figuration

*Gino Severini, 

Fine Art

I recently discovered Gino Severini‘s paintings while researching for my classes and I’m totally smitten. Although affiliated most distinctly with the futurists, Severini’s depictions of flesh are highly reminiscent of the highly pixelated mottling of Renoir, Seurat, and Picasso — (this specific way of representing flesh through seemingly arbitrary, patchey strokes of color never gets old for me. Absolutely love these! 

    
    
    
    

    
    
    
   

*the thing about the renaissance painters 

Fine Art, thoughts

In researching for my upcoming classes I’ve found myself intentionally leaving out the old dudes. You know, the italian boys club along with their byzantine cohorts — whose elaborate surnames inspired the collective naming of all four teenage mutant ninja turtles. And yet for me, somehow, they seem to prove undeniably relevant to contemporary picture-making (or atleast the process of discovering the intrinsic properties of composition and color). Masaccio and Botticelli in particular have been recurrently on my radar. While the biblical and mythological narratives they tend to illustrate are compelling, it is the push-pull of foreground and background elements in their compositions that is perhaps most compelling. Consciously or otherwise, both of these guys have a wonderful way of creating dynamic spatial relationships through their implementation of color and highly-contrast areas wherein intensely mottled fields of flesh bump up against sharp delineations color. Call me old fashioned, but I still get goosebumps when I look at these pictures.. Piero della Franseca and Giovanni Bellini too!.

  
  
  
  

*Carl Larsson, magical interiors

Fine Art

I just discovered this infamous Swedish painter and I am really surprised that I had never before seen his work! There is something entirely unique about Larsson’s style for the time inwhich he painted. While the post impressionists also painted scenes of domestic life — Larsson brings a uniquely graphic quality through his use of watercolor that affords these compositions the animation of Toulouse-Lautrec, the vividness of van Gogh, the illustrativeness of Mucha, and the solitude of Wyeth. Larsson depicts the intimacy of everyday home life in such a seductive way! Almost like if Vermeer were a caricature artist in the early 20th century. Really excited about these. It becomes evident that Larsson was examining the objects in his compositions as fields of pattern and color in much the same way that contemporary graphic designers tend to which allows liberties for the viewer in terms of qualifying what exists in the background or foreground of the picture.