Now this, my friends, is what we call “stick ’em with the pointy end”.
Tag: European Art
Monday
Mmm, fiber arts. In this case, it’s just wool and silk, no cloth of silver or cloth of gold, but it’s still a lovely piece and you can see the care that went into the weaving and dyeing of the yarn/thread by the vibrancy of the colors that remain to this day (especially the blue-green hues, and the reddish-browns).
Sunday
This is not a stabbity-stab. This is a hackity-slash. A beautiful, heavy, very well-cared for hackity-slash.
Sunday
Baroque is about being over the top, but only in the most elegant possible manner. There is no way on earth that you’re going to be playing patty fingers in the holy water with this font, and that’s the point: elegance to the point of misery. Beauty and majesty to the point that you behave yourself or so help you…
Saturday
This is another one of the paintings that I like to make a special visit to every time I’m in the museum. I enjoy the balance of colors, the simple childishness of the work, and how it makes me feel. I smile every time I see it, and that is a rare feeling in my life, so I will take it for all it is worth.
Friday
This piece is painfully evocative; it hits you like a swift kick to the gut. You know immediately what it is meant to portray and why. You know why you are meant to feel the way you do when you look at it. There is no wiggle room for interpretation. And yet, in the harshness, there is a delicate beauty of form and composition, of balance… and in the darkness, a tiny glimmer of hope.
Thursday
What I love about this painting is the organic feel of the design; all of the lines mesh together in a way that is very harmonious. Nothing feels over the top, nothing feels out of place. It is all about balance.
Wednesday
We could talk for hours about the balance of the composition, about how the curves enhance the overall effects, of how the colors work to draw your eye from one part of the canvas to the next… Or we could just say that my favorite color is green and leave it at that.
Tuesday
When you think of the sheer number of things that were destroyed in the French Revolution, then the Napoleonic Wars, then the World Wars, the fact that this not only survived, but made it out of France intact is a miracle. That it is preserved and in a public collection to be admired and appreciated for its beauty and its historical significance is also a miracle.
Monday
This is one of those examples of landscape art where the true beauty of the painting isn’t actually of the landscape itself: it’s of the stormy sky and the light peeping through the clouds. Everything else is immaterial.