bugoy1

I love good Art. I assume folks here do too. That's part of what draws us in to a site like this.

So my questions to you are these; what is your favorite style of Art? Who is your favorite painter? Favorite sculptor? Favorite architectural style? What works would you have us Google?

I'll start. There are a few styles of Art that I love. For sculpture I prefer Baroque and kinetic sculpture. For painting I really enjoy Art Nouveau. In Architecture I can't get enough of Art Deco. Bernini is my favorite sculptor. Alphonse Mucha, Vincent Van Gogh, and Jan Vermeer are my favorite painters.

Okay. Your turn!

Shanley

Hi Bugoy!

First of all, thanks for starting this thread. I think we'll now all have some interesting stuff to google.

For me, surrealism and impressionism are the best. My favorite painter of all times is Salvador Dali. Then there would be Van Gogh as well, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec.
Still one of my favorite classic paintings is 'The Raft of the Méduse'.

For sculpture, who better than Constantin Brancusi, our Romanian sculptor.

As for architecture, I enjoy many styles: gothic but also Greek architecture.

bugoy1

Thanks for sharing, Shanley! That's so good stuff you mentioned.

I really enjoy Dali's work too. That's part of why I have 10 "Hallucinogenic Toreador" drawings. I guess I now have to do a Valentine theme too. Have you seen the Disney/Dali video "Destino"? If not, it is on YouTube. Here's a link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GFkN4deuZU

For me, part of why I love a certain style is because I just can't do it. I've tried to do Art Nouveau stuff and I stink at it.

Who else wants to share?

Baldur

This is a great topic, thank you bugoy1 for bringing this into being.

Now for a Baldurspiel...

Painting: Gustave Klimt, Ivan Bilibin, Maxfield Parrish, Adolf Wolffli, Vincent Van Gogh and Arnold Böcklin

Sculpture: Classical and Hellenistic Greek, Auguste Rodin

Architecture: Romanesque Revival (Henry Hobson Richardson), Gothic, Craftsman, English Tudor Revival, Storybook Style

Textiles: Willam Morris, Vera Neumann, Candace Bahouth, Kaffe Fassett

Music: (that I am listening to at the moment) Django Reinhardt, Caravan Palace, Ella Fitzgerald, Linda Ronstadt, Claude Debussy,

Ceramics: Grueby pottery, Roseville pottery, Iznik pottery, Motawi Tile, Ephraim Faience Pottery, Door Pottery

bugoy1

Thanks, Baldur!

I had to Google many of those. You seem very partial to Swiss painters.

Textiles, Music and Ceramics hadn't even occurred to me for posting.

Thanks for teaching me some new stuff!

clorophilla

I can't chose!!!!!
Love so different styles, but impressionism and cubism may be I favourite most.

But what about ancient sumeric art, or surrealism, or art nouveau?

my masters:
Francisco Goya, Vang Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso, Daumier, Klee (just some of many many I love)

Romanic architecture

Michelangelo, Luca della Robbia

ceramic - ancient Greece - Euphronios, the master of the masters

Baldur

Yes, the art of Sumeria and Assyria, Baldur is adding that to his list.
Thank you for the reminder clorophilla.
One of my favourite sculptures is by an unknown artist, the name lost in antiquity. It is the Dancing Faun found in the ruins at Pompei.
Oddly of all the reproductions of Satyrs and Fauns here at Boughbreak there is no version of him.
I will remedy that this year.

bugoy1

Thanks for the additions, Clorophilla!

Baldur, you mentioned sculpture reproductions - do you sculpt? If so, what medium/media? I work in stone. I've done almost everything from soapstone to granite. Alabaster is my favorite to work with.

Baldur

I am indeed a sculptor, albeit a horrible one... lol having taken a 2 day quickie adult ed intro into stonecarving.
In stone I've only worked in relatively soft sandstone, but have had more success in clay. My work tends to be heavyhanded, no finesse to it at all.
I had a big chunk of Fimo that I never baked to harden, but instead reworked it over and over. Originally it was many different coloured pieces but eventually got kneaded into one greenish mass.

bugoy1

Ha! Yeah. I understand. I decided that I wanted to try sculpting AFTER graduating from college. Sandstone is too grainy for my liking. Alabaster is softer and easier to file. It also makes crisper, cleaner edges than I've been able to get in sandstone. You'll have to try it some time. I even have my students play around with it for a quarter. They love it! It is their favorite thing to do in class. If you'd like to see some of their work, I will temporarily put my school blog on my profile. Look under "Sculpture" and then there is a post called "Student Works". That is a Power Point presentation of some of the last few years worth of their efforts.

I'd love to see some of your work some time, Baldur!

five

I could go on a long time ... For now...

Vermeer, Clyfford Still (one painting in particular), Matisse, Braque/Picasso (so cubism, generally, especially Analytic Cubism), Cezanne, Klee, Lascaux (and other caves) art, Egyptian hieroglyphs, San rock painting, Bernini, Eva Hesse, Rauschenberg (the Combines in particular), De Kooning (except the women), Delacroix, Max Ernst (especially the rubbings), Arthur Dove, Da Vinci, Minoan frescos, Bernini, Albers ...

bugoy1

Excellent additions, Five!

Baldur

Yes, I visited your blog yesterday and loaded the slideshow. There was a lot of good work there.

In the class I took we were tought to get a glossy finish on stone by repeated buffing with finer and finer grades of sandpaper. In the glossy versions of your student's work the finish appears to be a coating. What was used for that finish? Polyurethane?
You have pupils who are farther advanced than I am. Baldur needs to get out his chisel and mallet again.

Baldur

Baldur needed a quiet Winter craft for when he doesn't feel like picking up a book in the evenings.
A couple years ago I taught myself needlepoint using a printed kit with preselected yards. The second piece quietly morphed into something better when Baldur started straying from the pattern. 50% of that piece was my own design.
The newest piece currently underway is entirely original. It resembles a fragment of a Persian rug...had the rugweaver been hallucinating.

bugoy1

I'm glad you checked it out, Baldur! I'm proud of their efforts. I'm lucky to get such good kids each year.

We also polish the piece with sandpaper and end at 600 grit. We use the wet/dry sandpaper in water. We tend to get a better gloss that way. As for the coating, we use either Carnauba wax or mineral oil. 90% of my students use the oil because they can apply it just before getting graded. A student takes the photo and then I grade it. That is why they look so shiny - it hasn't had a chance to seep in yet. Over the next 24-48 hours it will gradually settle into the microscopic cracks of the stone. The mineral oil seals the stone a little bit from moisture damage. The same is true for the wax. The reason more students don't use the wax though is because it has to be applied the day before they get graded. The next day they can buff the wax just like on a car. That doesn't allow for procrastination. So most students tend to do the last second mineral oil on their project before getting graded. An entire quarter is barely enough time to get the stone carved, riffled, sanded, and sealed.

Baldur

Comment #13
tought - o + a = taught

Baldur should proofread before posting

chirping1

Speaking as someone who's had no formal artist education beyond high school, I have to admit to being very ignorant of the great painters, so I have a tendency to only like what I like regardless of the artist, although my preference is probably more for those artists who depict real life rather than surrealism or other styles. Consequently my favourites are an eclectic mixture from Claude Monet to Beryl Cook.

Qsilv

Confession—

As a child I loved DaVinci and Michaelangelo. Copied them endlessly. (Which practice, seriously, taught me a great deal.) But I also read the newspaper comic strips, and pretty soon I began to see how recognizable each artist’s characters were. It bothered me that the “Masters” drew/painted people in a way that was richer and perhaps more complex (although there’s plenty of power in a single calligraphic line used well by an expressive cartoonist…) and yet… those Masters still created beings that were recognizably each their own… so, weren’t they just essentially cartoons then?

People told me that was NOT a problem; it was their “style”, and as I matured I’d “find myself”, and wind up having a recognizable style of my own. And, “An artist always depicts himself”. ALL that bothered me! Truthfully? It still does. Instead of feeling flattered when people here in TD say ‘I recognized that as yours immediately!’... far from cheer, what I feel is a grave unease… like I’m slacking somehow… falling into a kind of shorthand pattern.

Gradually I grew to admire/love lots of other artists, but the ones I love best are the ones I don’t easily recognize. And ALMOST always, I love a single piece more than the artist him/herself. In short, I’m barking rotten at favorites!

Here’s a list though, just to tease—

PAINTING—
Michael Sweerts (ONLY his small Old Woman, but that perhaps more than any other painting on earth), Morris Louis (Veil series), Sargent (his landscapes of the Val Trompe area in northern Italy even more than his people), Millais, Bouguereau, Klimt, Alma-Tadema, VanGogh, Monet (ohmygod… to stand in a room surrounded by his enormous garden pieces…!)

DRAWINGS/B&W PHOTOGRAPHS—
Cave artists of Lascaux (primitive? NOOOooo!), Georgia OKeefe (yes I love her flowers but I LOVE one very small pencil sketch she did of a woman’s back, so simplified that almost no one viewing it even understood what it was), Hans Holbein (for his photographically subtle portraits drawn with silver wire, a technique called ‘Silverpoint’), Robert Mapplethorpe (whose work stunned me with its sensitivity to shape and surface texture long before I understood its meaning), Gene Richee (for his shadows).

SCULPTURE—
Brancusi, Bernini, Young Shin Kim (both her buncheong and non-buncheong work, but especially two pieces –Spring, and Wings of Birth (which may be a typo of what is elsewhere titled Wings of Birds, but I think not)), and an unknown who eased a giantic smooth dark stone into a form almost egg-like on all sides but one, which turns out to be a veil/shroud/blanket just parting with spring awakening from it in the form of one strong almost Art Deco style hand, arm and foot and a mostly hidden face… I last saw it down in La Jolla at Scripps Institute of Oceanography many years ago and have never been able to find it on the ‘net.

But in my mind (eyeing Bugoy1 carefully…), sculpture is also where to include wrought iron, blown-glass, Venetian beadwork and lampwork (whether done by Chihuly or unknown women magically floating delicately twisted iris in a single inch of glass).

ARCHITECTURE—
I’m smitten with the Arts & Crafts style, the Japanese cum Shaker effects a bit more than Mission, but all of it makes me just purr inside, so Greene & Greene, absolutely.

Apparently a good many architects have found the need to design the furniture to fit their rooms. I adore Art Nouveau details and the tall, narrow proportions of French windows and doors, and am annoyingly aware of and uncomfortable in or around stodgy boxy rooms or furnishings.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘Falling Water’ photographs much more elegantly than it feels when you walk around inside it, darn it. But Peter Bohlin’s little guest house at Twin Farms, called “The Aviary”, blending boulders and wood and glass (and water!), does it for me, along with much of the work of Walt Landi (who manages to ease metal organically into the mix).

FABRIC—
Yes! These, like science, should never have been separated from the Fine Arts. At their finest they are far more than mere mechanical craftsmanship. There’s something special going on in their creation… their design… their fullness of execution. From Appalachian piecework to current “Watercolor Quilts”, minds like computers keep track of the threads and colors and combinations. And who dreamed up the patterns? Where does an original idea come from?

I remember seeing a centuries-old Chinese screen… stitchery so fine, each long airy feather on a crane’s neck narrowed down to a single silk fiber, many inches long.

I love Oriental rugs… in silk… shimmering as if butterflies had, in a series of paroxysms, shaken the iridescent dust from their wings. I’m not into bold patterns here. I want these to look blurry/faint from a distance or angle… like lawns, meadows where you sit and smile quietly, gradually becoming aware of grass blades, miniscule flowers, buds, gem-like bugs, sunshine in the gardens.

FOOD—
Another science… AND art. Visual! Croquembouche to sushi to molecular gastronomy!

Aren’t these all activities of curious, innovative, pattern-seeking minds?

How do you choose a “Favorite” from such a banquet?

THEATER/CINEMA— DANCE— MUSIC— …powerful fields; I’m awfully certain they belong.

POETRY/PROSE—
Ok, not perhaps, visual art… unless you count the pictures they make in your mind… and why wouldn’t you? Isn’t that what all “Art” is supposed to do… awaken you to the edges of your own emotional cliffs?

(laughing softly… stepping off soap box, tucking it under my arm …)

Baldur

Qsilv, were you referring to Donal Hord's "Spring Stirring"?

Baldur

Here is a link to that sculpture.
http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WMH6QC_Spring_Stirring_La_Jolla_CA
I hope this is the correct piece.