Category Archive: ART
El Greco
(Doménikos Theotokópoulos,1541-1614) The master of iridescent, intense, orogenic paintings, rocketing up to a boiling grey sky – so high the artist seems to want us to genuflect whilst viewing, preferably in dread as well as admiration. Filled with preternatural radiance and colours and sinuous, writhing, stretched bodies that eerily crowd his paintings, spurning conventional balance of framing, this singular genius and his dramatic and expressionistic style was first fêted, then ignored, then disparaged, then re-discovered. From Crete to Venice to Rome to Holy Toledo, ‘El Greco’ was influenced by Italian masters such as Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto (who also used clay…
Continue Reading →Rembrandt
(15 July 1606 / 7 – 4 October 1669) A man from Leiden sallied forth, Though plain of face, he ventured north; From callow youth to grand old age He shows himself at every stage, An autobiography in paints Along with sundry sinners and saints. [His light and shade: His stock in trade: Full in control Of workings of the soul – And mysterious light: Enigmatic sight: All of human thought In his canvas caught.] After long life, after his last breath, He was a pauper at the death, Forgotten then his splendid skill And the phosphorescent thrill Viewing the…
Continue Reading →Painted Saints and Martyrs
As Cats are to the internet, so Saints were to the religiose and their artisans. Whether by miracle or martyrdom, these historical figures (a miniscule sample of whom are below) provide the anthropomorphic link between the carnal world and the beatific vision.
Continue Reading →Flower Girl: the Brilliant Rachel Ruysch
Michiel van Musscher "Portrait of the artist Rachel Ruysch in her studio" (1675-85)
(3 June 1664 – 12 October 1750) Until the Dutch were sent mad by tulips, the Dutch Golden Age had Rachel Ruysch to thank for the luscious still life gallery of flowers. Her minute observations of each flower, each stem, each inquisitive insect, in an extremely naturalistic way, but according to an elaborate arrangement or composition, are close to miraculous. Simon Schama suggested that this flower genre was a product of male oppression: “There were certainly women painters in the Republic, but just as opportunities for women writes and poets were available so long as they obeyed male assumptions about ornamental…
Continue Reading →John Martin
"Pandemonium'
(19 July 1789 – 17 February 1854) The great romantic painter of startling tableaux of the Apocalypse, John Martin passed from glazing plates to classical landscape painting until he found his mileu in fire and brimstone. Stories of the Old and New Testaments were his templates, and the vast (or small) canvasses and plates of destruction, panic and woe were wildly successful, although now out of fashion (for now). “Below the rational and sensuous surface of nineteenth-century painting, the bright skin of Impressionism, the solid material world of Courbet, or, further back, the ideal forms of neo-classicism, there ran a…
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