Arcimboldo

Let's talk about Art!

Who: Giuseppe Arcimboldo
When: Born in 1526, Died in 1592
Where: Born in Milan, traveled to Lombardy, worked in Vienna, then Prague, finally returned to Milan
What: an amazing artist you have probably never heard of before
For more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Arcimboldo

Arcimboldo is best known for his detailed and fanciful portraits, most of which are made up of a variety of plants, animals and objects put together to create a person. The individual pieces of each portrait contribute to the overall sense of who the person is that is being portrayed. Every detail is built from smaller objects and items to provide a sense of who the person in the portrait actually is. In the portrait of Spring, featured below, over 80 different species of flowers have been identified.

Arcimboldo was greatly influenced by Leonardo da Vinci, who had spent considerable time in Milan as a court artist. Historians report that much of Arcimboldo's early work was done as a natural illustrator of birds, plants, and animals, all of which were completed in the style of da Vinci. During his lifetime Arcimboldo served Maximillian II, who became Holy Roman Emperor in 1564, and Rudolf II, who succeeded his father in 1576.

Throughout his years serving the Roman Emperors Arcimboldo painted many portraits of the court (few of which have survived) as well as the more fanciful compositions I have included here. In his later years he explored the challenge of reversible paintings, such as the one above, which can be viewed from the top OR the bottom. In this case the painting is either a bowl of produce or a gardener. I suppose for the fickle art lover this is the best of both worlds, you can have a still life one day and a portrait the next!

Extreme Exposure

Let's talk about Art!

What: The Annenberg Space for Photography
Current Exhibit: Extreme Exposure
When: exhibit opened in October 2010 and will run through April 17, 2011
Where: 2000 Avenue of the Stars #10, Los Angeles, CA, 90067
Hours: Wednesday - Sunday, 11:00 am - 6:00 pm, closed Monday and Tuesday
Cost: General admission is free, you only have to pay for parking (on the weekend with validation it cost $1, I don't know about the weekdays)
Website (for more info): http://www.annenbergspaceforphotography.org/

The current exhibit is called Extreme Exposure and is a combination of five photographers' works. Each of these photographers have done amazing work in some of the Earth's most extreme environments (hence the exhibit name!). The exhibit can be explored through a combination of photographs, video shorts that allow the photographers to explain or expand on the works you see, Microsoft surface tables, and a library with further reading and longer videos.

I was touched and awed by the works I saw in the exhibit.

• Clyde Butcher has done stunning black and white film work in Florida and throughout the nation's national parks. As I viewed many of his pieces I felt if I took one step forward I would be in the photograph and no longer observing it. If I closed my eyes I imagined I would hear the sounds of the swamp just from looking at his pictures of the Florida wetlands. 

• Paul Nicklen's photographs showed me animals throughout the coldest climates in the world, above and under water. His work is stunning and his methods are terrifying for anyone sane. From leopard seals to narwhal whales to polar bears to penguins he allowed me to see these animals in ways I have never seen before.

• Michael Nichols had some of the most amazing animal photographs I have ever witnessed. Tigers leaping from cliffs, owls swooping down for food, hippos surfing and so much more. He also created a phenomenal photograph of a redwood tree that stopped me in my tracks (you have to see it to believe it).

• Donna and Stephen O'Meara are a wife and husband team who have spent their lives taking stunning pictures of erupting volcanoes all over the globe. The colors and compositions are bold and beautiful.Their images of the volcano that erupted in Iceland in April of 2010 are gorgeous.

Each of these amazing photographers seemed to become part of their environment and it shows in their finished works. If you are in Los Angeles and have a chance to visit the exhibit I HIGHLY recommend it!

Happy Art-ing!

All-in-one Postcard!

I received a post card in the mail last week! It is always a treat to get something that is not a bill or an advertisement or a necessary piece of correspondence, but this was particularly exciting because it contained all three elements of my blog title: Food, Art, and Flora!

Below is the postcard:

Now, I will admit, this is an odd sort of picture, yet perfect for me! In case you are not certain about the elements I have labeled below... Food in the form of chiles. Art in the form of painted mailboxes. Flora in the form of the wreath and paintings of plants on the mailboxes.

Dear friend, thank you for thinking of me and sending the postcard!

Art and Resistance.

I am reading a book right now called "The War of Art", by Steven Pressfield. It is about overcoming the blocks that prevent us from doing the creative work we feel called to do. The following section significantly altered the way I look at resistance, so I thought I would share it with you.

In some ways I think this is like breaking through a big brick wall. 

Resistance and Love

Resistance is directly proportional to love. If you're feeling massive Resistance, the good news is, it means there's tremendous love there too. If you didn't love the project that is terrifying you, you wouldn't feel anything. The opposite of love isn't hate; it's indifference.
The more Resistance you experience, the more important your unmanifested art/project/enterprise is to you - and the more gratification you will feel when you finally do it.

Art. Lost between Food and Flora.

I look back over the last few months and note there have not been too many postings about Art; I have been much more focused on Food and Flora. I have decided it is time to change that trend.

Some would say that the fields of gardening and cooking, and their subsequent explorations, are art in their own right, and I would not argue with this statement. Growing and tending plants is not just about soil, sun and water; there is definitely an art to their cultivation. Cooking is similar to starting with a blank canvas, but instead of paints, I start with garlic, onions, olive oil, then combine them together, hoping to make something artfully delicious. 

The word 'art' has many definitions; I found sixteen in the dictionary. I happened to like the sixteenth best. It defined art as "science, learning and scholarship." That of course got me thinking about what do each of those words mean and what does that mean for a definition of 'art'?

• Science is a "knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation." (second definition out of seven)
• Learning is "to acquire knowledge, mastery or understanding by study or experience." (first definition out of three)
• And finally, scholarship is "learning or knowledge acquired by study." (first definition of four)

So what does all this mean?

Based on the definition of art being science, learning and scholarship I see the following results:

• Art is about knowledge
• Art involves observation and experimentation
• Art is about understanding a subject through experience (possibly observation or experimentation) 
• Art is about learning

I think the last part is the most important, ART IS ABOUT LEARNING.

Art is not just about the artist learning about the subject matter and mastering it. It is also about the artist helping others learn about their subject. It is about sharing knowledge and a unique point of view, based on observations and experiments.

If art is about knowledge and learning, and the learning is not just for the artist, but the audience as well, I think then, there are two additional statements that help shape my definition of art:

• Art is about teaching
• Art can change the world through the sharing of knowledge

Everyone practices art, whether painting or writing or acting or singing or cooking or gardening or sewing or crafting or speaking or something else entirely. The art that you practice is a way for you to interact with the world and share your mastery and your point of view.

How does your art change the world?

Definitions from Websters Dictionary.

Monet

I know, another impressionist artist - I just love that phase of art, so here are a few highlights from one of my favorites.

• Claude Monet, born in 1840, died in 1926.
• Applied to art school multiple times in his early life, but was denied. Eventually served in the military and was honorably discharged.
• Started seriously painting in 1862 (at the age of 22) - almost no paintings exist from this period in his life.
• Participated in his first independent artist's exhibit in 1874 - continued to participate in exhibits for the rest of his life
• Throughout his career Monet worked with only 6 colors on his palette - lead white, cadmium yellow, vermilion, deep red, cobalt blue, and emerald green
• In 1883 (at the age of 43) Monet started painting on multiple canvasses at one time. He would pick a site, set up multiple canvasses and work on each one in succession as the light changed. He could have up to 12 canvasses going at one time in one site.
• In 1887, at the age of 47, Monet achieved his first year of financial stability as an artist.

• 1888 was Monet's first year of painting wheat stacks
• 1892 was the first year Monet painted the Rouen cathedral
• The water pond was first drafted by Monet in 1893 - it was eventually built on his property at Giverny. Over the years the pond evolved and grew to involve an island, 4 bridges and multiple installments of plants

• Monet first started painting the water lilies there in 1903. He continued to paint water lilies until his death in 1926.
  
• Throughout the years Monet was seized by bouts of melancholy - it is estimated that he may have destroyed as many canvasses as are still in existence today during those low times.
• In 1908 Monet started going blind - but he continued to paint until 1926, when he died.
• Look at the cathedral paintings - can you tell which was painted at what time of day? Can you feel the differences in the colors?
  
• The same with the japanese bridge in his garden - can you feel what time of day Monet might have been painting based on the colors?
  

Is it Art?

I think this is a fascinating interactive website that could be art... or it could be an interesting way to quantify feelings... or it could just be pretty... or it could be a complete waste of time (but I don't think so) or... you be the judge and check it out for yourself!!!

www.wefeelfine.org

So these 2 guys (Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar) decided to "harvest" human feelings from blogs all over the world. They took the feelings and gave them colors and shapes depending on whether the feelings were happy or sad and how strong they were. The shapes bounce all over the screen (Madness) and you can click on them to see what they mean - the blog that matches that feeling (sometimes it has a picture linked to it) will post at the top of the screen. These guys have created a database of millions of feelings - and made the database pretty! What a cool way to share information!!

In addition to displaying feelings in Madness (random bouncing shapes with colors), they have also created visual displays of their database that include montages of pictures, quivering mounds of feelings and metrics (numbers) linked with colors. All of this is interactive.

I know this is not what you think of as typical artwork, but it's a pretty interesting and a fresh way to show a database of information. I find myself mesmerized by the Madness display and the crazy spinning scene of colors.

Couldn't the mass of human feelings consolidated into one interactive display be considered artwork?
Enjoy the Madness!!

Kandinsky

Vassily Kandinsky is another favorite artist of mine. He was born in 1866 in Moscow and died in 1944. He traveled extensively throughout Europe and Asia, lived in Moscow, Munich, Berlin, and Paris, and was married twice. For many he is known as "the father of abstract painting" - though not because he was the first abstract painter, but instead because of the depth and breadth of his work from 1900 to 1944.

Kandinsky was a prolific painter, producing a great variety of work, which I will discuss next. He was also an influential writer and professor of the arts, detailing his thoughts on color, composition, and culture. Kandinsky believed a true work of art should involve music, color and movement. Over his years as an artist he was active in many organizations that furthered the theory and study of art.

For those who study art history Kandinsky's works can broken down roughly into three separate phases. First, he spent much time studying color and seems to have derived inspiration from the impressionist movement and the use of dots and dashes of color. This phase of his art work lasted from 1900 to approximately 1914, and was also known as his "heroic" years; he spent most of this time period in Munich.

In 1914, when WWI started, Kandinsky left Munich for Switzerland and eventually ended up back in Moscow where he seemed to produce very little art work from 1917 to 1921. In 1922 Kandinsky returned to Germany and landed in Munich at a German art school, called Bauhaus. During these years he entered his next phase of painting and seemed to take a distinct interest in the importance of structure and geometry in painting. His paintings were still rich with color and contrast, but the subjects became far more geometric and abstract.

In 1933 Kandinsky made his final move, coming to Paris where he continued to paint. His paintings entered their third phase during this time becoming more organic. In the world of art history, one would say his paintings became biomorphic (to me this means if I were to look at a slide on a microscope of a bunch of cells the stuff I saw on the slide would be similar to the stuff in Kandinsky's paintings). His paintings during this period were described as pulsating with life and living substance.

I have attached three paintings from throughout his lifetime. Can you tell which painting came from which period in his life?

Here's a hint - the first is called Blue Rider (painted in 1903), the second is called Study of Squares (painted in 1913), and third is called Dominant Curve (painted in 1936).

Vincent

One of my all-time favorite artists is Vincent Van Gogh. Today I wanted to share a little bit about his life and a cool place in LA where you can see one of my favorite paintings of his.

Vincent was born in the Netherlands on March 30th, 1853. His father was a reverend; he had 2 brothers and 3 sisters. In his early years Vincent followed in his father's footsteps, working as a preacher at a parish and doing missionary work. In 1880 he abandoned this path and began drawing. Finding his calling in art he experimented with pen-and-ink, lithography, and oils, especially blazing trails in the use of complementary colors in his paintings.

Throughout his life Vincent was unlucky "in love", first falling in love with a girl who was already engaged. Next his affections landed on a widow who rejected him. He spent time with a prostitute who gave him venereal disease (for which he needed treatment), had an affair with an older woman who tried to commit suicide on him, and cut off his own ear following a quarrel with another painter and presented it to a woman.

In the last years of his life Vincent spent much of his time being hospitalized or in an asylum, though he was still able to paint and some of his most magnificent works (I think) came from these last years of his life. On July 29th, 1890, Vincent died after shooting himself 2 days earlier. His brother was by his side.

Somewhere in the midst of the hospitalizations, the year after he cut off his ear (1888), Vincent painted my favorite piece, Irises. I love the colors, the broad brush strokes, the lone white iris amongst the purple. I also love the fact that he actually signed this painting. Throughout his career Vincent did not often sign his work. He felt it was arrogant to sign his paintings and when he did he would only sign as "vincent" and often it was to add a certain color to an area. For some reason he chose to sign Irises and that makes it even more interesting to me.

Irises is currently on display at the Getty museum, in Los Angeles. Check out the website below for information on hours and visiting - the thing I love about this museum is it's free! When you pull into the parking lot you pay $10 to park, then ride a tram up to the museum. The exhibits, gardens, sculptures are all free for you to view at your leisure! If you are ever in LA it is worth the trip, at the very least to check out the VanGogh paintings (although I will admit the rest of the artwork is not too shabby either).
http://www.getty.edu/