Artist of the Week: M.C. Escher

Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972) is one of the world's most famous graphic artists. His art is enjoyed by millions of people all over the world, as can be seen on the many web sites on the internet. full bio here.

  " I believe that producing pictures, as I do, is almost solely a question of wanting so very much to do it well"

 

 The Fall of Man

1920 

woodcut

1948

 
"I am always wandering around in enigmas. There are young people who constantly come to tell me: you, too, are making Op Art. I haven't the slightest idea what that is, Op Art. I've been doing this work for thirty years now"

 1939

 1959

" I don't grow up. In me is the small child of my early days"

The official Escher website contains everything you ever wanted to know about him, a complete gallery and video interviews.

Artist of the Week - (Linking to ABC Wednesday)

J is for Jasper Johns

born May 15, 1930

Jasper Johns is an American contemporary artist who works as a painter, printmaker and sculptor. In the late 1950’s, Jasper Johns emerged as force in the American art scene. His richly worked paintings of maps, flags, and targets led the artistic community away from Abstract Expressionism toward a new emphasis on the concrete. Johns laid the groundwork for both Pop Art and Minimalism. Today, as his prints and paintings set record prices at auction, the meanings of his paintings, his imagery, and his changing style continue to be subjects of controversy. read the rest here.

 

"To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist."

 ~Jasper Johns

 Flag

 1954-55

 (encaustic, oil and collage on fabric mounted to plywood)

42 x 61 in.
Museum of Modern Art, New York

"One night I dreamed I painted a large American flag, and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it. And I did. I worked on that painting a long time. It's a very rotten painting—physically rotten—because I began it in house enamel paint, which you paint furniture with, and it wouldn't dry quickly enough. Then I had in my head this idea of something I had read or heard about: wax encaustic."

~Jasper Johns 

 Target

1958

 MoMA, New York

"Everyone is of course free to interpret the work in his own way. I think seeing a picture is one thing and interpreting it is another. "
Jasper Johns

 Map

 1961

MoMA, New York

"I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don't think that's a painter's business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason."

~Jasper Johns

Color Linoleum Cut
5 Linoleum blocks cut by the Artist and Printed on
Handmade Kurotani Mitsumata paper
22 3/4 x 17 inches 

Racing Thoughts

 1983

 (painting, collage and assemblage)

Collaboration was an important part in advancing Johns’ own art, and he worked regularly with a number of artists including Robert Morris, Andy Warhol, and Bruce Naumann. In 1967, he met the poet Frank O’Hara and illustrated his book, In Memory of My Feelings.

SOURCES:

American Masters

  JasperJohns.com

The Artchive

Joseph K. Levine Fine Art

MoMA - Jasper Johns: A Retrospective

Linking to ABC Wednesday, Round 8

ABC Wednesday and Artist of the Week - Warhol

W is for Warhol

 Andy Warhol

(August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987)

American Pop Artist

"An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have."

~Andy Warhol

 (one of my favorite Warhol photos)


“I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say "figment."

Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928, in a two-room row house apartment at 73 Orr Street in Pittsburgh. His parents, Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants Andrej and Julia Warhola, had three sons. Andy was their youngest.
Devout Byzantine Catholics, the family attended mass regularly and observed the traditions of their Eastern European heritage. Warhol’s father, a laborer, moved his family to a brick home on Dawson Street in 1934. Warhol attended the nearby Holmes School and took free art classes at Carnegie Institute (now The Carnegie Museum of Art). In addition to drawing, Hollywood movies enraptured Andy and he frequented the local cinema. When he was about nine years old, he received his first camera. Andy enjoyed taking pictures, and he developed them himself in his basement.  Read the rest of the biography here

"Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes."
Andy Warhol

Self-Portrait

"I am a deeply superficial person." 
~Andy Warhol

Gold Marylin

1962

"I love it when you ask actors, 'What're you doing now?' and they say 'I'm between roles.' To be living life between roles.' That's my favorite."

 ~ Andy Warhol

 Eight Elvises
1963

The highest price ever paid for a Warhol painting is $100 million for a 1963 canvas titled Eight Elvises. The private transaction was reported in a 2009 article in The Economist, which described Warhol as the "bellwether of the art market." $100 million is a benchmark price that only Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, Pierre-August Renoir, Gustav Klimt and Willem de Kooning have achieved.^[1]

 Jackie

1964 

"I think everybody should like everybody."

Velvet Underground album cover

Originally released in March 1967 by Verve Records. Recorded in 1966 during Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia event tour, The Velvet Underground & Nico would gain notoriety for its experimentalist performance sensibilities, as well as its focus on controversial subject matter expressed in many of their songs.

1969

"What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest."
Andy Warhol

Flowers

1970

 Mao

1972

Andy Warhol's Mao Tse Tung (1972) is a silk-screen portrait of the Chinese leader that was made in many versions. It is one of the series of silk-screens that he made on the subject of fame. They began in the early 1960s with his many portraits of Marilyn Monroe whose sad death in 1962 led him to contemplation of what it meant to be famous and what it could possibly be worth. read the rest at Lots of Essays.com

Note:  best for last but chronologically out of order:  Warhol cats from the 1950's. I also like his little Christmas drawings which I hope to feature sometime in the coming week.

 

"It's all about your attitude."

Sources:

The Warhol Museum

 ^{Warhol biography:  scenes of cinema e-journal} 

The Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

 <sup>Lots of Essay.com

The Modern Cat 

Thinkexist</sup>

^{See other participants at ABC Wednesday}

ABC Wednesday and Artist of the Week

Jan or Johannes Vermeer van Delft, 

b. October 1632, d. December 1675

Dutch Baroque genre painter who lived and worked in Delft, created some of the most exquisite paintings in Western
 art.

That I recall, I've seen  four of Vermeer's paintings in person. The first two below at The Frick in New York City where they were exhibited for a short time, along one which part of their permanent collection entitled Soldier and a Laughing Girl. Also one entitled The Concert, which is in the permanent collection of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

 The Milkmaid

 c.1658-1660

 The Glass of Wine

c. 1658-1660

Woman with a Water Jug

  c.1664-1665

The Concert 

c.1665-1666

Soldier and a Laughing Girl

 c. 1658

 Of the Vermeers I've seen, by far the most stunning is Soldier and Laughing Girl (above). I love the perspective, with the soldier's back turned to us as we gaze at the obviously pleased girl he is talking to. The map on the wall and the window are just right in detail; adding and not distracting from the subjects of the painting. I love how Vermeer paints windows.

 Girl with the Pearl Earring

c. 1665

Sources

Olga's Gallery

Web Museum Paris

Essential Vermeer

To view other takes on letters, visit ABC Wednesday the meme that spells it out (that's corny but I couldn't resist!)

ABC Wednesday and Artist of the Week - Georges Seurat

S is for Seurat

(2 December 1859 – 29 March 1891)

 French Neo-Impressionist; founder of the Pointillism school (also known as "Divisionism")

George Seurat, quiet and intense, had been classically trained at the École des Beaux-Arts. He was attracted to the Impressionists, with their different approach to art. His feeling that Impressionism lacked discipline (combined with study of scientific writings on color theory) led him to create a new style: pointillism. In this, tiny, detached brushstrokes (dots, really) of pure color are placed closely to one another on the canvas. Together they create a shining, harmonious whole composition.

“Some say they see poetry in my paintings; I see only science.”

Un Dimanche d’été à l’Île de la Grande Jatte 

(his most famous work) 

1884–1886

Seurat spent over two years painting A Sunday Afternoon, focusing meticulously on the landscape of the park. He reworked the original as well as completed numerous preliminary drawings and oil sketches. He would go and sit in the park and make numerous sketches of the various figures in order to perfect their form. He concentrated on the issues of colour, light, and form. The painting is approximately 2 by 3 meters (6 ft 10 in x 10 ft 1 in) in size.  Read more about this painting here.

Un Dimanche d’été à l’Île de la Grande Jatte

Detail

Bathing at Asnieres
 1884

The Siene at la Grande Jatte 

1888

 La Siene a Courbevoie

c. 1885-86


“Under a blazing mid-afternoon summer sky, we see the Seine flooded with sunshine . . . people are strolling, others are sitting or stretched out lazily on the bluish grass.”  ~ Georges Seurat

 Pierrot with a White Pipe. (Aman-Jean) 

1883

“Originality depends only on the character of the drawing and the vision peculiar to each artist.”

 The Channel of Gravelines, the Direction to the Sea

1890

Young Woman Powdering Herself

c. 1888-1890.

 Invitation to the Sideshow (La Parade de Cirque). 

1887-89

Sources:

George Seurat - The Complete Works


Web Museum Paris

Thinkexist.com

 ABC WEDNESDAY 

 

Artist of the Week and ABC Wednesday

R is for Redon

Bertrand-Jean Redon, better known as Odilon Redon (April 20, 1840 – July 6, 1916) was a French Symbolist painter, printmaker, draughtsman and pastellist.

"A title is justified only when it is vague and even aims confusedly at the elliptical. My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They determine nothing. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined. They are a kind of metaphor..."

 

Beatrice

 1885

pastel over charcoal; private collection

The Golden Cell

1892  

Oil and gold metallic paint on paper prepared with white ground;The British Museum 

"The value of art lies in its power to increase our moral force or establish its heightening influence."

The Boat, aka with Carona

1898

"While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality... true art lies in a reality that is felt."

Ophelia

c. 1900-05 

 Pastel on paper mounted on board, The Woodner Collection 

"I have often, as an exercise and as a sustenance, painted before an object down to the smallest accidents of its visual appearance. But the day left me sad and with an unsatiated thirst. The next day I let the other source run, that of imagination through the recollection of the forms and I was then reassured and appeased."  ~ Redon

 Flower Clouds

1903

Pastel; The Art Institute of Chicago

"What distinguishes the artist from the dilettante? Only the pain the artist feels. The dilettante looks only for pleasure in art."

Le Bouddha (The Buddha)

c. 1905 

Pastel on paper; Musee d'Orsay, Paris 

"I await joyous surprises while working, an awakening of the materials that I work with and that my spirit develops."

Red Boat with Blue Sail
1906-07 

Oil on canvas,  Private collection 

Silence (Le silence)  

1911

Profile and Flowers 

1912  

Pastel on paper, McNay Art Institute, San Antonio, TX 

"I have a feeling only for shadows."

 

The Red Sphinx
c. 1912 

Oil on canvas,Private collection 

Anemonies In A Blue Vase

If you'd like you can also check out The Pagan's Eye, my blog of original photos. This week, there are several photos shot in rural Southern Vermont. I snapped a moment of Austrian old world charm we came upon while taking a Sunday drive and explored the history of the Green River Bridge and Timber Crib Dam, which was our destination.

 Peace to everyone out there in the world!

 

 

ABC Wednesday is a fun project, now in its fourth year! If you have something to share, be it a photograph, piece of art or poetry please post in on your blog and sign up here with Linky tools. Due to time differences just post when it is convenient on Tuesday onwards.ABC Wednesday  

Thanks to the great folks who make this sharing game possible!