Our friend here is exquisitely carved from the finest marble. He is very important in that everything about him is symbolic and beautiful, as well as extremely important to the spirituality of the Buddhist religion. Plus? very serene and calming.
Month: August 2019
Saturday
While not as ritualistic as Japanese and Chinese art, Korean art is more function over form – everything is clearly intended for use, rather than for trotting out for show.
Friday
This Buddha has a facial expression like mine after working overnight for multiple days straight. However, this Buddha is also a lot prettier than I am.
Thursday
Back in the day, portrait painting was one of a handful of legitimate jobs that women could do that brought prestige. However, they very often were attributed to their male counterparts for obvious reasons (aka, a woman couldn’t paint that well, no formal training, etc.), which makes this portrait special in the SLAM collection. It is correctly attributed, it is well-painted, the brush strokes are minimal and the subject appears almost airbrushed. Welcome to the 18th century equivalent of Photoshop!
Wednesday
I’m ever so fond of this painting. I always stop in front of it and admire the realism of the asters. The rest of the painting seems unfinished or even haphazard in comparison to the care taken to present the flowers in such perfect light, but oh, what beauty. <3 (Sorry, I’m working overnights and my brain is a puddle of mush at this point.)
Tuesday
The muted colors of this painting really hammer home the truth of the pollution levels of London in the early 20th century. This isn’t just some allegorical reference to global warming: this is the muted palette of an impressionist who thrived on bright, inviting colors. So sit on that and stew on it for a minute or two.
Monday
This is another case of ‘small but mighty’. All in all, it is a series of haphazard brushstrokes that don’t even really make a complete picture, yet, the impressions of everything that they want to convey somehow come across. The colors aren’t quite correct, but they are close enough to approximate what your eye believes it wishes to see, and it fills in the blanks and the extreme contrast of the figure of the little girl seems to be stark, even harsh and alien to the rest of the scene.
Sunday
Beckmann uses a very distinct style of intense dark-lining and heavy shadowing that gives many of his works a foreboding feel to them, despite their kaledescopic color qualities. This is one such work; the shadows feel out of place, the lighting not quite right, everything is just slightly surrealistically off-putting, yet, there isn’t anything quite wrong about it.
Saturday
In a lot of ways, this is similar to elements of broader reaches of “African” art, but when you begin comparing it more closely, the comparisons become more caricatures than anything else. This is more expressionism than imitation; allowing for the expression of the artist’s worldview rather than imitating the viewpoints around him. It’s also bordering on cubism, but we’ll digress on the allusions to Picasso.
Friday
What I enjoy the most about this sculpture is the unstudied, unaffected aspects of it. The nudity is very natural, the curves very real. It’s only when you reach the facial features that you suddenly realize that the sculptor has gotten a little careless and his model’s face has become something more simplistic and expressionist than realistic.