The darks and the lights work well in this photo and I felt it lent itself well to black nd white. It makes me smile as someone is clearly going in to get some chocolate.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) was a German expressionist painter and printmaker. He volunteered for army service in WW1 but soon suffered a breakdown and was discharged. In 1933 his work was branded degenerate by the Nazis and in 1937 over 600 of his works were sold or destroyed. He committed suicide in 1938. I have selected two of his woodcuts of portraits just so I could consider how portraits could be done in linocuts instead of etching. Clearly they have a lot fewer lines and, in my mind, they look less realistic. The second one looks a bit like Frankenstein! The black and white is striking however I think an etching has a bigger potential to be more atmospheric. The woodcuts don't capture the subtleties of the face so well and you would need to hope the face had a few stand out features which could help the viewer identify it as the sitter. I prefer the first print as it is less black and white as the lines and shapes are smaller, the second one is too "chunky...
For my second contemporary art blog I am choosing Richard Wentworth. He was born in 1947 in Samoa and made his life in London. Between the years of 1971-87 he taught at Goldsmiths College and has been thought to have influenced the Young British Artists. He does do photography however it was his sculpture that caught my eye. He uses “ready made” and found objects and he is interested in putting together objects that don’t belong together, that are in an unusual setting and are broken. It is not obviously clear what the deeper underlying messages Wentworth is trying to put across in his work. Having watched a few of his interviews I can honestly say I didn’t have much of a clue what he was going on about (and I wasn’t the only one from what I could find). However as a basic message he is interested in using objects in ways they weren’t, on the surface, designed for and challenging our perceptions of what an object is for. He is telling us to not take objects for granted as th...
Chris Rose is a local wildlife/bird artist. Although he works in a very realistic style he describes his paintings as about colour, light and pattern and he uses abstract shapes. He will play with horizontals and verticals to make things more interesting. He started off in illustration as he needed to earn a living. He was one of the artists illustrating Handbook of Birds of the World where he had to research exactly how a bird looks and replicate that exactly on paper. He worked very closely with the publisher who had commissioned him and he did what was wanted. He made the picture a quarter bigger than required so they could be reduced which sharpened the pictures. Illustrating a book like this also meant he had to be able to paint the vegetation correctly and to the correct size and think of interesting ways of painting water so it didn't all look the same. Now Chris paints for exhibitions and enjoyment. He doesn't have to follow anyone's rules bar his own and he ...
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