Breakfast In Bed by Mary Cassatt, courtesy of the Huntington Museum of Art

THE CONNECTIONS OF MARY CASSATT

There is a romantic notion that great art is created in some kind of cultural vacuum, but the reality is much different. While there are a number of wildly eccentric and unique artists who seem to come out of nowhere, the vast majority of artists are linked through innumerable connections, personal, professional, geographical and even familial. Mary Cassatt, an American painter most known for her paintings of women and children, is a very good example of this interconnectivity that seems to tie artists together.

Mary’s family was very well off and rooted in Philadelphia. She and her siblings received a very fine education and Mary spent some of her youth in Europe, studying art, learning to speak French and German and absorbing its culture at a time when most of our European ancestors were fleeing the continent by the boatload. An artistic sense ran deep in the family. Mary’s mother was committed to the art aesthetic and a distant cousin, Robert Henri, would become an important American painter.

The Childs Bath by Mary Cassatt, courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago

After her bouts of European culture, she became deeply committed to art and enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. There, she befriended fellow Philadelphian, Thomas Eakins. Both of them felt that the Academy’s teachings were coming up short and believed that the best taught art was in Europe. Leaving America independently, they both studied under Jean-Leon Gerome a French academician who specialized in highly detailed paintings, a style that would influence both Eakins and Cassatt. After a time, Eakins returned to Philadelphia; Mary stayed in Europe.

Mary’s father did not like his daughter working as an artist, preferring she seek her living in something more professional. Still, he covered her living expenses while expecting his daughter to earn enough money to pay for her supplies. Europe had become the home for quite a number of American expatriates, with a number of painters living in Paris and Munich while Italy had established itself as home for expatriate sculptors. Many of these artists earned their living through selling their work to the well-to-do Americans who traveled Europe and Mary intended to follow that same route.

Little Girl in Blue Chair by Mary Cassatt, courtesy of the National Gallery of Art

She pursued a career painting for Salon shows but failed to become self-sufficient. Fortunately for her long-term reputation, she was swept up in the general complaints of the Salon and eventually displayed work in the Impressionists shows. There she became associated with another group of artists, such as Claude Monet and Eduard Degas. In particular, she and Degas developed a mutually artistic attraction: he, with his young ballerinas, and she with her mothers and children. Degas helped Mary expand her artistic talents into pastel and etching. Mary introduced her family’s wealthy friends to the works of the Impressionists at a time when they were seen as deeply revolutionary in their styles. Her stipulation that all work bought must eventually be donated to a public museum endowed cities like Chicago, New York and Philadelphia with priceless collections of Impressionist art.

Mary’s work reflects the inspiration and restrictions placed on women in the 19th century. While the Impressionists painted any number of public scenes, from nightclubs and theatres to drinking gardens and train stations, Cassatt was restricted to domestic scenes. Actually, paintings of women in these situations were in high demand in the 19th century and hers are some of the finest examples, as they are sharply detailed but sympathetic, without the touches of sentimentality they make most of the work in this genre difficult to enjoy these days.

Mary painted for most of her life but her interest dwindled as she grew old and cutting edge art moved away from Impressionism and into styles much more radical and anti-realistic. In her last years, she fought for the cause of women’s rights and died in Paris in 1926.

Fork In The River, An oil on canvas painting for sale available from Fine Art Gallery Of Realism

BEND IN THE RIVER, canvas size: 18 x 36

Bend In The River shows a river as the summer evening sun lights up the shoreline trees. In the foreground is a prominence of land that barely juts from the shade as the small river flows around it. On the farther shores of the river lies parkland. A series of trees to the left are falling into the shade while the trees on the right can still be seen in full sun. In the distance, trees can be seen sheltering a few houses. The river reflects the blue sky and a little of the contrasting light of the trees.
I don’t enter plein air competitions often. It is difficult to get the time off from work. I entered a local plein air show for two years straight. The first year was a real success for the organizers; the second year was not as good. On that second year, I had to arrange a series of afternoons off from my job to paint in the show. Most of my time was spent on an agonizingly detailed painting of a storefront window. It was near the 4th of July and a local shop had a display of patriotic bunting and colors, complete with a red tricycle and store items. I painted the shop window in between periodic busts of downpouring rain.
In the evening, I painting along the shoreline of the local river. There are a number of pretty views of the river as it passes through the town and the visual choices you make depend upon where people are painting at the time and what a location looks like at certain times of the day. Here, two forks of the river merge just as the river takes a bend in the distance.
I have always liked a contrast of light and dark, so that is what I like best about this painting. I like the way the sunlight illuminates the trees on the right while the shoreline to the left is falling into shadows. The river has a dark, murky look to it so it reflects the blue of the sky very well. All of it is sketched loosely, allowing the light and color to display the landscape rather than freezing it in a sense of detail. I prefer paintings that way.
Over all, this is a very calming picture to me, as the light is slowly passing. The river drifts, but it doesn’t rush. The evening light is bright, but it isn’t glaring. I think summer evenings should be like this more often.

Silence In the City, A Cityscape available from Fine Art Gallery Of Realism

SILENCE IN THE CITY

18 x24

Silence In The City is a painting of a Catholic Cemetery. A statue of Mary stands upon the gravestone on the far right. Other stones are scattered throughout the cemetery. It is a late afternoon and sunlight spills across the cemetery lawn and onto the tombstones. A grand old tree hangs over on the left while two young maples are growing up on the right. Along the back, a row of businesses and houses stand against a milky summer sky.
Actually, this painting was done in August and September although none of trees really show any signs of fall. This painting is a contrast between life and death, light and shadow and contrasting sizes. Generally, people paint or photograph cemeteries in gloomy weather. It gives it a sense of atmosphere and the inclement weather creates a sense of depth as it gives the background a foggy look. This cemetery was near my house and it just shined in fair weather. It seemed to defy its purpose as my neighbors walked, biked and jogged through there regularly. It was well tended and proper care was given to those laid to rest in it.
I really liked the way the sunlight creates the contrast in this painting. The tombstones shine in the light and the statue of Mary, on the right, seems to greet the sun as it gives form to her alabaster look. I also liked the buildings. They reminded me of Edward Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning, a row of buildings that seem to step out of time and into the sunlight. I even liked the billboard and the traffic light that appears more often than I realize in my work.
In a way, there is something strangely glorious about the painting. The mood was not religious in anyway but I suppose that, considering the location, some people may see it that way.

Sunset, Canyon De Chelly by Edgar Payne, from the Mark C. Pigott Collection

THE RETURN OF EDGAR PAYNE

America produced two major schools of regional landscape artists- the Hudson River School, which focused on New England, and the California/Southwestern school. The Hudson River painters were at their most active during the mid 19th century and were extremely popular in their time. The artists of the southwestern part of the United Artists came later and, although there were regionally well known, their long-term reputations suffered from the rise of Modernism despite the quality of their work.

Among the best of the California painters was Edgar Payne, a Midwesterner who became enchanted with the beauty of the West Coast. Payne was born in Missouri, although his family traveled around. Legend has it he tried to make paint out of pokeberries as a child and did spend two weeks at the Art Institute of Chicago but he seems to have had a very strong independent streak in him. Like his father, he traveled incessantly but was lucky enough to have the financial backing of groups willing to supoort is artistic wanderlust. The Congress Hotel, in downtown Chicago, financed his painting of a massive West Coast mural and the Santa Fe Railroad financed his work in the Southwestern desert country. His desert paintings are very well regarded because of the Native American figures that are minutely scaled against the massive rock formations in the area, but it is his work in California that really gave him his first fame.

Laguna Coastline by Edgar Payne

He lived most of his adult life in Laguna Beach and was fascinated by both the coastline and the Sierra Nevada mountains. Once he married Elsie Palmer, another California artist, the couple spent their summers in California and spent their winters promoting their work in New York. During those years, Payne’s wanderlust also took them to Europe, where he repeated his themes by painting the French coastline, as well as portions of the French Alps.

While Payne was a gifted painter, it’s his immense sense of the dramatic that really highlights his work. There is no Midwestern subtlety in his themes of grandeur. Even the paintings that focus on a flatter landscape build their drama from some other feature, whether it is the massive build up of clouds over the desert or the golden autumn of a massive sycamore tree. This relentless pursuit of drama may lead a few people to question the accuracy of subject matter but, like all art, truth may not be the only object of the artist’s intent.

Like a lot of good 20th century realists, Payne’s reputation was flattened by the radical changes in 20th century art. Fortunately, there has always been a devoted market to California plein air painters and landscape artists and his work has always had a high reputation among those collectors. In reaction to the waves of artistic change that filled those decades, Payne became one of many American artists who organized an artistic group based on the rapidly fading artistic principles that had guided art in the past. He also wrote a book on landscape painting called the Composition of Outdoor Painting that deals with the principles of design behind painting landscapes.

This past winter, the Pasadena Museum of California Art organized a retrospective of Payne’s work. The show first appeared at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento in February and will appear in Pasadena this June. At the end of the year, the Gilcrease Art Museum in Tulsa will host the show. In honor of the event, Colorado Public Television has also put together a nice video entitled Edgar Payne: The Scenic Journey on the artist’s life and work.

Desert Skies by Edward Payne

This is the start of a recent landscape. Only a few object on the right have been painted.

The Race To Paint A Spring Landscape

Last month, I posted an article about what an artist may look for when he or she is finding a suitable view to paint. In the article, I posted a few photographs and made a few comments. At the time, the weather had been historically warm and it seemed obvious that we were headed into a warm spring and that the trees and flowers were going to pop early. But what a difference a few days made! By the time I posted the article, the weather was already showing signs of cooling off.

It looked like I would be starting on an early painting but everything changed. Despite some beautiful weather, the days cooled off and rainy days cycled in. Family obligations and spring-cleaning also filled in some of these cooler days. By the end of April, it looked like I may not be able to start the painting at all. I had sketched it out in a really rough way, blocking in where a few important features would stand in the painting but it looked like I may have to move onto summer paintings before I’d made a big start on this one. Those things happen.

But I’ve had a few breaks this past week. The seasonally cool temperatures are still around and the trees are only opening in clusters. At the park where I was painting, most of the trees are still budding, so I was able to make a few trips and see if I could begin.

With a wide spread of trees still budding, the painting needed to have the sky filled in a head of time. One of the problems with landscape painting is the predominance of beautiful blue skies, especially if you plein air paint. A truly diligent artist may find the determination to paint in troubled weather but most people wait until the weather is nice. That leaves us with lots of paintings with lovely skies. Usually, I find that I just paint in a blue sky until I find the right situation to capture what I am looking for. The sky I did paint in this painting is a basic combination of phthalocyanine blue and titanium white. I really do want more out of this sky than just the heavy brilliance of blue but until I get a meteorological break, I guess I’m left with what I have.

These farther objects are the start of my attempt to paint this spring.

With the trees slowly changing each day, I am racing to capture them in seasonal change. Everything else in the painting is temporarily secondary. You can see that across the middle of the painting , it is primarily scribbled out sketches with various blobs of neutral color places where the houses stand. In time, once I’m done with the trees, I can move on to the houses and the lawns.

Because it is easier for me to work by layering objects on top of each other, I usually start my paintings towards the back and come forward. In this painting, I started at my far right where the most distant objects stand in relation to the various trees I need to paint. A tall pine, a barn and a large bush of bridal’s wreath stand. They represent the first objects in a string of springtime trees and shrubbery that I need to paint as fast as I can.

Ghent Altarpiece by Hubert and Jan Van Eyck, courtesy of Cathedral of St. Bavo

THE VAN EYCKS AND THE RISE OF OIL PAINTING

The last centuries of the Middle Ages saw an economic rise in Europe as both the Mediterranean area and the countries around the North Sea became wealthy on trade. In the north, the fishing that fed Europe’s meatless Fridays, as well as a growing trade in cloth and fabric brought wealth to more than just the local royalty. With that wealth came a strong desire to purchase art or to contribute art to the local churches and cathedrals. The top men in this industry were the Van Eyck brothers, Hubert and Jan.

In most art history books, Jan is the more well known. He was born in the last years of the 1300’s, with dates ranging from 1380 to 1400 as semi-educated guesses. Like his brother, he was probably born in Maaseik, in Belgium, a town not far from Liege. Nothing is known of the lives of either brother until Jan shows up in the records as a court painter and diplomat for Jan of Bavaria. Supposedly, Hubert was the better painter but there is no painting that can be attributed to him. Instead, it’s Jan who has left a bit of a record.

Jan Van Eyck is considered the father of modern art painting as he is the first artist whose name can be attributed to oil paintings but the process of oil painting goes back much farther. Some time during the early Middle Ages, Chinese Buddhists were mixing pigments with resin and oil to use on metalwork and artwork. The process seems to have traveled along the Spice Route and in the years after 1000 AD, directions were written down on how to make oil paint. In those years, oil painting’s role was secondary, being applied to other processes. It wasn’t until the Van Eycks’ works appear that we can see that an art form had risen from a decorative process.

Madonna and child reading by Jan Van Eyck, courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria

The other striking observation is that the Van Eycks were the top men of a craft that already existed. Other artists, such as Robert Campin and Rogier of Weyden, suggest that the Van Eycks were not alone in their field. The way it looks, some time around 1300 or 1350, oil painting became reliable and popular enough to progress from being a secondary style to becoming a primary art style. By the early 1400’s, linseed oil was being processed and artists who had once made their living decorating illuminated manuscripts were now painting boards and linen fabric.

Despite the scarcity of information concerning Jan and Hubert Van Eyck, they have left one undeniable masterpiece, the Ghent Altarpiece. Ghent is in western Belgium and was a highly successful town by the 1400’s. A wealthy financier, named Joducus Vid contracted with Hubert to paint the altarpiece for the Church of St. John. The altarpiece has around 20 or so pieces of various sizes and are collectively around 11 feet high by 15 feet wide. The paintings are on oak panels primed with a solution of chalk and glue.

Hubert worked on the project for a number of years. Each piece was cut and primed before Hubert sketched out the visual ideas on each panel. Afterwards, Hubert started underpainting. Prior to Impressionism and packaged oil paint, artists had to paint in layers. Although it was very time consuming, it gave the paintings a genuinely jewel like look. Either Hubert was painting the entire altarpiece, layer by layer, or he completed some pieces and did not start others. Either way, the altarpiece must have been around three quarters finished when Hubert died. Vid contacted Jan to complete the work but his diplomatic work tied him up for several years before he was able to finish the altarpiece.

As the first notable oil painting and as a beautifully executed celebration of Medieval Christianity, the Ghent Altarpiece may be as covetous and as historically battered as the Mona Lisa. Maybe even more so. During the horribly violent religious wars of the 1500’s, the painting was hidden from iconoclastic violence. In the 1800’s, Napoleon grabbed it for France and, later, Germany grabbed it. It was returned to Belgium under the Versailles Treaty that ended WWI. Twenty two years later, the Nazis grabbed it and hid it in a cave. In between, portions of the painting had been stolen and a few pieces have never been retrieved. Currently, the altarpiece resides in the Vid Chapel of the St.Bavo Cathedral.

Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini (?) and his Bride by Jan Van Eyck, courtesy of the London National Gallery

Ophelia by John Millais, courtesy of Tate London

THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD

The first half of the 19th century may have been the high water mark for academic art. It was during those years that the art schools in France and England had the greatest influence on their countries’ artistic and aesthetic tastes. But by mid century, both countries saw a small but aggressive counter-revolution fought by small handfuls of artists who chose to reject the prevailing artistic styles defined by the schools. In France, that war was fought by the Impressionists and their influence has been felt to this day. In England, the revolt was less successful but still left a large legacy throughout the 20th century.

So what were the academies doing wrong? The simplest answer is “to not change with the times.” Both the British and the French academies were glorious schools set up at an earlier age but the Romantic movement swept the European art circles in the early 1800s, so it was eventual that a small group of artists, embracing the Romantic movement’s logic, would reject the authority of these schools and look for something more meaningful. For the Pre-Raphaelites, that meant embracing a photo-realistic look, medieval themes, a strong curiosity with death and an aesthetic naturalism. From Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott to Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley, English Romantics believed in an ancient heroic time that did not exist but left a trail of medieval influence that probably canbe traced from Ivanhoe to Burne-Jones to J.R.R. Tolkien and finally to the heavy metal bands of the 1970’s so heavily into Tolkien.

The group was started by William Hunt, John Millais and Dante Rossetti, all students at the Royal Academy in London. The academy was led by England’s greatest portrait painter of the time, Sir Joshua Reynolds. Unfortunately, Reynolds, like his counterparts in Paris, believed in the dusty, musty, varnish-aged look of the Old Masters’ art work. This called for paintings that looked as if they had been painted two hundred years earlier. The three students firmly rejected this artistic philosophy, believing that art had gone wrong somewhere. With Romanticism as their guide, they found fault with the Rococo and Baroque styles, and found art to be at its best at around 1490. That would be just before Columbus sailed for America and a time when the Italian painters still painted without linseed oil or varnish. In other words, the end of the medieval age.

Christ In The House Of His Parents by John Millais, courtesy of Tate London

The Pre-Raphaelites started painting along these philosophic lines in 1848 and by 1850, the group had already raised a fuss over Millais’ painting Christ In The House Of His Parents. On the whole, the Pre-Raphaelites were fairly religious and New Testament themes favored their paintings, but to contemporary art critics, Milais’ painting verged on artistic sacrilege, as it displayed too many realistic touches and many thought the painting was ugly. But it brought attention to the group and for the next ten years, the Pre-Raphaelites seemed like the future of English art.

The group was joined by several other people, including Thomas Woolner and James Collinson. A number of other non-members also provided support and joined in their shows, including Edward Burne Wood and Ford Madox Brown. The group also was favored by a number of critics and became a running artistic soap opera as affairs and broken marriages seemed to dot their history. Collinson left the group early and, eventually, Hunt did too. Both men were deeply religious and chose to focus on those themes as artists. Following their departure group, the Pre-Raphaelites became much more focused on the Romantic medieval themes and the works of Tennyson and Shakespeare became their subjects. In particular were Lady Of Shallot by John Waterhouse and Millais’s Ophelia from Hamlet.

Although the Pre-Raphaelites seemed to dwindle away as newer and more important art movements came to England from France, the group left its mark. There were a number of well known painters, including James McNeill Whistler and John LaFarge, who were very influenced by the group. Rossetti also befriended William Morris, the man behind the Arts and Crafts movement and its accompanying Art Nouveau style. After the group passed away, their artwork fell out of favor although museums like Tate London have vast collections of their work. But hippies and baby boomers have been kind to the movement and the value of the work has increased greatly over the past half century.

Proserpine by Dante Rossetti, courtesy of Tate London

A Peaceful Retreat by Thomas Kinkade

THE CONFUSED LEGACY OF THOMAS KINKADE

Thomas Kinkade passed away last week, leaving this world an artistic reputation that is both confusing and peculiar. He is mostly noted for his paintings of Hobbitesque houses that are always illuminated from within and for the ambitious, and even blatant, ways he promoted his work. These illuminated houses could be found on calendars, collectors’ plates and on giclee prints available through his chain of galleries, and his fans were legion. His death says a lot about the way we now interpret art and the state of art in the world today. In a world filled with ironic art, his legacy is one of the greatest ironies.

Kinkade was a fairly competent artist who found a gold mine. An impoverished child, he found faith in born again Christianity, which he symbolically represented by illuminating his houses from within. This motif, as well as his garish color choices, were used repeatedly in his work and provided him with gimmicks that his fans loved and his detractors hated. But despite his obvious sentimentality, the issues concerning his art are not as easy to ignore as his detractors think.

First of all, despite what we may think, his sentimental, garish style has a longer history in art than we may want to acknowledge. In the 19th century, Europe had a number of artists who specialized in this type of sentimental art and a some of them came to America. In particular, Germany had a number of well acclaimed art schools as well as an artistic style that leaned towards highly detailed landscape painting. With the influence of the Impressionists came a higher degree of color experimentation but the fascination with detail continued. Even after the rise of modern art, there were art galleries that continued to sell paintings in this tradition. Kinkade just made this style his own.

Another complaint about Kinkade’s paintings was its obsessive commercialization. His galleries only sold giclee prints, not originals. He also sold his work through the shopping networks. On top of that was the string of commercialized products that displayed his paintings. While this can seem shameless, the only differences I can see between Kinkade’s huckstering and what art galleries do across the country is quality of work and the fact that, for once, the artist is making the money himself. The same can’t be said for Vincent Van Gogh or Edward Hopper as museums sell walls full of Sunflowers and Nighthawks prints.

There also seems something shameful about cranking out art so thoughtlessly in order to please clients but the world is filled with talented artists do just that, if they can. Even the greats were shameless from time to time. Peter Paul Rubens had a factory that cranked out art used to appease the heads of state. In the 1500s and 1600s, Dutch artists produced a massive amount of art created to feed the country’s obsession for genre painting. Picasso abused his world-renowned talent by scribbling on paper just to appease tourists and pay local businesses. It was easier than checking your wallet for cash. And how shameless are the artists displaying their work at International Fairs around the world? What soul remains when you know your client base owns oil well in Dubai? Is all shamelessness just a matter of degree and talent?

I doubt you can find any of Kinkade’s work in a museum and I doubt that there will be any rush by the museums to buy his work in the same way that they hustled for Warhols several years ago. Still, when he was living, Kinkade was possibly America’s best-known living artist, a strange fact that says as much about the state of art as it does the commercial routes that Kinkade took. Why has art allowed itself to become so fragmented that only hustlers can make a name for themselves? Why do so many artists chose to define themselves so radically that they become cult figures? Can an artist still find a happy medium between talent and vision and claim some success?

Service Station Along The Road, available through the Fine Art Gallery Of Realism

SERVICE STATION ON A HOT DAY;canvas size: 18 x 36

Service Station On A Hot Day is a painting of a service station littered with a number of cars and trucks. In front of the station, construction work has begun on the parking lot. A minivan has stopped for gas and in one of the service bays, a car is being worked on. Behind the station, a line of suburban trees is framed by an intensely blue midday sky. To the right, traffic lights display red, and in the foreground lies a major road with a grassy meridian.
Not everyone likes urban landscape paintings but, like everything else I paint, I am attracted to contrasts, in this case, the contrast between the trees and the service station and traffic lights. On the one hand, the trees represent the natural world, living, growing, reproducing and dying; an eternal process that continually brings the reality of nature back into our lives. The service station is our civilized life and its need for continual repair. Our civilizations are so ephemeral compared to the eternity of nature. In a handful of years or a few decades, what we have built must be replaced. We fix more than we build. The Station needs repair, as does the car in the service bay. The minivan needs refilling. In fact, it wouldn’t be long until the station was closed, a recurring problem for my paintings. On more than one occasion, I have had to stop a painting in some state of incompletion, whether in planning or in execution, because of changes in buildings, streets, playgrounds and neighborhoods.
Despite the construction, the painting is still dominated by the vivid blue sky. It shines the heat of summer upon the scene. It makes the streets hot and still. The trees provide a cooling relief between the vibrant sky and the hot land the sun bears down upon. The trees handle summer well but one of them is already stressed and yellowing.
There are a few pieces of detail to mention, including one that has now vanished from our lives. That is a telephone booth. A person, probably driving the white van, is talking on the phone. Once the station permanently closed, the phone was gone. Now, if you don’t have a cell phone, you have to beg to place a call. Also, there is an ice machine, something that is still in our lives.

Home page of the Google Art Project

THE GOOGLE ART PROJECT

Have you heard about the Google Art Project? I first heard about it not too long after it was launched in early 2011 but I carelessly forgot. The problem was that, at the time, its selection of museums was limited as was the museum galleries it showed. I spent a few days fascinated by the tours but I moved on to other things. Shame on me.

Now, the site is back in the news as it has added a number of new museums, including several American ones. Off the top of my head,I remember The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. I even saw the site mentioned on the evening news and that reminded me that the Art Project could use as much promotion as possible.

The website is tastefully but simply styled, as most educational websites need to be. Each time you arrive at the site, you are greeted with a different work of art from their gallery. On my recent visit, Eduard Manet’s In the Conservatory was displayed. Within the image of the painting. a translucent box displays the title and the artist, as well as the dates it was painted and, at the bottom of the box, the museum or gallery where it is found. The usual buttons surround the painting with the most important at the upper left.

Gallery view of Sunday On La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat

You can wander or search through the lists of museum and gallery collections, artists and artwork titles. I chose the Art Institute of Chicago as I know it well and it is finally on display on the website. A slideshow of artwork from the museum iss displayed and I chose A Sunday On La Grande Jatte by the short-lived Georges Seurat to use as a visual guide. The museum gallery feature is very interesting. You can navigate through some of a museum’s galleries and get a Googlesque view of the place. It’s not the same as being there but will I ever see the Hermitage in person? Here, you can see Sunday On LA Grande Jatte on the museum’s gallery wall, as well as the Art Institute’s aging parquet floor and one of the skylights that were renovated a few decades ago. With many of the gallery views, you can navigate the room and stand in fromt of the art work but not all of the work is displayed well, even if it is found in the museum’s slide show. One of the Art Institute’s famous works is the Nighthawks by Edward Hopper. The painting is beautifully displayed in the museum’s slide show but it’s barely visible in the gallery tour.

You can also look at a painting up close, if you choose. My third photo is a close up of Sunday On La Grande Jatte. Seurat painted a number of large paintings that were based on pointillism; the theory of using complimentary colors in small dots next to each other, not unlike the microscopic dots found on a color television picture tube. Seurat’s work is a good example of how detailed these images of the paintings can get. Standing in from of a Seurat, the idea seems intriguing until you find that you can be overwhelmed by his painted dots. This screen shot shows a military trombonist and a few military men with a ship in the distance. Because of image reduction, this photo makes everything look good but if you view this image at full screen, you can find these colorful dots are starting to pixilate.
At this distance, you can see some of the basic styles of painting, such as layering of transparent paints and the placing of highlights on top. You can also see some of the effects of age on the works as cracking and crazing can be seen.

Close Up Of Sunday On La Grande Jatte

The list of museums that the Art Project displays is getting impressive. Among the museums are the Frick Collection, a Manhattan mansion once owned by Andrew Carnegie’s right hand man and now displaying his art collection; the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) in New York City, the Uffizi in Florence, Italy, housed in a Medici building; and the newly opened Acropolis Museum in Athens, which holds many newly discovered objects from the site of the Acropolis. The list goes on and on and is very impressive. Personally, if the weather is bad and wish you had some place better to be, strolling through the virtual galleries of the Art Project would be a wonderful way to spend an afternoon.

Word of warning: the Art Project is not mentioned amount the clutter of links that Google provides on their browser. I did not find anything labels art within the links of g-mail, books, play, etc. You will need to search for it or save the link below.

The website is: http://www.googleartproject.com/