on alcoholism

“I drank to drown my sorrows, but the damned things learned how to swim.”
- Frida Kahlo [1907-1954]

gek

“Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.”
- Vincent van Gogh

1st truly great British painter

- William Hogarth [1697-1764]

new language of painting

- Jackson Pollock dripped paint upon canvases on the floor.

book a night in Van Gogh's Arles

For $10 here.

action painter

perfect circle

Pericles and Aspasia at the Studio of Phidias

Phidias [5th century BCE] was known to draw perfect circles freehand.

when it becomes something else

Venetian Canal, 1913

"The smartest painter follows his brush."
- Artist George Gallo [born 1956] quoting John Singer Sargent [1856-1925]

not painted in a studio

The Impressionists freed art from 1000 years of tradition.

celebrated rather than criticized

The Twist, 1964

Thomas Hart Benton [1889-1975] celebrated American life rather than criticizing it.

bleak

Eleven A.M., [1926]

Edward Hopper [1882-1967] emphasized the bleakness and despair of modern life.

welfare painter

Carlos Enriquez, 1926

"We always had this dream that she would be recognized and that she'd be able to get some money, but it really did not work out that way."

- Alice Neel's [born 1900] lawyer son Richard, who said that there are very few people who are as right-wing as he is, and that there were very few people who were as left-wing as he was as a kid.

hobby

misanthrope

The Gulf Stream, 1899

"We're all alone on a battered boat, adrift. The figure could be any of us."

Winslow Homer [1836-1910] is regarded by many as America's greatest painter.

Homer might have been inspired by Géricault [1791-1824] here.

generalized personal dilema

Untitled, Gerhard Richter [born 1932], 1990

One has to believe in what one is doing, one has to commit oneself inwardly, in order to do painting. Once obsessed, one ultimately carries it to the point of believing that one might change human beings through painting. But if one lacks this passionate commitment, there is nothing left to do. Then it is best to leave it alone. For basically painting is total idiocy. [1973]

The image of the artist as a misunderstood figure is abhorrent to me. I much prefer the high times, as in the Renaissance or in Egypt, where art was part of the social order and was needed in the present. The suffering, unappreciated Van Gogh is not my ideal. [1993]

An earlier reference on this blog to Van Gogh here.

California Impressionist

Marion K. Wachtel [1875-1954]

self-taught

Winslow Homer [1836-1910], Prisoners from the Front [1866]

Preeminent 19th century American painter.

"Look at nature, work independently, and solve your own problems."

"What they call talent is nothing but the capacity for doing continuous work in the right way."

The material that Homer collected as an artist-correspondent during the Civil War provided the subjects for his first oil paintings. In 1866, one year after the war ended and four years after he reputedly began to paint in oil, Homer completed this picture, a work that established his reputation. It represents an actual scene from the war in which a Union officer, Brigadier General Francis Channing Barlow (1834–1896), captured several Confederate officers on June 21, 1864. The background depicts the battlefield at Petersburg, Virginia. Infrared photography and numerous studies indicate that the painting underwent many changes in the course of completion. [source: Metropolitan Museum of Art]

Artist Armagan was born without eyes