Ogni pittore dipinge sè

August 1, 2018 11:34 PM

Looking at art like an artist, we see that Every Painter Paints Himself. Art's Masterpieces, Explained, by Simon Abrahams

some SHORT PIECES: Leonardo’s Christ as Salvator Mundi (c. 1499) - "And that is what the painting represents: a mirror. Christ's hand raised in blessing is a reflection of Leonardo's own hand touching and painting the panel."

Picasso’s Cat Catching a Bird (1939) - " Her mismatched eyes - white contoured in black and vice versa - are a poet’s: one is open to the exterior world, the other closed for insight."

Lichtenstein’s Man with Coat (1961) - "The wire hook, resembling a halo, when combined with the lines of radiance from the coat, suggest the artist's divinity and purity of mind, the result of Lichtenstein's clever use of a 1950's advertising symbol for cleanliness: radiating lines, which are themselves a draughtsman's stock-in-trade."


some BLOG POSTS:
The Poetry of Turner’s Eyesight
Eye-Opening: Michelangelo, Goya and Pixar’s Inside Out

some ESSAYS:
Manet’s Le Déjeuner and Mlle. V. Simply Explained

Who’s Who in Portraits 4: Renaissance Faces

Portraits of the Artist as America’s Founding Fathers

Artist Index

see also: "Every Artist Paints Himself": Art History as Biography and Autobiography, Colin Eisler, Social Research, Vol. 54, No. 1, Reflections on the Self (SPRING 1987), pp. 73-99

posted by the man of twists and turns (4 comments total)

Himself, huh? Otherwise, very cool.
posted by lauranesson at 12:21 AM on August 2, 2018 [3 favorites]

Years ago, I met an expert in forensic facial reconstruction at a university. They add clay to unidentified human skulls in scientific measures to help identify Janes and Johns Doe and help solve missing persons cases. He said that art students were usually his worst students because every face they reconstructed looked just like themselves.
posted by mochapickle at 1:20 AM on August 2, 2018 [7 favorites]

Interesting. I haven't read it all yet, but I want to skip ahead to the good stuff. Can someone point out where he starts talking about Room 237 and the faked moon landing?
posted by gusottertrout at 1:24 AM on August 2, 2018 [3 favorites]

Back when I was working in the video game industry, it was a running joke that every character model's face, given enough time, would eventually start to look like the artist who was working on it. At the time, I thought it was a combination of ego and general artist tom-foolery. I later started to think it was because looking at themselves in the mirror for reference was cheap and easy.
posted by ga$money at 7:11 AM on August 2, 2018 [1 favorite]