Image Essay #13

GLENN BROWN: COLOR Glenn Brown is an English artist from London whose paintings is finely crafted and often comments on other paintings, copying them but with a twist. Moving from the sweet to the sickly sweet, Glenn Brown makes photo-realistic paintings by mixing together reproductions of other artists' work. From a distance Brown's version appears identical, but on closer inspection is revealed to be painted completely different. There was some controversy over his exhibition at the 2000 Turner Prize, as the artist Tony Roberts closely based one of the paintings on a science-fiction illustration Double Star produced in 1973. This gave rise to a charge of plagiarism. Brown eventually settled the resulting legal action out of court.

I chose this artist because his unique but yet controversial style of painting interests me the most. I believe the reason why we have today’s pieces of art is because something from past artist has inspired us. I believe that early artists inspire Glenn Brown, but he does not copy them.

Brown presents large, meticulously wrought oils inspired by sci-fi imagery and paintings by Salvador Dali and Frank Auerbach. Some critics refer to Brown as an appropriation artist, and he has faced copyright infringement litigation mounted by a number of detractors ranging from pulp novel illustrators to the Dali Foundation. The London-based artist's interpretations of earlier artworks, however, are wildly imaginative. Using a painstaking technique with nearly imperceptible brushwork, ultra-slick surfaces and a witty play on scale and color.

Image Essay #12

PIET MONDRIAN Piet Mondrian is a Dutch painter, who carried abstraction to its limits. Through radical simplification of composition and color, he sought to expose the basic principles that underlie all appearances. He developed "neoplastic" aesthetic involving reduction of paintings to elements of straight lines, primary colors, noncolors. Mondrian created a new style called Neoplasticism, based on some of the ideas of the cubists. He created a series of almost identical geometric paintings based on a theory of universal harmony. Neoplasticism is the theory and practice of the de Stijl group, chiefly characterized by an emphasis on the formal structure of a work of art, and restriction of spatial or linear relations to vertical and horizontal movements as well as restriction of the artist's palette to black, white, and the primary colors.

Mondrian’s goal was to eliminate all traces of representation in favor of balanced compositions of primary color and vertical and horizontal lines. His belief that a canvas—a plane surface—should contain only planar elements led to his abolition of all curved lines in favor of straight lines and right angles. In other words, Neoplasticism represents the absolute elements—primary colors and vertical and horizontal lines—that underlie all appearances. He used vertical and horizontal lines to show that the canvas was a place consisting of right angles. His achievement of balance between unequal parts affected the direction of art, architecture, and industrial design.

In this piece named, Composition with Red, Black, Blue, Yellow and Grey, Neoplasticism is defintly at work. The painting includes straight, grey lines, and the primary colors red, blue, and yellow. The straight lines only create geometric shapes, and no curve lines are present in this piece. This is an above average example because it contains all the pieces that make up a piece of Neoplasticism work of art.

Image Essay #11

ANDY WARHOL Warhol is best known for his silk-screen prints of packaged consumer products, everyday objects, such as Campbell's Soup Cans, poppy flowers, and the banana appearing on the cover of the rock music album The Velvet Underground and Nico , and also for his stylized portraits of twentieth-century celebrity icons, such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Judy Garland, and Elizabeth Taylor.When he started painting, he wanted to find a target for himself. At the time Pop Art, as it was later named, was already an experimental form. Warhol turned to this new style where popular subjects could be part of the artist's vocabulary. His early paintings show images taken from cartoons and advertisements, hand-painted with added paint drips. He added these drips to give his paintings a seriousness by emulating the style of the abstract expressionists that were en vogue at the time. He wanted to be taken seriously or to sell his paintings.

Not only is Andy Warhol well-known for the elements he paints, but how he creates them. Warhol’s use of photo silkscreen is creative because it is a technique traditionally used for mass production for commercial purposes. Photo silkscreen is a printmaking technique that allowed Warhol to repeat images over and over. It contains many layers of rubber glaze and paint. Warhol used photo silkscreen to create some of his most famous works of art. On the website of http://webexhibits.org/colorart/marilyns.html, I listened to a tape recording of an interview with Andy Warhol. He says the reason why he uses artificial colors ( colors that are mixed and are not realistic to the element being painted) because he does not know how to paint realistically. He also says that he tries mixing a flesh tone, but never seems to get the right one. Warhol’s stylistic painting makes his artwork memorable and creative. He may not be the best realsitic painter, but he sure is the best pop culture painter.

Image Essay #10

CHIAROSCURO Chiaroscuro is an important artistic term meaning "light/dark". It implies the deep contrast between light and shadow that gives a sense of drama and tension to a painting. Chiaroscuro helps strengthen the illusion of depth on a two-dimensional surface, and was an important topic among the artists of the Renaissance. The father of chiaroscuro was Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Caravaggio brought this technique to a whole new level, creating an atmosphere of extreme tension by his intense contrasts. After Caravaggio, this became an important feature of Baroque art and was emulated in particular in the many "Caravaggio schools" which were born all over Italy.

This painting by Caravaggio is the best example of the usage of chiaroscuro. The main focus is the main in the center. We know this because he has the brightest value, white, on him. The figures around the man are also painted with a “shadow” of light, but none as bright as the man in the middle. The background negative space is shaded with a dark value. This makes a good contrast between the figures and background. When chiaroscuro is used in this painting, it seems as if there is a window on the left hand side, but we know in fact that there is not because of the background and space around the figures,