Come on, People! Share some artists you love.
 

Come on, People! Share some artists you love. Enrich our lives with stuff we haven't seen before. Why do you like an artist? Where did you learn of them? Post here or start a new thread (better). Thanks.

Among many I love, John Singer Sargent particularly for his stunning works in white / off white - they make you just want to come right up and rub the fabric between your fingers. Arp & Miro - coz nothing's lovelier than connecting blobs. Ron Arad - for some incredible chair-things. Most glass blowers working on artistic items: the movements they make as they blow create shapes in space that are themselves kinetic art. And that's just for entrée.

Nice, Seree. I am looking over this website which has his complete works (wonder if that's true?) Which are your favorites?

http://www.johnsingersargent.org/

I love this one...
http://www.johnsingersargent.org/Lady-Agnew.jpg
The chair is formal and feminine - the dress is a feminine confection - but her attitude is like a woman to be reckoned with and she sits in the chair in a very casual way. "What? You want a piece of me?"


As far as glass - I love Chihuly

http://www.portrait.gov.au/site/exhi...tewhiteley.php

This links to studies used by Brett Whiteley to do his portrait of Patrick White, one of Australia's best novelists (he won the Nobel Prize For Literature)
Brett is generally considered one of Australia's greatest moden artists, much of his work is on the 'net. I don't think the final portrait is one of Brett's best' works but it was an interesting collaboration between two artists and the studies here show that, I think.
cheers
Ross

http://www.the-athenaeum.org/art/full.php?ID=53048

Sargent was awesome. I didn't see this painting on "The Complete Works" site, but I may have simply missed it.

A great Sargent quote:

"A portrait is any picture that has something wrong with the mouth"

Yes, Sargent is great. But let's loosen up!

How about David Park, the dean of the Bay Area Figurative movement in San Francisco. In the late '40s, Park, a student of Clifford Still, drove all his abstract pictures to the dump and began painting the figure. He inspired Richard Diebenkorn to paint figuratively, and headed a group that included Elmer Bischoff, Joan Brown, and others in the bay area. He died quite young of cancer. Google him for lots of images. Two good ones here. And a nice short video here.

I'm fond of kinetic sculptures. Lately I've been enjoying Anthony Howe's wind-powered pieces.

Years ago I workshopped a sonnet here featuring one of George Rhoads's rolling ball machines at Rady Children's Hospital San Diego, but the poem's been rejected by so many publishers that I guess I'll just shut up and let the sculpture speak for itself. (The RCHSD sculpture shares many of the same features as this one, but on a much smaller scale.)

Julie, I remember that poem. Have you considered sending it to Ekphrasis? Otherwise keep an eye peeled for themes on ekphrasis. If I run across one, I'll let you know.

Thanks, Janice. I didn't think the piece would be a good fit for Ekphrasis, since the poem discusses the piece but isn't really ekphrastic. But I guess it's worth a shot.

My favorite public art piece anywhere is the one I walked on every day on my way to and from work, when I was a librarian at the University of California, San Diego:

Alexis Smith, Snake Path, 1992

As the video points out, it's especially fun to walk on while leaving the library at night, when Bruce Nauman's colorful neon Vices and Virtues, 1988, are dancing along the top of an adjoining building.

http://youtu.be/X59U4mUqWtw

Picasso At Work. I went looking for a Y'tube of Picasso drawing I wanted to share but couldn't find it then discovered this. Tantalizing glimpses of him drawing and most interesting for me, transforming soft pottery into…
but you'll need to see the 'tube to find out.
cheers
Ross

A Paul Weingarten landscape--The Manhattan Bridge. By my reckoning, one of the greatest painters working. Formalist poets, I would think, should have a real feel for the quality of something like this.

http://cassowary.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/weing.jpg

Full disclosure, he's not entirely unknown to me. Here is his website.

With all due respect, I wish we could bring the level of discussion of art up a few notches here: Who doesn't love Sargent and Picasso? And sculpture gardens? Introduce us to artists that work, as we do, in the grand tradition. God dammit. And discuss.

Thanks,
RM

(Actually, I don't really love Sargent or Picasso. But you know what I mean, I hope.)

Rick
Picasso almost single handedly began the transformation of art from representation to abstaction, he took Cezanne's intuition that form was as much a product of the eye as the the thing and created with Braque, cubism. That lead to Kandinsky, Miro etc in Europe and then the Abstract Expressionists of the New York school.
I didn't like Picasso either till I saw an exhibition of his drawings, his mastery of imaginitive design, and then my brother who is an art book collector got several massive books of his work, he did 1000's of painting and drawings, he was literally drawing in bed when he died at 90 something, when I looked through my brother's books I saw some amost abstract landscapes of villagers that were wonderful, I don't like a lot of his work, especially his middle and old age stuff where the colours are horrible and the technique becomes repetitive, but he is a giant of modern art, his graphic style influenced western illustrative art all over the place, book covers, advertising, fashion art.
People think of Picasso as a Spanish bull with all his young wives, but his closest friends were poets, and for a year he stopped painting entirely and wrote only poetry. If you read about his life you realise that although he was tough he was also extremely sensitive, I think you can see in film of him his nobility and the deep cultural wellsprings of Spain.
As for Sargeant, wonderful work, very traditional really, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, come to mind, some are very formal, I like the flamenco dancer, his most succeesful painting for me.
Well I hope this stimulates interest, but critiquing paintings, whew, that's hard work, maybe asking too much of poets although Budelaire was a perceptive critic of painting, he also drew a little and had marvellous handwriting. Don't know of many poets who also painted, although strangely Frank Sinatra did reasonable abstract paintings in his old age.
I used to paint but gradually stopped to specialize in writing as I realized you can 'spread yourself too thin' I also tried everything, dancing, acting, guitar playing, singing. Was OK at all of them but it was always dabbling, gave me something to write about and helped me be a good teacher but now I am too old to do anything but write.
cheers
Ross

Yes, [well, there are some like me who think Picasso went to the circus] but it's like being asked to share poets we love and expecting something interesting to come from "Shakespeare!" or "Whitman!" I took Sharon's plea as in invitation to introduce artists, and the obvious pictures that came up were a bit disappointing.

I have read most of John Richardson's multi-volume life of Picasso, by the way. And, of course, there is plenty to discuss. It's just that.... never mind.

David Park, by the way, is not particularly obscure. But the Bay Area Figurative Movement, a reaction against abstract expressionism and the New York School specifically, oughta intrigue.

Also, I got off the dime here more because of Wes's cartoon than the previous entries.

Well, I don't mean to dampen discussion, and I realize I'm being a bit of a bastard. Nor am I saying much about the artists I'm bringing up, because of time constraints. I'll drop out.

RM

Rick...
that was quick, you replied before I finished editing. You don't like circuses? but I know what you mean. Bit like Warhol…. although I like his work too.
a broken clown on an empty stage c'est moi

Dropping back in...

I'll admit to having dragged Weingarten in more than once....

There are painters like him that I think are doing something very heroic. They are translating the great tradition into contemporary and personal contexts.

Paul was once loosely associated with another painter named Simon Gaon, who in turn was a member of The Street Painters, a New York-based group. Here is one of his.

http://cassowary.files.wordpress.com...simon-gaon.jpg

...and I will throw in a completely unrelated portraitist, a regionalist, David Bates, who paints the gulf coast (though I think he lives in Dallas).

http://cassowary.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/bates1.jpg
[Very (too?) like Marden Hartley?]

Dave is a friend of mine, and one of the founders of the Outdoor Painter's Society (OPS). I don't think you can really make it out, but the hat I'm wearing in my avatar is from OPS. Dave gave it to me when we were painting in Dallas because the humidity was wreaking havoc on my hair, which was not short then.

Oooh, I like the David Bates portrait. It has that unapologetically flat, outlined, off-kilter look that I so enjoy in religious icons. Somehow the lack of perspective makes the emotion pop more.

Well, I like him. As I said, a regionalist (not that Gaon doesn't exude New York City). They used to have a huge painting of an arboretum by Bates at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It hung in a large stairway by a two-storey window looking into Central Park. I consider him a guilty pleasure. When I first encountered him, I thought of Beckmann, but it is really Marsden Hartley that he emulates. Makes sense...an American!

I met him once 15 years ago when he assured me he would never paint again. He was making sculpture. Very charming guy. Unpretentious.

Wes, show us your work in the other art thread!

Rick

OK. Marden Hartley: Madawaska, Acadian Light-Heavy http://cassowary.files.wordpress.com...ight-heavy.jpg

Rick
The painting you posted of Manhattan Bridge is fine, it's like Soutine.
Yes Beckmann, (also Picasso!!!) Powerful piece but I don't think I'd want to look at it too much, makes me feel inadequate. It is nice to see work one's never seen before. I must learn how to post images in this size, it's effective.
kind regards
Ross

Wes
have you heard the term 'pointy headed' meaning too intellectual. I thought the cowboys hats were a sly ref. to that. The New Yorker still worth reading just for the cartoons.
ross

Isn't Hartley's name actually "Marsden"?

Yes, I typoed. You're one tough customer, Gail White. Show us an artist! Or tell us what you think of Simon Gaon or something!

Two Painters in London
 

I made this it's own thread in Art Gallery. Thanks. RM