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The Girl With a Watering Can
I was browsing thru Renoir stuff when I found this cool painting. One painting caughted my eye, it’s called “A Girl With a Watering Can” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The painting lives in the National Gallery of Art now.
Ophelia in Art
Ophelia is a character from Hamlet. It is said that you can remove her from the play and it works just fine. Hamlet in a sense is a study of madness. Both Ophelia and Hamlet lost their fathers. Hamlet started to hallucinate ghosts that told him to kill. He went on a murder spree. Ophelia reacted by singing and gifting flowers. In a sense, she suffered a childhood regression. She dies by falling from a branch and landing in a river. With her cumbersome dress she drowns or she freezes to death. It depends on the story. On her funeral,...
Artists Transformed by Debilitating Illness or Injuries
The first artist I wanted to talk about is Frida Kahlo. She used to paint for the fun of it. Originally, she was going to be a doctor. One day, her bus crashed. A steel pole pierced right through her. This gave her chronic back pains. Since she had nothing better to do, she started to paint more. Her style didn’t change much, just her subject matters. She got into symbolism a lot. She also tended to depict skulls often, to show her fear and respect of death. When her big exhibition opened, she was in too much pain. Her...
Overpainting in Art and Its Reasons
Overpainting is to paint over something that is more or less finished. The most common reason is to save money. Beneath the Mona Lisa there is another maiden. The canvases were expensive back in the day. So, it was cheaper to just paint over it. Hunt painted over just the face. He had gotten married. For this reason, he changed the face of the woman in the painting. Now, she has the face of the wife and the hair of the other woman. Las Meninas only got a cross. It was important for folks to know that Velazquez was a...
Dancing in Art
We first start by looking at the Ancient Egyptians. They depicted a lot of aspects of their life in their murals. This included art and music. The Greeks and Roman also depicted dancing in their vases. During medieval art, dancing dropped off the face of the earth. It came back with the Greeks in the Renaissance period. Dancing typically appeared in paintings of the Bacchanal. It was rare for dancing to feature contemporary folks. Things continue like so during the baroque and Neoclassical period. The rococo brought a bit of court dancing into the frame. In the 1800s, dancing was...