Check out these visual art images:
Flood at Port-Marly
Image by cliff1066™
Flood at Port-Marly, 1872, oil on canvas by Alfred Sisley
In December 1872, the Seine overflowed its banks at the small village of Port-Marly. The opportunity to paint the watery reflections of a rain-heavy sky lured both Alfred Sisley and Claude Monet. Sisley painted several flood views in 1872, and others a few years later.
Traditionally, artists depicted flood scenes to communicate the drama and destructive power of nature. Sisley, however, who has been called the "purest" of the impressionists, was interested in visual effects only. He painted this picture on the spot, probably in a single session. The colors are the muted and nuanced tones Sisley preferred, and the shapes of his brushstrokes change in response to the different textures of light and the landscape: gliding ripples in the watery reflections, broad square blocks of pigment in the window panes. Sisley chose his vantage points carefully, to frame and compose his views. Notice how he uses the trees and pylon at the right to balance the tall mass of the restaurant on the left and how the dark figures who pole small boats help our eye mark the distance into the background.
www.nga.gov/collection/gallery/gg87/gg87-66436.html
Glenn Brown – Declining Nude (After Pissaro’s Self-Portrait) (2006)
Image by Cea.
oil on panel 140 by 99cm
"Brown’s artistic process today involves scouring the internet for source images. Taking his cue from the founders of Appropriation Art, his quintessentially post-modern approach to painting borrows images from two extremes of visual culture: masters of painting canonised by art history and low-brow, sci-fi illustration which in Brown’s
pantheon is awarded equal status. Unlike the dispassionately cool re-presentation of appropriated images in, say, a Richard Prince photograph, however, Brown’s subjects are filtered through the very personal lens of the artist, any idiosyncrasy amplified by
the long periods of solitary studio time required by Brown’s labour-intensive technique."
Worlds apart
Image by t_a_i_s
www.moma.org –
I recently found this text on the cover of a book called "Museum Watching" by Elliott Erwitt, which I loved and thought I’d share with you:
"I am a dedicated people watcher who loves to see art and art watchers watching. Museums provide irrisistible visual feasts of science, history, art on canvas, in sculpture, in buildings that are themselves art. Blending with displays, spectators provide the human scale, thinking, judging, having fun, feeding sensibilities. It all makes fine hunting for a furtive photographer on the prowl."