BS: Your Favorite Visual Artist

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Visual Artist
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 12 Dec 02 - 03:32 PM

For those, like myself, who haven't (yet) picked favorites, there are links to some excellent web sites for browsing in This Thread

I've got my choices narrowed down to about 195 artists, and 7,000 paintings/sculptures. I'll get back when I've sorted them a little more, but I suspect that if I pick "favorites" it will be individual works, rather than just "artists."

I'm impressed that virtually all of those named above are actually real, and generally good, artists. Although the trend is a little more toward the Impressionists than mine, there don't seem to be too many going for the "pop-trash" stuff.

There are some very good living artists - if you can find them. Maybe I can pick out a few later.

I note the absence above of P.P. Rubens. SWMBO says he should be everybody's favorite, but I think that's a personal thing with her. I do like his "Cimon and Pero" (there are a couple of versions). I'm surprised to see Freud - thought noone knew about him. Has anyone looked at Zorn?

John

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Visual Artist
From: Micca
Date: 13 Dec 02 - 06:34 AM

Oh, and
Fay Adams for her Coastline photographs
and Verushka for the body painting pics

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Visual Artist
From: Micca
Date: 13 Dec 02 - 06:45 AM

OOOPS that should ,of course read Fay Godwin...

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Visual Artist
From: GUEST,Fred Miller
Date: 13 Dec 02 - 09:07 AM

John in KS, I don't know, Freud is quite good, but awfully sticky humid for my taste. Incredibly, I think Balthus is still alive. I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Serra. Or good post popish people like Hockney, who's supposed to be so widely popular. His ideas about the use of camera obscura are interesting, pretty convincing.

   I'd like to mention someone whose name I can't recall, a woman who paints faint grids on unprimed canvas, sort of classed with minimalists, Alice...? um. Anyway, they don't reproduce well at all, but are some of my favorite things to see. And of course, John Banvard.

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Visual Artist
From: reggie miles
Date: 13 Dec 02 - 10:08 AM

A bit off subject here I know but.... Has anyone heard a recent news piece about a researcher who claims that around 1400, the late Gothic and early Renaissance period, the discovery and use of a lens to produce a camera obscura effect is what artists like Jan Van Eyck and others used to reproduce the graphic detail found in their paintings? Check out Van Eyck's 1432 painting Giovanni Arnofini and His Bride. I find this contemporary art detective work fascinating. I can't remember the detective's name but his examples of just how these tracings of projected images, similar to how one could trace an image with an opaque projector, were accomplished seems to expose a technique secretly used for centuries by many revered artists. He seems to make a fairly damning case, using early paintings to show how many of the images drawn using this technique are mirrored and therefore the finished pose shows them as left handed instead of right handed. It also answers a life long question for me as well as, I suspect, countless other artists. How did they do that?

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Visual Artist
From: Bobert
Date: 13 Dec 02 - 12:24 PM

Speaking of Van Eych, Reggie, I love the way he (with perhaps some assistence from his brother) painted those jewels with painterly layering of medium with very little pigment so he was like really building a jewel with paint. Time consuming work but the Van Eych signiture...

Bobert

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Visual Artist
From: GUEST,Fred Miller
Date: 13 Dec 02 - 02:30 PM

Reggie, my post didn't take. That's artist David Hockney and a co-author. There was a short piece in the New Yorker about it months ago, and a book out.

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Visual Artist
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 13 Dec 02 - 05:18 PM

Reggie -

There was a fairly recent article in one of my magazines, possibly Smithsonian, Technology Review, or Invention and Technology, by the author in question, I believe. One of the interesting points is that the apparent errors in perspective are key to reaching the conclusion that a "projected image" may have been used.

It has been an "open secret" that some "technological aids" have been used for a very long time. The real questions are "by whom?" and "to what extent?" As pointed out in the summary article I saw, it is fairly easy to make a credible argument that some sort of "projection" was (likely) used in a particular work, but there remains the problem of how it was done - pinholes, lenses, and concave mirrors were offered as "possible methods" but the argument that one or the other was "the" method is, perhaps, less certain than was implied by that particular article (agreed by the author in a follow-up note, I believe).

Albrecht Dürer (Late Woodcuts) (click on the 8th pic down*, "Draughtsman Drawing a Recumbent Woman" from 1525) shows a method of "projected image" drawing sometimes still used today that requires no lenses or mirrors, but can produce an "inverted" or "reversed" image as sometimes used. This method was certainly not something "discovered" by A.D.

* many "art" sites request no links directly to individual pictures, so the link is to an index page.

Some people seem to find great joy in believing that the artist somehow "cheated" in making his work. I suppose that the first artist who made a "brush" by hammering his "paint stick" between two rocks to fray the end a little probably faced the same charge. Try a "paint-by-numbers" job sometime - and see if it makes you really feel like a great artist. Even if some graphical aid was used, there's a lot more to producing a decent artwork.

John

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Visual Artist
From: Bobert
Date: 13 Dec 02 - 10:26 PM

It's all about vaishing points, which artists have employed going back before Albrecht Durer, but not too much further than Durer. Prior to Michelangelo who was just a generation ahead of Durer, everything seemed *flat* and perspctive was either not important or figured out.

Speaking of perspective, Durer's woodcut "Demonstration of Perspectivde" (circ 1525) suggests that artist were just getting it as he depicts an artist using a string to assist in setting up a perpective.

Ouch, that hurt...

Bobert

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Visual Artist
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 14 Dec 02 - 02:46 AM

Bobert -

I'd have to go back to the history books, but I think that the "vanishing point" in its current form as a drafting concept came even later than Durer - and the terminology has changed a little. Artists painting large scenes knew that distant things appeared smaller a very long time before the "geometry" and other analytical tools were widely available to tell them "how much smaller."

Durer's reference to "perspective," while accurate in his own time, wouldn't stand up well to the modern definitions. What is demonstrated in that woodcut would perhaps be called "projective geometry" now, which is at least subtly different.

The significant thing is that if you view a distant object "across a point and against a grid," as the "draughtsman" is shown doing, you will get essentially the same "projection" of the object as if you used a lens or mirror. In fact - if an artist holds his thumb at the distance of the canvas, and paints everything in proper size as it appears relative to his thumb, the picture could incorporate the same "projective errors" that were found in the cited analysis (although he'd need an extremely well calibrated thumb).

Big-Mick-the-Angelo's "two tombs," among his most frequently cited works, are dated to 1531 and 1533, which is quite contemporary with Durer's ca. 1525 book(s). Maybe he read the books. At any rate, it may be (?) assumed that Durer probably didn't invent what he illustrated, but was largely publishing knowledge known at least to a few for some time before he made the pictures for the techniques he showed. One of Durer's sketches, "The Women's Bath," dated 1496, shows ceiling beams apparently "drawn to a vanishing point," which shows knowledge of "diminishing size with distance;" but since that's what you see - it doesn't prove (or disprove) his use of a "vanishing point" concept in making the sketch. Maybe he just used his thumb.

Note that the discussion of Durer doesn't mean I've picked him as a favorite. His extensive works in woodcuts and engravings, since they require rather heavy handed tool work, make it more likely that he would have "thought geometry" (and maybe mechanical aids) in his work. Look at Baldung-Grien who did some overlap between engraving, woodcuts, and painting to see some transference of technique (maybe), and then to Leonardo and Michelangelo for rock bashers who also did quite a lot of painting.

For "calculated" as opposed to "computed" perspective, look closely at a few Greco portraits (any of his several Magdalenes will do) and then consider that his ego assumed that they would always hang at least 8 feet above the viewer. Give them the appropriate tilt, and they're much less grotesque, and I'm told he did it on purpose.

John

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Visual Artist
From: Cluin
Date: 14 Dec 02 - 03:31 AM

The vanishing point was being used in Italian painting in the mid 1300s almost 150 years before Durer's time.Though earlier practitioners like Giotto, Duccio and the Lorenzettis used a separate vanishing point for each object (composed of straight lines), it took Masaccio painting in the early 1400's to apply the single vanishing point to the whole painting, as well as to break with tradition and apply it to figures and faces as well. Masaccio also extended the vistas to an appearance of great distances, rather than the previous practice of distance being halted by a flat background.

But Durer, along with others to come later, did have a hand in developing and documenting the principles of 1, 2 and 3 point perspective as we know them today. They were still being refined into the last century.

Of course the Chinese knew something about foreshortening and the effect of distance on scale back in the 5th century, but they didn't use drafting-like principles to illustrate it. Their techniques were more formulaic and philosophical, splitting the landscape scene into bottom/foreground, middle-distance and top/background areas.

Jeez, 3 years of art history stays stuck in there years later, doesn't it?

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Visual Artist
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 14 Dec 02 - 04:51 AM

Cluin - thanks. That's helpful.

Un(?)fortunately, I don't have the benefit of much art education, so about all I have to rely on is what I've seen - mostly by wandering around the web. Paintings earlier than the 1400s are pretty rare, with the exception of frescoes where the artist may have needed to "fill a space" rather than having the freedom of a large canvas, so what I've seen of the earliest periods may not be too representative of what was done - only of what survived.

It is very distressing to see some of what must have been beautiful work in such poor shape that it's impossible to tell much about the "theories" employed.

Just to give Bobert the satisfaction of "picking the winners," I did a quick look and came up with:

  Escher         7
  van Gogh       7
  Dali           5
  Klee           4
  Rembrandt      4
  Goldsworthy    3
  Rodin          3
  Turner         3
  Cassat         2
  Chihuly        2
  Gaugin         2
  Hopper         2
  Klee, Paul     2
  Michelangelo   2
  Modigliani     2
  Monet          2
  Picasso        2
  Pollock        2
  Wright         2
  Wyeth          2
  134 others ....1 each
  

Naturally, there were a few "hanging chads" where I couldn't really tell what was a vote and what was just a comment.

I'm afraid most of the front-runners wouldn't be my picks, but I've looked at something like 7,000 thumbnails and 5 or 6 hundred blowups in the past couple of months, so I'm still sorting. My tastes tend toward the academic realist school, so for something to hang on the wall I'd likely go with Bouguereau, Ingres, Waterhouse, or some other of those "discredited hacks," but then my screen-saver and my most-used desktop pics came in a brown paper wrapper too. There is that one Penn Browning....

John

John

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Visual Artist
From: Bobert
Date: 14 Dec 02 - 08:47 AM

John,

Thanks fir the refreshing. The artist that learning frawing form as a kid, Will Anderson, had spent several years in Europe working for the US government right after WWII and had a keen eye and a few bucks and had peuchased a pair of Durer woodcuts which he had proudly hung in his studio. Being a kid, they never meant much to me until many years later, and after the required 2 semesters of "Art History" in my art major in college, I appreciated them so much more when visiting with his widow.

He also owned an original Bosch. Whew, go figure. The government must have been paying awfully well back then...

Bobert

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Visual Artist
From: Cluin
Date: 14 Dec 02 - 03:00 PM

John,

Yeah, it seems that one of the aims in developing early forms of perspective in painting stemmed from the effort to, since a lot of Italian Renaissance paintings were frescoes (so they were on walls of course) the artists were trying to realistically create the illusion (walking the old Oxymoron Hiway there) of space receding into the wall. And since a lot of these frescoes were viewed from below, the perspective was often a bit fudged (especially with later masters Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo, but even long before them)to make it seem a continuation of the ceiling lines of the room. I've never been to Florence or Venice, so I can't attest to it personally, but one of my instructors was and he assured me that it was so, if you stood in the right spot.

Sculpters Michelangelo and Donatello (who came earlier and was in fact credited with being one of the first one to really try this) even performed some of this viewer-below fudging on their statues. Explains the extra heavy brow ridge on Micheangelo's David.
Perhaps it also explains David's foreshortened penis, poor bugger. ;)

The Northern Renaissance however (of which Durer was the golden boy), because of the climate, featured less fresco and more, smaller oil or tempera on panel work. Oil paints were in fact developed in the north, by the Dutch and Germans. When the Italian artists finally got a look at the work of Durer and other northern artists, they were apparently blown away by the heavy use of line in their painting. The southern tradition featured more areas of tone and little line. So goes the story anyway...

Phew! Enough history.

But, incidentally, most of the visual artists I know are also musicians. Or, even if they don't play/sing, they at least are keen music appreciators with large record/CD collections. Visual art and music seem to go hand in hand.

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Visual Artist
From: GUEST,Fred Miller
Date: 14 Dec 02 - 06:14 PM

Well, perhaps someone else is investigating the lens question too, but everyone I know associates it with the artist David Hockney, and his book. What makes it interesting--unlike discovering that maybe Faulkner used a thesaurus--is the observations, from the point of view of an artist, and one who draws pretty well. He thought he recognised Warhol's line quality in an old drawing, a swift, super-confident line (Warhol traced from a projector). If you know Hockney's rapidograph ink drawings and how hard they are to do, you can see how he'd be sensitive to that. And he got interested in it, is still learning about it, and how to do it--it's not really easy to use--and he makes it an interesting case. A sidelight interest is how the best eyes in the field of art history can have been so unobservant, how much resistance there has been to considering the question today. (The use of lenses was apparently associated with occult, by the church, and so open reference to it was inhibited, although there were some remarks about artists who only paint in dark cellars.)

Otherwise, at least for me, it'd all be very tedious, since I grew up with photos, can't begin to imagine the excitement artists once felt for perspective as a device, and have re-learned perspective drawing almost as many times as I've forgotten it again. Aesthetically, I've never experienced How did they do that? in regard to the chores of technique. It's just like how gymnastics-dance routines are so sad and lugubrious, compared to, say, dance. Or those singers who use every song as an excuse to practice their scales. Bleah.

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Visual Artist
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 14 Dec 02 - 07:32 PM

There's no argument that Hockney makes a very credible case. Unfortunately, the only way we can "support" it, pending someone's finding a "camera obscura" with the artists name written inside, is to propose all of the other ways the results might have come about - and see if he can knock them down.

In the category of "training wheels for artists," there seems to have been a resurgence recently of books featuring all of the old "penny postcards" that came out with the invention of photography, that were frequently described as "artists aids" to get past the censors.

Off to a jam for now.

John

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Visual Artist
From: GUEST,Fred Miller
Date: 14 Dec 02 - 08:27 PM

Yes John, but fortunately one doesn't have to quite care whether Hockney sways academia about how who did what when. He makes interesting observations about art, which is good, and a little unusual, in itself. In science, one studies the history of science of course, but not exactly Science-History as the subject. They even teach Business-Ethics in business schools now. Still don't teach aesthetics in the art department. And still look at slides and take notes at the same time--ruined my handwriting!--as if a damn xerox hasn't been invented. I enjoy Hockney's goading the academics, for its own sake, because I think it's a bit of a ruse, the way it's taught.

Perhaps I'm just bitter because my ground-breaking work on Picasso's neglected "Paul McCartney Period" of the 1920's has been largely ignored. Such works as The Pipes Of Paul McCartney, Antibes, Summer, 1923; Two Paul McCartneys Reading A Letter, Paris, 1921; or even the modest tempera on wood, Paul McCartney Abducting A Woman, Juan-les-Pins, 1920--merit further consideration in light of all those guys looking just like Paul McCartney, damn it.

   And then the New Yorker published a piece on Balthus, by some hack, wimpishly "exposing" the improbability of his pretention to some sort of aristocratic title, and such trivial nonsense. Dopey notions that he'd painted himself as a woman in The Guitar Lesson, along with piles of Freudian gunk. (Why is cross-dressing so often associated with great art? Leonardo/Mona, Shakespeare in Love, blah blah) Yet they totally ignore and continue to reject my research which demonstrates beyond question that when Balthus painted himself as The King Of Cats (1935) he was really only a minor Duke to a family of Mole-rats who he had painstakingly dressed up as cats!

    The art-establishment deserves the needling that Hockney gives them, from his practical working knowledge as an artist. Then maybe my own research will find a more welcome reception!!!

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Visual Artist
From: reggie miles
Date: 15 Dec 02 - 01:31 PM

Fred, LOL!

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Visual Artist
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 15 Dec 02 - 04:56 PM

Fred -

You probably made your mistake in picking Picasso for your research. With over 80,000(+/-?) Picasso "originals" in circulation, he's so easy to research that the competition must be really fierce.

Obviously 80,000 words about some guy who only "created" one or two masterpieces would have given you a much better chance at being credentialed as a serious authority. Especially if they guy was dead - or too illiterate to contradict you.

good piece.

John

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Visual Artist
From: Cluin
Date: 15 Dec 02 - 05:57 PM

Fred, don't lets forget when Picasso revisited his Paul McCartney series in `37 with:

"Paul McCartney announces another duet with Michael Jackson"



...even though he later changed his mind and retitled it "Guernica"

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Visual Artist
From: GUEST,Foe
Date: 16 Dec 02 - 12:26 PM

Bobert - I don't understand the whole process of collotype/pochoir but it is an early photographic process (collotype) where the film produced was then cut into a stencil. Pochoir is a stenciling process where colors are hand applied to the print (somehow). My three Klee's each have an embossed seal in the lower right corner that says "PROCEED JACOMET". (Jacomet process) Daniel Jacomet opened an atalier in Paris in the early 1900's and used this process for mostly upscale limited edition art books. If you look at a collotype under a magnifying glass you won't see any benday dots that are the color dots that make up color pictures in printing. I think the process died out in the mid 1900's as too labor intensive. Put "collotype & pochoir" into GOOGLE or Yahoo and you'll get some hits. If you want to discuss further: [e-mail] (that's a "one" after the "f")

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Visual Artist
From: Bobert
Date: 16 Dec 02 - 01:21 PM

Thanks, GUEST, Foe. Looks as if I'm gong to have to get the print out its original frame which I believe is around 50 years old, maybe a little older and do some examining. Yeah, I kinda know what you are talking about. A little like silk screening? By looking at the Klee print thru the glass, it looks as if it has that layered look to it.

I'll keep you posted.

Thanks again,

Bobert

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Visual Artist
From: Alice
Date: 16 Dec 02 - 01:27 PM

Bobert, look at your print with a magnifying glass and if it is an offset lithograph reproduction you will see the little dots of the color separation (CMYK) cyan (blue), magenta, yellow, and black. If it is a SERIGRAPH, then you will see continuous flat areas of ink.

Alice

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Visual Artist
From: GUEST,Foe
Date: 16 Dec 02 - 02:26 PM

I'll try a blue clicky for a link to collotype & pochoir

http://library.ucsc.edu/exhibits/trianon/cp.htm

Well I tried. The link abouve gives info

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Visual Artist
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 16 Dec 02 - 04:39 PM

If I'm lucky, first Guest,Foe's link

Collotype And Pochoir

And then I'll go look at it some more.

John

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Visual Artist
From: GUEST,Foe
Date: 17 Dec 02 - 07:54 AM

Thanks JohnInKansas. Me and computers are sometimes at odds.

Foe Meader

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Visual Artist
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 17 Dec 02 - 09:54 AM

On the subject of prints, I just ran into the following description for a "limited edition" release:

About Iris Giclée Limited Edition Prints

An Iris Giclée print is the highest quality print available today. Giclée, (pronounced "zhee-clay") is French for "to spray". In brief it is a process where the original image or a reproduction quality transparency is digitally scanned. Then in a collaborative effort of artist and master printer the image is then worked on the computer screen to get it as accurate as possible. In the Giclée process, a very fine stream of ink, more than four million droplets per second, is sprayed onto archival art papers. Because no screens are used, the prints have a higher apparent resolution than offset lithographs. This process offers one of the highest degrees of accuracy and richness of color available in any reproduction process.

In the last few years the Giclée print has become highly regarded by many of the world's important fine artists, collectors, galleries, and museums. Prominent Art Museums such as the Smithsonian and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York have hosted exhibitions featuring Iris Giclée prints.

So, anybody have anything on what makes this different than my "ink-jet" printer???

John