Romanticism is style I expect I will continue to study as I progress in painting portraits. Because there is a strong sense of movement and emotion in the period as well as the artists exaggeration through certain visual elements; I believe that it can give one me a style that also has a strong attention to detail, inclusion of nature and freedom of adding stylistic details that I naturally am drawn to.
My limitations in this piece will be of course the visual facts of the period, where my portrait cannot include the fashion of the time (furniture, and attire). I am encouraged by this because as it will give my piece its own identity, while allowing me to study the style of painting.
Vermeer's work allows me to work on lighting effects a little more than my last piece. Using Vermeer and Romanticism I will attempt a natural lighting source that works with the motion and subtly of Romanticism, but will probably include a window like a typical Vermeer piece.
I have already worked a few photos of my wife to work from, but I already feel that I may have to revise her pose.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Johannes Vermeer
Johannes, Jan or Johan Vermeer (Dutch pronunciation: [joˈhɑnəs jɑn ʋərˈmeːr]; baptized in Delft on 31 October 1632 as Joannis, and buried in the same city under the name Jan on 15 December 1675) was aDutch painter who specialized in exquisite, domestic interior scenes of middle class life. Vermeer was a moderately successful provincial genre painter in his lifetime. He seems never to have been particularly wealthy, leaving his wife and children in debt at his death, perhaps because he produced relatively few paintings.[3]
Vermeer worked slowly and with great care, using bright colours and sometimes expensive pigments, with a preference for cornflower blue and yellow. He is particularly renowned for his masterly treatment and use of light in his work.[4]
Vermeer painted mostly domestic interior scenes. As Koning points out: "Almost all his paintings are apparently set in two smallish rooms in his house in Delft; they show the same furniture and decorations in various arrangements and they often portray the same people, mostly women".[5]
Recognized during his lifetime in Delft and The Hague, his modest celebrity gave way to obscurity after his death; he was barely mentioned in Arnold Houbraken's major source book on 17th century Dutch painting (Grand Theatre of Dutch Painters and Women Artists), and was thus omitted from subsequent surveys of Dutch art for nearly two centuries.[6][7] In the 19th century Vermeer was rediscovered by Gustav Friedrich Waagen and Théophile Thoré-Bürger, who published an essay attributing sixty-six pictures to him, although only thirty-four paintings are universally attributed to him today.[2] Since that time Vermeer's reputation has grown, and he is now acknowledged as one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
Self Portrait - Age 24, 1804
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ ogyst dɔminik ɛ̃ɡʁ]; 29 August 1780 – 14 January 1867) was a French Neoclassical painter. Although he considered himself to be a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, by the end of his life it was Ingres'sportraits, both painted and drawn, that were recognized as his greatest legacy.
A man profoundly respectful of the past, he assumed the role of a guardian of academic orthodoxy against the ascendant Romantic style represented by his nemesis Eugène Delacroix. His exemplars, he once explained, were "the great masters which flourished in that century of glorious memory when Raphael set the eternal and incontestable bounds of the sublime in art ... I am thus a conservator of good doctrine, and not an innovator."[1] Nevertheless, modern opinion has tended to regard Ingres and the other Neoclassicists of his era as embodying the Romantic spirit of his time,[2] while his expressive distortions of form and space make him an important precursor of modern art.
Romanticism and Portraits: Ingres
Portrait of Baron Joseph Vialetes de Mortarieu
by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
1806 , French, oil on canvas
..welcome to the world of romanticism: where feelings and emotions are more highly prized than logic and reason. romanticism stemmed from what some felt to be a too extreme obsession with logic and reason (prior to this period many significant scientific discoveries spurred the public to prioritize science above all other subjects). prompted by the writings of such thinkers as rousseau, artists began to put more of their personal feelings into their works. the results were sometimes dramatic compositions that forced reactions from the viewer or morepeaceful arrangements that inspired self-introspection.
...so what's so romantic about this portrait then? well, despite ingrés' oft-quoted stance against the less classically based style of romantic art, his works often contained elements of that very movement. in this portrait of a young mayor recently elected for office in his hometown, ingrés infused the figure with a dashing, debonair air by painting the figure in stylish modern dress and creating a gentle wind to tousle his hair. softly blended colors and edges lit by a gentle light source all draw focus to the youth of the subject. the bright medals standing out clearly against the plain black dress coat add a final masculine touch to the already romanticized portrait of an accomplished young man. ingrés protested that his work was more in the classical tradition (which is true if one considers the fine brushstrokes and ideal forms of figures in his works) but paintings such as this one of baron joseph show that the artist was clearly influenced by many other movements in art.
Source:
Norton Simon
Redbeansoup.com
http://www.redbeansoup.net/nortonsimon/roman.html
Romanticism Defined
Romanticism, first defined as an aesthetic in literary criticism around 1800, gained momentum as an artistic movement in France and Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century and flourished until mid-century. With its emphasis on the imagination and emotion, Romanticism emerged as a response to the disillusionment with the Enlightenment values of reason and order in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789. Though often posited in opposition to Neoclassicism, early Romanticism was shaped largely by artists trained in Jacques-Louis David'sstudio, including Baron Antoine-Jean Gros, Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. This blurring of stylistic boundaries is best expressed in Ingres' Apotheosis of Homer and Eugène Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalus (both Museé du Louvre, Paris), which polarized the public at the Salon of 1827 in Paris. While Ingres' work seemingly embodied the ordered classicism of the David in contrast to the disorder and tumult of the Delacroix, in fact both works draw from the Davidian tradition but each ultimately subverts that model, asserting the originality of the artist—a central notion of Romanticism.
In Romantic art, nature—with its uncontrollable power, unpredictability, and potential for cataclysmic extremes—offered an alternative to the ordered world of Enlightenment thought. The violent and terrifying images of nature conjured by Romantic artists recall the eighteenth-century aesthetic of the Sublime. As articulated by the British statesman Edmund Burke in a 1757 treatise and echoed by the French philosopher Denis Diderot a decade later, "all that stuns the soul, all that imprints a feeling of terror, leads to the sublime." In French and British painting of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the recurrence of images of shipwrecks (2003.42.56) and other representations of man's struggle against the awesome power of nature manifest this sensibility. Scenes of shipwrecks culminated in 1819 with Théodore Gericault's strikingly original Raft of the Medusa (Louvre), based on a contemporary event. In its horrifying explicitness, emotional intensity, and conspicuous lack of a hero, The Raft of the Medusa became an icon of the emerging Romantic style. Similarly, J. M. W. Turner's 1812 depiction of Hannibal and his army crossing the Alps (Tate Britain, London), in which the general and his troops are dwarfed by the overwhelming scale of the landscape and engulfed in the swirling vortex of snow, embodies the Romantic sensibility in landscape painting. Gericault also explored the Romantic landscape in a series of views representing different times of day; in Evening: Landscape with an Aqueduct (1989.183), the dramatic sky, blasted tree, and classical ruins evoke a sense of melancholic reverie.
Another facet of the Romantic attitude toward nature emerges in the landscapes of John Constable, whose art expresses his response to his native English countryside. For his major paintings, Constable executed full-scale sketches, as in a view of Salisbury Cathedral (50.145.8); he wrote that a sketch represents "nothing but one state of mind—that which you were in at the time." When his landscapes were exhibited in Paris at the Salon of 1824, critics and artists embraced his art as "nature itself." Constable's subjective, highly personal view of nature accords with the individuality that is a central tenet of Romanticism.
This interest in the individual and subjective—at odds with eighteenth-century rationalism—is mirrored in the Romantic approach to portraiture. Traditionally, records of individual likeness, portraits became vehicles for expressing a range of psychological and emotional states in the hands of Romantic painters. Gericault probed the extremes of mental illness in his portraits of psychiatric patients, as well as the darker side of childhood in his unconventional portrayals of children. In his portrait of Alfred Dedreux (41.17), a young boy of about five or six, the child appears intensely serious, more adult than childlike, while the dark clouds in the background convey an unsettling, ominous quality.
Such explorations of emotional states extended into the animal kingdom, marking the Romantic fascination with animals as both forces of nature and metaphors for human behavior. This curiosity is manifest in the sketches of wild animals done in the menageries of Paris and London in the 1820s by artists such as Delacroix, Antoine-Louis Barye, and Edwin Landseer. Gericault depicted horses of all breeds—from workhorses to racehorses—in his work. Lord Byron's 1819 tale of Mazeppa tied to a wild horse captivated Romantic artists from Delacroix to Théodore Chassériau, who exploited the violence and passion inherent in the story. Similarly, Horace Vernet, who exhibited two scenes from Mazeppa in the Salon of 1827 (both Musée Calvet, Avignon), also painted the riderless horse race that marked the end of the Roman Carnival, which he witnessed during his 1820 visit to Rome. His oil sketch (87.15.47) captures the frenetic energy of the spectacle, just before the start of the race. Images of wild, unbridled animals evoked primal states that stirred the Romantic imagination.
Along with plumbing emotional and behavioral extremes, Romantic artists expanded the repertoire of subject matter, rejecting the didacticism of Neoclassical history painting in favor of imaginary and exotic subjects. Orientalism and the worlds of literature stimulated new dialogues with the past as well as the present. Ingres' sinuous odalisques (38.65) reflect the contemporary fascination with the exoticism of the harem, albeit a purely imagined Orient, as he never traveled beyond Italy. In 1832, Delacroix journeyed to Morocco, and his trip to North Africa prompted other artists to follow. In 1846, Chassériau documented his visit to Algeria in notebooks filled with watercolors and drawings, which later served as models for paintings done in his Paris studio (64.188). Literature offered an alternative form of escapism. The novels of Sir Walter Scott, the poetry of Lord Byron, and the drama of Shakespeare transported art to other worlds and eras. Medieval England is the setting of Delacroix's tumultuousAbduction of Rebecca (03.30), which illustrates an episode from Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe.
In its stylistic diversity and range of subjects, Romanticism defies simple categorization. As the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1846, "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling."
Another facet of the Romantic attitude toward nature emerges in the landscapes of John Constable, whose art expresses his response to his native English countryside. For his major paintings, Constable executed full-scale sketches, as in a view of Salisbury Cathedral (50.145.8); he wrote that a sketch represents "nothing but one state of mind—that which you were in at the time." When his landscapes were exhibited in Paris at the Salon of 1824, critics and artists embraced his art as "nature itself." Constable's subjective, highly personal view of nature accords with the individuality that is a central tenet of Romanticism.
This interest in the individual and subjective—at odds with eighteenth-century rationalism—is mirrored in the Romantic approach to portraiture. Traditionally, records of individual likeness, portraits became vehicles for expressing a range of psychological and emotional states in the hands of Romantic painters. Gericault probed the extremes of mental illness in his portraits of psychiatric patients, as well as the darker side of childhood in his unconventional portrayals of children. In his portrait of Alfred Dedreux (41.17), a young boy of about five or six, the child appears intensely serious, more adult than childlike, while the dark clouds in the background convey an unsettling, ominous quality.
Such explorations of emotional states extended into the animal kingdom, marking the Romantic fascination with animals as both forces of nature and metaphors for human behavior. This curiosity is manifest in the sketches of wild animals done in the menageries of Paris and London in the 1820s by artists such as Delacroix, Antoine-Louis Barye, and Edwin Landseer. Gericault depicted horses of all breeds—from workhorses to racehorses—in his work. Lord Byron's 1819 tale of Mazeppa tied to a wild horse captivated Romantic artists from Delacroix to Théodore Chassériau, who exploited the violence and passion inherent in the story. Similarly, Horace Vernet, who exhibited two scenes from Mazeppa in the Salon of 1827 (both Musée Calvet, Avignon), also painted the riderless horse race that marked the end of the Roman Carnival, which he witnessed during his 1820 visit to Rome. His oil sketch (87.15.47) captures the frenetic energy of the spectacle, just before the start of the race. Images of wild, unbridled animals evoked primal states that stirred the Romantic imagination.
Along with plumbing emotional and behavioral extremes, Romantic artists expanded the repertoire of subject matter, rejecting the didacticism of Neoclassical history painting in favor of imaginary and exotic subjects. Orientalism and the worlds of literature stimulated new dialogues with the past as well as the present. Ingres' sinuous odalisques (38.65) reflect the contemporary fascination with the exoticism of the harem, albeit a purely imagined Orient, as he never traveled beyond Italy. In 1832, Delacroix journeyed to Morocco, and his trip to North Africa prompted other artists to follow. In 1846, Chassériau documented his visit to Algeria in notebooks filled with watercolors and drawings, which later served as models for paintings done in his Paris studio (64.188). Literature offered an alternative form of escapism. The novels of Sir Walter Scott, the poetry of Lord Byron, and the drama of Shakespeare transported art to other worlds and eras. Medieval England is the setting of Delacroix's tumultuousAbduction of Rebecca (03.30), which illustrates an episode from Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe.
In its stylistic diversity and range of subjects, Romanticism defies simple categorization. As the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1846, "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling."
Source:
Kathryn Calley Galitz
Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum Of Art
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/roma/hd_roma.htm
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Final Project: Another Portrait?
It is not that I mind that I have to do another portrait, but wonder minimally what else I may have come up with.
My wife wants me to do a portrait of her. Creatively it gives me a heading to steer in the perimeters of the project, so no complaints. It will be a learning venture and I will always look at it this way. Content and symbolism will still be achieved in the piece once I get my homework done.
My Influences and research:
I am influenced by Romanticism, especially the work of Ingres who I researched before. It is not the technical part of his work but rather the classic style that I feel is important of me to learn before I break out into my own. Of course my expectations of reaching that level of portrait is far from attainable due to my own skill and time frame.
Thanks to work in my last piece I am also encouraged to push my understanding of lighting effects. I have always been interested in the effects of Vermeer's work and hope to attain some level of skill with this. His use of lighting is popularly celebrated so I think it is a good place to start.
Somewhere between my ongoing technical growth and research in these two artists I hope to bring about an artwork that I my wife can like and I would be proud to place in her office or our home:)
I am not putting too much pressure on myself, if id does not come out great I can always do it again.
Her Influences:
I already have to include her personality into the piece. Knowing she also has a strong liking of Romanticism, but she would rather impressionism:)
Her homeland will be reflected in the piece but as in my last portrait I aim first with colours. Her hometown of Mostar, Herzegovina stands in my mind with allot of grey mountains, Lavender fields in the summer and rosemary bushes that grow wild everywhere. The teal blue of the Adriatic sea and the Neretva river are also important, but the I will contemplate with as I would not describe the region as colourful (coming from the Caribbean). Artists she is drawn to are Delacroix, Corot and Boudin.
Though I will reflect on her preferences because her portrait should reflect her personality; me as the artist must remember it is also how I see her and would like to illustrate that to the the viewer. But I hope to capture this in, posture, dress and gaze.
My size will be square (already part of my reflection of her personality), so most probably 36"x 36".
All left to do is a initial sketch to figure out layout and composition. The problem here I feel will be what to include as Ingres and Vermeer had allot in their pieces and I doubt I will have as much time. With that worked out I will venture into a photograph to work from and begin.
As Ingres portraits stood as period pieces with style of dress and furniture and indications I also hope to incorporate these. Vermeer was known for doing middle to lower classes doing everyday things so I will steer my creative exploration this way also.
My wife wants me to do a portrait of her. Creatively it gives me a heading to steer in the perimeters of the project, so no complaints. It will be a learning venture and I will always look at it this way. Content and symbolism will still be achieved in the piece once I get my homework done.
My Influences and research:
I am influenced by Romanticism, especially the work of Ingres who I researched before. It is not the technical part of his work but rather the classic style that I feel is important of me to learn before I break out into my own. Of course my expectations of reaching that level of portrait is far from attainable due to my own skill and time frame.
Thanks to work in my last piece I am also encouraged to push my understanding of lighting effects. I have always been interested in the effects of Vermeer's work and hope to attain some level of skill with this. His use of lighting is popularly celebrated so I think it is a good place to start.
Somewhere between my ongoing technical growth and research in these two artists I hope to bring about an artwork that I my wife can like and I would be proud to place in her office or our home:)
I am not putting too much pressure on myself, if id does not come out great I can always do it again.
Her Influences:
I already have to include her personality into the piece. Knowing she also has a strong liking of Romanticism, but she would rather impressionism:)
Her homeland will be reflected in the piece but as in my last portrait I aim first with colours. Her hometown of Mostar, Herzegovina stands in my mind with allot of grey mountains, Lavender fields in the summer and rosemary bushes that grow wild everywhere. The teal blue of the Adriatic sea and the Neretva river are also important, but the I will contemplate with as I would not describe the region as colourful (coming from the Caribbean). Artists she is drawn to are Delacroix, Corot and Boudin.
Though I will reflect on her preferences because her portrait should reflect her personality; me as the artist must remember it is also how I see her and would like to illustrate that to the the viewer. But I hope to capture this in, posture, dress and gaze.
My size will be square (already part of my reflection of her personality), so most probably 36"x 36".
All left to do is a initial sketch to figure out layout and composition. The problem here I feel will be what to include as Ingres and Vermeer had allot in their pieces and I doubt I will have as much time. With that worked out I will venture into a photograph to work from and begin.
As Ingres portraits stood as period pieces with style of dress and furniture and indications I also hope to incorporate these. Vermeer was known for doing middle to lower classes doing everyday things so I will steer my creative exploration this way also.
Portrait 2:Completion
I had far too much fun with this piece while in mid process. Affected by the Trinidadian music in my drive; I had to switch to my everyday musical style to complete it.
My satisfaction with the technical work as it pertained to the human anatomy slowed my completion also. Every time I mixed blue paint it seemed to be different and I had to re touch the entire piece, but was encouraged with how the piece looked.
The lighting effect was very clear in my head but I struggled to let it make sense.
Though I was very happy with the outcome and what people's impressions were of the piece in critique, part of me will always hope that I did more in detail.
One good thing that came out of my enjoyment was a stretch in the background in learning a bit of what I see as impressionism, stumbling on a style that worked with longer brush strokes and heavier thicker paint.
Unfortunately I doubt it will be a style I will use in my next piece, but will further in future pieces.
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