A word

I was going though my digital art magazines when I came across this quote. "I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to,and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration." Frida Kahlo

I'd really like to use that as a reason as to why I should not explain my art because sometimes I just really can't.

Painting Assignment - Development 2

More of how the painting came to be. This is a progression shot of the picture during my first lesson. I was aiming to get simular colours to the original painting here. As it turned out I had to make the background more interesting later on. I admit it looks pretty flat at this stage.


Adding in the towers,it really annoyed me that I didn't have very good brush control here,but I don't think I've gotten much better since then. I was aiming for some kind of lonely and mysterious place that was errected as something impressive or as a monument to someone. Incidently,the tower ended up looking like a lighthouse. So the picture looks more like a abanndoned sea that dried up eons ago. I did ditch the little shadows that were going to look like gateways. In my original sketch,it was a mysterious set of pillars and towers that had shadowy gates that lead to who knows where. I might do a version of that idea during the holiday.

Now for something vaguely different. I present a tower of another sort. You could go and make your own conclusions here but really I just saw it and said "It's tower-esqe in composition" and took a picture of it. I think the most disturbing thing is,it looks more forlorn than my painting.




This is more or less the final product,I am going to take a better picture of it by the end of the week. But now the tower has a lot better shadows and looks like it's expecting a light from above or falling stars. Go figure. I did learn a lot from painting this,but it seems I forgot most of it when I started my next one. I really don't know where this all ended up,I think I was heading towards a tower in an endless void and it turned into something else. Surprisingly it is somewhat impressionistic which I like.

Meaning Influential

For this lesson,you will require a dictionary.According to dictionary.com

Nostalgia noun
1.A wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one's life, to one's home or homeland, or to one's family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time.
2.Something that elicits or displays nostalgia.
3. The condition of being homesick; homesickness.

Infinite adjective
1.Immeasurably great: an infinite capacity for forgiveness.
2.Indefinitely or exceedingly great: infinite sums of money.
3.Unlimited or unmeasurable in extent of space, duration of time, etc.: the infinite nature of outer space.
4.Unbounded or unlimited; boundless; endless: God's infinite mercy.
5.Mathematics.
a.Not finite.
b.(of a set) having elements that can be put into one-to-one correspondence with a
subset that is not the given set.

Infinite noun
6.Something that is infinite.
7.Mathematics. an infinite quantity or magnitude.
8.The boundless regions of space.
9.The Infinite or the Infinite Being, God.

10.The unlimited expanse in which everything is located; "they tested his ability to locate objects in space"; "the boundless regions of the infinite".

Influences
De Chirico won praise for his work almost immediately from writer Guillaume Apollinaire, who helped to introduce his work to the later Surrealists.

Yves Tanguy wrote how one day in 1922 he saw one of De Chirico's paintings in an art dealer's window, and was so impressed by it he resolved on the spot to become an artist — although he had never even held a brush.

Other artists who acknowledged De Chirico's influence include Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, and Philip Guston. De Chirico strongly influenced the Surrealist movement.

Michelangelo Antonioni, the Italian film director, also claimed to be influenced by De Chirico. Some comparison can be made to the long takes in Antonioni's films from the 1960s, in which the camera continues to linger on desolate cityscapes populated by a few distant figures, or none at all, in the absence of the film's protagonists.

Modern photographer Duane Michals was also influenced by De Chirico.

John Ashbery has called Hebdomeros "probably...the finest [major work of Surrealist fiction]." [1]

Fumito Ueda's critically acclaimed Playstation 2 game Ico (and also its sequel, Shadow of the Colossus, in a less direct way) was strongly influenced by de Chirico. Both games feature children wandering though huge, ancient and otherwise uninhabited buildings, are predominately yellow and green in colour and use music only for cut-scenes, enhancing the feeling of space and sparseness. The box art for Ico used in Japan and Europe is particularly imitative of de Chirico's Melancholy and Mystery of a Street and The Nostalgia of the Infinite.

The 1914 painting Melancholy and Mystery of a Street was used as the cover for the "adult version" UK paperback edition of Philip Pullman's The Subtle Knife, part of the His Dark Materials trilogy. It is appropriate considering the novel's setting of a southern European-looking town that was abandoned by all but a few disowned children.

De Chirico's 1915 painting The Seer (or The Prophet) is featured on the cover of jazz pianist Thelonious Monk's 1958 album Misterioso.

Personally I belive The Lost Thing by Shaun Tan has some inspiration to de Chirico's work. But that is a personal consideration by me.
(c)by Shaun Tan

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This post is part of an art assignment to research a painting,document this research and produce an interpretation of said painting. Such is the power of the internet and the immediate quality of blogging.

Another biography

Giorgio de Chirico

The Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), acclaimed by the surreallists as a forerunner of their movement, founded the school of metaphysical painting.

Giorgio de Chirico was born on July 10, 1888, in Volos, Greece, the son of an engineer from Palermo. The family settled in Athens, where De Chirico studied art at the Polytechnic Institute. His earliest works were landscapes and seascapes.

After the death of his father in 1905 De Chirico, attracted by the German neoromantic school of painting, moved to Munich. There he saw the paintings of Arnold Böcklin and discovered the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, which exercised a great influence on him.

The attraction of Böcklin for De Chirico is best understood from the artist's own words: "Böcklin knew how to create an entire world of his own of a surprising lyricism, combining the preternaturalism of the Italian landscape with architectural elements." De Chirico also spoke of the metaphysical power with which "Böcklin always springs from the precision and clarity of a definite apparition." These statements describe the characteristics of De Chirico's own art.

In 1909 De Chirico went to Italy. The following year he began to execute the paintings that became characteristic of his style, such as the Enigma of the Oracle and the Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon. This style he developed further in Paris between 1911 and 1915, where he worked in isolation and in poor health. When he exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1913, Guillaume Apollinaire called him "the most astonishing painter of his time."

De Chirico had to return to Italy for his military service and was stationed in Ferrara (1915-1918). The architecture of that city, with its far perspectives, deepened his sense of the mysterious. In 1917 he met the painter Carlo Carrà at the military hospital in Ferrara, and they launched the metaphysical school (Scuola Metafisica) of painting, which attempted to create a new order of reality based on metaphysics. Giorgio Morandi, Ardengo Soffici, Filippo de Pisis, Alberto Savinio (De Chirico's brother), and Mario Sironi soon became members of the circle.

Characteristics of His Art

The art of De Chirico centers upon the antithesis between classical culture and modern mechanistic civilization. These two elements are locked in a desperate struggle, and the tragic quality of this situation exudes an aura of melancholy of which De Chirico is a prime exponent. The iconographic elements of his early art - modern railways and clock towers combined with ancient architecture - are to be sought in the artist's childhood memories of Greece. For the strange visual images in which De Chirico cast his mature works (1911-1918), he used an airless dreamlike space in his townscapes with an exaggerated perspective artificially illuminated, with long sinister shadows, and strewn about with antique statues. There is an elegiac loneliness too (the Delights of the Poet, 1913) and the disturbing juxtaposition of such banal everyday objects as biscuits and rubber gloves with those of mythical significance. And De Chirico's new man has no face; he is a dummy (Hector and Andromache, 1917).

A favorite amusement of ancient Greece was the composition of enigmas. In De Chirico's art they symbolize an endangered transitional period of European culture. From the enigma to the riddle presented by one's dream life is but a short step.

Late Works

De Chirico moved to Rome in 1918, and on the occasion of an exhibition that year he was hailed as a great avant-garde master. A year later he became one of the leaders of Valori Plastici, a group of painters espousing traditional plastic values which dominated the artistic scene in Italy at that time. In 1919 an exhibition of De Chirico's works in Berlin made a deep impression on the central European Dadaists. Between 1920 and 1924 his art underwent numerous fluctuations.

In 1925 De Chirico returned to Paris, where the French proclaimed him one of the masters of surrealism. He, however, had quarreled with the Dadaists and surrealists (he corresponded intensely between 1920 and 1925 with Paul éluard and André Breton) and had left this stage of his development far behind.

In Paris, De Chirico designed scenery and costumes for the Ballets Suédois and the Ballets Monte Carlo and began to paint a series of ruins, wild horses, and gladiators. After 1929, the year in which he published a strange dream novel, Hebdomeros, he changed his style entirely, renounced his adherence to the modern movement, and from then on, living in Rome, became not only a fierce critic of modernism but an academic painter of neoclassic character. He died in 1978.

Out of Answers.com
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This post is part of an art assignment to research a painting,document this research and produce an interpretation of said painting. Such is the power of the internet and the immediate quality of blogging.

Painting Assignment - Development

A look into my visual diary.
A look at some of my planning,looks like. After I did the copy(picture coming!) I took on the suggestion of my class mates,to make the tower twist. A friend says it looks like the tower melted.

So I moved on and tried a free-form kind of approach. I had a better picture in my mind so of course,it never came out. I tried to make a tower that had a lot of empty space but it also went up. I don't know if that makes sense. But I think the tower is supposed to be a memory of infinity or is a representation of infinite space. I will write more later.

13th May- According to my teacher,I can have my own opinions as part of my research for this assignment. Looking even harder at the picture and trying to figure out just what it is all about. I might be on the right track with it,maybe the title is somewhat misleading. It might relate to the Tower of Babylon,which was supposably a tower that went on for ever. So the 'tower series' by de Chirico may be a continuation of this - a tower is really a big,long building constructed to go as high as mechanically possible.

Another way of looking at this picture/series is as a continuing theme of searching for a retreat. Everyone likes to have their own private space. It could also be a look into a strange fantasy world. Though I kind of like that idea,lonely towers that go upwards to some dizzy height in a empty world that is barely inhabited. It's very open to interpretation,so what I write here could be right.



Incidently if you look at the next progression of idea development,it looks very simular to another of the Tower Series known as the Great Tower. Perhaps the other ones are all aspiring to become like this monument. I don't know where I was heading,I think I was trying to create this space that was a construction that was open or lead up to somewhere. It's annoying when I can see it in my head by not have it translate to paper!


Something of a final development stage - it of course changed while I was painting it. I think I was going for a long and thin tower with archways that went somewhere or perhaps didn't make sense. I think I'll always be in some fantasical landscape.

Some article on de Chirico - I haven't read it since it might upload spyware on my computer. You have been warned!!
Some notes or a report someone did on de Chirico
A poem based on the Nostalgia of the Infinite
Exposure to the ideas of modern mathematics has led artists to attempt to depict graphically the haunting qualities of the infinite. - An article on modern mathematics

"magic unreality and poetic sensibility of metaphysical images" - de Chirico's work as described by here


Guess who?
He studied art in Athens before moving to Paris where he created such unusual works as "Toys of a Prince", "Sweet Afternoon", and "Nostalgia of the Infinite". Influenced by the writings of Apollinaire and Nietzsche, he founded the movement called "pittura metafisica". For 10 points, name this Italian artist known for long shadows and exaggerated perspectives such as those in "Mystery and Melancholy of a Street."
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This post is part of an art assignment to research a painting,document this research and produce an interpretation of said painting. Such is the power of the internet and the immediate quality of blogging.

Giorgio de Chirico - The Nostalgia of the Infinite

The subject of the painting is a large tower. The scene is struck by low, angular evening light. In the foreground below the tower are two small shadowy figures reminiscent of those in future works by Salvador Dalí. This painting is the most famous example of the tower theme which appears in several of de Chirico’s works.

Though the painting is dated 1911, this date is generally held in question. It has been speculated by the Museum of Modern Art in New York that it was created from 1912 to 1913 while the Annenberg School for Communication suggests 1913-14.

Stealing from here again
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This post is part of an art assignment to research a painting,document this research and produce an interpretation of said painting. Such is the power of the internet and the immediate quality of blogging.

Giorgio de Chirico - Ariadne

This composition presents one of the artist's famous deserted public squares rendered in simple broad forms. Somber monolithic arches on the right cast a heavy geometric shadow filling two�thirds of the right foreground. On the left, seen slightly from above and in a vertical perspective, is the statue of the sleeping Ariadne. The background is sealed by a brick wall, beyond which rises a squat white tower. A distant train approaches from the left, a sailing ship from the right. The palette consists of ocher, deep brown, white, and green.

"Ariadne" is part of a series of five paintings, all of 1913, in which the statue of Ariadne plays a major iconographic role. This statue is a Roman copy of a lost Hellenistic sculpture of Ariadne asleep on the island of Naxos, where she had been abandoned by Theseus. The sculpture of Ariadne had great symbolic meaning for de Chirico, perhaps evoking the classical past to which he had been exposed during his childhood in Greece. In these works Ariadne is seen from various angles, horizontally, vertically, and in partial close-up. The most important paintings in the series are "Ariadne," "The Soothsayers Recompence" (1913; Philadelphia Museum of Art), and "The Silent Statue" (1913; formerly Jean Paulhan, Paris).

"Ariadne" is executed in the dry, thin manner that characterizes de Chirico's works of 1913�14. The artist created this composition, which belongs to his most elegiac early period, while living in Paris (1911�15). The "early" de Chirico, still a painter of simple and magical dreamlike pictures, as exemplified by "Ariadne," became one of the acknowledged predecessors of the Surrealists.

Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
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This post is part of an art assignment to research a painting,document this research and produce an interpretation of said painting. Such is the power of the internet and the immediate quality of blogging.

Giorgio de Chirico - Web crawling

Chirico developed his enigmatic vision in Munich and Italy and from 1911 to 1915 he worked and exhibited in Paris. His powerful, disturbing paintings employ steep perspective, mannequin figures, empty space, and forms used out of context to create an atmosphere of mystery and loneliness. His work exercised a considerable influence on early surrealist painters but was never successfully imitated. In Ferrara, Chirico developed what he termed metaphysical painting, in which he consciously exploited the symbolism of his art. Chirico is represented in leading galleries throughout the world.

Forcibly kidnapped from Fact Monster

Giorgio de Chirico (July 10, 1888 - November 20, 1978) was an Italian painter born in Volos, Greece founded the scuola metafisica art movement. After studying art in Athens and Florence, de Chirico moved to Germany in 1906 and entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where he read the writings of the philosophers Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer and studied the works of Arnold Bocklin and Max Klinger. After 1910 he lived in Italy.

De Chirico is best known for the paintings he produced between 1909 and 1919, his Metaphysical period, which are memorable for the haunted, brooding moods evoked by their images. At the start of this period, his subjects were still cityscapes inspired by the bright daylight of Mediterranean cities, but gradually he turned his attention to studies of cluttered storerooms, sometimes inhabited by mannequins.

He won praise for his work almost immediately from the writer Guillaume Apollinaire, who helped to introduce his work to the later Surrealists. Yves Tanguy wrote how one day in 1922 he saw one of de Chirico's paintings in an art dealer's window, and was so impressed by it he resolved on the spot to become an artist -- although he had never even held a brush! Other artists who acknowledged de Chirico's influence include Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, and Rene Magritte. De Chirico strongly influenced the Surrealist movement.

Later in his life De Chirico abandoned the metaphysical style and started painting more realistically, but with much less success.

De Chirico also published a novel in 1925: Hebdomeros, the Metaphysician. His later paintings never received the same critical praise as did those from his metaphysical period.

Borrowed Giogiro de Chirico ART CENTRE


After studying art in Athens and Florence, de Chirico moved to Germany in 1906 and entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where he read the writings of the philosophers Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer, and studied the works of Arnold Böcklin and Max Klinger.

He returned to Italy in the summer of 1909 and spent six months in Milan. At the beginning of 1910 he moved to Florence where he painted the first of his 'Metaphysical Town Square' series: The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon after the revelation he felt in Piazza Santa Croce. He also painted The Enigma of the Oracle while in Florence. In July 1911 he spent a few days in Turin on his way to Paris. De Chirico was profoundly moved by what he called the 'metaphysical aspect' of Turin: the architecture of its archways and piazzas. It was the city of Nietzsche. De Chirico moved to Paris in July 1911, where he joined his brother Andrea. Through his brother he met Pierre Laprade a member of the jury at the Salon d’Automne, where he exhibitted three of his works Enigma of the Oracle, Enigma of an Afternoon and Self-Portrait. During 1913 he exhibited his work at the Salon des Indépendants and Salon d’Automne, his work was noticed by Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire, he also sold his first painting, The Red Tower. In 1914 through Guillaume Apollianaire, he met the art dealer Paul Guillame, who he signs a contract with for his artistic output.

At the outbreak of the First World War, he decided to return to Italy, arriving in May 1915 when he enlisted in the Italian army. He was considered unfit for work and assigned to the hospital at Ferra. He continued to paint, and in 1918, he transfered to Rome. From 1918 his work was exhibited extensively in Europe. He met and married his first wife, the Russian Ballerina Raissa Gurievich in 1924, and together they moved to Paris. In 1928 he held his first exhibition in New York and shortly afterwards, London.

In 1930 De Chirico met his second wife, Isabella Pakszwer Far, a Russian, with whom he would remain for the rest of his life. Together they moved to Italy in 1932, finally settling in Rome in 1944.

De Chirico is best known for the paintings he produced between 1909 and 1919, his metaphysical period, which are memorable for the haunted, brooding moods evoked by their images. At the start of this period, his subjects were still cityscapes inspired by the bright daylight of Mediterranean cities, but gradually he turned his attention to studies of cluttered storerooms, sometimes inhabited by mannequin-like hybrid figures. Later in his life De Chirico abandoned the metaphysical style and started painting more realistically. His later paintings never received the same critical praise as did those from his metaphysical period.

De Chirico also published a novel in 1925: Hebdomeros, the Metaphysician. His brother, Andrea de Chirico, who became famous as Alberto Savinio, was also a writer and a painter.

Stolen and abused from Wikipedia


Major Italian painter, who founded the metaphysical school. He was born in Volos, Greece, the son of an Italian engineer. He studied art in Athens and in Munich, where he was strongly influenced by the allegorical works of the 19th-century Swiss painter Arnold B�cklin. In Turin and Florence and in Paris, where he settled in 1911, he painted deserted cityscapes, such as Enigma of an Autumn Night (1910) and Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (1914). These early metaphysical works, through sharp contrasts of light and shadow and exaggerated perspective, evoke a haunting, ominous dream world. As an army conscript in Ferrara in 1915 de Chirico met the futurist painter Carlo Carr�; together they founded the magazine Pittura Metafisica in 1920. From 1915 to 1925 de Chirico painted bizarre, faceless mannequins and juxtaposed wildly unrelated objects in his still lifes, a technique adopted by the surrealists. From 1924 to 1930 de Chirico gave enormous impetus to the surrealist movement and influenced such surrealists as Yves Tanguy and Salvador Dal�. By the mid-1930s he had turned to an outworn academic style and chose to become a fashionable portraitist.

As taken from this site here

Another 1 page site about de Chirico

A timeline of de Chirico's life

APdf From the The Philadelphia Museum of Art Also a HTML Google web crawler version

de Chirico Officale website In Italian
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This post is part of an art assignment to research a painting,document this research and produce an interpretation of said painting. Such is the power of the internet and the immediate quality of blogging.

In the Beginning

In the Beginning, The Nostalgia of the Infinite caught my eye. I was already in a relationship with Vase with Fifteen sunflowers so it seemed unfaithful to be looking at someone else. If anyone was too blame it was Dali's fault. I had been researching him approximately 3 weeks before hand and had finally come to some point where I actually understood Surrealism. I could also blame this which had lead me done to this work.

I don't know why it was this game as I have never played it before. It was a random encounter on my usual walk on the net. Despite the size of it,I never venture far enough. Wikipedia seems to part of my safety net.

I only found out this week,Giorgio de Chirico is considered a starting point or an influence for Surrealistic art.

I'm not sure what drew me to this picture,I remember feeling that my substitute painting teacher would tell me that I was picking something too easy. Every one's seen Van Gogh countless times. Of course it never occurred to me at the time that I could choose anything I felt like.

Though it did occur to me that painting sunflowers was difficult and that I still had yet to decide on a way to reinterpret the painting. I blame it on the fact that Ico was on my mind. Perhaps it was the apparent simplicity of it all that convinced me to do it. My eye is always drawn to buildings I don't know why. But buildings as a man-made structure are always easier to remodel than something that has occurred naturally.

And so half an hour later,I was holding both paintings in my hand,trying to decide which one to go for. It later became a split second decision based on the teacher mentioning that The Starry Night should not be appearing in the class,because there is always someone who wants to work it to death. Perhaps not in those words but that is what memory is for. It embellishes.

3 hours later and I had finished making a copy of The Nostalgia of the Infinite. Although I missed painting in the flags,I was quite happy with it. It wasn't a pure copy,but it did give me an excellent view of the composition. Before I started painting it,it was just a strange picture of a tower.

And now I can see the infinite space that was/is occupied within this painting.

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Originally conceived in my head somewhere near the 20th of April.
This post is part of an art assignment to research a painting,document this research and produce an interpretation of said painting. Such is the power of the internet and the immediate quality of blogging.