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.

Towers

A few things about towers since the subject of the paintings are tower(s).
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower
Towers are tall man-made buildings, always (and usually much) taller than they are wide. Towers are generally built to take advantage of their height, and can stand alone or as part of a larger structure. Examples of the various uses of towers include:

* To save ground-level space: skyscrapers, cooling tower, chimney
* To enhance views: tourist towers, air-traffic Control tower, railroad yard tower, harbor control tower, filming tower
* To increase strategic advantage: prison watch tower, defensive walls, siege tower, fire lookout tower, camera tower
* To increase potential energy: storage silo, water tower, drilling tower, ski-jump ramp
* To enhance communications: radio mast, lighthouse, light tower, minaret, bell tower, clock tower, weather beacon
* As support: suspension bridge, cable-stayed bridge, pylon, aerial tramway support pillar
* To access tall or high objects: launch tower, service tower, supply tower, scaffold, tower wagon
* To access atmospheric conditions aloft: wind turbine, meteorological measurement tower, tower telescope, solar power station
* To protect from exposure: BREN Tower
* For industrial production: shot tower
* To drop objects: drop tower, bomb tower, diving platform
* To test height-intensive applications: elevator test tower
* To improve structural integrity: thyristor tower
* To mimic towers or provide height for training purposes: fire tower, parachute tower
* As art: Eiffel Tower, Shukhov Tower, Space Needle
* For recreation: rock climbing tower
* As a symbol: Tower of Babel, The Tower (Tarot card), church tower

Skyscrapers are often not classified as towers, although most have the same design and structure of towers. In the United Kingdom, tall domestic buildings are referred to as tower blocks. In the United States, the now-destroyed World Trade Center had the nickname the Twin Towers, a name shared with the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur.

Inccidently "The Tower" is a poem by William Butler Yeats which is a passionate indictment of a man wrestling with age. It can be read here.

Towers also relate to The Tower card.

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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.

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.