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I like many of the classical paintings by the old masters, (Leonardo DaVinci, etc.) I also like the works of Georgia O'Keefe, (particularly after she moved to New Mexico), and Charles Russell.
THere are scores of Georgia O'Keefe paintings at The Palace of the Legion of Honor museum in San Francisco. The building itself is gorgeous, neoclassical built of marble. It's one of the most beautiful buildings I've ever seen located in Lincoln Park in a setting that overlooks the Pacific Ocean.
http://i144.photobucket.com/albums/r199/MoMark/PalaceOfLegionHonor.jpg (broken link) They also house many of Rodin's sculptures, including "The Thinker" in a sculpture gallery. I went through there a few years ago just for grins and giggles and was blown away. The building is set up inside as interconnecting galleries, so when you're in one, you can look through the doorway into the next, and past that gallery's doorway to the next,etc. It's actually chock full of masterpieces you'd recognize and the building, design of the galleries, and presentation of the art is unparalleled in my opinion. It truly is in a class of its own. It's by far the best museum I've ever been in, and that is in comparison to the Louvre, Smithsonian, Chicago Metropolitan Museum of Art, etc. It's not a huge museum, but it's top-notch first class all the way and the Georgia O'Keefe paintings there blew me away. There was one of an orange-red poppy, simple, larger than life, yet exquisitely detailed and balanced. I love her work. It also had that famous pre-Renaissance painting of the elongated Christ on the Cross...I can't remember the name of the piece, but it was in my college art textbook as an example of late Medieval religious art. I love that museum!
Wow! What a museum! I would like to see it! That orange-red poppy you spoke of, it sounds like the one I've used as a background on my computer. Don't you just love the way she put her colors together? I've read a little bit about her. She was a bit of a rebel.
I love art and have been fortunate to have traveled around the country and Canada to visit many art museums. My absolute favorite museum is The Metropolitan Museum Of Art, when I go there I feel so happy, it has many times brought a tear to my eye. If you love art and have never been there, please make an effort and go, you will love it!
Favorite painters: Matisse, Chagall, and especially Degas.
Favorite sculpture: The Kiss by Rodin
Favorite painting: The only one I could afford and it's hanging in my bedroom. I bought it from an artist at an American Indian festival, it's a Surrealism with a tree shaped as a woman, black & white with a really cool cut mat frame. I've had it for about five years and I still stare at it almost everday.
I don't know the name or the artist who painted this classic picture, but when I was about 5 years old a lady gave me a print of the picture where an angel was watching over a little boy and girl crossing a bridge that was in bad shape with planks missing. I am the youngest child in my family and I have a brother three years older than myself and I "identified" our being the children in the picture. I lost the picture some time ago, but I now have a brooch and earrings designed by Lee Sands that used that picture as inspiration.
My favourite painting is Christ of St John of the Cross by Salvador Dali,I first saw this painting when I was nine years old and fell in love with it there and then. I'm fortunate that it hangs in a gallery only 10 minutes from my home. I have yet to see another painting which evokes the feelings I have when I see this one, I am not religious at all but I don't think that matters,I love it for it's beauty, not what it represents.
It was bought by Glasgow City Council in 1952 for the controversial sum of £8,200 (about $15,500). Last year it was voted by a very large margin as Glasgow's favourite painting. (don't tell anyone but I voted twice !!!)
I adore that painting and when we lived in Scotland we would often go to St Mungo to see it. Even as an atheist it has an amazing power and in my opinion is Dali's masterpiece.
It's impossible for me to chose as a great painting will always affect me differently depending on my mood but some famous and more obvious favourites:
Vermeer's "The little street "
Brughel's "land of Cockaigne" and "peasant wedding"
Seurats "Bathers at Asnieres" and "Sunday aftertoon at la Grande Jatte"
Caillebotte's "Rainy day"
Amongst a thousand others , I love Pissaro, Rembrandt, O'Keefe, Manet, De Hooch, Hieronymus Bosch,Da Vinci,Tamara de Lemp.i.c.ka ( her name appeared blanked out for some reason so apologies for the dots !),Sam Skelton ( Scottish painter) , Emily Carr and the list goes on and on...
In Sculpture Rodin of course and Bill Reid .
Sometimes I will see art by "unknown" artists which I think are just as deserving of world acclaim though and my list remains a fluid one...
Le Bal au Le Moulin de la Galette by Pierre Auguste Renoir
I love the swirls of the blues and greens, the sense of the warm summer evening with laughter of young people and clinking glasses blending in to the music of the band. This has been one of my favorite paintings for a very long time.
Homage to Bleriot by Robert Delaunay (1914)
A Cubist who decided to go round, creating forms he called, "orphs." Orphism was a short-lived submovement of Cubism, but I love the interpretation of light and darkness. Delaunay presaged the Futurists in his contemporary subject matter and seems to have taken great fun in painting the colorful marvels of the early 20th century.
Boys In A Pasture by Winslow Homer (1874)
Perfect composition marries Homer's uncanny ability to depict strong sunlight and subject matter that is singularly American without being Americana. The painting reminds me of my boyhood in a lot of ways.
Dante and Virgil in Hell by Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (1822)
It's very hard to find a good photograph of this painting. This is Delacroix's first masterpiece and my favorite. I wish you could see the transparency of the water over the limbs of the damned souls clutching to the ferry. The painting is dynamic, moving, frightening, yet fascinating. The poet Virgil guides Dante (author of The Divine Comedy) through Hell itself in a scene that's perhaps slightly too real.
The Art of Painting by Johannes Vermeer (1660s)
Vermeer made only 34, possibly 35, paintings. Of them all, this one is arguably the most representative of the tremendous skill that places him with the likes of da Vinci and Michelangelo. Dutch art was the first to focus on the lives of average people and here Vermeer causes us to steal a glimpse of a scene as if we were merely walking by a room. The figures aren't moving in space, we are. This was something new in art and Vermeer's invention. The tapestry that would have been used as a curtain proscenium in other painters, becomes the curtain we pull aside to view the treasure within. The girl is likely Vermeer's daughter Maria and the painter is likely Vermeer himself. Vermeer liked to play with the apparent focus of the eye, but here he makes everything impossibly in-focus. There is so much more to this painting than I can go into here, but it's his tour-de-force work in my book.
Revelers by Euthymides (c. 510BC)
Classical Greek ceramics may seem dull, but it was a pretty intense world. The ceramics community was in a ghetto near Athens next to a cemetery. There the potters would make all sorts of ceramic items for every day household use but they would save their best work for the named painters who went shop to shop. The community was very competitive and no competition was as fierce as that between Euthymides and Euphronios. Euphronios was given to painting large scenes from Homeric myth, highly intricate but very formally displayed. His dying heroes were always in the throes of majestic deaths while his maidens always wept nobly nearby. Euthymides found Euphronios' work a bit stiff and instead painted scenes of every day Athenian life, frequently with a keen sense of humor. Revelers is a happy work showing three friends out getting drunk and playing with weapons and mock battling in their stupor. The composition is exquiste but spare, nothing like the works of Euphronios which covered nearly every available inch between the upper and lower border friezes. In fact Euthymides even allows the spear of the center reveler to go outside the bounds of the frame. If his drunks are irreverent, then so is the painter. We know that Euthymides painted this because it is inscribed so but there is also another inscription, a playful dig at his competitor who would most certainly look down his nose at Euthymides' subject matter, "As never Euphronios."
No. 14 by Mark Rothko (1960)
Rothko is all about horizons. Some are happy, some are whimsical, some are placid, but No. 14 is decidedly sinister. It's just black and red, just color fields placed together so that the black seems reddish and the red seems a bit black. It's a trick of the eye that each color takes on something of its partner, but here the effect is forboding. The empty blackness juxtaposed against the bloody red; perhaps its the aftermath of Armageddon, perhaps it's the end of life, a Hellish planet? I find, strangely enough, that I want to see Rothko's paintings alone, not near each other, and I also hear a single unending note with each of them. No. 14 invokes the note of B with me and I imagine I hear it every time I see the painting. I find Rothko's patinings worthy of meditation for the real genius behind them is that we bring many things to his paintings that aren't even there to begin with.
Nine Scenes from the Book of Genesis by Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (1508-1512)
This is a case of, you have to see it to believe it. No photograph is capable of doing it justice. The figures are so intensely real, their movements so natural, their integration into the ceiling so perfect, that the whole work seems alive. It's overwhelming to view, doesn't seem real. Each face has a story, is a real person, and there in it all is one of the most famous images in all of art, God giving Life to Adam. The effect is literally dizzying, with your eye trying to focus on different planes. The ceiling isn't flat yet Michelangelo used a technique of perspective to make it seem so. The best view of the ceiling is lying on the floor if the room is crowded enough and the guards can't see you do it. This work is one of the great treasures of art and the restoration has been magnificent. It's works like this that can restore one's faith in mankind; tells us we can do beautiful things worthy of our better nature.
Dolly Watkins Booth by Thomas Cole (late 1820s)
In kerchief and traveling cloak, she smiles slightly as if trying hard not to smile too much. Yet her eyes are inquisitive, watching, knowing. She loved to read and here she holds her prized glasses, windows to the world beyond her rural life. It's as if she's about ready to take off out the door, to adventure out into the world and would do so if she didn't have to sit for this silly portrait! I always smile when I see her. She seems to be watching, enjoying still the life she richly lived and left behind.
Dolly Watkins Booth is my great great great great grandmother and I'm sure I would have loved her dearly. Of all paintings, this one I treasure most.
Le Bal au Le Moulin de la Galette by Pierre Auguste Renoir
I love the swirls of the blues and greens, the sense of the warm summer evening with laughter of young people and clinking glasses blending in to the music of the band. This has been one of my favorite paintings for a very long time.
Homage to Bleriot by Robert Delaunay (1914)
A Cubist who decided to go round, creating forms he called, "orphs." Orphism was a short-lived submovement of Cubism, but I love the interpretation of light and darkness. Delaunay presaged the Futurists in his contemporary subject matter and seems to have taken great fun in painting the colorful marvels of the early 20th century.
Boys In A Pasture by Winslow Homer (1874)
Perfect composition marries Homer's uncanny ability to depict strong sunlight and subject matter that is singularly American without being Americana. The painting reminds me of my boyhood in a lot of ways.
Dante and Virgil in Hell by Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (1822)
It's very hard to find a good photograph of this painting. This is Delacroix's first masterpiece and my favorite. I wish you could see the transparency of the water over the limbs of the damned souls clutching to the ferry. The painting is dynamic, moving, frightening, yet fascinating. The poet Virgil guides Dante (author of The Divine Comedy) through Hell itself in a scene that's perhaps slightly too real.
The Art of Painting by Johannes Vermeer (1660s)
Vermeer made only 34, possibly 35, paintings. Of them all, this one is arguably the most representative of the tremendous skill that places him with the likes of da Vinci and Michelangelo. Dutch art was the first to focus on the lives of average people and here Vermeer causes us to steal a glimpse of a scene as if we were merely walking by a room. The figures aren't moving in space, we are. This was something new in art and Vermeer's invention. The tapestry that would have been used as a curtain proscenium in other painters, becomes the curtain we pull aside to view the treasure within. The girl is likely Vermeer's daughter Maria and the painter is likely Vermeer himself. Vermeer liked to play with the apparent focus of the eye, but here he makes everything impossibly in-focus. There is so much more to this painting than I can go into here, but it's his tour-de-force work in my book.
Revelers by Euthymides (c. 510BC)
Classical Greek ceramics may seem dull, but it was a pretty intense world. The ceramics community was in a ghetto near Athens next to a cemetery. There the potters would make all sorts of ceramic items for every day household use but they would save their best work for the named painters who went shop to shop. The community was very competitive and no competition was as fierce as that between Euthymides and Euphronios. Euphronios was given to painting large scenes from Homeric myth, highly intricate but very formally displayed. His dying heroes were always in the throes of majestic deaths while his maidens always wept nobly nearby. Euthymides found Euphronios' work a bit stiff and instead painted scenes of every day Athenian life, frequently with a keen sense of humor. Revelers is a happy work showing three friends out getting drunk and playing with weapons and mock battling in their stupor. The composition is exquiste but spare, nothing like the works of Euphronios which covered nearly every available inch between the upper and lower border friezes. In fact Euthymides even allows the spear of the center reveler to go outside the bounds of the frame. If his drunks are irreverent, then so is the painter. We know that Euthymides painted this because it is inscribed so but there is also another inscription, a playful dig at his competitor who would most certainly look down his nose at Euthymides' subject matter, "As never Euphronios."
No. 14 by Mark Rothko (1960)
Rothko is all about horizons. Some are happy, some are whimsical, some are placid, but No. 14 is decidedly sinister. It's just black and red, just color fields placed together so that the black seems reddish and the red seems a bit black. It's a trick of the eye that each color takes on something of its partner, but here the effect is forboding. The empty blackness juxtaposed against the bloody red; perhaps its the aftermath of Armageddon, perhaps it's the end of life, a Hellish planet? I find, strangely enough, that I want to see Rothko's paintings alone, not near each other, and I also hear a single unending note with each of them. No. 14 invokes the note of B with me and I imagine I hear it every time I see the painting. I find Rothko's patinings worthy of meditation for the real genius behind them is that we bring many things to his paintings that aren't even there to begin with.
Nine Scenes from the Book of Genesis by Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (1508-1512)
This is a case of, you have to see it to believe it. No photograph is capable of doing it justice. The figures are so intensely real, their movements so natural, their integration into the ceiling so perfect, that the whole work seems alive. It's overwhelming to view, doesn't seem real. Each face has a story, is a real person, and there in it all is one of the most famous images in all of art, God giving Life to Adam. The effect is literally dizzying, with your eye trying to focus on different planes. The ceiling isn't flat yet Michelangelo used a technique of perspective to make it seem so. The best view of the ceiling is lying on the floor if the room is crowded enough and the guards can't see you do it. This work is one of the great treasures of art and the restoration has been magnificent. It's works like this that can restore one's faith in mankind; tells us we can do beautiful things worthy of our better nature.
Dolly Watkins Booth by Thomas Cole (late 1820s)
In kerchief and traveling cloak, she smiles slightly as if trying hard not to smile too much. Yet her eyes are inquisitive, watching, knowing. She loved to read and here she holds her prized glasses, windows to the world beyond her rural life. It's as if she's about ready to take off out the door, to adventure out into the world and would do so if she didn't have to sit for this silly portrait! I always smile when I see her. She seems to be watching, enjoying still the life she richly lived and left behind.
Dolly Watkins Booth is my great great great great grandmother and I'm sure I would have loved her dearly. Of all paintings, this one I treasure most.
Brilliant and eclectic choice of paintings. I particularly like the one of your great, great, great, great, grand -mother, what a wonderful portrait.
There is a definite sparkle and twinkle in her eyes and I love the shadow of a smile on her lips as if thinking about a private joke. A very human and yet skilled painting. A portrait should not just capture our physicality but our soul and I think it does just that.
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