Wednesday 17 March 2010

Famous Spanish painters

Among our most famous painters are:

* El Greco


* Velázquez


* Murillo


* Zurbarán


* Goya


* Sorolla


* Dalí


* Picasso


* Miró



* Barceló

Famous British painters







GRAFFITI

BANKSY
Birth name: unknown
Born 1974 or 1975 (1974 or 1975) Bristol, UK.
Nationality:British
Field: Graffiti Street Art, Bristol underground scene Sculpture

Fiction
Banksy is a pseudonymous British graffiti artist. He is believed to be a native of Yate, South Gloucestershire, near Bristol and to have been born in 1974, but his identity is unknown. According to Tristan Manco, Banksy "was born in 1974 and raised in Bristol, England. The son of a photocopier technician, he trained as a butcher but became involved in graffiti during the great Bristol aerosol boom of the late 1980s."His artworks are often satirical pieces of art on topics such as politics, culture, and ethics. His street art combines graffiti writing with a distinctive stencilling technique. His art has appeared in cities around the world. Banksy's work was born out of the Bristol underground scene which involved collaborations between artists and musicians.
Banksy does not sell photos of street graffiti. Art auctioneers have been known to attempt to sell his street art on location and leave the problem of its removal in the hands of the winning bidder.
from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banksy

BRITISH POP ART

Pop art is a visual art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art. Pop removes the material from its context and isolates the object, or combines it with other objects, for contemplation. The concept of pop art refers not as much to the art itself as to the attitudes that led to it.

Pop art is an art movement of the twentieth century. Characterized by themes and techniques drawn from popular mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane cultural objects, pop art is widely interpreted as a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstrac expressionism, as well as an expansion upon them. Pop art, aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any given culture, most often through the use of irony. It is also associated with the artists' use of mechanical means of reproduction or rendering techniques.

Much of pop art is considered incongruent, as the conceptual practices that are often used make it difficult for some to readily comprehend. Pop art and minimalism are considered to be art movements that precede postmodern art, or are some of the earliest examples of Postmodern Art themselves.

Pop art often takes as its imagery that which is currently in use in advertising. Product labeling and logos figure prominently in the imagery chosen by pop artists, like in the Campbell's Soup Cans labels, by Andy Warhol.


SIR PETER THOMAS BLAKE

Sir Peter Thomas Blake (born 25 June 1932, in Dartford, Kent) is an English pop artist, best known for his design of the sleeve for the Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. He lives in Chiswick, London, UK.

Career



On the Balcony, 1952.

During the late 1950s, Blake became one of the best known British pop artists. His paintings from this time included imagery from advertisements, music hall entertainment, and wrestlers, often including collaged elements. Blake was included in group exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and had his first solo exhibition in 1960. It was with the 'Young Contemporaries' exhibition of 1961 that he was first identified with the emerging British Pop Art movement. Blake won the (1961) John Moores junior award for his work Self Portrait with Badges. He first came to wider public attention when, he was featured in Ken Russell's film on pop art, Pop Goes the Easel, which was broadcast on BBC television in 1962.

from:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Blake_%28artist%29

Work

On the Balcony (1955-57) is a significant early work and still stands as one of the iconic pieces of British Pop Art, showing Blake's interest in combining images from pop culture with fine art. The work, which appear to be a collage but is in fact wholly painted, shows, among other things, a boy holding Edouard Manet's The Balcony, badges and magazines. It was inspired by a painting by Honoré Sharrer depicting workers holding famous paintings. Blake’s characters are strangely static and scarcely seem to notice the accumulation around them – even when images are tacked right on top of them. This was not merely whimsical thinking or dreams of consumer grandeur, and albeit not a simple display of products; it was life as Blake experienced it, as true and telling an account of the surroundings of the time as could be made.



The First Real Target, 1961, Tate Gallery.

Blake also painted several notable album sleeves. He designed the sleeve for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band with his then-wife Jann Haworth. The Sgt. Pepper's sleeve has become an iconic work of pop art, much imitated and Blake's best known work. The means of production was the construction of a set with cut-out photographs and objects, such as flowers, centred around a drum (sold in auction in 2008) with the title of the album. Blake also made sleeves for the Band Aid single,"Do They Know It's Christmas?" (1984), Paul Weller's Stanley Road (1995) and the Ian Dury tribute album Brand New Boots and Panties (2001). He also designed the sleeves for the Pentagle's Sweet Child and The Who's Face Dances (1981), which features portraits of the Pentagle band by a number of artists.


In 1969 Blake left London to live near Bath. Blake's work changed direction featuring scenes based on English Folklore and characters from Shakespeare. In the early 1970s, he made a set of watercolours to illustrate Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. Blake moved back to London in 1979 and his work returned to the earlier popular culture references.

Blake was made a Royal Academian in 1981, and a CBE in 1983. "A major retrospective of Blake's work was held in the Tate in 1983...(and) in 2002 Blake was awarded a knighthood for his services to art." In February 2005, the Sir Peter Blake Music Art Gallery, located in the School of Music, University of Leeds, was opened by the artist. The permanent exhibition features 17 examples of Blake's album sleeve art, including the only public showing of a signed print of his famed Sgt. Pepper's artwork. In June 2006, as The Who returned to play Leeds University 36 years after recording their seminal Live at Leeds album there in 1970, Blake unveiled a new Live at Leeds 2 artwork to commemorate the event. Both the artist and The Who's Pete Townshend signed an edition which will join the gallery's collection.

In 2006, Blake designed the cover for Oasis greatest hits album Stop the Clocks. According to Blake, he chose all of the objects in the picture at random, but the sleeves of Sgt. Pepper's and Definitely Maybe were in the back of his mind. He claims, "It's using the mystery of Definitely Maybe and running away with it." Familiar cultural icons which can be seen on the cover include Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, Charles Manson (replacing the original image of Marilyn Monroe, which couldn't be used for legal reasons) and the seven dwarfs from Snow White And the Seven Dwarfs.

Blake also revealed that the final cover wasn't the original one. That design featured an image of the shop 'Granny Takes A Trip' on the Kings Road in Chelsea, London. Blake created an updated version of Sgt. Pepper - with famous figures from Liverpool history - as part of the successful campaign for Liverpool to become European Capital of Culture 2008, and is creating a series of prints to celebrate Liverpool's status.

In 2008, Blake painted a pig for the public art event King Bladud's Pigs In Bath in the English city of Bath.

He also recently designed a shopping bag for the Lucky Brand Jeans company for the holiday season.

Blake created the carpet which runs through the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom's Middlesex Guildhall building.

(Adapted from wikipedia)

BRITISH OP ART

Op art, also known as optical art, is a style of visual art that makes use of optical illusions.

Optical art is a method of painting concerning the interaction between illusion and picture plane, between understanding and seeing. Op art works are abstract, with many of the better known pieces made in only black and white. When the viewer looks at them, the impression is given of movement, hidden images, flashing and vibration, patterns, or alternatively, of swelling or warping.



BRIDGET RILEY
Shadowplay
Cataract
Movement in Squares




Bridget Louise Riley CH CBE (born April 24, 1931 in Norwood, London) is an English painter who is one of the foremost proponents of op art.

Early life
Bridget Riley was born in London and spent her childhood in Cornwall and Lincolnshire. She was educated at Cheltenham Ladies' College. She studied art first at Goldsmiths College (1949–1952), and later at the Royal College of Art (1952–1955), where her fellow students included artists Peter Blake and Frank Auerbach. Her early work was figurative with a semi-impressionist style. Around 1960 she began to develop her signature Op Art style consisting of black and white geometric patterns that explore the dynamism of sight and produce a disorienting effect on the eye.

During her early career, Riley worked as an art teacher at the Loughborough School of Art in 1959, then at the Hornsey School of Art, and from 1962-1964 at the Croydon School of Art. She also worked as an illustrator for the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency prior to giving it up in 1964.[1]

Riley lived and worked with fellow Op Artist Peter Sedgley during the latter half of the 1960s. Together they created the artists' organization SPACE, with the goal of providing artists large and affordable studio space.
(From Wikipedia)


BRITISH ROMANTICISM


JMW TURNER




Joseph Mallord William Turner (23 April 1775– 19 December 1851) was an English romantic, landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker. Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, but is now regarded as the artist who elevated lanscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting. Although renowned for his oil paintings, Turner is also one of the greatest masters of British watercolour landscape painting. He is commonly known as "the painter of light" and his work regarded as a Romantic preface to impresionism.




Biography



An engraving of a sketch by Turner depicting Brougham Castle.




The fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up, painted 1839.




The shipwreck of the Minotaur, oil on canvas.

Turner was born in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, London, England. His father, William Gay Turner (27 January 1738 – 7 August 1829), was a barber and wig maker. His mother, Mary Marshall, became increasingly mentally unstable, possibly due in part to the early death of Turner's younger sister, Helen Turner, in 1786. Mary Marshall died in 1804.

Possibly due to the load placed on the family by these problems, the young Turner was sent to stay with his maternal uncle in Brentford in 1785, which was then a small town west of London on the banks of the River Thames. It was here that he first expressed an interest in painting. A year later he attended a school in Margate on the north-east Kent coast. By this time he had created many drawings, which his father exhibited in his shop window.

He entered the Royal Academy of Art schools in 1789, when he was only 14 years old, and was accepted into the academy a year later.Sir Joshual Reynolds, president of the Royal Academy, chaired the panel that admitted him. At first Turner showed a keen interest in architecture but was advised to continue painting by the architect Thomas Hardwick (junior). A watercolour by Turner was accepted for the Summer Exhibition of 1790 after only one year's study. He exhibited his firstoil painting in 1796, Fishermen at Sea, and thereafter exhibited at the academy nearly every year for the rest of his life.

Turner travelled widely in Europe, starting with France and Switzerland in 1802 and studying in the Louvre in Paris in the same year. He also made many visits to Venice.



As he grew older, Turner became more eccentric. He had few close friends except for his father, who lived with him for thirty years, eventually working as his studio assistant. His father's death in 1829 had a profound effect on him, and thereafter he was subject to bouts of depression. He never married, although his two daughters by Sarah Danby were born in 1801 and 1811.



He died on 19 December 1851. He is said to have uttered the last words "The sun is God" before expiring. At his request he was buried in St Paul's Cathedral. His last exhibition at the Royal Academy was in 1850.

Adapted from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org

MORE FAMOUS BRITISH PAINTERS:

* David Hockney (b. 1937)
* Damien Hirst (b. 1965)
* Alfred Sisley ( 1839-1899)
* William Morris (1834-1896)
* John Everet Milliais (1827-1896)

London Teamx

Thursday 11 March 2010

Ludovit Fulla

(1902 – 1980 )

Ludovit Fulla is not only a painter, but also the graphic designer, illustrator. He was also one of the most famous Slovak scenography and art educators. He worked as a teacher in Ružomberok, Malacky, Senica, Martin, Bratislava. For his illustartions of the books for children (Slovak folk tales) he was remembered and so widespread that almost every family in Slovakia had the book with his illustrations.
Even for those who doesn´t meet so often with fine art is not a problem to recognize authorship of Ludovit Fulla.
Fulla in his creation inspired by children's drawings, cubism, the work of P. Klee, M. Chagall, L. Feininger, K. Maleviča and W. Kandinsky.
Large collection of his works is now found in the Gallery of Ludovit Fulla in Ružomberok.
Here are some of them:









Wednesday 10 March 2010

Slovak most famous painters - list

The list of the most known Slovak painters and graphics:
• Janko Alexy (1894-1970) - maliar
• Miloš Alexander Bazovský (1899-1968) - maliar, grafik
• Peter Michael Slavomil Bohúň (1822-1879) - maliar, grafik
Martin Benka (1888-1971) - maliar, ilustrátor
• Andrej Barčík (1924-2004) - maliar
• Cyril Blažo (1970) - výtvarník
• Ladislav Cemicky (1909-2000) - maliar
• Albín Brunovský (1935-1997) - grafik, maliar, ilustrátor
• Josef Czauczik (1781-1857) - maliar
• Lajos Csordák (1864-1937) – maliar
Stefan Cpin (1919 – 1971) – maliar, ilustrátor, grafik
• Ladislav Čarný (1949) - výtvarník
Ľudovít Fulla (1902-1980) - maliar, grafik, ilustrátor
• Edmund Gwerk (1859-1956) - maliar
• Mikuláš Galanda (1895-1938) - maliar, grafik, ilustrátor
• Elemír Halász-Hradil (1873-1948) - maliar
• Jozef Hanula (1863-1944) - maliar
• Vincent Hložník (1919-1997) - maliar
• Gyula Jakoby (1903-1985) - maliar
• Nándor Katona (1864-19324) - maliar
• Jozef Božetech Klemens (1817-1883) - maliar, sochár, polyhistor
• Jozef Kostka (1938-1981) - maliar
• Rudolf Krivos (1933-1988) - maliar
• Ján Kupecký (Johann Kupecky) (1667-1740) - maliar
• Anton Lehmden (1929) - maliar narodený na Slovensku
• Karol Ľudovít Libay (Karl Ludwig Libay) (1816-1888) - maliar
• Palo Macho (1965) - maliar
• Cyprián Majerník (1909-1945) - maliar
• Ladislav Medňanský (1852-1919) - maliar
• Ján Mudroch (1909-1968) - maliar
• Master of Okoličné (Majster okoličiansky) (15th-16th century) - maliar
• Theodor Jozef Mousson (1887-1946) - maliar
• Endre Nemes (1909-1985) - maliar
• Zolo Palugay (1898-1935) - maliar
• Milan Paštéka (1931-1998) - maliar
• Ján Rombauer (Johann Rombauer) (1782-1849) - maliar
• Ester Šimerová-Martinčeková (1909-) - maliar
• Dominik Skutecký (1849-1921) - maliar
• Koloman Sokol (1902-2003) - maliar
• Andrej Smolák - maliar
• Karl Sovanka (1883-1961) - maliar, sochár
• Teodor Jozef Tekel (1902—1975) – maliar
Andy Warhol (baptized Andrew Warhola, his father's family name was Varchola) (1928-1987)
• Imrich Weiner-Kráľ (1901-1978) - maliar
• Ladislav Záborský (1921) - maliar
• Viera Žilinčanová (1932) - maliar
• Ernest Zmeták (1919-2004) - maliar
• Dušan Mravec (1980) - maliar

Friday 26 February 2010

JULIAN KOHUT

Julian Kohut, born in 1952, is another Polish painter who comes from Rudzica, near Bielsko-Biała.
The most famous of his paintings present scarecrows.

JULIAN FAŁAT

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Fa%C5%82at
Julian Fałat, (1853 – 1929), was one of the most prolific Polish painters of watercolor and one of the country's foremost landscape painters as well as one of the leading Polish impressionists. Fałat first studied under Władysław Łuszczkiewicz at the Kraków School of Fine Arts, and then at the Art Academy of Munich.
He used to live in Bystra Śląska, near Bielsko-Biała.

Thursday 25 February 2010

Steve Cpin

Steve Cpin was born in Olcnava (Slovakia), which is a small willage about 3 km far from Spišské Vlachy, in 1919. He is an illustrator of the books for children. He lived in Modra near Bratislava. He worked as a fine art teacher in Art School. He painted mainly small aquarel pictures of village life. He was awarded by several awards for his illustrations.

Some of Steve Cpin´s ilustrations:


by Diana, 12 years old



Friday 4 December 2009

Pablo Picasso: Spanish painter


Pablo Picasso: Cubism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso

Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga on the 25th of October, 1881. Malaga is a town in Andalusia, in the south of Spain and it is known as the capital of the Costa del Sol.
His father was also a painter and he painted mostly pigeons and still-lifes. Picasso was a brilliant student although he didn't like school. Picasso's work is divided into different periods. During the blue period his paintings were dominated by a blue palette signifying misery and despair and he painted beggars, blind people, himself, poor friends. The rose period shows a more cheery style where he used pink, orange and beige colours and during which he painted mainly circus people: clown, harlequins, saltimbanques...
But Picasso is probably best known by his work in the Cubism style. In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed and re-assembled in a abstracted form, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints as if the objects had all the faces visible at the same time. Cubist artists were also interested in the simplification of natural forms into geometric forms specially cylinders, spheres and cones.






London Team.

Tuesday 10 November 2009

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain in 1881 and died in France in 1973. His dad was a drawing and painting teacher. Picasso was a brilliant student although he didn't like school.
Picasso's work is divided into different periods. The most important one is The Cubism. He worked with Georges Braque and they experimented with breaking the visual world into geometrical figures. They also experimented with the idea of creating an image as if it was seen from different angles at the same time.
His most important painting is probably the 'Guernica': it depicts the bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War and it describes through different symbols the absurdity of the war, the suffering it inflicts upon individuals especially innocent civilians. He leaves to everybody's interpreation the meaning of the symbols. The Guernica has become a reminder of the tragedy of war.
http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso

Sunday 8 November 2009

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was born on October 25, 1881 in Malaga, Spain and died on April 8, 1973 in Mougins, France. He was the son of an art and drawing teacher and a brilliant student.
He worked on different fields: painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking and ceramics.
Picasso's art is classified into periods:
Blue period (1901-1904)
This period consists of somber paintings in shades of blue and blue-green. Many paintings of gaunt mothers with children belong to this period. Blindness is also a recurrent theme of this period.
Rose period (1904-1906)
This period is characterized by a more cheery style with orange and pink colours, and featuring many circus people, acrobats and harlequins.
Cubism (1909-1912)
This is a style that Picasso developed along George Braque using monochrome brownish and neutral colors. Both artists took apart objects and 'analyzed' them in terms of their shapes.
Classicism and Surrealism
During the 1930s the minotaur replaced the harlequin as the motif of his work. Arguably Picasso's most famous work is his depiction of the bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. This large canvas embodies for many the inhumanity, brutality and hopelessness of war. The public who look at the symbols must interpret them as they understand them. The Guernica is now exhibited at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid.
http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso

Saturday 17 October 2009

STANISŁAW WYSPIAŃSKI, POLISH ARTIST

text from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Wyspia%C5%84ski
Born:January 15, 1869, Kraków, Poland
Died:November 28, 1907, Kraków, Poland
Stanisław Wyspiański was a Polish playwright, painter and poet, as well as interior and furniture designer.
Wyspiański’s artistic output is very eclectic, drawings, sketch-books, oil-paintings, pastel drawings, portraits and self-portraits, designs of stained glass windows and paintings, illustrations, graphic art, plans of furniture and interiors, development of Wawel.
Drawings, such as 1890 self-portrait and drafts from his journeys across Europe and Poland, are among Wyspiański’s well-known works. He also created a herbarium by drawing plants. He was, however, most frequently using the technique of pastel; his first pastel drawings were produced between 1890 and 1894. They mainly present the artist’s family, friends and other artists. Wyspiański eagerly drew his children in everyday situations.