rob miller paintings and drawings.

Pages

  • Home
  • Lancashire, home ground
  • Yorkshire
  • Cumbria
  • Barefoot Gallery
  • Scotland
  • Salle Gerard Phillipe
  • About
  • buy art fair
  • Espania
  • Cork Oak
  • Portugal
  • Sine Dubio
  • G.E.Miller
  • Lunesdale Arms Tunstall
  • Pochades

Cork Oak

Cork Oak Portugal 60x60cm acrylic on canvas painted for the 3ªas Jornadas Literárias de Montemor-o-Novo.Portugal and featured as part of an international exhibition at galeria 9Ocre Montimor O Novo
Links to this post No comments:
Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to Facebook

Drawing Clouds in May Rob Miller RSA

Links to this post No comments:
Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to Facebook

Pochade painting of Plantation Road Edgworth Lancashire Rob Miller RSA


Links to this post No comments:
Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to Facebook

Lancashire painting Pochade day at Withnells Lark Hill. Rob Miller RSA



Links to this post No comments:
Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to Facebook

Pochade Three Lowes Painting by Lancashire artist Rob Miller

Pochade Three Lowes above Entwistle
oil on board 

Links to this post No comments:
Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to Facebook

Western Isles Winter Painting by Rob Miller RSA

Across the sound Isle of Harris Winter Oil on Canvas 70 x 70 cm
A gap in the rains, Cumulus cloud illuminated by the sun drifting over a silver sea  New work in oils studio photograph so the colours are slightly darker than the original oil painting.
Links to this post No comments:
Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to Facebook

Pochade days At Rattens Clough Brinscall poems direct from nature by Rob Miller FRSA





Links to this post No comments:
Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to Facebook
Older Posts Home
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)

Art hero

"Painting from nature is not copying the object, it is realising ones sensations" Paul Cezanne

ABOUT THIS BLOG

This blog is intended as an open door to my art studio and my work: my paintings sketches and field notes; which are inspired in part by my walks through Britain and Western Europe; in part by the poetry of place; in part by the nuances of paint and colour; and above all by nature; Please enjoy your visit.
Rob Miller

Popular posts

  • Autumn Cork Oak and Casares Bahia Painting
  • Londons Maida vale in Spring a Painting by Rob Miller
  • North woodland drawings by Rob Miller
  • Pochade Redmonds Edge Pochade Oil on board
  • Notes from a small sketch book
  • Western Isles Winter Painting by Rob Miller RSA
  • Guernica (painting) - Art and Politics in Spain
  • John Piper the artist two short articles from two International Gallerys
  • Painting grasslands words versus paint Rob Miller

Useful links

  • Andalucia White Villages
  • Art Supplies by Great Art
  • Art Supplies Ken Bromley
  • Barefoot Gallery
  • BBC Rob Miller.
  • BBC William Turner
  • Casares Video
  • El Tiempo Estapona-
  • Galeria9Ocre
  • Margit Bjorklund
  • On the seawall Poems
  • Rob Miller Paintings and Drawings
  • rob miller saatchi
  • some landscapes.
  • Ted Hughes
  • The art of Landscape
  • Walking Britain
  • Walks in Andalusia
  • Wendy J evy Gallery

Artist Blogs

  • Marine Oil Paintings
  • Empty Easil
  • John Constable
  • John Piper
  • Art Blog News
  • Dubia arts
  • Manuel De Casa Branca

Blog Posts

  • 1st Festival Internacional de Arte Marbella (15)
  • Andalucia (89)
  • Art Practice. (5)
  • Art Supplies (5)
  • Article (25)
  • Buy Art fair (1)
  • Canals (3)
  • Civil War in Spain (8)
  • Cork Oak (15)
  • Cotswolds (11)
  • Drawings in Mixed Media (43)
  • Exhibition (28)
  • France (3)
  • Hebrides (3)
  • Highland (3)
  • Human Event (12)
  • Industrial Landscape (5)
  • Jaccottet (5)
  • Lake District (9)
  • Lancashire (23)
  • Landscape (117)
  • London (4)
  • Manchester (2)
  • North West England (74)
  • Oil Painting (11)
  • Oils (15)
  • Olive Tree (3)
  • Pacific (1)
  • Painting Acrylic on Canvas (91)
  • Pennine (14)
  • Pennine Uplands (20)
  • Poets of the land (5)
  • Portugal (8)
  • Ribbehead (3)
  • Ribble Valley Lancashire UK (10)
  • Roeburndale Forest of Bowland UK (3)
  • Scotland (3)
  • Seascape (11)
  • Sketch Book notes (20)
  • Snowdonia North Wales (1)
  • The Lakeland Fells (1)
  • Video (4)
  • Water (5)
  • Watercolour (18)
  • West Scotland (5)
  • Yorkshire (8)
  • Yorkshire Dales (10)
  • Yosemite (5)

Blog Archive

Search This Blog

Loading...

Impressions Artist Prints

Hand signed giclee Artist proofs of Rob Millers impressionist landscapes are now available. The artist proofs, on hahnmuhle paper make this beautiful work even more accessible View images on te portfolio site rob-miller.org Email rob@rob-miller.org or telephone 07841140562 for further details

Blog Images

Most images in this blog are my personal snapshots taken on my Panasonic DFC FS10 in the studio or outside. They are not studio takes by a professional photographer. The content of this site is protected under Law by theCreative Commons License....


postcards and prints are now available by mail order from fine art america
Tweets by @robartmiller

Three bite life practice

"You can do this anytime you eat a meal. Before taking the first bite, just pause and think of those men and women of wisdom and mentally offer them your food. In this way, you connect with the virtue of devotion.

Before taking the second bite, pause and offer your food to all those who’ve been kind to you. This nurtures the virtues of gratitude and appreciation. The third bite is offered to those who are suffering: all the people and animals who are starving, or being tortured or neglected, without comfort or friends. Think, too, of all of us who suffer from aggression, craving, and indifference. This simple gesture awakens the virtue of compassion.

In this way—by relying on our teachers, our benefactors, and those in need—we gather the virtues of devotion, gratitude, and kindness."

http://pemachodronfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/NoTimeToLose.png

Blog banner above

Lancashire Home ground, The essential Ribble Valley, a view of Pendle from the flanks of Longridge Fell, Oil on linen board, Rob Miller, 70cm x50cm

Scotland painting The croft with the rusted roof

Scotland painting The croft with the rusted roof
acrylic on canvas 60x60cm

Vermilion Gallery Knutsford

Vermilion Gallery Knutsford
croft in storm light buy this work here

Galeria 9Ocre Portugl

Galeria 9Ocre Portugl
Cork Oak Corush

Total Pageviews

Sparkline

Lune Willow

Lune Willow
Acrylic on Canvas

Lunsdale Arms Tunstall

Lunsdale Arms Tunstall
Lune Valley

Opus Gallery Derbyshire

Opus Gallery Derbyshire
Friday and Saturday 50% off selected works

Rob Miller

Rob Miller
Rob Miller RSA

Sine Dubio

Sine Dubio
Westmorland Barn,Eagle Crag, Winter Ribble and other works by Rob Miller. For prices and details of this premier Lakeland Fine Art Event contact Sophia artworks@sinedubioart.com 01524 737 096

Wendy J Levy Gallery

Wendy J Levy Gallery
See recent work by Rob Miller at the Wendy levy Gallery Didsbury Manchester

Salle Gerard Philippe Paris Sur

Salle Gerard Philippe Paris Sur
Le fleuve sous la pluie chateauneuf sur loire

Art workshops

Art workshops
Summer workshops for small groups. Painting in the West Pennines with Rob Miller and James Naughton tel 07841140562 or email rob@rob-miller.org for details

Barefoot Gallery Wetherby Yorkshire

Barefoot Gallery Wetherby Yorkshire
On show this week new work

BUY ART FAIR MANCHESTER 2012

BUY ART FAIR MANCHESTER 2012
Rob Millers work on stand 5

Today's Painting

Today's Painting
Northern Row 1

COURTYARD GALLERY APPLEBY

COURTYARD GALLERY APPLEBY
buy Rob Millers work here

Galeria van Gestal Marbella

Galeria van Gestal Marbella
Acrylic on canvas 50cmx50cm

CORK OAK PAINTINGS

CORK OAK PAINTINGS

Subscribe to updates of this blog

Posts
Atom
Posts
All Comments
Atom
All Comments

Hebrides Croft

Hebrides Croft
Acrylic on Canvas

Albert Marquet River Scene

Albert Marquet River Scene
A wonderful painting I wish I had seen his work ten years ago or more

Lancashire summer revisited

Lancashire summer revisited
Acrylic on canvas
Tweets by @robartmiller
Turner Monet Twombly, at Tate Liverpool, Seven Magazine review

In this group show of three painters' late works, Cy Twombly looks very much at home in the company of Turner and Monet

4 out of 5 stars
Image 1 of 3
'Hero and Leandro' by Cy Twombly (1984)

By Andrew Graham-Dixon

5:36PM BST 11 Jul 2012

Comments1 Comment

Turner Monet Twombly is an intriguingly peculiar affair. Following up Tate Britain’s 2005 blockbuster Turner Whistler Monet, this new exhibition extends the comparative scope of its predecessor by leaping forward from the 19th to the late 20th century – and indeed beyond, all the way into the 21st. Cy Twombly died just a year ago and, at first sight, his inclusion looks like a deliberate provocation.

The links between Turner and Monet are well documented: Monet admired Turner deeply, and spent much of his creative life developing insights derived from the work of his English forerunner. But why has an American painter, working so much later, been elevated into their august company? While Twombly was a fine painter, he was hardly a titan of world art. A sceptic might conclude the whole enterprise to be little more than a misguided attempt to piggyback him to an undeserved eminence, on the backs of two far greater artists.

The exhibition turns out to be more thought-provoking than expected, though. It is best regarded as a controlled experiment, first exploring the connections between Turner and Monet, then examining how a much later artist has coped with the predicament of working with their inheritance. Twombly appears as an interesting test case, a paradigm for the anxiety of influence.

The paintings are grouped by themes, such as “Melancholy” or “Atmosphere”, and all are drawn from the later period of each painter’s life. But behind the rubrics and the slightly forced rhetorical preoccupation with old age, a familiar story is being told – albeit with an unexpected twist.

RELATED ARTICLES

  • Van Gogh to Kandinsky, at Scottish National Gallery – Seven magazine review

    15 Aug 2012
  • My encounters with Cy Twombly

    06 Jul 2011
  • Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye, at Tate Modern, Seven magazine review

    06 Jul 2012
  • The Horse, at British Museum, Seven magazine review

    09 Jun 2012
  • Yoko Ono, Serpentine Gallery, Seven review

    27 Jun 2012

Turner in his later years daringly broke away from the straitjacketing preconceptions of 19th-century academic art. In many of the experimental oil paintings included here – such as the sense-stunningThames Above Waterloo Bridge – as well as in his improvisatory watercolours, he liberated himself from the narrative paraphernalia that encumbered his contemporaries’ expectations of great painting. At the centre of his late work lay a single, deeply original proposition, which had nothing to do with telling stories and everything to do with defining the nature of the universe: light, in all its transience and mutability, is the one constant element that constitutes reality.

Whereas most saw eccentricity or even madness in Turner’s late work, Monet instantly grasped its profound implications. He never matched Turner’s originality or technical subtlety: his paint was applied more heavily, in impasted dabs and dashes, rather than in etherised veils of colour.

But Monet brilliantly expanded on Turner’s work. His series paintings, in which he painted the same motif at different times of day – the front of Rouen Cathedral, say, ocean-blue at dawn or pink as a prawn at dusk – are programmatic demonstrations of the extent to which apparently stable objects are caught in the constant flux of changing light and passing time. In his late water-lily paintings, he created vast open fields of light flashing and sparkling on water.

In doing so, he was taking Turner’s big idea and giving it monumental expression. Such panoramic depictions of light and colour would be among the principal inspirations of the New York School – the Abstract Expressionists, in particular.

It is at this late point that Twombly sidles into the narrative. A member of the same generation as Jasper Johns, he reacted against the grand claims made for abstract painting by an Abstract Expressionist such as Jackson Pollock (“I am nature,” Pollock had famously remarked).

Twombly, something of an aesthete, was drawn to the fluid look of New York painting; and drawn too to the work of Turner and Monet, who had helped to shape it. He created expansive fields of light, loose, drippy paint, shot through with explosions of colour reminiscent of Monet’s waterlilies or Turner’s suns.

But he knew it was not enough merely to reprise their perceptions about light and nature. So, as this show reveals with surprising vividness, he forced their language back towards all that Turner had liberated it from in the first place – story and legend.

Many of Twombly’s pictures are titled after ancient myths and many have words from those myths scribbled into their otherwise inchoate surfaces. The most eloquent example is a triptych inspired by the tale of Hero and Leander.

At first sight these increasingly watery abstracts might almost be a homage to Turner or Monet, but they are meant, in fact, to suggest the successive stages of Leander’s tragic drowning as he swims the Hellespont to join his lover. Going, going, gone: almost comically, the final picture conjures an emptiness of water, and the submersion of the dead protagonist.

So Twombly’s relationship to Monet and Turner is both direct, and bizarre. To achieve their ambitions, they removed narrative from art altogether, and turned it towards the light. To achieve his ambition, he went straight back to the infernal academic storytelling they had regarded with such horror. Twombly is the most modern of the three, yet also the most old-fashioned.

Miners Track nr Accrington

Miners Track nr Accrington
Acrylic on canvas 76cmx76cm

South Pennines Broadhead Road

South Pennines Broadhead Road
Oil on Canvas

Galeria Van Gestel Plaza de los Naranjos Marbella

Galeria Van Gestel  Plaza de los Naranjos Marbella
See Rob Millers work here from

Britaine

britaine.co.uk
we are in
Britaine.co.uk
Lancashire

Art Materials Costa del Sol

For the best art materials for the professional artist, including an excellent range of oil and acrylic paints plus supports I can highly recommend

Bellas Artes. Los Arcos.

C/Galverston no 9
29601 Marbella,
Tel/Fax 952 86 05 54

John F Carlson

John F Carlson
American Impression teacher and author

Artisan Fine Art Gallery

Artisan Fine Art Gallery
Contemporary Paintings, Drawings and sculpture

Galeria 151 Picture Framing

Galeria 151 Picture Framing
Lisa at Galeria 151, direction Casares from Estapona can provide a good selection of quality frames as well as stretch new and old canvas's tel 952 800 676 galeria151@gmail.com

Rivington Field and woods

Rivington Field and woods
watercolour on paper

Northern Impressions

Open publication - Free publishing - More art
artwork and contents are the property of rob miller and can be used only with permission. Simple template. Powered by Blogger.

Sublime in art

18th century

[edit] British philosophy

Grosser Mythen, Swiss Alps. British writers, taking the Grand Tour in the 17th and 18th centuries, first used the sublime to describe objects of nature.

The development of the concept of the sublime as an aesthetic quality in nature distinct from beauty was first brought into prominence in the 18th century in the writings of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, and John Dennis, in expressing an appreciation of the fearful and irregular forms of external nature, and Joseph Addison's synthesis of concepts of the sublime in his The Spectator, and later the Pleasures of the Imagination. All three Englishmen had, within the span of several years, made the journey across the Alps and commented in their writings of the horrors and harmony of the experience, expressing a contrast of aesthetic qualities.[1]

John Dennis was the first to publish his comments in a journal letter published as Miscellanies in 1693, giving an account of crossing the Alps where, contrary to his prior feelings for the beauty of nature as a "delight that is consistent with reason", the experience of the journey was at once a pleasure to the eye as music is to the ear, but "mingled with Horrours, and sometimes almost with despair".[2] Shaftesbury had made the journey two years prior to Dennis but did not publish his comments until 1709 in the Moralists. His comments on the experience also reflected pleasure and repulsion, citing a "wasted mountain" that showed itself to the world as a "noble ruin" (Part III, Sec. 1, 390–91), but his concept of the sublime in relation to beauty was one of degree rather than the sharp contradistinction that Dennis developed into a new form of literary criticism. Shaftesbury's writings reflect more of a regard for the awe of the infinity of space ("Space astonishes" referring to the Alps), where the sublime was not an aesthetic quality in opposition to beauty, but a quality of a grander and higher importance than beauty. In referring to the Earth as a "Mansion-Globe" and "Man-Container" Shaftsbury writes "How narrow then must it appear compar'd with the capacious System of its own Sun...tho animated with a sublime Celestial Spirit...." (Part III, sec. 1, 373).[3]

Joseph Addison embarked on the Grand Tour in 1699 and commented in Remarks on Several Parts of Italy etc. that "The Alps fill the mind with an agreeable kind of horror".[4] The significance of Addison's concept of the sublime is that the three pleasures of the imagination that he identified; greatness, uncommonness, and beauty, "arise from visible objects" (that is, from sight rather than from rhetoric). It is also notable that in writing on the "Sublime in external Nature", he does not use the term "sublime", but uses terms that would be considered as absolutive superlatives, e.g. "unbounded", "unlimited", as well as "spacious", "greatness", and on occasion terms denoting excess.[2]

Addison's notion of greatness was integral to the concept of the sublime. An art object could be beautiful but it could not rise to greatness. His work Pleasures of the Imagination, as well as Mark Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination (1744), and Edward Young's poem Night Thoughts (1745), are generally considered the starting points for Burke's analysis.

[edit] Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke's concept of the sublime was developed in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756).[2] Burke was the first philosopher to argue that the sublime and the beautiful are mutually exclusive. The dichotomy is not as simple as Dennis' opposition, but antithetical to the same degree as light and darkness. Beauty may be accentuated by light, but either intense light or darkness (the absence of light) is sublime to the degree that it can obliterate the sight of an object. The imagination is moved to awe and instilled with a degree of horror by what is "dark, uncertain, and confused."[5] While the relationship of the sublime and the beautiful is one of mutual exclusiveness, either one can produce pleasure. The sublime may inspire horror, but one receives pleasure in knowing that the perception is a fiction.[6]

Burke's concept of the sublime was an antithetical contrast to the classical notion of the aesthetic quality of beauty as the pleasurable experience described by Plato in several of his dialogues (Philebus, Ion, Hippias Major, and Symposium) and suggested ugliness as an aesthetic quality in its capacity to instill feelings of intense emotion, ultimately creating a pleasurable experience.[7] Prior to Burke, the classical notion of the ugly, most notably related in the writings of Augustine of Hippo, had conceived it as lacking form and therefore as non-existent. Beauty was, for St. Augustine, the consequence of the benevolence and goodness of God's creation, and as a category had no opposite. The ugly, lacking any attributive value, was a formlessness in its absence of beauty.[8] For Aristotle the function of art forms was to create pleasure, and had first pondered the problem of an object of art representing the ugly as producing "pain." Aristotle's detailed analysis of this problem involves his study of tragic literature and its paradoxical nature to be shocking as well as having poetic value.[9]

Burke's treatise is also notable for focusing on the physiological effects of the sublime, in particular the dual emotional quality of fear and attraction noted by other writers. Burke described the sensation attributed to the sublime as a "negative pain" which he called delight, and which is distinct from positive pleasure. Delight is taken to result from the removal of pain (caused by confronting the sublime object) and is supposedly more intense than positive pleasure. Though Burke's explanations for the physiological effects of the sublime experience (such as tension resulting from eye strain) were not taken seriously by later writers, his empiricist method of reporting from his own psychological experience was more influential, especially in contrast to Kant's analysis. Burke is also distinguished from Kant in his emphasis on the subject's realization of his physical limitations rather than any supposed sense of moral or spiritual transcendence.[10]

[edit] German philosophy

[edit] Immanuel Kant

See also Immanuel Kant's Aesthetic philosophy

Viviano Codazzi: Rendition of St. Peter's Square, Rome, dated 1630. Kant referred to St. Peter's as "splendid", a term he used for objects producing feeling for both the beautiful and the sublime.

Kant, in 1764, made an attempt to record his thoughts on the observing subject's mental state in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. He held that the sublime was of three kinds: the noble, the splendid, and the terrifying.

In his Critique of Judgment (1790),[11] Kant officially says that there are two forms of the sublime, the mathematical and the dynamical, although some commentators hold that there is a third form, the moral sublime, a layover from the earlier "noble" sublime.[12] Kant claims, "We call that sublime which is absolutely great"(§ 25). He distinguishes between the "remarkable differences" of the Beautiful and the Sublime, noting that beauty "is connected with the form of the object", having "boundaries", while the sublime "is to be found in a formless object", represented by a "boundlessness" (§ 23). Kant evidently divides the sublime into the mathematical and the dynamical, where in the mathematical "aesthetical comprehension" is not a consciousness of a mere greater unit, but the notion of absolute greatness not inhibited with ideas of limitations (§ 27). The dynamically sublime is "nature considered in an aesthetic judgment as might that has no dominion over us", and an object can create a fearfulness "without being afraid of it" (§ 28). He considers both the beautiful and the sublime as "indefinite" concepts, but where beauty relates to the "Understanding", sublime is a concept belonging to "Reason", and "shows a faculty of the mind surpassing every standard of Sense" (§ 25). For Kant, one's inability to grasp the enormity of a sublime event such as an earthquake demonstrates inadequacy of one's sensibility and imagination. Simultaneously, one's ability to subsequently identify such an event as singular and whole indicates the superiority of one's cognitive, supersensible powers. Ultimately, it is this "supersensible substrate," underlying both nature and thought, on which true sublimity is located.[13]

[edit] Schopenhauer

In order to clarify the concept of the feeling of the sublime, Schopenhauer listed examples of its transition from the beautiful to the most sublime. This can be found in the first volume of his The World as Will and Representation, § 39.

For him, the feeling of the beautiful is pleasure in simply seeing a benign object. The feeling of the sublime, however, is pleasure in seeing an overpowering or vast malignant object of great magnitude, one that could destroy the observer.

  • Feeling of Beauty – Light is reflected off a flower. (Pleasure from a mere perception of an object that cannot hurt observer).
  • Weakest Feeling of Sublime – Light reflected off stones. (Pleasure from beholding objects that pose no threat, yet themselves are devoid of life).
  • Weaker Feeling of Sublime – Endless desert with no movement. (Pleasure from seeing objects that could not sustain the life of the observer).
  • Sublime – Turbulent Nature. (Pleasure from perceiving objects that threaten to hurt or destroy observer).
  • Full Feeling of Sublime – Overpowering turbulent Nature. (Pleasure from beholding very violent, destructive objects).
  • Fullest Feeling of Sublime – Immensity of Universe's extent or duration. (Pleasure from knowledge of observer's nothingness and oneness with Nature).

[edit] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Hegel considered the sublime to be a marker of cultural difference and a characteristic feature of oriental art. His teleological view of history meant that he considered "oriental" cultures as less developed, more autocratic in terms of their political structures and more fearful of divine law. According to his reasoning, this meant that oriental artists were more inclined towards the aesthetic and the sublime: they could engage god only through "sublated" means. He believed that the excess of intricate detail that is characteristic of Chinese art, or the dazzling metrical patterns characteristic of Islamic art, were typical examples of the sublime and argued that the disembodiment and formlessness of these art forms inspired the viewer with an overwhelming aesthetic sense of awe.[14]

The Practical Business of Painting by John Piper


Abstraction is a luxury. yet some painters today indulge in it as if it was the bread of life. The early Christian sculptors, wall-painter and glass-painters had a sensible attitude towards abstraction. However hard one tries (many attempts have been made to make them tow the line with modern art) one cannot catch them out indulging in pure abstraction. Their abstraction, such as it is, is always subservient to an end - the Christian end, as it happened. Abstraction is a luxury that has been left to the present day to exploit It is a luxury just as any single ideal is, and like a single ideal it should be approached all the time, but not pre-supposed all the time. To pre-suppose it always, if you are a painter is to paint the same picture always: or else to give up painting altogether because there is nothing left to paint....

Thomas Cole Lancashire Artist

Thomas Cole

Posted by Charley Parker at 10:33 am

Thomas Cole - The Oxbow
Though often thought of as a quintessentially American painter, the founder of the Hudson River School of painting and even the father of American landscape painting in general, it is perhaps fitting that Thomas Cole was an immigrant. Born in Lancashire England he moved to the U.S. with his family in 1818, when he was 18.

Cole spent a year on his own in Philadelphia before going on to join his family in Stubenville, Ohio, where he worked as a wallpaper designer for his father’s wallpaper factory. He later returned to Philadelphia for two years, and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts was inspired by the works of Thomas Birch and Thomas Doughty. He then moved to New York and devoted himself to the study of landscape painting.

He did a series of paintings after a sketching trip up the Hudson River that proved to be very successful and he began to accept commissions for works that displayed the grandeur and drama of the still largely unspoiled American wilderness.

Cole took several trips to Europe, refining his distinctly American art with the study of the European masters. He eventually settled in Catskill, New York. There is a Thomas Cole National Historic Site at Cedar Grove.

Cole had a distinct influence on other painters of the time, notably Asher B. Durand, whose famous painting Kindred Spirits was a tribute to Cole and his friend poet William Cullen Bryant; and the renowned painter Frederic Edwin Church, who was Cole’s only formal student.

Cole divided his attention between landscape commissions and large scale allegorical paintings of imaginary views that embodied philosophical ideals, such as a series showing The Voyage of Life, in four stages from childhood to old age.

The most famous of these is his grand sequence of five large canvasses depicting The Course of Empire, from the wilderness of an undiscovered continent to the pastoral beginnings of a young country to the heights of imperial glory and on to the inevitable destruction and collapse of an empire under its own weight.

Cole apparently preferred his ambitious allegorical works, but he is most often admired for his dramatic landscapes, with sweeping views of the wild and open country that still beckoned the American spirit of adventure and discovery.

The image above is alternately titled The Oxbow or The Connecticut River Near Northampton (larger version here and here).

It shows a long view of the American landscape, renewed and glowing in the sun as the darkness of a storm subsides.

    Art Practice Tips

    Working with Charcoal.

    This is a totally renewable resource, and if you work directly with nature like I do than you should celebrate the moments of use. Charcoal is a great medium once you have overcome its nature to make marks and you take some of the initial control. For me its all about speed, impression, gesture and the pressure you apply when you use it. You can draw with it on almost any type of paper, canvas, board, linen, meant for drawing or painting. Remember, though, that Char(coal) is also very messy. It comes off your skin very easily but watch your clothes, to avoid your self and everything around you becoming all black, you have to learn how to handle it with your hands and fingers giving it some respect. Charcoal comes in various sizes and compressions the most compressed can be very black, Also charcoal can be used alongside any other medium and its velvet hue is just a wow alongside oils, inks, acrylic or whatever.Lots of people will want to advise you on the use of an eraser with charcoal, and give some stuff about negative image... but don't be taken in, the best thing about charcoal is its ability to be instantaneous and spontaneous. It certainly tries to help you capture in a stroke the movement of a body, the line of tree or the ripple of light in water. Get some cheap paper and practice, practice, practice. Use it on its edge, on its side or however. Grind it down and use a cloth to spread it. Tips After working with charcoal, you will probably get your hands and face dirty The best cleaning material for your skin are baby wipes especially when working outdoors when soap and water isn't readily available.

    Pisarro

    Pisarro
    Rives de Marne à Chennevières - 1863

    Jackdaw Arts Newsletter A GREAT READ

    The Jackdaw is a bi-monthly paper six a year) founded in 2000.Its purpose is to keep interested parties informed and entertained about aspects of art which are in the news.
    By and large it’s pretty nasty and critical of many things, and especially of the art establishment which stinks like the rotting carcase it is.If The Jackdaw isn’t amusing in parts then it has failed. It’s pretty childish sometimes too and do beware because parts of it are not entirely true – I’ll leave it up to you to believe whichever bits you like and to disregard the rest.
    Some of it is serious. Some of it is just downright bad. Some issues are better than others. But no other art publication dares to be like it.


    The last thing I want you to think is that The Jackdaw has an agenda. On the contrary, it doesn’t believe in anything at all and, by the way: “It’s totally unsuitable for Birmingham”*.



    I’ll send you a complimentary copy if you email your address.



    David LeeEditormailto:dg.lee%40virgin.net



    Art Practice Tips The Small Sketchbook

    Keeping a sketchbook is a great way of keeping track of creative ideas and getting in the habit of regular drawing, as well as being a useful resource for large works when you are feeling short on ideas. I tend to use the small sketchbook for making quick impressions of what I see or aides memoir for later. It is your invaluable personal tool and usually it isn't something that you would show someone else except as a discussion point. For me the small sketch book contains drawings some paintings, notes about a certain painting such as colours and moods. Notes and memos to aid yourself plan for a show, an outing or a new line of work.Remember that not every drawing you do needs to be a finished work of art. You can use a sketchbook for rough notes, thumbnails and ideas, too. When you open your sketchbook, think about what your intention is for your drawing session. While trying something challenging is always worthwhile, simple subjects can often be rewarding. Don't feel constrained by what others think art should be about - make your drawings about whatever you find interesting, be it an unusual object, an interesting face, a beautiful landscape or an invented fantasy.The great English sculpture Henry Moore for example made large sculptural shapes, his sketchbook however contains detailed beautiful drawings of the sheep that grazed outside his window the drawings eventually led to large sculptural pieces. In fact its true to say that the sketchbook is the crucial piece of kit for sculpture, designers, dancers and many other creative artists as well as painters.I have posted 6 notes from a small sketch which are pages from my Andalucia sketchbook as examples of the kind of work that I do. They are currently small drawings 19 x 14 using both sides or pages of the book when it is fully open. The books are Daley Rowney and are far from expensive, the paper which I think is recycled is very soft almost like sugar paper, and has an off white colour. I was put aback a little because it is quite porous and for many years I have used a more expensive solid cartridge paper sketch book from Windsor and Newton. But having got used to this ones character I have in fact grown to like the way the pen strokes or paint soaks through the paper.

    Oil painting medium

    If the thickness of your oil paints are keeping you from spreading or blending them easily, you need some additional oil painting medium to mix in with the paint.
    What is painting medium? It’s simply what holds or carries the color in your paint.
    The oil paint you squeeze straight out of the tube consists of two parts: pigment (little particles of color) and medium (clear oil).
    Different brands of paint, and even various colors within the same brand, often have different consistencies of medium and pigment which keeps them from mixing easily with each other.
    Using just a little bit of extra medium while you’re painting (it doesn’t take much) will even out those dissimilarities.
    Overall, you’ll get improved color blending on your palette and a much smoother application of the paint to your canvas.
    Only two ingredients are needed to make oil painting medium: linseed stand oil and turpentine. Both can be found at any art supply store and are made by the same companies you get your oil paints from.
    Here’s how to make painting medium.
    Mix one part linseed stand oil with two parts turpentine or odorless mineral spirits, cover tightly, and let sit.
    Stand oil is so thick that the two liquids won’t want to combine right away—be prepared to wait a few days for it to completely mix.
    If you’re wondering what to put it in, glass containers with a tight screw on cap work best.
    If you get impatient, turn the container on its side or top every few hours to help the stand oil and turpentine mix together faster.
    Once it’s all one liquid, I usually pour just a small amount into a container and dip into it with my brush whenever I’m mixing colors or working with thicker, more opaque paint. Make sure to keep the rest of the medium sealed up and it’ll last quite a while.
    There are a few other benefits to using this medium as well. It’ll make your oil paint tougher and more durable—and it will keep the skin of your painting from cracking as it dries.
    As far as drawbacks go, there’s only one: drying time.
    Oil paintings take longer to dry when stand oil is involved, up to a week (or longer even) depending on your location’s humidity and temperature.
    If waiting that long is out of the question, you can substitute sun-thickened linseed oil for the stand oil and gain a few days.
    Just realize that using sun-thickened linseed oil in your medium may turn your lighter colors (like white) slightly yellow over time.
    Of course there are other oils which work as well.
    You can make painting mediums out of poppy seed oil, walnut oil, and other types of linseed oil. Most of them have faster drying times but more yellowing tendencies, which is why I prefer stand oil.

    Highland Renewal

    Highland Renewal are a charity based on the Isle of Mull in the Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland.

    We manage the Tireragan estate at the very southwest tip of Mull for regeneration, conservation and educational purposes.

    Tireragan encompasses wild rocky coastline, upland heath and bog, nationally important native woodland communities and associated wildlife all regenerating to a increasingly natural state.

    Highland Renewal is also committed to the promotion of conservation through education and environmental arts.

    Please explore our web site to learn more about Highland Renewal and Tireragan. Over the coming year we will be publishing online more educational materials and research data.

    www.highlandrenewal.org

    Oil Painting Mediums

    As with other types of paint additives, there are a whole host of oil painting mediums to tempt you.
    But which ones do you really need and which can you do without - at least for now /
    It's easy to believe that your painting will be a complete mess unless you use each and every one of them - every time...
    It won't. But a little prior knowledge helps as well.
    Don't forget we're using the term 'Mediums' in this article in relation to oil painting additives and not in its other context as the type of paint you're using ie: acrylic paints, watercolor paints, etc.
    Have a look here at the main oil painting mediums and a brief description of what each one does.
    Gesso Primer It may seem odd to start the oil painting mediums section with what is in fact an acrylic medium. However, it's widely used as a base coat for art canvasses when oil painting. Comments for gesso regarding acrylic paint mediums apply equally to oil painting mediums.
    Turpentine The best known thinner and cleaner for oil paints and brushes. Use the distilled artists version rather than the household version for best finishes on your painting. Traditionally mixed 50/50 with linseed oil for an excellent medium. However, its powerful odor is not always welcome in the house and may be an irritant for some artists.
    Low Odor Thinners An excellent substitute for turpentine, in all the areas mentioned above - without the smell!
    Linseed Oil After turps, probably the best known of the oil painting mediums. On its own gives colors a high gloss. Added to colors it produces a glaze effect. Used 50/50 with turpentine or low odor thinners, it provides a good, general purpose paint medium for oil painting. Slows down drying time. Compared to some oils, it can go a little more yellow over a period of time.
    White spirit A cheaper version of low odor thinners and turps. Ok for thinning paints for underpainting, but probably not for quality work. Fine for cleaning brushes.
    Prepared Oil Painting Mediums Varying from one manufacturer to another, a combination of white spirit and other oils to provide a ready-mixed, user-friendly paint diluent. A beginner could use this, instead of mixing their own combination of oils and other additives.
    Stand Oil A faster-drying version of linseed oil. Reduces consistency of paint and brush marks.
    Poppy Oil For adding to lighter colors and white. Less inclined to yellow than linseed oil. However slower drying.
    Gold size Although primarily intended for applying gold leaf, it provides a relatively fast drying oil-based paint medium.
    Alkyd Gel & Liquid Oil Painting Mediums Alkyd oil paints are well known for their much faster drying properties than regular oil colors. Alkyd paint mediums can be added to conventional oil paints to speed drying time by up to 50%. Can also be used as a glazing medium. Like acrylics, the glazing technique is where a translucent color is painted over another, dry color. The lower one glows through but is affected by the density of the top glaze. Creating misty or smoky backgrounds is a good example of a glaze.
    White Alkyd Paint Strictly speaking, this isn't a paint medium, but I use this a lot to speed the drying of conventional oils where I want a lighter tint or a highlight, as opposed to a glaze. The white alkyd paint, when mixed with other colors, acts in the same way as the alkyd gel, but doesn't lose the opacity of the color.
    Gloss or Matt Picture Varnish A spirit based varnish, equally at home on acrylics as well as oils. Dries to a gloss finish and will not yellow or bloom. Gloss and matt varnishes can be mixed to give a satin finish. Can be removed with turpentine or white spirit.
    Retouching Varnish A thin varnish which can be painted over a touch-dry painting to 'lift' areas where the oil has sunk into the canvas, leaving dull spots. Can also be used as a temporary varnish, say for exhibitions, where thicker paint on a recently completed painting may take many months to dry through completely. Can be removed prior to, or left on underneath, the final varnish coat.
    Damar Varnish Dries in a few hours with a satin - medium gloss. Removable.
    So there we are. If you've read this far, it'll be obvious already that several oil painting mediums do fairly similar things.
    Probably the best ones to start with are Low Odor Thinners, one of the mixing oils such as Linseed oil and one of the other additives that promote quicker drying.
    Then as you become used to them, try out the other oil painting mediums one by one. This way minimises confusion over what to use and when and stops you wasting your money.
    Good luck!
    "To the parallel question, What makes a true painter? Pissarro would answer that a true painter is very seldom found: he is one who can put two tones of color in harmony. In other words,Pissarro defines the nature of true painting in specifically visual terms. I've pasted the section on Pisarro from the "artchive" website which makes a great read. You can find it at the bottom of this blog. I've blogged it for the reason that currently I see it as a base reference for my work and because I rate the efficacy of this painter very highly...

    Articles, comments, practical work, links and things..

    With over 43000 visitors to date, I would like to say thankyou, it makes the writing, posting and upkeep of this artblog more than worthwhile. A special hello to the many visitors from North America and Australia, many thanks for your custom. have a good day..Rob

    The romantic north,

    "The power of place is well known to all of us. For most of us hypo-sensitivity isn't neccesary for us to know whether we dislike a place or not." As Eduardo Santa Anna wrote in an article on my fellow northern painter Colin Halliday, "for artists however the notion is on a different scale, they can transform a place into poetry, music or painting..." or as a more noted English source Constable said "painting is but another word for feeling", I was brought up in 50's, 60's and 70's in the heart of industrial East Lancashire and at its ending. If I looked and travelled South East to my Aunty Edi in Failsworth,or Grandad in Burnley I saw Lowreys Lancashire and when I looked North West and followed in the footsteps of fellow Blackburner Wainwright I saw Wordsworths and William Mallard Turners nature and its elemental forces at work, you could even visit quite easily the places on the River Lune were he painted and which the romantic art critic John Ruskin saw as the definitive romantic landscape veiw. The struggle of love for myself as a northern Landscape painter was and still is this conflicting choice of powerful material that is accessable and to hand; so many moods, so much conflict and so much poetry of place; for me the real sublime feeling of the north maybe lies in the geography of the mid ground of existance, and its that that I currently explore. Rob Miller 04/03/2011



    "There is only one master here - Corot. We are nothingcompared to him, nothing." Claude Monet, 1897
    "He is still the strongest, he anticipated everything..."Edgar Degas, 1883Introduction [to the 1996 catalog of the exhibition "Corot"] Today it is rather surprising to read the unqualified praise for Corot voiced over and over again by the generation of painters who were maturing just when he died. It seems peculiar that these artists so greatly
    esteemed le père Corot, since Corot pretended to be out of touch with artistic developments at the end of his life and disapproved of the confrontational nature of the work produced by Monet and the other Intransigeants seeking to commandeer the walls of the annual Paris Salon. The very notion of modernity that infuses much of Monet's art, the knowing urbanity of Degas's, the ceaseless experimentation that characterizes both these oeuvres seem completely at odds with Corot's contemplative vision of a timeless, unchanging Arcadia - or what some call his monotonous views of Ville-d'Avray. Reading further, one learns that in the late 1920s and early 1930s both the painter Jacques Emile Blanche and the historian Alfred Barr, founder of New York's Museum of Modern Art, believed that Corot's impact on twentieth-century art would rival Cezanne's. These views are so far from the present day conception of Corot's importance to the history of painting that a thorough reappraisal of his art is clearly long overdue. Since the 1930s historians have attempted to establish Corot as the precursor of Impressionism, the inventor of sunlit landscapes untroubled by anecdote or meaningful incident. Struck by his marvelous studies painted in the open air in Italy, the writers Germain Bazin and Kenneth Clark saw Corot as the perfectly optical painter with a perfectly innocent eye - in short, the unthinking man's painter - so long as he was only sketching from nature. Comparing the on-the-spot study of the bridge at Narni with the finished Salon painting of the same view, Bazin called the former "a marvel of spontaneity in which there is already the germ of Impressionism, [while] the Salon picture, even though it is painted in beautiful thick paint and with great delicacy, is nonetheless a rather artificial Neoclassical composition." In Clark's opinion, the same study "is as free as the most vigorous Constable; the finished picture in Ottawa is tamer than the tamest imitation of Claude." Since the 1980s, when Peter Galassi directed attention to the outdoor painting of Corot's near contemporaries Michallon, Bertin, Granet, and Caruelle d'Aligny, art historians have linked Corot to the generation of painters who preceded him as opposed to those who followed him. As those and other painters in Corot's Italian circle became better known, Corot was more and more seen as the obedient disciple of Pierre-Henri Valenciennes, the codifier of Neoclassical landscape painting; as the last in a line of painters continuing to work an aesthetic forged in the eighteenth century. Yet while both views contain much truth, neither characterization of Corot - as the last Neoclassicist or as the first Impressionist - is sufficient to encompass the totality of his achievement. For example, neither explanation satisfactorily accommodates the extraordinary history paintings, among them Hagar in the Wilderness, Diana Surprised in Her Bath, Democritus and the Abderites, Homer and the Shepherds, that actually made Corot's reputation in the 1840s: the kind of painting that prompted Baudelaire to write, "at the head of the modern school of landscape stands M. Corot." These are the works that continue to disturb modern critics. Nor does either theory adequately account for Corot as a painter of figures. When pressed by an interlocutor, Degas proclaimed Corot an even greater figure painter than a landscapist. It was largely the figure paintings that Degas recommended to his collector friends, such as Henri Rouart, who owned Lady in Blue. Degas's colleague Mary Cassatt actively counseled American collectors the Havermeyers, the Palmers, Colonel Payne, and others to buy figure paintings rather than landscapes. It was Corot the figure painter who impressed Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cezanne; as Edward Lucie-Smith has observed, paintings such as Corot's Dance of the Nymphs may be the key to Cezanne's late paintings of bathers. In the 1910s, Juan Gris and Picasso copied figures by Corot. The exhibition of his figure paintings organized at Paul Rosenberg & Cie. in 1928 profoundly affected the work of Andre Derain and Andre Lhote, and it prompted Blanche and Barr to reevaluate Corot's impact on the art of the present century. Yet today Corot continues to elude art historians and critics, which is why we believed it important to mount a retrospective in which every aspect of his painted oeuvre would be fully represented. A different kind of exhibition might have shown Corot only at his most ravishing, but it would be deceptive: a fundamental aspect of Corot's work is that his drawing is sometimes awkward, his compositions sometimes formulaic. An exhibition tightly focused by theme or period might have shown Corot as a more coherent and consistent artist than he appears here; but his oeuvre does in fact reflect the seemingly contradictory tenets of Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Realism, and Naturalism. Nonetheless, artists from Delacroix to Courbet to Renoir to Picasso, who knew Corot's work well, stubbornly held it in the highest possible regard. We hope that this exhibition will enable a new generation of viewers to know Corot's art well and to discover for themselves all that his paintings have to offer.
    from Corot introduction by Prof Micheal Pantazzi

    Albert Marquet

    About a year after I was born 1955, Kyfan Williams, a Welsh landscape painter I have come to admire, visited Paris, he mentions seeing Marquets paintings in the diary of his visit. His work being " a continuation in all that was good in French Landscape painting. I thought it worth putting in this piece on him along with some images...

    Albert Marquet was born on March 27, 1875 in Bordeaux. In 1890, he moved to Paris to attend the Decorative Arts School, where he met Henri Matisse. They were roommates for a time, and they influenced each other's work. Marquet began studies in 1892 at the École des Beaux-Arts under Gustave Moreau, a symbolist artist who was a follower of the Romantic tradition of Eugène Delacroix. In these years, Marquet exhibited paintings at the Salon des Indépendants. Although he did not sell many paintings, the artistic community of Paris became aware of his work. His early compositions were characterised by a clear and painterly Fauve approach, in which he had a fine control of the drawing and responded to light, not only by intensifying the strongest tones, but also by seeing the weaker ones in coloristic terms. In 1905 he exhibited at the Salon d'Automne where his paintings were put together with those of Henri Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck, André Derain, Othon Friesz, Georges Rouault, Raoul Dufy, Henri Charles Manguin, Georges Braque, Louis Valtat and Jean Puy. Dismayed by the intense coloration in these paintings, critics reacted by naming the artists the "Fauves", i.e. savage beasts. Although Marquet painted with the fauves for years, he used less bright and violent colours than the others, and emphasized less intense tones made by mixing complementaries, thus always as colors and never as grays. At the end of 1907 he stayed in Paris and dedicated himself, together with Henri Matisse, to a series of city views. The fundamental difference between the two is that while Matisse used strong colours, put on the canvas with decided brush strokes, Marquet favored grayed yellows, greyed violets or blues. Black was usually used as a violent contrast to light colors for such forms as bare tree trunks or calligraphically drawn people contrasted with very light, often yellow or orange streets and sidewalks. Another difference is that Marquet used an approximation of traditional perspective, although his colors and compositions constantly referred to the rectangle and cut its plane with their calligraphy. From 1907 to his death, Marquet alternated between working in his studio in Paris and many parts of the European coast and in North Africa. He was most involved with Algeria and Algiers and with Tunisia. In his voyages he painted the sea and ships, but also the lights and animated life of the city, especially cities on the waterfront, like Algiers. Among European cities Marquet remained impressed particularly with Naples and Venice where he painted the sea and boats, accenting the light over water. He adopted a technique nothing like the impressionists', painting water as a large area of simple tone which held the plane of the water surface without illusionistic perspective, from which the ships arise into a different plane. His views of the lagoon in Venice do this very economically. The water stays at a right angle to the picture plane and the large ships float with ease, with their reflections exactly the correct tone to project the required space. His color is much like Matisse of the 1920s, here. His contrasts of vivid colors describe the waves of the sea with simple drawing which accompany the exactly observed color tones, giving a scene of placid movement. The human figures are much simplified, calligraphically drawn in a way related to Japanese Shijo style work. Matisse is said to have called him "our Hokusai". During his voyages to Germany and Sweden he painted the subjects he usually preferred: river and sea views, ports and ships, but also cityscapes. Over the course of his career he often returned to the same subjects, even years later, recording subtle differences in the light. He painted a few portraits, and between 1910 and 1914 he painted a series of nudes in whorehouses, and prepared the illustration of a work on lesbian lovers. But he is best known for his many landscapes. Unlike Matisse, there are no obvious periods of change in his work. To the end he was one of Matisse's closest friends, and they discussed each other's work with the greatest openness. His death was unexpected and sudden, from a gall bladder attack and subsequently discovered cancer, for which at that time there was no therapy. Marquet died in Paris, on 13 June 1947.

    article from www.artinthepicturecom

    Green Cornfield Van Gogh

    Green Cornfield Van Gogh

    Using Colour Van Gogh

    When you look at a landscape painters work long enough and then take a trip down a country lane or through a town do you start to see the way the artist sees?

    "Instead of trying to exactly what I see before me, I make more arbitrary use of color to express myself more forcefully."
    When he first devoted himself to painting full time, in 1880, Van Gogh used dark and gloomy earth colors such as raw umber, raw sienna, and olive green. These were very suited the miners, weavers, and peasant farm laborers who were his subjects. But the development of new, more lightfast pigments and his exposure to the work of the Impressionists, who were striving to capture the effects of light in the work, saw him introduce bright hues into his palette: reds, yellows, oranges, greens, and blues.

    Typical colors in Van Gogh's palette included yellow ocher, chrome yellow and cadmium yellow, chrome orange, vermilion, Prussian blue, ultramarine, lead white and zinc white, emerald green, red lake, red ocher, raw sienna, and black. (Both chrome yellow and cadmium yellow are toxic, so some modern artists tend to use versions that have hue at the end of the name, which indicates that it's made from alternative pigments.)

    Van Gogh painted very rapidly, with a sense of urgency, using the paint straight from the tube in thick, graphic brush strokes (impasto). In his last 70 days, he is said to have averaged one a day.

    Influenced by prints from Japan, he painted dark outlines around objects, filling these in with areas of thick color. He knew that using complementary colors make each seem brighter, using yellows and oranges with blues and reds with greens. His choice of colors varied with his moods and occasionally he deliberately restricted his palette, such as with the sunflowers which are almost entirely yellows.

    "To exaggerate the fairness of hair, I come even to orange tones, chromes and pale yellow ... I make a plain background of the richest, intensest blue that I can contrive, and by this simple combination of the bright head against the rich blue background, I get a mysterious effect, like a star in the depths of an azure sky."

    article qouted http://www.about.com/ 'painting'

    Corot

    Corot
    Fontenblue sketch

    John Constable

    John Constable

    The English landscape painter John Constable once wrote, "I should paint my own laces best." This precept guided his career, as Constable developed a unique style combining objective studies of nature with a deeply personal vision of the countryside round his boyhood home. While most landscapists of the day traveled extensively in search of picturesque or sublime scenery, Constable never left England. His name is so closely associated with his native Stour Valley that the area is sometimes referred to as "Constable country. Although his family hoped that he would join his father's business, they permitted him to enter the Royal Academy Schools at the age of twenty-two. Until he completed his studies nearly ten years later, Constable divided his time between East Bergholt, where he would sketch out of doors in the spring and summer, and London, where he exhibited finished oil paintings based on these open-air studies at the Academy. Rejecting the accepted hierarchy of genres, which ranked idealized landscapes that told historical or mythological tales above views observed in nature, Constable sought recognition for humbler scenes of cultivated land and agricultural labor (The Cornfield ; 1826; The National Gallery, London). The small, precise painting Golding Constable's Flower Garden (1815; Ipswich Borough Council) seems to record every detail of his father's domestic garden, as well as the barns and fields beyond. Beginning with the 1819 Academy exhibition, Constable demonstrated his aspirations more boldly by exhibiting large-scale scenes of working farms and waterways painted in his studio, using increasingly broad brushstrokes and thickly applied highlights. The Hay Wain (1821; National Gallery, London), one of these so-called six-footers, was among the three paintings that Constable exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1824, where he was awarded a gold medal. His strikingly fresh, apparently spontaneous transcription of the landscape, described by the French writer Stendhal as "the mirror of nature," caused a sensation among French painters. For Eugène Delacroix, in particular, Constable's rich, shimmering surfaces came as a revelation, and, during his 1825 visit to London, he sought out the reclusive artist. Yet success had come late to Constable, who often struggled to support a large family (his wife Maria bore seven children before she died in 1828). Throughout the 1810s and 1820s, Constable supplemented his income by painting portraits (06.1272) of local dignitaries. The patronage of Dr. John Fisher, whom Constable first met in 1798 and who later became bishop of Salisbury, remained crucial throughout his career. Between 1811 and 1829, Constable often visited the Reverend Fisher at Salisbury, where he sketched the Gothic cathedral (50.145.8) from a range of viewpoints under various weather conditions. These preliminary oil studies served as the basis of several paintings that picture Salisbury Cathedral alternately menaced by storms, framed by puffy cumulous clouds, or surmounted by a rainbow. Intensive studies of clouds and skies enabled Constable to achieve these unique atmospheric effects. In 1821 and 1822, during his intense "skying" period, he produced dozens of watercolor, crayon, and oil studies of the clouds over Hampstead Heath (2009.400.26). His cloud studies—celebrated today—were not exhibited in his lifetime. Painted rapidly, wet-in-wet, Constable used short strokes and a restricted color palette to train his hand and eye, and to enhance the realism of his later paintings. He labeled almost all of these images with scientific precision, indicating the date, time, wind, and weather conditions under which they were painted. Yet his ultimate goal was to paint the sky—which he deemed landscape's "chief organ of sentiment"—more expressively. Indeed, landscapes from the time of his wife's death (e.g., Hadleigh Castle, 1828–29; Tate, London) feature dark, turbulent skies that carry the brunt of the works' emotional weight. In the later part of his career, Constable made fewer open-air oil sketches. Instead, he increasingly prepared studio sketches inspired by his earlier outdoor drawings. He undertook one major project in his final years—a series of twenty mezzotints after his paintings entitled Various Subjects of Landscape, Characteristic of English Scenery (39.68.27) to be engraved by a little-known printmaker, David Lucas, under his supervision. The series, known as English Landscape and published from 1830 to 1833, became a manifesto of his views on landscape painting and a summary of his career. The second edition bore the subtitle "Principally Intended to Mark the Phenomena of the Chiar'Oscuro of Nature," reflecting his belief that chiaroscuro, or the contrast between light and dark, was a principle of nature, and therefore crucial to landscape painting (the medium of mezzotint excels at conveying such tonal gradations). This emphasis on naturalism distinguishes Constable's approach from the classical tradition of landscape painting. Today he is often considered, along with J. M. W. Turner, one of England's greatest landscape painters.

    Elizabeth E. BarkerDepartment of Drawings and Prints, The Metropolitan Museum of Art



    Pissarro


    "Living in Saint Thomas in 1852, [although] employed in a well-paying business, I could not endure the situation any longer, and without thinking, I abandoned all I had there and fled to Caracas, thus breaking the bonds that tied me to bourgeois life. What I suffered is incredible, but I have lived: what I am suffering now is terrible, much worse even than when I was young, full of zeal and enthusiasm. Now I am convinced that my future is dead. Yet I think that if I had to start all over again, I would not hesitate to follow the same path.""Here, in a rare autobiographical flashback at the end of a letter to the painter, dealer, and collector Eugène Murer, forty-eight-year-old Camille Pissarro looked back in 1878 to the beginning of his artistic career, when, at twenty-two, he left his native Saint Thomas for Caracas. This letter sets the tone for any interpretative analysis of Pissarro's work by placing special emphasis on a concept central throughout Pissarro's correspondence: freedom. It stresses the acts of self-liberation and self-assertion which inaugurated the young Pissarro's career as he set off on that initial voyage, leaving behind family ties, a secure income, and a comfortable position as a clerk in order to venture on a new life as an artist. During his lifetime, the grasp at freedom - asserting his own position independent of accepted rules - took several forms: he distanced himself from the values and conventions imposed by his bourgeois background; when he reached Paris, in 1855, he gradually and increasingly came to resist the aesthetic dogmas conveyed by the Académie des Beaux-Arts and by the Salons, even though a few of his works were initially accepted for Salon exhibitions. From the 1870s onwards, Pissarro professed passionate disdain for the Salons and refused to exhibit at them. Among the Impressionists, only he and Degas persisted in their unwavering defiance of the Salons: they asserted their own beliefs with an almost militant resolution. Degas was, incidentally, the artist to whom Pissarro referred the most often throughout his correspondence: their intense and mutual admiration was based on a kinship of ethical as well as aesthetic concerns.
    "Pissarro remained attached to several fundamental values during his life; they are reflected to various extents throughout his work. The letter to Murer suggests some of the mainstays of Pissarro's ethics as a painter: a headstrong courage and tenacity to undertake and sustain the career of an artist stubbornly unmoved by current fashions and market trends; a lack of fear of the immediate repercussions of such a choice - isolation from his well-to-do family and an extremely precarious financial situation, which he faced until he was in his sixties; a profound belief in the benefits of what he called "enthusiasm" and "ardor"; a confidence that his love of work was strong enough to bolster his morale and keep him going; and an unshakable conviction that he had made the right choice ("if I had to start all over again, I would not hesitate to follow the same path"). Pissarro remained committed to these values, which in turn later endowed "Père Pissarro" with a known mark of integrity that made others willingly turn to him for advice. His pivotal role in the formation and the preservation of the Impressionist group illustrates this. In fact, he was the only artist who showed his work at all of the eight Impressionist exhibitions, from 1874 to 1886.
    "His unending search for freedom or autonomy - which meant not so much the capacity to do anything, but rather the capacity to invent new rules and to experiment with them - can be seen readily throughout his work. From his arrival in Paris in 1855 until his death in 1903, Pissarro displayed a profound and insatiable curiosity about the work of his younger colleagues: Paul Cezanne, with whom he worked and shared ideas and methods intermittently from 1872 to 1882; Paul Gauguin, who was his pupil and close colleague from 1879 to 1883; Paul Signac, Maximilien Luce, and in particular, Georges Seurat, with whom from 1886 to 1890, he shared a short-lived interest in Neo-Impressionism. Of course, Pissarro was also influenced by the work of his two eldest sons, Lucien and Georges, and a few years before his death, Pissarro was providing advice and guidance to two of his sons' friends: Henri Matisse and Francis Picabia.
    "Pissarro was as determined to strive for the freedom necessary to conduct his own work as to keep an open mind about the works of others, to be a recipient and a beneficiary of tolerance. Of course, this does not in any way imply that he blindly accepted anything that happened in the contemporary art world: his severe comments on Bonnard's work. for instance, offer a strong case in point: 'Another of these Symbolists who has just produced a fiasco. All the painters who respect themselves - Puvis, Degas, Renoir, Monet, and your servant - are unanimous in finding the exhibition of that artist organized at Durand hideous. That Symbolist goes by the name Bonnard.'
    "Pissarro's attachment to freedom extended into specifically technical aspects. Not only is it impossible to classify his style into neat chronological categories, but furthermore, his style often varies even within the same painting: his brushwork techniques, together with his compositional devices, seldom follow a single formulaic pattern within any given work. A comparison of two paintings as different and as far apart chronologically as Upper Norwood, Crystal Palace London of 1870, and The Siesta, Eragny, done nearly thirty years later, indicates clearly the extent to which these two works radically differ from each other technically, chromatically, and compositionally. More intriguing is that each work in itself displays at least four or five juxtaposed and distinct techniques. The speckled surface in the foreground of Upper Norwood Crystal Palace, London and its rather tight, agitated brushwork are in stark contrast with the more ample, serene swirls of paint that make up the sky; these in turn are offset by the smooth, homogeneous, earthy blocks of paint that form the sidewalks; all this, in turn, is heightened by many regular touches of paint which, in combination, suggest small, cubical units of architecture in the central part of the painting.
    "Similar observations could be made of The Siesta, Eragny, though there again the range of techniques used is considerably different. Here a crust of thick layers of flecks of paint (foliage) is intertwined with an accumulation of long, thin or thick threads of paint (haystack) with a more or less rhythmical juxtaposition of intermediate brushstrokes (foreground). In short, Pissarro's use of a broad repertoire of techniques is characteristic both within single works and throughout his career: each single work itself went through different phases, acting like a microcosm of his whole career.
    "Pissarro's conception of painting was in this sense analogous to his conception of print making: his prints and his paintings on the whole reveal an amazing degree of curiosity and of concern for new technical devices. The artist with whom he most shared this passionate technical audacity was again Degas, whose methods he studied and regularly mentioned in his correspondence with his son Lucien, with whom he collaborated on certain prints in the late seventies. This ongoing technical exploration not only underscored his free, almost playful approach to painting but also elevated pictorial technique from its traditionally ancillary role.
    "In Salon or academic practice, techniques do not call attention to themselves. A technique well-mastered should first serve to represent something well; the better the representation, the less noticeable the technique should be. By heightening our awareness of the welter of techniques he resorted to, Pissarro did the precise reverse. He thus also suggested that techniques were plastic equivalents not necessarily subservient to their representational functions. Throughout Pissarro's work, techniques acquired a certain autonomy.
    "In his correspondence, Pissarro consistently established a distinction between what he called "literary painting" and what he called "a painter's painting."' In the former group he would place any work whose raison d'être is external: whose function is narrative, whose point is to tell a story - be it literary, historical, sentimental, social, mythological, or political. Thus, he was opposed to painters such as Louis Welden Hawkins, of whose painting Pissarro wrote: 'His painting, like that of many [otherl English artists, is literary - which is not a drawback - but it lacks something on the painterly side; it is thin and tough, and the values are weak; however, it is intelligent, a little Puvis de Chavannes-like: sentimental and feminine ... but ... it is not painting.'
    "Among the other category - the true painters, those who do do painting - Pissarro would place the Impressionists at large, and among them, Degas and Cézanne in particular. He viewed Cezanne's 1895 exhibition at Vollard's with wild enthusiasm: 'I was thinking of Cezanne's exhibition, where exquisite things can be seen, still lifes of an irreproachable finish, others very worked out and yet left halfway; however, the latter are even more beautiful than the others: one can see landscapes, nudes, some heads that are unfinished and yet truly grandiose, and it is so painterly, so supple.' So one might ask, What stands in the way of a painting's becoming a true painting - or a painter's painting? Referring specifically to Puvis de Chavannes again, Pissarro answered: 'It was not made to be seen as a picture.' It may look astonishing when presented in the right environment, 'but it is not painting'.
    "To the parallel question, What makes a true painter? Pissarro would answer that a true painter is very seldom found: he is one who can put two tones of color in harmony. In other words, Pissarro defines the nature of true painting in specifically visual terms.
    "With painting liberated from its traditional hierarchy of subjects, Pissarro's work could draw upon a wide choice of subjects, themes, and motifs - the diversity of which escapes conventional categories. Throughout his career, exotic landscapes and indigenous figures are painted just before views of Montmartre or of the outskirts of Paris; riverscapes appear next to kitchen-garden landscapes in Pontoise, or Louveciennes and are succeeded by winter scenes in London. Twenty years later, views of London parks interrupt the continuum created by his series of Paris boulevards or avenues his London bridges announce, in part, and collide with, his series of Rouen bridges. All of these look very different from his quiet and almost subdued, solitary, asocial Eragny landscapes, or from his intimate and seldom-seen family portraits, or from his exquisite still lifes - all of which were executed within the last decade of his life. Bare landscapes are offset by bustling market scenes, with milling crowds deeply engaged in socializing and commerce. All of this again seems to have little to do with his monumental single or dual figure paintings of the 1880s.
    "Though in different ways, his biography also stresses the importance of freedom in Pissarro's life. Born on July 10, 1830, he was brought up in Saint Thomas, which was, at the time, a possession of the Danish crown. The island became a privileged independent trading zone after the King of Denmark made it a 'free port' in 1764.
    "Pissarro was a descendant of a family from Braganza, a Portuguese medieval fortified city near the Spanish border. The family were Marranos - Sephardic Jews who had been prohibited to practice their own creed and forced to convert to Christianity or suffer at the hands of the Inquisition. Pissarro's parents, Frederic and Rachel, had married away from the synagogue. Pissarro's father had come from France to Saint Thomas in 1824 to serve as the executor of his late uncle's will and to help the widow sort out the affairs of the estate. Frederic's liaison with Rachel, his uncle's widow, resulted in their expecting a child, and they soon announced their intention to marry. However, the elders of the synagogue refused to acknowledge the wedding, which in some ways contravened Jewish religious tenets; it was not until 1833, eight years later, that the synagogue agreed to recognize the marriage officially.
    "After his death, in 1865, Frederic's will revealed that he had left a bequest of an unusual kind - a sum to be shared equally between the synagogue and the Protestant church in Saint Thomas. This unorthodox bequest may simply have stemmed from a survival of the Marranos' ambiguous religious position: a foot in the church and a foot in the synagogue, or it may have been a reflection of Frederic's annoyance at the Elders for having refused at first to legitimize his marriage. It was in Braganza, where Pissarro's forefathers had originated, that, in the eighteenth century, one of his ancestors was awarded the knighthood of the Order of Christ and the Pope himself granted him the special and rare privilege of building his own chapel there.
    "The duality in religious allegiances was clearly still alive with Pissarro's father and may have generated in the son's mind a strong sense of not wanting to belong to either. Camille, who later married a Catholic-born woman in a civil wedding, always professed a strong atheism, defining himself as a freethinker. In the 1880s, he became a fervent adept of the libertarian anarchism preached by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (although he had earlier in life professed more conservative views).
    "Yet what appears particularly clear-cut about Pissarro is that he was able to act both as a painter and as a political or social thinker without mixing or confusing the two fields: his art cannot be seen as in illustration of a political thesis - he does not use his colors and paints to depict a set of anarchistic 'ideas' or 'ideals' - and his political positions were certainly not solely dependent on his own interests as a painter. His art raises our awareness of the fact that a painting need not carry a revolutionary message in order to perform a revolutionary function. To depict the miseries and sufferings of the toiling masses or of the peasantry could indeed be seen as a fine and noble task: Pissarro knew, however, that these images did nothing to relieve oppression. He viewed commentaries which read illustrations of class opposition or visual commentaries of sociological treatises into his work as prototypes of reactionary thinking. Even if the narratives are of a sociological order rather than a religious or mythological one, the thinking process is identical. A recent trend of interpretations puts the image, or the 'message' before or above the action of painting. Its practitioners continue to envisage painting as 'literary,' with a pointed meaning - be it social or otherwise - and the action of painting as consequently subservient to the message or thesis to be understood. It has been my choice in this book to consider these questions through Pissarro's own thouqhts; his letters have been a principal source of analysis. There one finds that his reflections, pictorial and epistolary, are rivetingly alive and that their dynamics consistently escape the grasp of any preconceived monolithic 'meaning'.
    "Pissarro's radicalism is commensurate with the extent to which he subverted this traditional order of things; within his art, what grants signification to a painting is not so much its "meaning" as its "praxis," the fact that before anything, it was painted as a painting, not as a literary painting. That is one reason that he rejected first and foremost sentimentality in art: 'In my opinion, the art that is the most corrupt is sentimental art.' He also rebelled against anything that stands in the way of 'art - and art seen through our sensations.' The kinds of art that involves are many: religious, social, mythological, historical art - i.e., art with a narrative, art based on hypocrisy, on pretense, on careerism, or on false motives: he rejected any art that goes against the artist's sensations.
    "Sensation here evokes the intimate subjectivity of the artist's vision, or to put it otherwise, what is irreducibly idiosyncratic in his way of looking at things. Pissarro's pictorial reflection was a complex, self-questioning, recurrent, disparate, often paradoxical process. The chapters of this study tend to follow a broadly chronological progression, and in turn, the places where he lived - Caracas, Paris, Pontoise, London, Louveciennes, and Pontoise again - put their mark upon his work.
    "From 1882 onwards, after he left Pontoise, he essentially lived in the same village, Eragny, creating there the largest bulk of his work and, paradoxically, the work least often seen or reproduced. He also made increasingly frequent visits to Paris, where he generated a new interest in urban pictorial imagery in his series of cityscapes. Throughout the 1880s, he also developed a keen, though not exclusionary interest in figures, set in isolation or in groups.
    "Pissarro's art, it is essential to remember, escapes neat categorization or chronologies. The market theme, for instance, archetypical of his later years, was first developed in Caracas; his earliest view of Pontoise, Banks of the Oise in Pontoise, was executed while he lived in Louveciennes; his first major figure paintings were created, not in the 1880s, but in Paris, shortly after his arrival from the West Indies, Woman Carrying a Pitcher on Her Head, Saint Thomas, and then in Pontoise, La Bonne in the late sixties. In the midst of his intense Neo-Impressionist phase, Pissarro nonetheless executed market scenes, such as The Market at Gisors or Le Marché de Pontoise, which display almost nothing of the dot-to-dot fragmented application of color or of other technical aspects of his Neo-Impressionism. Neither the successive places where he lived, nor the successive technical periods that traditionally divide his work can satisfactorily explain, or exhaustively encompass, his oeuvre.
    "Essentially complex, his work made use of a phenomenal imagination, an unusually rich, innovative visual mind, a vast curiosity about techniques of all sorts, a profound poetic sensitivity, and an unquenchable passion for painting, as well as a strongly defined set of intellectual positions."
    - Text from "Camille Pissarro", by Joachim Pissarro
    Further reading on Pissarro:
    Camille Pissarro, by Joachim Pissarro. "Impressionist artist Pissarro's great-grandson Joachim presents the diversity and charm of his ancestor's work". Over 200 color reproductions of excellent quality.
    Camille Pissarro, by Christophe Becker. A more modest overview of Pissarro's life and work.
    Camille Pissarro: Impressionism, Landscape and Rural Labour, by Richard Thomson. "...places [Pissarro's] work within the context of contemporary social and political developments".
    The Impressionist and the City: Pissarro's Series Paintings, by Richard R. Brettell. Monet was not the only one to paint multiple images of the same motif. It is interesting to contrast the series paintings of the two Impressionists.