Saturday, January 11, 2014

Ekaterina Smirnova


My Journey Begins
"Creation is my lifestyle. The color of my skin is all the colors of my palette. I live in a legislative system of ART."

Colin Hayes

Colin Hayes (British, 1919-2003)

Vathi, Evvia

Landscape with vines

Charles Sheeler

Charles Sheeler (American, 1883 –1965)

View of New York, 1931. Oil on canvas

John Everett


Worbarrow Bay, Dorset

Seascape

St Michael, Azores, from the ‘Birkdale’

Seascape, Le Croisic

Frank Walter

Landscape Series, Sunrise

Frank Walter, self-styled 7th Prince of the West Indies, Lord of Follies and the Ding-a-Ding Nook, was born and lived in Antigua. He spent the last twenty-five years of his life in an isolated shack on a hillside, surrounded by his writings, some 25,000 typed pages of history, philosophy, and autobiography, and by the extraordinary paintings and carvings for which he is now remembered.
His pictures include figurative scenes, landscapes, abstract compositions, and real and imaginary portraits. They were painted with immediacy and spontaneity on a variety of materials.
credit: http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/2013/09/frank-walter-at-douglas-hyde/

Thursday, January 9, 2014

Monet, the garden at Giverny


Le Givre À Giverny, 1885


Coming into Giverny in Winter, Sunset (1885)


Prateria a Giverny, 1885


The entrance to Giverny under the snow, 1885


Sunset at Giverny, 1886


Meadow at Giverny, Morning Effect (1888)


Grainstack at Giverny, 1889


Springtime in Giverny, 1890


Morning on the Seine, near Giverny 1897


L’Ile aux Orties, 1897

At the beginning of May 1883, Monet and his large family rented a house and 2 acres (8,100 m2) from a local landowner. The house was situated near the main road between the towns of Vernon and Gasny at Giverny. There was a barn that doubled as a painting studio, orchards and a small garden. The house was close enough to the local schools for the children to attend and the surrounding landscape offered many suitable motifs for Monet's work. The family worked and built up the gardens and Monet's fortunes began to change for the better as his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel had increasing success in selling his paintings. By November 1890, Monet was prosperous enough to buy the house, the surrounding buildings and the land for his gardens. During the 1890s, Monet built a greenhouse and a second studio, a spacious building well lit with skylights.

Monet wrote daily instructions to his gardener, precise designs and layouts for plantings, and invoices for his floral purchases and his collection of botany books. As Monet's wealth grew, his garden evolved. He remained its architect, even after he hired seven gardeners.

Monet purchased additional land with a water meadow. In 1893 he began a vast landscaping project which included lily ponds that would become the subjects of his best known works. White water lilies local to France were planted along with imported cultivars from South America and Egypt, resulting in a range of colours including yellow, blue and white lilies that turned pink with age.
In 1899 he began painting the water lilies, first in vertical views with a Japanese bridge as a central feature, and later on the series of large-scale paintings that was to occupy him continuously for the next 20 years of his life. This scenery, with its alternating light and mirror-like reflections, became an integral part of his work. Monet had achieved, according to Gary Tinterow (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), a completely new, fluid, and audacious style of painting by the mid-1910s in which the water lily pond became the starting point for an essentially abstract form of art.
from wikipedia

Picasso, la lecture

La Lecture, 1932

La Lecture is a painting by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso completed in January 1932. The oil painting depicts Picasso's mistress and muse, Marie-Thérèse Walter, asleep with a book upon her lap. The painting led to the breakup of Picasso's marriage to Olga Khokhlova after she saw it at a retrospective exhibition and realised that the facial features were not her own.
Picasso met Marie-Thérèse Walter in 1927 as she exited the Paris Metro and they later began a relationship, which they kept secret because she was only seventeen and Picasso was married to Olga Khokhlova.

Benjamin Bohnsack


Untitled (Luftbahn 02), 2010, 
Tempera on canvas 180 x 200 cm