Who are your five favourite Artists?

jason_els

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I like:

Leonardo DaVinci (A true artist immerses for understanding and writes it all down.)
Rembrandt van Rijn (his studies on light and shade were amazing.)
Georges Seurat (Devil's in the details. He was really spot on.)
Salvador Dali (Sometimes it is good to have a skewed view.)
Jackson Pollack (With him, haute cuisine would be boring.<==Joke. :biggrin1:)

Considered all yours too Invisi, except Seurat. I have been lucky to see many of his works and they are a great pleasure.

I have just been looking at his work online, same with Seurat. This thread could be great for bunking off work :biggrin1:.


Have any of you gone to Chicago and seen La Grande Jatte? I have and it is, along with the Sistine Chapel, the most spectacular painting. Its size is wholly surprising as is its beauty. I had the same reaction many people around me did; something along the lines of, "Holy shit!" I'd kind of filed Seurat away in my head as an interesting post-Impressionist and left it at that. His NYC works are all relatively small, if very pleasant and interesting to look at. La Grande Jatte is a wholly different matter altogether. That's a masterpiece. It's completely breathtakingly beautiful. It made me understand why Sondheim made a musical (a good one too) about it. Photographs do not do it justice. I think it's like trying to photograph Byzantine/Ravenna mosaics. It just doesn't work.

If a starving Chinese baby in a private jet showing The Life of Rembrandt over Chicago.... and it was down to the baby or the painting..... I don't know...
 

Calboner

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Have any of you gone to Chicago and seen La Grande Jatte? I have and it is, along with the Sistine Chapel, the most spectacular painting. Its size is wholly surprising as is its beauty. I had the same reaction many people around me did; something along the lines of, "Holy shit!" I'd kind of filed Seurat away in my head as an interesting post-Impressionist and left it at that. His NYC works are all relatively small, if very pleasant and interesting to look at. La Grande Jatte is a wholly different matter altogether. That's a masterpiece. It's completely breathtakingly beautiful. It made me understand why Sondheim made a musical (a good one too) about it. Photographs do not do it justice. I think it's like trying to photograph Byzantine/Ravenna mosaics. It just doesn't work.
I used to live in Chicago, and would visit the Art Institute from time to time. The big Seurat always struck me as more a curiosity than anything else. Perhaps if I were to see the Sondheim musical I would find the painting more interesting on next viewing. Anyway, I was always more eager to go renew my acquaintance with Caillebotte's Paris Street: Rainy Day, which, as I recall, is in the room before the one with the Seurat.
 

jason_els

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I stole this from a previous post but these are a few I don't like. I have to work on the ones I do like later when I have more time. I thought this question had come up before, and it has, but that was some time ago and I didn't post in it.

Margaret Keane - Vapid subject matter and high school drawing class draftsmanship infected with the incessant maudlin motif of giant bug eyes. That this treacley trailer park stuff managed to reach the heights of popularity is without doubt the number one reasons America is considered to be tasteless.

http://www.keane-eyes.com/anewwebpage2.jpg

Morris Katz - Toilet paper and a trowel. That's what he uses to allegedly, "paint," with. Famed as, "The world's fastest artist," Katz has been known to paint just about anything in only a few minutes. Katz's paintings remind me of another activity that also lasts a few minutes and requires toilet paper. Perhaps these tools in greater hands would be worthy if it wasn't for Katz's singluar lack of insight into every subject he mangles.

http://www.morriskatz.com/CMDRnCHIEFS.gif

Thomas Kincade - King of the Hi-Liter school of motel art, Kincade's efforts span a wide range of subject matter from the quaint to the saccharine to the sanctimoniously precious. I suspect he was one of those kids who hung out in Helen Gallagher back in the 70s staring at the black light head posters after smoking a joint in the parking lot with his friends. That he's managed to create a marketing juggernaut peddling mediocrity should give every school board in the country reason to restore art to public education.

His Prince of Peace resembles Sauron wearing the Helm of Many Forks:
http://www.sharpedge.fr/united_cutlery/uc_helm/UC1412_sauron_helmet/pics/UC1412 Sauron.jpg
http://www.thomaskinkade.com/htmlroot/images/sculpture/prince_peace.jpg

Peter Max - A classic case of the one-trick pony who couldn't evolve beyond his stable. What once was fresh 40 years ago has become unbearably tiresome with his current work more resembling Technicolor vomit brought-up from eating bad mushrooms. Pretty vibrant colors are no substitute for the artistic insight Max long ago seems to have surrendered to LSD.

http://media.petermax.com/images/popup_1/11009.jpg

Helen Frankenthaler - Blobs and lines soaked into canvas and given a title for the effort as if the title could erase the fact that Frankenthaler could never truly free herself to evoke the passion necessary to be an abstract expressionist. Notable only for her invention of post painterly abstraction, her work is routinely surpassed by artists half her caliber.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...rankenthaler_Helen_Mountains_and_Sea_1952.jpg

John Currin - The flavour de jour mixes Katz's technique with lurid adolescent subject matter creating a singluarly banal suite of work which includes such wonders as a nude portrait of Bea Arthur. Currin's defenders cite his excellent draftsmanship and composition. These talents he does have but in the rarified air which Currin's reputation now enjoys, shouldn't he? Currin's work runs from the ridiculous to the disturbing: frequently venturing into the misogynistic without illuminating the genius of his impulse.

http://www.gageacademy.org/upload/John_Currin__The_Bra_Shop_1997a.jpg
 

vince

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Katsushika Hokusai
Wassily Kandinsky
Emily Carr
Bill Reid
Pablo Picasso
Henri Matisse

I saw a wonderful show at the New Tate in 2002 or 03, I can't remember, of Picasso and Matisse exhibited together and side by side. It explored their complicated, decades long personal friendship/competition that drove each man to new heights of genius. Picasso once said that one had to look at their works together and that, "No one has ever looked at Matisse's painting more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he." It was really something special for me to see these two masters exhibited together.
 

D_Gunther Snotpole

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:biggrin: I want to strike Carr and say A.Y. Jackson.

Reid stays. Ever been to the embassy in DC or the Vanc Intl Airport?

No, but I've seen some Reid stuff at the Museum of Civilization.

You've no doubt seed the Spirit of Haida Gwaii [click me] in bronze at the Vancouver Int. Airport. (The pic you may have clicked on is of the bronze casting outside the Canadian embassy in Washington.)

The museum holds the plaster cast of same.

Incredible piece.

(A.Y. Jackson? Good stuff. What about Tom Thomson?)


 
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D_Ireonsyd_Colonrinse

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Since the topic is 5 "favourite Artists" and no type of artist is specified:

1. 19th-century poets and novelists: Walt Whitman, Jane Austin, Henry James, Oscar Wilde (I'm cheating by cramming many favourites under one general heading)

2. Michelangelo (I'm currently going through a Michelangelo phase, which, unlike my homosexuality, is a phase that may pass).

3. The Beatles (I almost put Handel's Water Music... but, no, no, the Beatles win out).

4. The plays of Tennessee Williams and Tom Stoppard (ok, cheating again by giving myself a two-for-one)

5. Merchant-Ivory films ("Room with a View", "Maurice", "Howard's End", "Remains of the Day")
 

D_Gunther Snotpole

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Salvador Dali
Alphonse Mucha
Victor Horta
William Morris
Kitagawa Utamaro
I gotta say, bliss ... that's a very original list.
Dali and Morris I knew about.
I was dimly aware of Horta as an architect.
But Mucha and Utamaro are new to me.

I will be reading up on them.
This reminds me of something Mark Van Doren once said:
"The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery."