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

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 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

Perhaps the greatest single contribtion made by Leonardo da Vinci to Italian Renaissance painting was the simple pyramidal composition he developed in his seminal "Madonna and Child with Ste. Anne". This compositional idea was later perfected by Raphael in his many Madonnas, and became virtually a trademark of Italian painting for a century. We see a variation of it in the "Resurrection" by Piero della Francesca. The effect of the pyramidal composition is that of the pyramids themselves: stable, massive and timeless. Piero della Francesca uses the pyramid shape to give a feeling total permanance and significance to his subject. Christ is the top of a pyramid of figures, perfectly erect and frontal, looking directly at the viewer… Continue reading… 0 comments