The Art Thread

[Rambuchan]

Welcome to the Art Thread.

In my opinion, there simply isn’t enough ‘art’ on this forum, or chat about it. The only discussion we get on ‘art’ is basically in The Cover Art Thread and The Political Cartoons Thread. And I really can’t think of many others, errr Babe Thread for its photography? Hardly. (And sorry, as much admiration as I have for the work in C&C, I don't see it as being the same kind of art).

So let’s post some examples of our favourite artists’ work!!! Like the Cover Art thread, I’m going to start by posting some info and links. I hope you too will TELL US SOMETHING about the artist and their work, even if it is just a link. I don't think we need to treat it as a picture thread because surely some discussion will crop up. Ready?

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MARCEL DUCHAMP

Marcel Duchamp (1887 – 1968), the painter and mixed media artist, was associated with Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism, though he avoided any alliances. Duchamp’s work is characterised by humour, a wide variety of unconventional media, and its incessant probing of the boundaries of art. His legacy includes the insight that art can be about ideas instead of worldly things, a revolutionary notion that would resonate with later generations of artists.

Plenty more to read here - Full run down of his life and works.

Bicycle Wheel
Original Version: 1913, Paris.This is a replica, made in 1963.

[Now Lost. Bicycle fork and wheel screwed upside down onto stool painted white assisted readymade no dimensions recorded]

http://arthist.binghamton.edu/duchamp/Bicycle Wheel.html

"In 1913 I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn."

- Duchamp, Apropos of Readymades, 1951.

Actually made prior to the artist's coining the term, this Readymade is commonly termed the first of Duchamp's Readymades. Duchamp himself has confirmed this claim, but also glories in the inherent contradiction of such a designation. The piece was made when the idea of the Readymade had not been fully developed and yet, as a result of being called "No.1" in the long line of Readymades, it has received as much (if not more) attention than later, more clearly established Readymades. Duchamp explained his personal feelings and the motivations behind Bicycle Wheel in an interview with Arturo Schwarz in the 1960s:

"The Bicycle Wheel is my first Readymade, so much so that at first it wasn't even called a Readymade. It still had little to do with the idea of the Readymade. Rather it had more to do with the idea of chance. In a way, it was simply letting things go by themselves and having a sort of created atmosphere in a studio, an apartment where you live. Probably, to help your ideas come out of your head. To set the wheel turning was very soothing, very comforting, a sort of opening of avenues on other things than material life of every day. I liked the idea of having a bicycle wheel in my studio. I enjoyed looking at it, just as I enjoyed looking at the flames dancing in a fireplace. It was like having a fireplace in my studio, the movement of the wheel reminded me of the movement of flames" (588).

Probably the most famous "Ready Made" which Duchamp ever produced was "The Fountain" (1917). With such works, Duchamp sneered at the art establishment. It was a complete ridiculing of them to hang a ready made urinal on a gallery.

But he truly did inspire many a Conceptual Artist to follow. Our most recent examples of such artists are Damien Hurst and Tracey Emin.

After these Ready Mades appeared, the world was laid bare for artists to employ their mind as the sole tool with which to create their art. This was hugely significant when you consider the Socialist principles bubbling throughout Europe at the time. This work laid the field open for anyone to make art. But the art world elite soon closed ranks .

Two more great links for Duchamp:

http://www.marcelduchamp.net/
http://www.peak.org/~dadaist/English/Graphics/duchamp.html

 

[Rambuchan]

SALVADOR DALI

"Spanish Surrealist painter and printmaker, influential for his explorations of subconscious imagery."

Of course Dali is very famous. Many people have written far better biographies on him. So I won’t go on myself. This is a fantastic website which contains all his work together with an ok biography. http://www.virtualdali.com/

I’m focussing on his earliest work because not many people are as aware of how many different styles he tried out before he developed the characteristic Surrealism which made him such a household name.



Here are some early explorations of Dali. Anyone who has seen his paintings up close in a gallery will doubtless tell you how breathtakingly Dali paints. He was a real master with the brush and these explorations show how easily he went from one style to another before settling into what we know of him now.

Landscape Near Figueras, 1910

We can see that this is very much in the style of the great Impressionists that preceded Dali, Monet being the most famous example.

Bathers of Llaner, 1923


This too is an example of Impressionism. This is definitely in a ‘Pointillist’ style (painting with points not brush strokes – an early example of Pixels in action). One of my favourite Pointillists was Georges Seurat. Read more about Pointillism here: http://www.artcyclopedia.com/history/pointillism.html

Still Life with Moonight, 1925

Dali tries his hand at some Cubism. See Pablo Picasso for more on that!

Apparition Of Face And Fruit on a Beach, 1938

Now we arrive at his famous subconscious imagery paintings. These basically combined with the work of people like Luis Bunuel and the Dada Movement to form the Surrealist Movement.

As with all these styles and schools of thought, you can really go off on one about their place in politics (eg. Modernists and early Dadaists were intrinsically tied up with the early Soviet Communist Era, for example. The Flux Movement is also worth looking at as a distant branch of the Dada and Surrealist Tree.

Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man, 1943


This has to be my favourite of his.

 

[Rambuchan]

ANDY GOLDSWORTHY

“Andy Goldsworthy is a brilliant British artist who collaborates with nature to make his creations. Besides England and Scotland, his work has been created at the North Pole, in Japan, the Australian Outback, and in the U.S

Goldsworthy regards all his creations as temporary. He photographs each piece once right after he makes it. His goal is to understand nature by directly participating in nature as intimately as he can. He generally works with whatever he notices: twigs, leaves, stones, snow and ice, reeds and thorns.”

Can you see how the concept of using Ready Mades (from Duchamp above) is fundamental to the work that Goldsworthy does?






http://transformations.cqu.edu.au/journal/issue_05/pdf/ianmclean.pdf








See lots more of Goldsworthy’s work here
http://cgee.hamline.edu/see/goldsworthy/see_an_andy.html

Very good write up on him, his work, his techniques and his themes.
http://d-sites.net/english/goldsworthy.htm

 

[feline_dacat]

Wow! My favourite of all those has to be Andy Goldsworthy. To be able to make such awesome works, and then capture it on camera so well!
I particularly like the split stones and the icicles...

The icicles reminded me of permanent exhibition in the Science Museum works by a professional glass blower who made Klein bottles...

Klein bottles are 3D shapes with only one surface, no edges, no inside nor outside. Think of it as really complex mobius bands.
As far as i understand - these klein bottles are made up from these mobius bands.

Science Museum Page
Zimaths E-Zine on Klein Bottles and Mobius Strips

These may not exactly count as art, nor is it focused on one artist but these glass structures are beautiful and they really must been seen in person! I think that science and mathematics can be responsible for a lot of awesome creations. For instance, everyone's heard of Escher, right?

M.C. Escher

A lot of his works have mathematical bases... For instance, on the theme of single-sided, single-edged shapes:

A Mobius Strip of ants!

A more complicated Mobius Strip

Another of his famous works deals with Singularity:

According to this website on his mathematical art:

The secret of its making can be rendered somewhat less obscure by examining the grid-paper sketch the artist made in preparation for this lithograph. Note how the scale of the grid grows continuously in a clockwise direction. And note especially what this trick entails: A hole in the middle. A mathematician would call this a singularity, a place where the fabric of the space no longer holds together.

I love Escher's works! It makes my geeky little heart a-flutter!

 

[Rambuchan]

Escher - Brilliant choice!!!! I totally Escher. I've bought so many of those postcard booklets of his work. There are a number of the staircases that he has done. I don't think I've seen the one you posted before. Great write up too, thanks! I'll cough up somemore later on but I'm off into the sunshine now *stumbles out blinking in the harsh light*

 

[tossi]

I get nightmares from everything else then landscapes.

 

[FredLC]

Well, you obviously haven't met the DaL threads:

Drawing a Little

Drawing a Little... chapter 2

The Son of the Drawing a Little Thread

and the latest...

Drawing a little... again!

Regards .

 

[Jack the Ripper]

Art from alpha centauri documenting a mind worm battle/attack :

 

[Narz]

Awesome stuff! ANDY GOLDSWORTHY is new to me.

I've always liked MC Escher, he's the mofoin' man!

Here's something weird I made in photoshop the other day.

 

[Rambuchan]

I like that Narz, but what's with the sun burst light?

 

[Rambuchan]

You know those horrible yellow, green and brown curtains your parents had in the 70s? Well the designs (but not the colours) of them are thanks to the following artist. Not a great intro but you will see how she had much greater taste than the distortions of her work which spread through people’s homes. The look of “Swinging London” and “The Swinging 60s” owes a lot to this lady's work. It permeated nearly all walks of visual life: clothing, painting, interior design etc. This was strongest in the late 60s and 70s but her style is still largely influential. Her name?

BRIDGET RILEY



“Bridget Riley is one of Britain’s best-known artists. Since the mid-1960s she has been celebrated for her distinctive, optically vibrant paintings which actively engage the viewer’s sensations and perceptions, producing visual experiences that are complex and challenging, subtle and arresting.”

http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/riley/



“Optical art, or Op art as it is better known, became popular in Europe and in the United States in the mid 1960s. Op Art was dedicated to the exploration of discernible illusions. The term was first coined in America's Time magazine in October 1964, and by 1965 it was well entrenched in the art world and soon spilled over into advertising and design in popular culture.

Optical Art is a mathematically-oriented form of (usually) Abstract art, generally characterized by hard-edged black and white patterns or geometric shapes which use repetition of simple forms and colors to create vibrating effects, moiré patterns, an exaggerated sense of depth, foreground-background confusion, and other visual effects, often creating the appearance of an illusion.”
http://artzia.com/Gallery/Art/more.shtml

INTAKE

“Optical art is very much in vogue since Bill Seitz collected a show called "The Responsive Eye" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and then sent it on a nationwide tour. For my taste, the best artists of this school are limited to Vasarely, the father of it all, Larry Poons, Soto, and Bridget Riley. (Some of my favorites, such as Lichtenstein, Laing, Noland, and Stella, use optical effects wonderfully, but they are not primarily optical artists.)

Riley is a tiny, bright, intense young woman with a passion for perfection in her work. She often makes many drawings of a planned work before she starts on her main structure, and I have long sought after some of these splendid drawings.

"Intake" speaks for itself. Since it is executed in black and white, it reproduces well. What one cannot feel in reproduction are its large size and the stark whiteness of the stretcher against the very black image. This painting moves constantly. The effect you see results from the image thrown on the retina of your eyes, and partly from parallax (the placing of our eyes by nature about two inches apart, so they do not see the same image at exactly the same moment).

Like Poons', this work is active as your eyes scan it, but the method of creating the action is different. Some people ask, "Doesn't it make you dizzy? How can you live with it?" No, it doesn't make me dizzy, but it is always fascinating because it never gets lost on a wall, as many classical paintings do”.

http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen3/powers.html

Untitled (Fragment 2), 1965
screenprint on plexiglas
27 x 26c ins


Coloured Greys 3, 1972
Screenprint 57.1 x 58.9 cm


Zing 1, 1971


Big Blue 1981-82

Big Blue 1981-82 was painted after a trip to Egypt, where Riley was inspired by the landscape's intense light and colours. The work marks a shift in the artist's practice where sensuous curves were replaced by vertical bands of solid colours, creating a radiant, visually vibrating surface.

Nataraja



Installation at Tate Britain - Room 1, L-R: Composition with Circles 3, 2003. Graphite, acrylic paint and permanent marker on plaster wall, 483 x 1760 cm © 2003 Bridget Riley.


See plenty more here and in all the other links above.
http://www.thelondonseason.com/LShotspotarchive2003.htm

 

[Narz]

I like that Narz, but what's with the sun burst light?

I dunno, overcomplicating things maybe. :\

Here's some more photoshop "art"

 

[Rambuchan]

Just thought I would point out that this thread is for famous artists.

FredLC has a different thread going for Your Own art. Last page starts here:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=92746&page=5

Kindly post famous artists in here only. And until you get famous, please use Fred's thread .

 

[feline_dacat]

@Ram, whoa, her work is funky, but on a computer screen it makes my head spin! *dizzy*

I'm trying to think of an artist to post about, Watch This Space!

 

[Rambuchan]

Yes well the hurting eyes is a thing. You should try standing in front of those paintings in a gallery, whoooaaa!

[My hoster is playing up but if you wait, the pics load. If not then after one reload they appear (6 in this post), sorry]

But in actual fact Bridget Riley is doing much the same thing as this guy:

CLAUDE MONET

Claude Monet is generally considered to be the most outstanding figure among Impressionists. The term Impressionism derives from his picture Impression: Sunrise. A title was needed in a hurry for the catalogue of the exhibition in 1874. Monet suggested simply Impression, and the catalogue editor, Renoir's brother Edouard, added an explanatory Sunrise. The artist was not to know that because of criticism which seized upon the first word he had given the entire movement its name.

http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/fnart/art/monet2.html

More good links, which I shall pull some extracts from later.
http://webpages.marshall.edu/~smith82/monet.html
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/M/monet.html


So here we can see his 'impressionism' in action. If you bear in mind the comments above about the 'Reacting Eye of the Viewer', well Monet is showing us the 'Reacting Eye of the Painter' and the 'Reacting Landscape in Changing Light'. He often approached the same subject again and again, relishing it in different light settings. The very fact that he painted well on into an advanced state of blindness testifies to Monet's eternal love of light in all its forms. He relished the vibrancy of one light / colour up against another. And that is exactly what Bridget Riley was doing.









You can see him doing it again here with the Houses of Parliament.





He also did many renditions of Rouen Cathedral and his Lily Pond. All of which can be seen by clicking the links above.

 

[von_Seydlitz]

Monet is really great.
But - is this meant to be an art thread concerning painting and modern art in special?

 

[Rambuchan]

No man, any art I guess. I thought that fashion (clothing), architecture and stuff like that should be excluded. Perhaps 'fine art' would be a better description, or 'stuff you would see in galleries'. Other than that it's pretty much open I guess.

 

[von_Seydlitz]

Okay, I was pointing out on music. I mean.. classical music, not new-age-crap.

 

[Rambuchan]

Well I don't see how you will post anything other than the sheet music for classical music. You can't post us MP3s. If you feel you have to, then go ahead with the sheet music, but it might look a bit weird .

 

[von_Seydlitz]

For I'm a big fan of romanticism (please don't mix up with kitsch!) concerning painting, music and literature, I can't hold back and some region of my mind forces me to post this.

Caspar David FRIEDRICH

Caspar David Friedrich (September 5, 1774 – May 7, 1840) was an 19th century German romantic painter. Many critics consider his work outstanding and consider him one of the most important German romantic painters.

Born in Greifswald, he studied at Copenhagen from 1794 to 1798. After leaving Copenhagen, he visited several scenic spots in Germany before choosing to live in Dresden. His famous painting "Mönch am Meer" (Monk at the Sea) impressed Karl Friedrich Schinkel (later Prussia's most famous classicist architect) so much that he gave up painting and took up architecture, much to the benefit of German and world architecture. Caspar David Friedrich died in Dresden, Saxony.

His paintings portray the untamed power of nature; this is in sharp contrast to Enlightenment-era painters such as Thomas Gainsborough, who used nature to bring out qualities in their human subjects.

Friedrich's style influenced the painting of the Norwegian Johann Christian Dahl and perhaps also the painters of the American Hudson River School, the Rocky Mountain School, and the New England Luminists.

A few examples:
,,Der Chasseur im Wald" / ,,The Chasseur in the Woods"

„Abtei im Eichwald" / ,,Abbey in an Oak Forest"

„Kreidefelsen auf Rügen“ / ,,Chalk Cliffs on Ruegen"

A last one..
,,Winterlandschaft mit Kirche" / ,,Winter landscape with church"