Art Blog - Art In History

The other day a member asked me how she could get more visitors to notice her gallery among the multitude on the site. I gave her several suggestions, including sending people to your gallery through other media such as Facebook, blogging about it, or using key descriptive words in your text. Another way is to have a niche, a little corner of the art scene which, when a viewer is looking for it, they will find only a handful artists who qualify. If you are an Equestrian painter, or a painter of infant portraits, your chances are vastly improved… Continue reading… 4 comments

It is autumn in New England! That means it is both a wonderful and a dangerous time for plein air painters. Nature is begging you to capture her beauty, but also challenging you to compete with her brilliance. Fall color, perhaps more than any other subject, teaches you humility and caution, because it is a competition you will always lose. At any time, the range of color and value in nature is far beyond the range available to the artist trying to represent it. Usually, nature's restraint allows us to compete, by using strong color to represent that which in nature is muted. It is relatively easy to set up a range of color and value which will represent what we see. Autumn in New England is not so kind… Continue reading… 3 comments

I have discovered over the years that one of the things that turns me on most in my visual environment is accidental composition: the unplanned conjunction of elements into a grouping that has balance, energy and meaning. I find this in nature in abundance, but also in the works of man gathered together at random, or changed by alterations or decay over time. What results is composition which takes me beyond the familiar rules into new possibilities. Historically, I find this same fascination in Impressionists like Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. With the aid of candid photography, which created arbitrary slices of the world, they revolutionized the way artists could think about composition in painting… Continue reading… 2 comments

A few years ago I did a small piece under this same title, comparing two landscape paintings which treated the viewer very differently, one inviting him in, the second deliberately blocking his way. As a follow up to my recent posts on landscape painting, I thought that I should say more on this topic, which involves many of the most powerful tools available to the landscape painter. The most compelling aspect of a landscape painting is its ability to draw the viewer into its world. We will see later that the choice to exclude the viewer is powerful precisely because it frustrates this natural impulse to enter and explore. The "Cornfield" by Constable is a beautiful example of the magic of invitation, and of many of the most common devices by which it is nurtured… Continue reading… 1 comment

A couple of weeks ago I was driving up Interstate 89 in Vermont, keeping an eye as usual on the rockfaces which border the highway. Highway cuts expose the inner skeleton of the living rock, almost like cracking open a geode. What struck me is that not all exposed rock is interesting, and of the interesting rock, not all of it "works". Rocks, and any element in nature, may compose, or it may not. Many things can contribute to this natural composition: color, texture, the conformity of lines, all things which are available to the artist as well. But what I particularly noticed was that a rockface worked when it had large forms, and did not when there were none… Continue reading… 4 comments

After my recent post on landscape painting of the Romantic period, I want to do a more general piece on the appeal of landscape. I believe this appeal is grounded in the appeal to our age of scenes in nature, and that painted landscapes depend in large part on capturing this appeal. This appeal has many sources, but for me, two of them stand out: empathy and nostalgia. Even without these two elements, which we bring to nature from within ourselves, landscape would have plenty going for it. It is infinite in variety of texture, form and color, infinite in its possibilities for order, composition and movement. But these possibilities have always been there, and can't explain the immense appeal of landscape in the modern era… Continue reading… 6 comments

Over the course of the 18th century there was a remarkable change in attitudes toward nature, discoverable in all the arts, especially literature, painting and landscape architecture. It culminated in the Romantic landscape tradition in Europe and America in the 19th century, the golden age of landscape painting. It marked a major change in the relationship of man to nature. Romantic landscape covers the gamut between the Pastoral - inhabited landscape: comfortable and relatively tame, with shepherds and peasants - and the Sublime - wild nature: vast and powerful, inspiring terror and awe. The Pastoral was not a sea change in attitude… Continue reading… 6 comments

When we think of the naturalistic tradition in English landscape painting at the beginning of the 19th century we immediately think of the work of John Constable. Constable's work, done almost entirely in the Dedham valley of his youth, with excursions to nearby Salisbury and Brighton, is a celebration of the ordinary. With its marvelous sensitivity to the nuances of everything familiar, known and loved, he raises to the level of high art that which we see everyday and normally find unremarkable. But we are less likely to connect his great contemporary Turner to the naturalistic tradition. His work is so far from our day-to-day experience of nature, and so exciting in its foretelling of later abstract art, that we can easily ignore its essential naturalistic roots… Continue reading… 0 comments

One of the most powerful tools available to the landscape painter is the ability to draw us in to the space he creates, as if it were an extension of our own. There are many devices to make this happen: a powerful perspective rush into depth, a clear pathway leading in, an opening from darkness into light, a series of anecdaote or events along the way. However, an artist can also deny us any entry into the created space, thus assigning us a very different role. El Greco, in depicting his home town of Toledo, did not wish us to see it as an extension of our space, and therefore ordinary. There is no pathway to follow to get to the city, and nothing nearby to show you what the trip would be like… Continue reading… 1 comment