Georgia O’Keeffe, Before Fame

Georgia O’Keeffe was an American artist who lived from 1887 to 1986. She was well-known for her abstract drawings of flowers. Her paintings are known for their fluidity and contrast. Her earlier work had similar qualities, but unlike her later work, which is full of colour, her earlier work is charcoal based.

Back in 1915- 1918, O’Keeffe was either taking art classes or teaching them. She was experimenting with different ways of painting and drawing. Her paintings were becoming quite abstract and full of self expression. What I’m particularly interested is her charcoal drawings. These charcoal drawings were what made O’Keeffe known in New York. She had sent the drawings to a friend who showed them to Alfred Stieglitz, a gallery owner. He then exhibited her work in an exhibition of his.

Like Alfred Stieglitz, I love these drawings. They are so different to her other work and they are a breath of fresh air. They are abstract but distinct. There is huge contrast between the black lines and the white paper. She also smudges some the charcoal to create tone. A drawing in particular is drawing XIII. On the left are flowing lines suggest a river and the curves of the right could be hills. The staggered lines on the right could also be mountains. I love the fact that we can’t be sure, it’s so abstract that we, the viewer, have to study the picture before guessing what we see.

The darkened lines of the ‘river’ may portray the depth of the water. The darkness of the charcoals gradually transforms into the bleak whiteness of the paper, which may indicate the shallow waters of the river.

The charcoal on the hills is blended in to create a smooth effect. This reflects the idea of rolling hills O’Keeffe probably tried to portray in the drawing. She has done a similar thing for the mountains. However, she has drawn a thin black line for the tops of the mountains. She then rubbed out the charcoal next to the thin line to create a ‘white’ line against the black line. This creates more contrast between the white and the black of the outline of the mountains.

The collection of drawings by O’Keeffe is so complex and interesting. I really hope you enjoy the others, which can be found using this link:

http://contentdm.okeeffemuseum.org/cdm/search

In my opinion they are the very best of O’Keeffe.

Portraying schizophrenia

 Bryan Charnley’s art represents the serious effects Schizophrenia has on your mind. Diagnosed at 18 Bryan Charnley had to drop out of Leicester School of Art in order to combat his mental health disorder; Schizophrenia. In 1978, around the age 29, he began to paint again. In 1982, he began to address his inner life and his condition within his paintings.

Bryan’s life ended sadly, he committed suicide in 1991 with a painting left on his easel. This painting was part of 17 self-portraits Bryan he done whilst experimenting with his medication. Medication helps to stop symptoms of Schizophrenia and help people to cope with daily life without the worry of symptoms arising.

 It is this collection of work that I am interested in because, with each painting, you gradually see Bryan’s symptoms returning. They become scarier and more frightening. You start to see what he must have been feeling and how his disorder was gradually taking over his mind.

Below is the link to his website which shows his portraits in order with a small summary of each on the left.

http://www.bryancharnley.info/1portriat.asp

I was particularly interested in portrait 2 because it really emphasises how much some people with Schizophrenia need their medication. Bryan had only cut back a little on his medication by the second portrait, and already the painting looks dark and deep, a complete contrast to his first self-portrait. The painting is made up of dark blues and browns. He looks confused, and in the background there looks to be an eye. In the summary he explains that he was feeling paranoid and felt sensitive to human voices (this explains the rabbit-ear as he felt like a wild animal).  I think you can really see the paranoia coming through the painting because of the eye staring at him from behind.

I was also really interested in portrait number 9. It is a very bizarre painting; very ambiguous and abstract. The lips around the outside could possibly signify the voices he was hearing. In the summary, it says he had hallucinations. This painting must be portraying how he saw himself during these hallucinations.

It is amazing to go through these paintings, one by one and see how his mind and his grasp on reality dilapidated and became obscured. He was an excellent artist and it is sad to hear of someone so young and talented die in such an unpleasant state. 

O China Tree! O China Tree!

Christmas is just round the corner and I’m sure many of you will be thinking about buying a Christmas tree soon. There is one Christmas tree that I found this year that has particularly caught my eye, and it’s in the town of Hasselt, Belgium.

Instead of buying a ‘normal’ Christmas tree, this town has created one out of plates and other pieces of china! From what I’ve learnt from the news, not all the locals love it and would have preferred a real one. One woman even said that she thought it looked too bare.

Thinking about it I think it would be fun if my town had a piece of huge artwork displayed instead of a Christmas tree. The tree that my town has is not that interesting. It has a few lights on it, but it looks just like the one before that and the one before that etc. I think having some art that looks like a tree would be far more interesting. The tree has far more texture to it from the different sized plates. It would also illuminate in the dark because of the vivid white of the china. I think it’s a beautiful piece of work particularly as the plates aren’t all the same. There are also layers of cups randomly placed.

However, if it came to whether I had a piece of art like that for a Christmas tree or a real tree for my home, I think I would always pick the tree. This isn’t because I’m a traditionalist or because I love the smell of a tree (but it is a nice smell!), it’s because a piece of art like that should be appreciated. A piece like that, which is so intriguing and different shouldn’t be locked away from the public, instead it should be in the centre of the town.

 I also love the fact that this art piece isn’t only there to celebrate Christmas; it also is there to celebrate the town’s solidarity. The people of the town donated all the plates and cups and when placed altogether, the tree symbolises the town coming together for this festive season. This is a lovely message to send out, which is why I wish my town did this for Christmas, instead of placing a tree in the middle of town and throwing a few lights round it, then we could send our own message out to celebrate this festive season. Just a thought…

back in the day…

Art in the 13^th Century, the medieval period, was more or less always based on the Bible. Art was for monasteries, churches and such like; people didn’t have it necessarily in their houses, so therefore the main theme would be religion.

Although the art of this time is beautiful, I actually want focus on how different the artists were at this time compared with other periods, like the Renaissance.

First of all, medieval artists were brought up in a very different way. They would start by being apprenticed to a master artist. The artist would be taught techniques by the master and eventually would paint unimportant parts of the painting…under instruction from the master of course. The artist would then learn how to paint apostles, and the Virgin Mary. The artist would then probably be taught how to copy and rearrange scenes from old books into new frames, until he could paint a scene without a pattern/model at all.

With these techniques under an artist’s belt, he could paint any piece of artwork created in the medieval period. However if you asked this artist to sketch the landscape in front of him, he couldn’t do it. This is because artists of this period simply did not sketch. This seems a strange idea to you and me because if you think of an artist you think of them doodling and sketching the whole time.

They also never seem to do actual portraits, which seems strange considering portraits make up a lot of art.  The way in which they would show who they were drawing was to add a crown, or a mitre, and just to make sure they would even write the name below!

It had never seemed to occur to them to sit down in front of the object/person and paint them. This is such a weird idea to me considering some of the greatest pieces art was done like this. So is it right to compare these pieces of art to the paintings of Raphael or Michelangelo? It is important to remember that many techniques had been conquered by the time the Renaissance had come along. But all the same, surely some of the medieval paintings look like sketches when compared to things like the Sistine chapel or paintings of the Madonna.

Both periods have interesting paintings that are good to analyse, but if you had to pick and compare pieces of art from these 2 periods, you would probably say that you think the renaissance art is more ‘arty’ than medieval art, I think I would. Is this because we see ‘art’ as representing scenes of life, therefore art should be representational of the world. Does this mean medieval art isn’t really art? Your decision…

A last point; without 13^th century would the renaissance have happened?

A cat obsession? Louis Wain

 

 

An artist I recently found is Louis Wain. He is particularly known for his drawings/paintings of cats. This may sound quite dull at first, but the interesting thing is that this English artist had Schizophrenia and some psychologists believe that you can see this in his artwork!

 

He lived between 1860 and 1939. He was declared insane sometime in 1924 and was put in a hospital in Tooting. After a short period of time here, people noticed Wain’s talent and a fund was set up for him so that he could live at ease for the remainder of his life.

 

His artwork certainly is individual, and his cats are inimitable. There is so much detail within each picture and there is a vast amount of colour used. He has made the ‘cat’ his own; from portraits to scenes of cats dressed up, Wain has created such an array of cats. It is thought that the paintings with the detailed patterns in are the ones that show his Schizophrenia, but we can’t really know for sure.

 

However these paintings are my particular favourites. He must have spent hours painting these since the patterns are perfectly formed. Some paintings remind me of Eastern paintings, like Buddhism paintings, because of the vivid colours used and the different shapes used. He uses lines of various thickness and curves to create the patterns, and these curves meander round each other to create a busy but orderly effect.

 

In other works, it’s the eyes that define the painting.  He paints large eyes onto cats, forming different expressions; sometimes surprise other times happy. In some of his paintings, he uses bright lime yellow colours for the eyes. This then grasps your attention straight away.

 

I hope from reading these descriptions of his work, you will study further into these weird and fantastic art pieces. Many prints of his work are available online as well as in some art galleries.

Art in Buddhism

Many people know about Christian art, but Buddhist art as a whole, is not so well-known despite the fact that it is one of the six main religions of the world. Buddhist art came about around 500-300BCE and over time has spread all over Asia. Although Buddhism did not emerge till around 500 BCE, it took a couple of centuries for the art of this religion to develop. Buddhist art’s main theme is the Buddha and the life of the Buddha. However, there are also many different symbols and themes in Buddhist art, such as the Wheel, or the Bodhi tree. A lot of art also represent some of the bodhisattvas, which is an enlightened being/ existence.

 The first forms of Buddhist art were found on pillars. A monarch named Ashoka, who ruled around 272 to 231 BCE, had helped spread Buddhism across India by the use of pillars.  The pillars tended to portray pictures of the Buddha and keys aspects of his life, like his enlightenment, as well as earlier Indian beliefs. These pillars were quite Persian like and at first, had Indian subjects like cows, lions and elephants. These pillars seemed to be the first of Buddhist sculpture.

There were also ‘Stupas’, a mound in which relics were placed and a place where some Buddhists may have worshipped. Stupas played an important role in the development of Buddhist art too. Stupas could have lots of decoration and embellishments on; however, it is thought that the earlier Stupas were much more simplified. But there was still a lot of visual imagery on these earlier Stupas, and these images have helped us to learn how art has developed since then.

I find Buddhist art so interesting. I think it is because it evolved nearly 2500 years ago, and yet we know so much about it. It has managed to spread from country to country and it has developed so many variations. It is full of narratives and colour and although this blog is just a very brief overview of how it started off and developed, I hope that it sparks an interest in Buddhism. So why not learn more? There is so much more information out there.