MetaFilter posts tagged with Art and paintings

Painting From History

netbros — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 21:45:18 -0800

Tomokazu Matsuyama was born in Japan. He moved to the US when he was around ten years old, not speaking any English, and being overwhelmed by the culture shock of 1980s Los Angeles. His artistic work is a reflection of this upbringing. Matsuyama’s paintings envision traditional Japanese imagery through the lens of American pop art, creating a unique and beautiful hybrid. He strives to portray this global melee through a conscious “appropriation” of all of his influences: cultural, artistic, and personal. Matsuyama’s unconflicted and positively ebullient works do not ask, “What am I?,” but assert, “I am everybody.” (via) Matsu's work is a more conscious and introspective response to the tensions of bi-cultural experience. An upbringing split between Japan and America spurred the questions of national and individual identity that figure prominently in the style and subject matter of his paintings — attempting to parse the “natural chaos” of our social environment, Matsuyama pushes viewers to confront their conceptions of cultural homogeneity, which seems to contradict notions of Japaneseness. Discerningly appropriating influences from modern art and Japanese art from the Edo and Meiji eras, Matsuyama’s paintings are an aesthetically exciting and culturally fascinating facet, which portrays the lifestyle of this time.

Exploring Color

netbros — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:38:33 -0800

Rachell Sumpter takes color and detail to the extreme in her art exhibits, reminiscent of Fantasia in a sense. Sumpter is developing quite the portfolio as demonstrated at the Richard Heller Gallery. Her painting Finery reminds me of the Great Pacific Garbage Vortex, unfortunately.

International Fine Art

netbros — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 17:17:01 -0800

The Images of Eyes Gallery exhibits images and paintings of eyes by international artists, featuring work from about 200 artists from Algeria to Zimbabwe. Gallery I contains figurative paintings, oil and watercolor paintings, portraits, charcoal and ink drawings, lithographs, sculpture, digital, and other fine art content. Gallery II exhibits nude paintings, so may be NSFW.

The pictures and sketches of JRR Tolkien

nthdegx — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 12:01:53 -0800

The pictures and sketches of JRR Tolkien

Sometimes you have to dig for inspiration

maudlin — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 11:37:04 -0800

Apes do it. Birds do it. Even educated elephants do it. But can a dog do it? Can a dog make art? Meet Tillamook Cheddar, an adorable Jack Russell Terrier who, after 19 solo shows, has made more than $100,000 in sales of paintings like these. (I believe she did not choose the titles.) Opinions on her work vary. SAW Gallery's exhibit on animal art. (Any Ottawagonians seeing this?) Previously. Previously. Me, I'm open to ape art (some are more skeptical), have reservations about elephants, think the bower birds are doing something awesome that is mostly hardwired and partly inexplicable, but the dog may as well be a wind-up paintbrush for the artist owner who has carefully set up the media in advance. Her selected output is often really attractive (see: windup paintbrush), but that no more makes her an artist than her ability to roll in smelly stuff and lick herself thoroughly.

I like trains

winna — Sat, 09 May 2009 23:20:54 -0800

Paintings of trains. I like the energy of this one, but there are enough for everyone to have a favorite. Have you ever wondered how diesel locomotives work? Want to read an essay about the role of railways in music? Or maybe you just want to curl up with your laptop to read an entertaining book about trains. Or, if the paintings and the book aren't your thing, how about the Library of Congress? They have lots of train pictures. I like this one. Today is the 140th anniversary of the completion* of the North American transcontinental railroad! Hurrah for trains! * see previously for why this isn't a wholly accurate statement.

Art In HD

Rykey — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 08:26:46 -0800

Zoom in to brush-stroke level detail of the masters at the World's First HD Online Art Exhibition. At SXSW 2009, France's Zoomorama showed off its latest collaboration with Bridgeman Art Library. So far the collection features the work of only three artists, but for those of us who like to make museum security nervous by getting really close, the results are pretty amazing, and the implications for future exhibitions are exciting. [Flash]

A Whirling Phantasmagoria

netbros — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 08:42:36 -0800

Elphenden — elphen things from Sergei Tretiakov, 1967-2003. In between there were big cities, isolated islands, cannabis, oceans, pain and love...

Boy in the Water

netbros — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:45:49 -0800

Boy in the Water ― The website of artist Miran Kim. Her art is characterized by an eerie, gruesome quality, which she achieves without the use of computer effects. Miran Kim was born in New Jersey and lived with her family in South Korea from age eight to eighteen. She studied at the Academy Art College of San Francisco and the School of Visual Arts in New York. There she created a series of paintings titled Fear of the Unknown, which captured exactly the elements that she is famous for in her covers for the 'X-Files' comics. Miran was officially approved by the X-Files creator Chris Carter who stated "I love Miran Kim's X-Files cover art!" Miran Kim also did the artwork for graphic novel The Fallen (1999), written by David Aaron Clark.

Garden and Cosmos

adamvasco — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 12:55:55 -0800

A rare glimpse into a forgotten Hindu world.
Garden and Cosmos - The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur. Virtually none of the 60 works on view in "Garden and Cosmos" have ever been published or seen by scholars since their creation centuries ago.
All paintings are from the Mehrangarh museum. ( whose links are also full of interest ). (After the last days of horror and sadness I thought some Indian goodness was now required).

The Isle of the Dead

Iridic — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 10:49:20 -0800

The picture of a boat approaching a wooded island held a strange sway over the early twentieth century imagination. Strindberg closes The Ghost Sonata with the image; Rachmaninoff brought forth a symphonic poem from it; Freud, Lenin, and Clemenceau all owned prints, while Hitler hung one of the original five paintings on his wall. The work's creator, a Swiss Symbolist painter named Arnold Böcklin, never cared to give it a name. It was an art dealer who first called it Die Toteninsel — "The Isle of the Dead."

Contemporary Art

netbros — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 08:25:27 -0800

Hilda Magazine ― prose, poetry, illustrations, photography, video, and music from a wide assortment contemporary artists. [contains some nude art images] The magazine also includes links to some individual artist's personal sites. Following are presentations that I found particularly compelling or interesting: Niklas Goldbach Wheat Würtzburger Constantin Hartenstein Levi van Veluw Heidi Mortenson Sigurdur Gudjónsson Janaina Tschäpe Brenda Hillman Mary Mattingly Mikko Rantanen Lenka Clayton Jörg Piringer Robert Hodgin If you only look at one thing on Hilda, be sure to check out Magnetosphere, one of many of Robert Hodgin's experiments with the programming language Processing. Hodgin, van Veluw, and Mattingly have been previously featured on the blue.

visual connections

nickyskye — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 15:48:24 -0800

Pattern Recognition, mostly serene paintings, illustrations and photographs from a variety of sources, grouped according to similar motifs: Interiors in paintings and more l moon l napes l light and shadow l moments of quiet intimacy, daydreams, dreams l very early Vogue and Vanity Fair covers 1, 2 and 3 l portraits of children and more l children's book illustrations l flora. Portraits of women l Islamic world l monkeys l females and cats l mostly British l Mary l twinning l night. The archive of the blog with a rich selection of images.

The Grand Tour...in York

djgh — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:05:22 -0800

The Grand Tour is back, and this time it's in York. [Previously]

Hitler defaced

Artw — Sat, 31 May 2008 08:12:56 -0800

Jake and Dinos Chapman have bought a stack of Adolf Hitlers paintings for £115,000 and defaced them with rainbows and butterflies for their new show, "If Hitler Had Been a Hippy, How Happy Would We Be". The show also recreates "Fucking Hell", a huge swastika shaped diorama of tiny plastic nazis torturing and killing each other, which had been destroyed in a fire.

eclectic galleries

nickyskye — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 14:00:51 -0800

artjob.ru is a Russian site worth exploring with some pretty awesome, eclectic galleries (some nsfw). Naoto Hattori, 134 paintings of surrealistic Mona Lisas transformed and more l Child Soldiers Dream Simply of Being Children ads for Amnesty International/photographs by Michael Lewis l Christian Lohfink's playfully mischievous and dark humor photographs l Elliott Erwitt's superb black and white photographs, many iconic l Some lovely Russia in the snow photographs by Mikhail Tkachev. Innovative advertising images by Paolo Franco. Photographs of naked dancers by Bryon Paul Mccartney Sexy surreal paintings by Roland Hayder

Art to Go

djgh — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 21:15:13 -0800

The Grand Tour. Until August 31st, the National Gallery in England is putting reproductions of famous paintings on the streets of London, with MP3 audio guides and maps available for download. The reaction has been good.

Art Isn't Monkey Business.

brain_drain — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 12:40:14 -0800

Portraits of Stuffed Monkeys.

Not a subject you often see in paintings...

dobbs — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 18:05:15 -0800

The young people that have volunteered for this series have all endured physical pain and personal tragedy. They have developed a strong sense of 'self ' at an early age in order to survive public alienation due to their appearance.

Doug Auld's State of Grace - Paintings of Burn Survivors. via

A life at high altitudes

nickyskye — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 23:36:16 -0800

The Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York City, houses paintings by Nicholas Roerich, a Russian artist, who spent most of his life on the Indian-Tibetan border, creating evocative images of night and day in the Himalayan Mountains. (more inside)

Giovanni Boldini, the Master of Swish

matteo — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 12:04:41 -0800

In 1872, influenced by the Impressionists at the Exposition Universelle, Italian painter Giovanni Boldini permanently settled in Paris. There, he quickly developed a reputation for his elegant depictions of fashionable society women executed with bold, fluid brushstrokes that made the model appear to be thrown onto the canvas -- the "Master of Swish". By the turn of the century Boldini had become the most sought after portrait painter of the 'La Belle Epoque'. More inside.

Zdzislaw Beksinski

Gator — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 13:15:35 -0800

Zdzislaw Beksinski (warning: music) produced some hauntingly beautiful, disturbing works of art: many, many paintings, as well as photographs, drawings, and digital creations. Sadly, he was killed earlier this year.

Caravaggio's lost painting

matteo — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 09:12:49 -0800

The Caravaggio Trail: "The Lost Painting". (BugMeNot for the New York Times). more inside

Henri Rousseau at Tate Modern

matteo — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 11:17:54 -0800

When Henri met Pablo. Wandering through the rue des Martyrs in 1908, Picasso stopped beside an upholstery shop. "A head peered out, the face of a woman, hard eyes, a penetrating look, decisiveness and clarity. The canvas was huge. I enquired about the price. 'A hundred sous,' replied the dealer. 'You can paint over it.' It was one of the truest portraits ever of the French psyche."
Henri Rousseau's five-franc, life-size woman in Van Dyck black stayed at Picasso's side until his death, longer than any flesh-and-blood muse. A century later, she towers over us at Tate Modern's Rousseau retrospective as imperiously as a Velázquez monarch. More inside.

buy and print your art cheaply

mathowie — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 09:54:55 -0800

Artocracy is aiming to use the net to democratize yet another expensive thing in the world: the sale and distribution of art works. While the first works offered aren't that impressive and having to use your own inkjet is a limiting factor, I like the direction this is going in. From their Gallery, you can purchase prints from a dozen or so artists, in the range of $20-50, and then print as many as you wish at home. The Seattle PI has a full story. Perhaps this will spark a "long tail" of small change art sales from folks used to getting several thousand per canvas sold, while at the same time allowing any Tom, Dick, or Harry to have some nice looking apartment walls at home.