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Monday, 11 May 2009
Rapeseed oil - the way forward...
Great locally produced (in Yorkshire) rapeseed oil from Breckenholme Trading Company. The benefits are vast; taste, health, environmental...
www.btcyorkshire.co.uk
www.btcyorkshire.co.uk
JMW Turner - Ulysses deriding Polyphemus
from www.2blowhards.com
Turner created a mythological painting that Ruskin felt was perhaps his finest accomplishment (and which was duly copied by Moran a copy that hung in his studio for the rest of his life.)
J. Turner, Ulysses deriding Polyphemus Homer's Odyssey, 1829; composition study of the same
The mythological subject matter here allows Turner to 'personify' nature more gracefully than in the previous example. In this episode from 'The Odyssey,' Ulysses, having put out Polyphemus's eye and escaped with his surviving crew from the Cyclops's cave, is making for open sea at top speed, while the wounded giant has been blindly throwing great boulders in an attempt to sink the ship. Knowing his prey has escaped, however, Polyphemus craftily asks the name of the one who maimed him. Ulysses, blinded in his own turn by pride, names himself, not realizing that Polyphemus will ask his divine father to take revenge on the wily Greek. As Michael Bockemuhl points out, in Turner's painting the 'divine' elements of the story are pictorially identified with the energies of nature:
Polyphemus' at upper left'can hardly be distinguished from his surroundings, almost disappearing into it Nereids and a number of mythical fish may be seen in front of the ship's bow. These figures, too, cannot be clearly distinguished from their background. The effect of their transparent forms is as if they were woven from the foam, the sparkle and the reflections of the water's surface, half-figure, half-glittering wavecrest.
But what I suspect most caught Moran's eye is that Turner has managed to compose this picture so as to create the same rotating, energizing movement of the spectator's eye without the heavy-handed visual metaphor of the Hannibal picture. As the composition study shows above, the eye travels around a 'diamond shape,' starting from Ulysses' ship, following a diagonal downwards past the rising sun to the sea, up along the sail of another ship, then bouncing off the edge of the canvas and running up along the gold-flecked clouds, finally dipping downward past Polyphemus on the hilltop, half-obscured with mist, and down to the dark note of the Cyclops' deadly cave. In doing so, the composition incorporates the not-very-visible protagonists into the larger pattern of the landscape about them, underlining the theme of the picture: that human nature is merely one part of the dynamic 'natural order.' The same energies that drive the tiny human Ulysses also drive the huge monster Polyphemus, while the thrust of the hero's escaping ship echoes the rising sun. Moreover, while Turner presents us with a glorious, golden-toned landscape as the setting in which an adrenalin-drunk Ulysses stupidly forgets himself and blabs his name, the painter does so to remind us that Nature, even when it presents itself as benevolent, hides a threatening power that will ultimately humble the pride of even the most heroic of men.
Full article here
Georges Seurat - A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
The island of la Grande Jatte is in the Seine in Paris between La Defense and the suburb of Neuilly, bisected by the Pont-de-Levallois. Although for many years it was an industrial site, it is today the site of a public garden and a housing development. In 1884, the island was a bucolic retreat far from the urban center.
Seurat spent two years painting it, focusing scrupulously on the landscape of the park. He reworked the original as well as completed numerous preliminary drawings and oil sketches. He would go and sit in the park and make numerous sketches of the various figures in order to perfect their form. He concentrated on the issues of color, light, and form. The painting is approximately 2 by 3 metres in size (approx. 6 feet 10 inches x 10 feet 1 inch).
Motivated by study in optical and color theory, he contrasted miniature dots of colors that, through optical unification, form a single hue in the viewer's eye. He believed that this form of painting, now known as pointillism, would make the colors more brilliant and powerful than standard brush strokes. To make the experience of the painting even more vivid, he surrounded it with a frame of painted dots, which in turn he enclosed with a pure white, wooden frame, which is how the painting is exhibited today at the Art Institute of Chicago.
In creating the picture, Seurat employed the then-new pigment zinc yellow (zinc chromate), most visibly for yellow highlights on the lawn in the painting, but also in mixtures with orange and blue pigments. In the century and more since the painting's completion, the zinc yellow has darkened to brown—a color degeneration that was already showing in the painting in Seurat's lifetime.
Friday, 8 May 2009
Ghost in the Machine
Thursday, 7 May 2009
Renoir & Monet - La Grenouillère, 1869
Renoir
Monet
La Grenouillère (`The Froggery') was a restaurant and bathing place on a small branch of the Seine at Croissy. It was an extremely popular area because the Railway line from Paris to Saint-Germain, the first to be opened in France, had a station at nearby Chatou. Both Monet and Renoir painted several views of it in 1869 (Monet: La Grenouillère, Metropolitan Museum, New York; Renoir: La Grenouillère, Oskar Reinhardt Collection, Winterthur, Switzerland). Several successful academic painters had houses nearby, and the place was extensively written about, sometimes approvingly, sometimes not so, during the 1860s. It was thought of as a very `contemporary' subject, and its popularity was confirmed in the year that Monet and Renoir painted it, when it was visited by the Emperor Napoleon III and Eugénie, his wife.
Bathing at La Grenouillère by Claude Monet
In this painting, Monet's brushwork is vigorous and the individually distinguishable brushmarks indicate that hog's hair brushes between about 1-2cm (2/5-4/5in) wide were used. There is little variation between the size of stroke in foreground and background to suggest depth, although more uniformly straight horizontal strokes and pastel shades on the distant water aid the impression of depth and recession. His brushwork is strongly descriptive, catching the character of different forms. Long unbroken strokes outline the boats, short horizontal daubs indicate the foreground water, abrupt jabs are used for flowers and foliage. Monet rejected traditional, smooth brushwork which created an illusion of surface texture; instead, his varied handling helps to evoke the actual natural textures. Monet's talent for summarizing the essential character of his landscapes was already apparent in his early caricatures, which demanded an ability to capture basic features concisely.
Monet's palette for this picture was already fairly limited, moving toward the restricted range of the Impressionists. Black--the absence of light--appears to have been abandoned, confirming his move away from Manet's influence. Most of the colors typically found in Monet's Impressionist palette are already in evidence. Vermilion, one of the few traditional colors used by Monet, has been identified virtually pure in the red flowers on the left, and mixed with other colors elsewhere. The greens were viridian, emerald and chrome, the latter a commercially produced mixture of Prussian blue and chrome yellow widely marketed in the period. All three greens were modern colors. Chrome yellow and lemon yellow mixed, were used in the brightest greens of the background trees. Because of their tendency to blacken in the presence of sulphides, the chrome yellows were abandoned by most of the Impressionists toward the end of the 1870s. Monet replaced them with the more stable cadmium yellows. Cobalt violet, available from 1859, was the first opaque pure violet pigment to appear on the market and was therefore rapidly adopted by artists. It was used here by Monet in mixtures, for example in the foreground water. The early eighteenth century invention, Prussian blue, was used by Monet in the darkest mixtures, such as the swimming costumes, while cobalt blue is the bright blue of the water. Lead white was consistently used by Monet throughout his career, but, as strong contrasts form the basis of this composition, its role in this picture was relatively limited. In his paintings from the 1870s on, lead white was liberally used in most of his color mixtures, bringing with it a new overall brilliance and pale pastel-like quality, as he sought to depict the light tones and minimal light-dark contrasts of full sunlit landscapes. Interestingly, a family of colors commonly used by Monet from the early 1870s, the red alizarin lakes, has not been identified on this picture. The artificial alizarin, more permanent than the natural organic root derivative madder lake, was only discovered in 1868, which may account for its absence here. Both Prussian blue and probably chrome green were abandoned by Monet during the 1870s. Monet combined slurred wet-in-wet mixing on the canvas with premixed hues. For example, the somber colors on the boats are obtained by mixing complementaries, like red and green, which give darkish neutral hues that are more colorful than those made by sullying a color with black.
The apparently accidental nature of the composition is deceptive. The striking horizontal of the duckboard, which cuts right across the picture surface, is placed almost exactly halfway up the picture. This was an unconventional device at this date. The broad shapes of light and dark above and below that line echo each other, giving a flat decorative unity to the composition which is reinforced by the harmonizing colors and patterned brushwork. Thus, even at this early stage in his career, Monet was already preoccupied with contrasts of naturalistic illusion and flat pattern, which were to become a feature of Impressionism, and to remain with Monet throughout his life.
taken from www.ibiblio.org
Monet
La Grenouillère (`The Froggery') was a restaurant and bathing place on a small branch of the Seine at Croissy. It was an extremely popular area because the Railway line from Paris to Saint-Germain, the first to be opened in France, had a station at nearby Chatou. Both Monet and Renoir painted several views of it in 1869 (Monet: La Grenouillère, Metropolitan Museum, New York; Renoir: La Grenouillère, Oskar Reinhardt Collection, Winterthur, Switzerland). Several successful academic painters had houses nearby, and the place was extensively written about, sometimes approvingly, sometimes not so, during the 1860s. It was thought of as a very `contemporary' subject, and its popularity was confirmed in the year that Monet and Renoir painted it, when it was visited by the Emperor Napoleon III and Eugénie, his wife.
Bathing at La Grenouillère by Claude Monet
In this painting, Monet's brushwork is vigorous and the individually distinguishable brushmarks indicate that hog's hair brushes between about 1-2cm (2/5-4/5in) wide were used. There is little variation between the size of stroke in foreground and background to suggest depth, although more uniformly straight horizontal strokes and pastel shades on the distant water aid the impression of depth and recession. His brushwork is strongly descriptive, catching the character of different forms. Long unbroken strokes outline the boats, short horizontal daubs indicate the foreground water, abrupt jabs are used for flowers and foliage. Monet rejected traditional, smooth brushwork which created an illusion of surface texture; instead, his varied handling helps to evoke the actual natural textures. Monet's talent for summarizing the essential character of his landscapes was already apparent in his early caricatures, which demanded an ability to capture basic features concisely.
Monet's palette for this picture was already fairly limited, moving toward the restricted range of the Impressionists. Black--the absence of light--appears to have been abandoned, confirming his move away from Manet's influence. Most of the colors typically found in Monet's Impressionist palette are already in evidence. Vermilion, one of the few traditional colors used by Monet, has been identified virtually pure in the red flowers on the left, and mixed with other colors elsewhere. The greens were viridian, emerald and chrome, the latter a commercially produced mixture of Prussian blue and chrome yellow widely marketed in the period. All three greens were modern colors. Chrome yellow and lemon yellow mixed, were used in the brightest greens of the background trees. Because of their tendency to blacken in the presence of sulphides, the chrome yellows were abandoned by most of the Impressionists toward the end of the 1870s. Monet replaced them with the more stable cadmium yellows. Cobalt violet, available from 1859, was the first opaque pure violet pigment to appear on the market and was therefore rapidly adopted by artists. It was used here by Monet in mixtures, for example in the foreground water. The early eighteenth century invention, Prussian blue, was used by Monet in the darkest mixtures, such as the swimming costumes, while cobalt blue is the bright blue of the water. Lead white was consistently used by Monet throughout his career, but, as strong contrasts form the basis of this composition, its role in this picture was relatively limited. In his paintings from the 1870s on, lead white was liberally used in most of his color mixtures, bringing with it a new overall brilliance and pale pastel-like quality, as he sought to depict the light tones and minimal light-dark contrasts of full sunlit landscapes. Interestingly, a family of colors commonly used by Monet from the early 1870s, the red alizarin lakes, has not been identified on this picture. The artificial alizarin, more permanent than the natural organic root derivative madder lake, was only discovered in 1868, which may account for its absence here. Both Prussian blue and probably chrome green were abandoned by Monet during the 1870s. Monet combined slurred wet-in-wet mixing on the canvas with premixed hues. For example, the somber colors on the boats are obtained by mixing complementaries, like red and green, which give darkish neutral hues that are more colorful than those made by sullying a color with black.
The apparently accidental nature of the composition is deceptive. The striking horizontal of the duckboard, which cuts right across the picture surface, is placed almost exactly halfway up the picture. This was an unconventional device at this date. The broad shapes of light and dark above and below that line echo each other, giving a flat decorative unity to the composition which is reinforced by the harmonizing colors and patterned brushwork. Thus, even at this early stage in his career, Monet was already preoccupied with contrasts of naturalistic illusion and flat pattern, which were to become a feature of Impressionism, and to remain with Monet throughout his life.
taken from www.ibiblio.org
Wednesday, 6 May 2009
Paul Gauguin - Fatata te Miti & Parau na te Varua ino
Paul Gauguin's famous guise as the original Western savage was his own embellishment upon reality. No mere bohemianism, that persona was, for him, the modern sequel to the "natural man" constructed by his idol, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Gauguin's rejection of the industrialized West for an earthly paradise embraced, in artistic terms, all handmade arts and crafts as equivalent creative endeavors. As his own ideal artist-artisan, he produced an abundant, cross-fertilizing body of work in many media, dissolving the traditional boundaries between high art and decoration. Full Bio
Parau na te Varua ino (Words of the Devil), 1892
Lured to Tahiti in 1891 by reports of its unspoiled culture, Gauguin was disappointed by its civilized capital and moved to the countryside, where he found an approximation of the tropical paradise he had expected. The Tahiti of his depictions was derived from native folklore supplemented by material culled from books written by earlier European visitors and overlaid with allusions to western culture. The pose of the standing nude, for instance, is derived from a medieval statue of the biblical Eve and more distantly from the Venus Pudica of classical sculpture. The artist placed this rich combination of references to original sin, the loss of virginity, and occidental standards of beauty and art within the context of his Tahitian mythology and primitive, non-European aesthetics.
The meaning of the title Parau na te Varua ino is unclear. The phrase varua ino, evil spirit or devil, refers to the masked kneeling figure and parau means words, suggesting the interpretation "Words of the Devil." The meaning of many of Gauguin's Tahitian paintings remains elusive. There is little likelihood that Gauguin's original audience would have been able to interpret the Tahitian legends that Gauguin carefully inscribed on most of the sixty-six paintings he took back to Paris in 1892.
Fatata te Miti (By the Sea), 1892
Like Parau na te Varua ino, Fatata te Miti was painted during Gauguin's first trip to Tahiti. Its setting, in fact, is quite similar. The two paintings share brilliant pink sands and vividly colored accents, the brilliant fringed blossoms of the phosphorescing hutu, and on the left the same unusually shaped tree. These similarities point to Gauguin's use of "documents," the term he used for sketches and working drawings that he would incorporate into many paintings and prints.
Their similarities invite us to compare the two works, and in other respects we find they are quite different. Where Parau na te Varua ino is densely symbolic, this painting is a more straight-forward depiction of life on the island. One woman removes her pareo to join a companion already plunging into the sea for a swim. Nearby a man fishes with a spear. The intense, tropical colors—hot oranges and cool blues—convey sensual delight. This is the effortless and uninhibited paradise that Gauguin had hoped to find in the South Seas. Little remained of this life, however, by the time Gauguin reached Tahiti. Polynesian culture had been transformed by western missionaries and colonialism, and the ancient religion replaced by Christianity. Gauguin wrote and illustrated a manuscript about Polynesian mythology, but most of what he knew about the island gods came from previously published sources.
Parau na te Varua ino (Words of the Devil), 1892
Lured to Tahiti in 1891 by reports of its unspoiled culture, Gauguin was disappointed by its civilized capital and moved to the countryside, where he found an approximation of the tropical paradise he had expected. The Tahiti of his depictions was derived from native folklore supplemented by material culled from books written by earlier European visitors and overlaid with allusions to western culture. The pose of the standing nude, for instance, is derived from a medieval statue of the biblical Eve and more distantly from the Venus Pudica of classical sculpture. The artist placed this rich combination of references to original sin, the loss of virginity, and occidental standards of beauty and art within the context of his Tahitian mythology and primitive, non-European aesthetics.
The meaning of the title Parau na te Varua ino is unclear. The phrase varua ino, evil spirit or devil, refers to the masked kneeling figure and parau means words, suggesting the interpretation "Words of the Devil." The meaning of many of Gauguin's Tahitian paintings remains elusive. There is little likelihood that Gauguin's original audience would have been able to interpret the Tahitian legends that Gauguin carefully inscribed on most of the sixty-six paintings he took back to Paris in 1892.
Fatata te Miti (By the Sea), 1892
Like Parau na te Varua ino, Fatata te Miti was painted during Gauguin's first trip to Tahiti. Its setting, in fact, is quite similar. The two paintings share brilliant pink sands and vividly colored accents, the brilliant fringed blossoms of the phosphorescing hutu, and on the left the same unusually shaped tree. These similarities point to Gauguin's use of "documents," the term he used for sketches and working drawings that he would incorporate into many paintings and prints.
Their similarities invite us to compare the two works, and in other respects we find they are quite different. Where Parau na te Varua ino is densely symbolic, this painting is a more straight-forward depiction of life on the island. One woman removes her pareo to join a companion already plunging into the sea for a swim. Nearby a man fishes with a spear. The intense, tropical colors—hot oranges and cool blues—convey sensual delight. This is the effortless and uninhibited paradise that Gauguin had hoped to find in the South Seas. Little remained of this life, however, by the time Gauguin reached Tahiti. Polynesian culture had been transformed by western missionaries and colonialism, and the ancient religion replaced by Christianity. Gauguin wrote and illustrated a manuscript about Polynesian mythology, but most of what he knew about the island gods came from previously published sources.
EMBONPOINT
The Word of the Day for May 6 is:
embonpoint \ahng-bohng-PWANG (the "ng" is never pronounced, but the vowels are nasalized)\ noun
: plumpness of person : stoutness
Example sentence:
The judge was a man of stately embonpoint who walked with a heavy step as he entered the courtroom.
Did you know?
"Embonpoint" is most often used to describe people of heavy, but not unattractive, girth. It derives from "en bon point," a phrase from Middle French that means "in good condition." The word was first used as a noun in English in the 17th century. It has subsequently appeared in works by Charlotte Bronte ("a form decidedly inclined to embonpoint" -- Shirley), James Fenimore Cooper ("an embonpoint that was just sufficient to distinguish her from most of her companions" -- Home as Found), and George Eliot ("as erect in her comely embonpoint as a statue of Ceres" -- Adam Bede), among others.
embonpoint \ahng-bohng-PWANG (the "ng" is never pronounced, but the vowels are nasalized)\ noun
: plumpness of person : stoutness
Example sentence:
The judge was a man of stately embonpoint who walked with a heavy step as he entered the courtroom.
Did you know?
"Embonpoint" is most often used to describe people of heavy, but not unattractive, girth. It derives from "en bon point," a phrase from Middle French that means "in good condition." The word was first used as a noun in English in the 17th century. It has subsequently appeared in works by Charlotte Bronte ("a form decidedly inclined to embonpoint" -- Shirley), James Fenimore Cooper ("an embonpoint that was just sufficient to distinguish her from most of her companions" -- Home as Found), and George Eliot ("as erect in her comely embonpoint as a statue of Ceres" -- Adam Bede), among others.
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