Showing posts with label Painting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Painting. Show all posts

Saturday, January 24, 2015

Impression, Sunrise - Monet


We just learned about the famous work of art the Raphael Rooms by artist Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, also known as Raphael.

Another famous work of art is the painting Impression, Sunrise by artist Claude Monet in 1872 in Paris.

When Monet made this painting, he used very small thin brush strokes.
He tried to make the sunlight look right in his paintings.
He tried to paint simple things like boats, and he tried to paint things that were moving.

When he made this painting, some of the people looking at his art did not like it, so they used the word Impressionism to describe his painting.
Lots of other people liked this style of painting a lot, and they started painting that way.
Today Monet is one of the most famous painters in history.

In this painting you may notice the bright red sun, and the lines in the painting that make it look like things have movement.

(from: wikipedia - impression, sunrise)


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Saturday, January 17, 2015

Raphael Rooms - Raphael


We just learned about the famous work of art The Equestrian Statue of Gattamelata by Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi, also known as Donatello.

Another famous work of art is a collection of paintings called the Raphael Rooms by artist Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, also known as Raphael in Italy in 1509.

Just like Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, these were frescoes.
They were painted during the Italian Renaissance, which was a time when artists from all over Europe came to Italy to share their art and work with other artists.

The leaders of the Catholic church named Pope Julius II asked Raphael to paint four rooms, and in each room to paint all four walls and the ceiling, which is twenty paintings.

Unfortunately, Raphael died after he had only completed two of the rooms, so the other artists that he worked with finished the other rooms.

The first room he painted was The Stanza della segnatura, meaning Room of the Signatura.
The four paintings there were to represent theology (God), philosphy (wisdom), jurisprudence (law) and poetry.

The painting for philosophy was called The School of Athens and many people feel it was his greatest painting ever.

Raphael painted 21 different people in the painting, and the people in the painting are supposed to be famous philosophers through history.
Two of the most famous philosophers were Aristotle and Plato, who are in the middle of the room by the door.
Each of the philosophers is dressed and posed different, to help show who they all are and the things in life they tried to study.

(from: wikipedia - the school of athens)


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Saturday, January 3, 2015

Whistler's Mother - Whistler


We just learned about the famous painting The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Katsushika Hokusai.

Another famous piece of art is the painting Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1 by painter James McNeill Whistler in 1871.

The painting is better known by it's nickname Whistler's Mother, because it is a painting of Anna McNeill Whistler, who was the painter's mother.

Many people have asked what the painting means or what is the story behind it, but the artist Whistler very strongly believed in something called Art for Art's sake.
This means that he believed his paintings should be good enough for someone to enjoy, just by looking at them.
In French this was called l'art pour l'art which means "the art for the art".

Since it is a famous painting of an artist's mother, this painting has been used many times as a way to get people to remember their mothers and feel good about them.

(from: wikipedia - whistler's mother)


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Saturday, December 27, 2014

The Great Wave off Kanagawa - Katsushika Hokusai


We just learned about the famous painting American Gothic by Grant Wood.

Another famous piece of art is the painting The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Japanese painter Katsushika Hokusai in 1830.

This enormous wave in the painting is a wave of the open sea, called okinami.
If you look in the background of the painting you can see Mt. Fuji in Japan.

The style of painting for this artwork is called ukiyo-e, which means pictures of the floating world.
The paintings were woodblock printing, which was a special way for people to make paintings.

First a painter would paint a picture on a piece of very thin paper called washi.
Then someone would glue the paper on to a piece of wood, where a carver would carve traced lines through the paper into the wood to match the painting.
Then they would remove the paper, and paint the colors on to the wooden block.
Next another piece of fresh paper would be put on the block, and pressed hard against it using a tool called a baren. When the paper was pulled away, it would have a print copy of the original painting from the block.

Using this style, they could make many copies of the artwork and sell them to the rich people in the area.


(from: wikipedia - the great wave off kanagawa)


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Saturday, December 20, 2014

American Gothic - Grant Wood


We just learned about the painting Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer.

Another famous piece of art is the painting American Gothic by American painter Grant Wood in 1930.

The story behind the painting is that he was driving around the town of Eldon Iowa and saw an old farmhouse that had a fancy window in it, and he thought it was a bit silly to have a fancy window on such a plain house.
So he paid his sister and his dentist to pose as a farmer and his daughter.

You can notice that the pitchfork the farmer is holding has three prongs.
The three lines just like the pitchfork also show up on the farmer's overalls, his face, and the window of the farmhouse.

People were not happy with the painting at first because they thought Grant Wood was making fun of farmers in Iowa where the painting was done.
They thought he made them look boring and grumpy.

Grant Wood said that he actually liked hard working Americans that were serious and were farmers, and that's why he did the painting.

Very soon after he made this artwork, the Great Depression happened, which was a time where people had to work very hard to even get a little bit of food, and many people lost their jobs and were very poor.

Because this painting looked like serious hard working Americans, it became very famous and people liked it a lot because they thought it was a good picture to show very serious hard working Americans.


(from: wikipedia - american gothic)


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Saturday, December 13, 2014

Girl with a Pearl Earring - Johannes Vermeer


We've just learned about the Luncheon of the Boating Party by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and The Persistence of Memory by Salvadore Dali.

Another very famous painting is called Girl with a Pearl Earring by Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer in 1665.

The artist Vermeer painted what is called a tronie, which is the head and shoulders of a person, usually with a smile or something standing out in the painting, and not necessarily a painting of anyone famous.

The very dark background of the painting makes the woman more noticeable, and the light and dark colors are to make it look like there is a light up to the left shining on her face, and making her face look bright, her lips and eyes and pearl shine.


(from: wikipedia - girl with a pearl earring)


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Saturday, December 6, 2014

Luncheon of the Boating Party - Renoir


We just learned about the painting The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali.

Another famous painting is called the Luncheon of the Boating Party, by French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who is sometimes called just Renoir. (Sounds like uh-en-wah)
This painting shows a bunch of people having lunch on a boat.
When people are painted it is usually called figures.
When things like tables and food are painted it is called still life.
When backgrounds like mountains or sunsets are painted it is called landscape.
This painting combined all three.

Some of the people on the boat were Renoir's friends, and the woman on the bottom left playing with a dog is the woman that Renoir would marry later on.

The painting was made in the year 1881 and Renoir it is called an impressionist painting.
The impressionist painters did things like paint outside in the sunlight when a lot of people thought you should paint indoors.
They used lots of ways to try and show sunlight and brightness in their paintings, to try and make things look alive and happy.

Usually when someone wanted to make something stand out, they would use very sharp strong lines, kind of like the dark lines around the Mona Lisa, but for this painting they used bright colors in front of mixed colors. So the people in the white shirts really stand out in front of their background.

They also used different kinds of mixed colors and bright colors with small brush strokes to make it look like there was light shining off of people and things.
If you look at the white shirt the man is wearing, from far away you can see it as a white shirt, but up very close you can see almost a rainbow of colors like red, blue, pink, orange, yellow and white.


(from: wikipedia - luncheon of the boating party)


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Saturday, November 29, 2014

The Persistence of Memory - Salvador Dali


We just learned about the famous painting The Scream of Nature by Edvard Munch.

Another very famous painting is called The Persistence of Memory by the artist Salvador Dali.

His painting was very strange looking, almost like something weird out of a dream where things are melting.
This painting was using something called surrealism which kind of means taking things from our dreams or imagination and making real looking pictures out of them.

The painting has pocket watches that look like they are melting.
Some people think this painting says something about the way we think about time.
Is it really as simple as we think, where clocks just ticks on every second?
Or can we bend time, mush it around, speed it up or slow it down?
Salvador Dali said he thought of the idea to paint them that way by watching some cheese melt in the sun.


(from: wikipedia - the persistence of memory)


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Saturday, November 22, 2014

The Scream of Nature - Edvard Munch


We've now learned about some famous paintings: The Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo, The Last Supper by Leonardo Da Vinci and The Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh.

Another famous painting is called The Scream and was painted by Edvard Munch.

Munch was a type of painter called an expressionist, which meant that he usually made paintings that looked wild or weird or somehow stood out in a way that made you feel a certain way.

He told the story of how he came up with the idea for this picture.
He was walking along a bridge one day and saw the sky turn blood red, and the way the sun was shining on the city it almost look like all of nature was letting out a scream.

So he used bright bold colors with wavy lines to make the painting stand out and hopefully make you feel almost like you can hear a scream from the painting.

He wrote a poem about when he came up with the idea for his painting:

I was walking along the road with two friends
the sun was setting
suddenly the sky turned blood red
I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence
there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city
my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety
and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.


(from: wikipedia - the scream)


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Saturday, November 15, 2014

The Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel - Michelangelo


We just learned about the famous painting the The Last Supper by Leonardo Da Vinci.

Another very famous painting was the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, painted by Michelangelo.

Over 500 years ago, Michelangelo took on the job to add paintings to the ceiling of a chapel in Italy.
It took him four years to finish it, and it has almost 50 different paintings on it, with over 300 different people in all the paintings.

Michelangelo made something called scaffolding, which were like build up giant platforms for him to stand on while he painted the ceiling way at the top of the building.
He painted on what is called fresco, which means they put on wet paste to build the wall and he painted on it. The wet paste soaked the colors into the wall so it would look really good.

His painting shows many stories from the Bible, and he split the ceiling up into different parts for each area.

In the main top part of the ceiling he made three paintings about Noah, 3 paintings about Adam and Eve, and 3 paintings about God creating the world.
Around each of those paintings, he painted what people think might have been angels, and small shields with other paintings in them.
On the outside of those other 9 paintings, he made paintings of 12 prophets like Isaiah, Daniel and Jeremiah.
Below that he made 14 more paintings showing other people from the Bible like Jacob and Joseph.
In the 4 corners of the ceiling he painted more famous people from the Bible: Moses, Esther, David and Judith.
And in smaller paintings in the triangles between he made 8 paintings of the ancestors of Jesus, like Joseph.

Each one of those paintings that he did would have been a masterpiece in a museum somewhere, and he painted 47 different ones on the ceiling of a building!

Michelangelo was considered a master of painting and sculpting the human form.
That means he was really good at drawing and sculpting muscles, bones and skin so that it looked very real.


(from: wikipedia - sistine chapel ceiling)


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Saturday, November 8, 2014

The Last Supper - Da Vinci


We just learned about Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh.

Another very famous painting by Leonardo Da Vinci was The Last Supper.

It was a painting of the last supper that Jesus had with his disciples before he died on the cross, right when Jesus said that one of them would betray him.

Each disciple's body and face shows a different reaction to the news like anger or surprise.
Jesus is set at the middle of the painting to show that he is the most important.

The number 3 is important for Christians because of what is called the Holy Trinity.
The Father (God), Son (Jesus) and Holy Spirit are three separate but also one complete person.

So in this painting you can see that the disciples are all in groups of three, there are three windows in the back, and even the shape of Jesus is like a triangle, which has three sides.

This painting wasn't done on a canvas like you would hang on a wall, it was done right on a wall in a room.
Because it wasn't done on a painting canvas, the paint on the wall started to look worse year after year.
It was painted over 500 years ago, and many artists have worked very hard to fix up the paint and keep it looking good, which is called restoration.


(from: wikipedia - the last supper (leonardo da vinci))


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Saturday, November 1, 2014

The Starry Night - Van Gogh


We just learned about one of the most famous paintings ever made, The Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci.

Another very famous painting is The Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh.

When Van Gogh was painting, he was trying very hard to be creative and come up with a special style.
Something that wasn't simple like just a painting of a person or a town.

In his painting he used very bright yellows and bold blues to show contrast.
The spinning swirling wind makes it look like there is actually a strong wind blowing through the air.
The big bright stars and moon in the big blue night sky are there to help you imagine about how a clear dark night sky over a sleepy town might look.
Even the dark shape in the front which are cypress trees or bushes are a very strong contrast.

One very interesting thing about this painting is that after Van Gogh painted it, he cut his ear off!
He was at a mental hospital at the time, which is a place you can go if you are worried about life and not making good choices.
One of his friends came and visited him, and shortly after that Van Gogh went a little crazy, cut part of his ear off and ended up in the hospital with a bandage on his head.

He was ok later on, but it is a very famous story about a very famous painter.


(from: wikipedia - the starry night)


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Saturday, October 25, 2014

Mona Lisa - Da Vinci


One of the most famous paintings in the whole world is the Mona Lisa.
It was painted by Leonardo Da Vinci, one of the most famous artists of all time.

It might seem like just a nice painting of a woman, but there were many reasons why people liked it so much.

You might notice in the painting that the woman is sitting in front of what looks like a sky and mountains. She wasn't really sitting in front of that place, Da Vinci drew the background from his imagination. In the time when Da Vinci was living, people usually only painted pictures of real places they had in front of them. To paint an imaginary place without something to look at was a very big deal!

Da Vinci painted the woman's face and hands to look very bright compared to her hair and outfit. When something bright is put up against something dark it is called contrast, and artists sometimes use it to help things stand out more.

The painting also has very dark lines around the woman's hair and body, and the background looks fuzzy and has lighter colors. This helps make the woman look more important in the picture, and makes the background look far away.

The Mona Lisa also has very good perspective. That means it looks ike the woman's arms are in front of her body and the painting is behind her. Even though it is a flat painting, it looks almost like a real person was sitting there. These days we have 3D movies to go see, but in those days making a painting that looked real was the closest thing they had to 3D.

Da Vinci made this painting about 500 years ago, and even to this day it is one of the most well liked paintings in the world.

(from: wikipedia - mona lisa)


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