Video: Picasso

I am posting this little video because it shows how Picasso created his captivating and unique vision. Enjoy.

The Mystery of Picasso

Video: Vincent Van Gogh

I am posting a lovely and illuminating slideshow of some of Van Gogh's wonderful works. These beautiful pictures are accompanied by Don McClean's emotional and inspirational tribute to the artist.

Vincent

Edvard Munch (1863-1944)

This painting, The Scream, was painted by Munch in 1893. He was thirty years old and his artistic career was in full swing. His art reflects the anxieties and pains of both his times and his own life. He was a troubled man. He lost his mother, his brother, and his sister while he was still very young. His father died when he was twenty-six. He suffered from depression, alcoholism, and chronic illness. He once said that..."sickness, insanity and death were the angels that surrounded my cradle and they have followed me throughout my life".













This painting is called Melancholy, painted in 1891. Many of his paintings appear pessimistic and grim, but they are also haunting and touching. He, like the impressionists that inspired him, was not interested in representational art. He was more interested in engaging humanity and inviting them into the realm of the heart and mind. He explained it thus:

"We want more than a mere photograph of nature. We do not want to paint pretty pictures to be hung on drawing-room walls. We want to create, or at least lay the foundations of, an art that gives something to humanity. An art that arrests and engages. An art created of one's innermost heart."












The influence on Munch by the Impressionists, in style, purpose, colour, and subject matter, can be seen in this painting called Man in Cabbage Field, painted in 1916. Works by Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin are recalled when looking at Munch's art, and all of these are among my favourites.

There is a place in my mind where "The Scream" is well known and reflected. Whenever the noise that passes for music thunders from the flat upstairs, and whenever I hear politicians drone about their reasons for going to war, my soul is one with that marvellous painting. And anyone who has felt lonliness and despair, sorrow and loss will know the truth of Munch's art. Although influenced by others, he has marked his place in art by his own unique style. His subjects, human and vulnerable, are what gives meaning and life to his work.

Camille Claudel: Age of Maturity

The sculpture pictured here is called The Age of Maturity, by Camille Claudel. She was a student of Rodin and also his lover. I discovered this work in the Musee' D'Orsay in Paris. I was stunned. Sometimes a work of art can stop you in your tracks, take hold of your heart, your imagination, and your humanity, and reveal something deep and real about our human condition. This piece did it for me.

There are three figures here. An old man, and old woman, and a young woman. The old man is moving forward but he is trying to reach backwards towards the young woman, who is reaching out to him. The old woman has her arm draped around the old man offering a comforting strength and guiding him forward. His expression is one of agony. He wants to stay, he wants what is behind him. The old woman's expreassion is one of understanding, even pity, but also strength and resignation. The young woman reaches out to the old man with a true longing. Her expreassion is one of begging, pleading, and need.

Life goes in only one direction...towards the future. There comes a time when we have to let go of our past. Put away the desperate desires of youth. Maturity is about facing that time with dignity. Letting go of youth and accepting mortality. Coming to terms with ageing and dying.

Does the young woman represent all that was wonderfull and desireable in the old man's past. Is this why he is reluctant to leave her behind? Is this sculpture a symbol of every mid-life crisis?

Claudel was Rodin's lover and student. But he refused to leave his long term love, Rose, in favour of her. She realised that she would never be Rodin's wife. Is this sculpture just Camille on her knees begging Rodin to stay with her and leave Rose? Perhaps. Perhaps it is that...and more. But I know what it meant to me.

I had just turned 50 when I first saw this piece. I had also been recently diagnosed with leukaemia. Maturity touched me very deeply. It is now, and will remain, one of my favourite works of art.

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) is one of my favourite artists. The first time I stood in a room, at the Tate Gallery in London, filled with his giant, complex, and beautiful paintings I was stunned. I had never been a "fan" of abstract expressionism before coming face to face with Pollock's vision. I could see no meaning or purpose in blobs and streaks of colour past mere decoration.

But my appreciation soon changed. Pollock's canvasses are huge, as they must be. The painting here is called "Galaxy", painted in 1947. The chaos exhibited in Pollock's painting is deliberate and wonderful. His style of working, laying his canvas on the ground and dripping and pouring his paint in practiced frenzy, earned him the nickname of "Jack the Dripper" from Time Magazine.

His art eveolved directly from surrealism and cubism. The artistic desire to break free of mere representative works, and to express the inner landscape of both the artist and the viewer, led to more and more innovation in techniques and style. Pollock was a trailblazer.

The painting above is called "Blue Poles", painted in 1952. At first glance there is little to be understood in Pollock's works. But the more of his works you see, the more you appreciate the talent of the artist. Trying to make sense of Pollock's canvasses is hopeless. Even Pollock eventually stopped naming his works. Why project a name onto something that is pure expression?

Pollock had a short and troubled life. Alcoholism and depression accompanied his success. He died in a car crash at the age of 44.

If anyone is interested in trying their hand at Pollock's style, here is a website that might interest you: http://jacksonpollock.org/

Salvador Dali...Dreamscapes and More

The painting above is called The Persistence of Memory. Dali painted this in 1931 when he was 27 years old. He was, by this time, one of the most famous of the Surrealist artists. Surrealism attempts to portray, through contrasting and illogical imagry, the landscapes of the subconcious mind. Dali was greatly influenced by the new ideas put forward by Sigmund Freud, the father of psycho-analysis. I am fascinated by the ability of Dali to provoke the subconcious mind, to entice it into the conciousness of the viewer, and to allow the viewer to wander into the dreamscapes that he has so skillfully, and sometimes playfully, placed before us.

As a student Dali was exposed to, and mastered, many different styles of painting. From Impressionism to Cubism and from the traditional to the bizzarre, he displayed a talent and a curiousity that would not diminish as he grew older. His personality was as surreal and individual as any work he created. He worked in many different medias and was very much a product of the twentieth century. He used film, literature, music, and television to promote himself, his work, and his vision of the world.

This painting is called The Face of War. He painted this in 1940. By this time he had already seen WWI, the Spanish civil war, and the outbreak of WWII..he was 36 years old. Pictured here is a tormented face, surrounded by serpents. Each tortured orifice of this face is filled with skulls, and each of those skulls is also filled. Death upon death...on and on

This painting is a portrait of the wonderful Mae West. Dali painted this in 1934. I love the way that the portrait is delivered as an optical illusion, at first a room, perhaps an art gallery, and then then the face. Dali often did this in his work. He used to induce a mental state in himself, a sort of double-vision paranoia, and then draw his hallucinations. Seeing faces in clouds and patterned wallpaper is as close as I can come to describing this state. But Dali took this to delightful extremes.

I will leave you with a Dali quote: "One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams. "

Vincent Van Gogh

The painting here is called "A Pair of Shoes" by Vincent Van Gogh. I feel like those shoes sometimes. In a very real way those shoes and I are soul brothers (no pun intended). Old, worn out, scarred, scuffed and weary, they have put many a hard mile behind them and are enjoying a deserved rest. These shoes look strangely comfortable to me, as though the shoes and the wearer had become as one, and they appear to be waiting patiently for the journey to begin once again.

Vincent Van Gogh has long been one of my favourite artists. His work was much more than mere represntation, reproducing the world around him in colour and light. His work reached into the soul of the painter himself and exposed us to an inner landscape. Our own meloncholies and dreams, our fears and hopes, our simple ups and downs are displayed in his wonderful pallet and frantic brush strokes.

The painting here is called "Enclosed Field with Peasant". It is owned by the Indianapolis Museum of Art, if anyone in the neighborhood of Indiana is interested in seeing it. Van Gogh was a prolific artist. His sketches, watercolours, and paintings are many. I have seen them in Amsterdam and Paris, and I never visit London without making a beeline for the National Art Gallery and heading straight for the Van Gogh's.

Vincent Van Gogh opened the door for, and greatly influenced, that school of art called Expressionism . The deliberate distortion of reality and the use of colour and technique to portray the psychological and emotional landscape of the human condition. His use of bright and brilliant colour, coupled with his own unique vision and technique, led Vincent to produce some of the world's most treasured works of art...even though he only managed to sell one of his paintings in his lifetime.

His life as an artist is well documented in his letters to his brother Theo. The mental, emotional, and artistic travails of Van Gogh are played out in these letters. His lack of success as an artist and his failures at love and relationships, coupled with the emotional burden of deep meloncholy lows and manic highs, led to eventual breakdown and suicide. All of this is captured for all time in his work. But, more than all of this, there is pure and honest beauty.