world. So, perhaps more fervently than ever before in my life, I wish for all of us a happy - and more peaceful, more thoughtful, more fair, more loving - New Year.



Sunday, December 24, 2017

'Twas the night before Christmas - and, thus, this year's holiday card!



It was my turn to produce our holiday card this year, and I just couldn't come up with an idea; I was running out of time and I had nothing. I eventually conjured the thought that I'd like to find something with the saturated colors and rich detail of Early Netherlandish painting. When the amazing Arnolfini double portrait by van Eyck showed up in my search - as it certainly would - and I noted the predominant green and red in the composition, it seemed like a more than reasonable choice. And not too difficult to manage; not much more than face-swapping. It even had a dog in a supporting role!

The Arnolfini Portrait (aka The Arnolfini Wedding, The Arnolfini Marriage, Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife) by Jan van Eyck, 1434.

And yes, with such an iconic painting, all sorts of cheeky - or worse - things have already been done to this image, painted, photographed, and Photoshopped; I'd like to think our version is a little more subtle, more tasteful, a little more respectful of the original, that most. Since, unlike the way we usually concoct these things, I started with an image rather than a concept, when it came time to give it a title, we really had no idea what story our silly mugs were trying to convey. We eventually gave up. And now we're leaving the story for the viewer/recipient to imagine. So, what is the story?

Nicholas would like to wish everyone a happy holiday, a merry Christmas, or whatever lovely thing it is you do to celebrate at this time of year.
(Yes, it pretty much sounds like a bark, but it actually translates to "Joy!")



Friday, December 22, 2017

Snow in Russia - paintings by Isaac Levitan


Forest in the winter, 1885.

I've posted about Levitan before; he was certainly one of the very greatest landscape artists of all time. This is just a small selection of his paintings of... snow!

Early Spring, 1898.
The Last Snow; Village of Savvinskaya., 1884.
Garden in the Snow, circa 1880s.
Countryside; Winter, 1877-1878.
The Tomb of Nadia Yakovleva, 1882.
Springtime; The Last Snow, 1895.
Gray Day, 1895.
Early March, 1900.
Horse-Drawn Sled in the Winter.
Winter, 1895.
Winter Landscape with Mill, 1884.
Boulevard in the Evening, 1883.
March, 1895.
Winter Landscape; Hunters in the Snow, 1876.