It's winter, but through art we can sit in Italian villas, smell the roses, or even paint our own still life visions of beauty. All are welcome to post scenes either from museum galleries, or exhibit your own painting class projects. What art inspires you?
This message was edited Dec 15, 2013 10:33 AM
Many paintings touch me, I love the pastels of Mary Cassat, the sea scenes of Winslow Homer, the pastorals of Andrew Wyeth......That said, I get my most enjoyment from painting botanicals....I would love to post a photo of my latest rose, but I gave my camera's memory card to a friend, who's hanging some of my pictures in a coffee bar....guess I need to get another card!
Yes please when you can, do get a memory card and post your pictures, Marilyn.
This weekend I was inspired when we attended the John Singer Sargent watercolor exhibit at the MFA. I have some pictures to share once DD2 sends them to me from her iphone.
Great....will love to see them! My late DH & I loved to go to the Clark in Williamstown....we had friends that lived in that town years ago, & would visit both. Talked to the fellow who has my memory card.....I should have it back by Thurs.
how nice Rosemary. is that painting Mary Cassatt?
This is Fort George Island by Moran. My daughter chose this painting for a class project. We like the colors.
I like the palm trees also, Sally.
The painting in the opening screen is by John Singer Sargent. I think it's called Carnation lily, lily, rose. It's in England so I've never actually seen it, but I did plant the Gold Band lily in the picture. There are lots of beautiful Sargent paintings in Boston, and a fair amount of Mary Cassats too for that mattter.
Now I have a bunch of great watercolors in my email, so I'll try to convert them into photos.
Last weekend I had the opportunity to see the MFA exhibit of watercolors by John singer Sargent. He painted these after he had made his name painting portraits of high society easterners. I have selected just a few among the many luscious paintings. One thing I especially appreciated is that i had never seen most of them before.
He clearly loved his niece Rose Marie whom he pictured in several garden scenes. This was the painting the MFA selected for their brochure.
Magnolias,
pomegranates (1908)
and gourds
Most are opaque and translucent watercolors with graphite underdrawings
This message was edited Dec 18, 2013 7:34 PM
It was hard to choose among paintings of the Villa di Marlia, Lucca painted in 1910
And the Corfu painting Lights and Shadows (1909) stood out too
He must have traveled to a number of different villas.
There was a room devoted only to Venice, a room of paintings of Beduin tribesmen, a room full of portraits, and two rooms exploring white washes as he painted Carrara marble, among others. It was a very large, impressive exhibit that brought together paintings from the Brooklyn Museum and the MFA.
I hope to have a chance to see them again, and maybe pay more attention to photography. Hope you enjoy these, and better yet, I hope you can go see them.
beautiful!
Wow....those are gorgeous! I've never seen any of them, but I loved them all......
The exhibit closes Jan 20. I think I will go again so i can experience the Alps, Venice, the dessert, even the quarries through an amazing artist's vision. And the gardens are pretty good too.
Lucky to be close to the city......
that looks interesting Rosemary - may venture in - have never been the MFA and I went to NU across the street.
Please let me know what you think if you see the watercolors, Bill.
I still hope Marilyn and others will post pictures of their art work. There's no chance of me painting these days ( I am looking for some pics of my murals and sets paintings when much younger), but I can admire the work of others.
Ooops....got my memory card back, & unthinkingly, deleted it all.....my paintings will be back from the exhibit in April.....I have another chance to exhibit at a historic house in the area, in June, but that will be with my class, so only one or two paintings will go in......here is the painting of a Japanese iris in the show, but now it's matted & framed & looks better!
lovely!!!
I love that it looks so delicate. Watercolors are great if a person can muster the self control. I always wanted to rework my scenes, so I was better at oils and acrylics.
not great with a brush - only with rocks :)
Thanks......the JI was difficult, I had to use a brush with only a few hairs to do the stippling on the blossom.....Bill, working with rocks is a huge talent!
Did I say yet that many of the Sargent watercolors are about rocks? A whole room was devoted to the white marble quarries in Carrara.
After Boston this exhibit goes to Houston.
Maybe Bill can catch it out west when he travels for his job.....
Rosemary, thank you for this thread - one of my favorite subjects is flowers in art - but not exclusively. I hope Robin posts more of her work, and agree with Ronnie about Moran.
If any of us, for whatever reason, have trouble getting physically to an exhibit, there are on-line sources that can be researched by artist or subject or historical period, etc. and that have great scans that can be saved to a folder on your hard drive or whatever storage you use, especially if they date to before 1923 in our country which makes them open domain; that is, not under copyright (with exceptions). You can then set one of these paintings to be your computer screen background, as well as make a screen saver out of the file. If you're reading a book online, you can "float" it in a 2"x4" column (as in ASCII - cut and paste the book to Text Document) over the painting, and matching text to painting can add a lot to the experience.
Here is a collection of John Singer Sargent on the interactive humanities website, The Athenaeum - http://www.the-athenaeum.org/art/list.php?m=a&s=tu&aid=368
Another great thing about this is that if you can't walk far enough or see well enough to physically enjoy an exhibit, sometimes being able to see these paintings on a computer monitor makes all the difference.
Anyhoo, there's an art search engine that includes The Athenaeum among many other sources that I have set for JSS again - http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/sargent_john_singer.html
In artcyclopedia, I think the best images are often in the Image Archives.
Rosemary, you started with a sunny afternoon in a garden, so here's a sunny day in Celia Thaxter's Garden, painted by Childe Frederick Hassam - http://www.the-athenaeum.org/art/full.php?ID=26931 ,
and here is the book she wrote about her garden, in which the foregoing painting of her and her garden was done - http://www.the-athenaeum.org/art/full.php?ID=26931
Wonderful thread - hope we can keep it going :)
ps - since I've given credit to who the artist was and to the source of this scan (The Athenaeum) above, and since this is open domain, I think it'll be okay to post Hassam's painting of Celia and her garden -
hmf - welp - my computer cannot upload the painting (although in the past, there was no problem doing this on dg), so the above link will have to do - it would be a shame to downsize this image anyway - hope y'all love this one as much as I do :)
Thank you for posting Celia's Maine garden.....it's one of my favorites....and thank you for wanting to see more of my botanicals. I'm working on a hellebore right now, should be finished by next week. However, I've only been painting 9 years, & it's still a very difficult medium for me. My art teacher, Betsy Rogers-Knox, is an amazing botanical watercolorist...you can see some of her work at the Botanical Society in NYC....she also has some paintings touring a few major cities....She had a showing in London last spring & won a medal for her work.....
Thank you for posting the link to the Athenaeum, and Celia Thaxter's Garden too! Since the MFA's collection of JSS was mostly in storeage, I haven't fully checked, but I wonder if they are all posted. At the exhibit I had noticed that The Cashmere Shawl which is posted from the MFA collection had looked quite faded. But this is an amazing treasure trove to look at on-line. It amazes me too, that it is possible to use the link under each painting to purchase a painted reproduction.
Yes, we want more of Marilyn's paintings!
For me, viewing a scene through the artist's eyes opens up one's vision. JSS often drilled down to some interesting detail, so I am trying to do that here by photographing the placemats of his paintings, which are from the museum giftshop.
Thanks, Rosemary.....nice amaryllis!
Nice wall piece in the background Rosemary.
Matches the amaryllis.....
