Grandmother of French Cinema Agnès Varda on Becoming an Artist at 88

Agnès Varda, Autoportrait devant une peinture de Gentile Bellini, 1962/2015. Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo

Though known as the “grandmother of the French New Wave,” for decades 88-year-old Agnès Varda felt she wasn’t allowed to be an artist. Looking back, the filmmaker realizes it was something she had always desired: she had studied art history at the École du Louvre and photography at the École des Beaux-Arts, was friends with artists, and had been following the work of many others since the age of 18. But in France, especially, she was pigeonholed. “They put me in the drawer as a…

Source: Grandmother of French Cinema Agnès Varda on Becoming an Artist at 88

American Gothic by Grant Wood Poster | Zazzle #Sold!

American artist Grant Devolson Wood (1891-1942) painted American Gothic in 1930. It is held by the Art Institute of Chicago.

Source: American Gothic by Grant Wood Poster | Zazzle

N.B. I’m not currently responding to comments or visiting blogs because of ill-health but I much appreciate your support.

Take care and keep laughing!

Ana-Luisa de Cavilla Scrutton Maker/Artist – Room and Christmas Decorations

Please do check out my friend Ana-Luisa’s delightful handmade concoctions for Christmas at running hare art & design. She and I have known each for many years and worked together on a musical adaptation of Alice Through the Looking Glass, she as The White Queen and me as The Red Queen. It was excellent casting all round!

Source: Ana-Luisa de Cavilla Scrutton Maker/Artist – Room and Christmas Decorations

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A Lesbian Artist Who Painted Her Circle of Women at the Turn of the 20th Century

Romaine Brooks, “Self-Portrait” (1923), oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of the artist

WASHINGTON, DC — Tucked into a far corner of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, an exhibit showcases the extensive career of artist Romaine Brooks, a turn-of-the-20th-century icon who’s since bee…

Source: A Lesbian Artist Who Painted Her Circle of Women at the Turn of the 20th Century

Birth of Rembrandt van Rijn | If It Happened Yesterday, It’s History

July 15th 1606

Birth of Rembrandt van Rijn

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was born in 1606 in The Dutch Golden Age (1585-1702) where the Dutch Republic was the most prosperous nation in Europe. It led the way in trade, science and the arts. Rembrandt was this periods most dominant figure.

Early on, Rembrandt decided that academic life wasn’t for him and he left university to become a painter’s apprentice. This was only a stepping stone for him as he had greater ambitions of becoming an artist himself. In 1631, he moved to Amsterdam where his career took off. Interestingly, his paintings would offer art lovers today an insight into the Amsterdam of his day. He painted portraits for wealthy families and organisations, as well as scenes from history, mythology and the bible. Many of these paintings or portraits were known as ‘impasto’, owing to the fact that they were created on thick, lumpy paint. His technique also made dramatic use of light and shade.

The Militia Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq, better known as ‘The Night Watch’ was one of his finest examples of effective use of light and shade. It is also famous for rather than showing the soldiers in a formal pose, Rembrandt painted them as though they were about to march into action.

While his career flourished, his private life was clouded by tragedy. He would lose his wife, his son and later in life his lover. Bankruptcy would almost also cripple him, but despite his troubles his later years would be a prolific period artistically. His life work included hundreds of paintings and prints, and interestingly some 90 self portraits, leaving us a record of how he looked throughout his illustrious life, until his death in 1669.

Source: What happened this month in history? – If It Happened Yesterday, It’s History

Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807): the artist as businesswoman | Romantic Illustration Network

A self-portrait In the Traditional Costume of the Bregenz Forest (1781)

Reblogged on WordPress.com

‘All I possess has been attained by my work and industry … ‘ (from Angelica Goddden’s Miss Angel, Kauffman)

Friends and readers,

I return to my series of blogs on women artists. Thus far in this second round, we’ve looked at Giovanna Garzoni (1600-70), Strange and magnificent still lifes; Sofonsiba and Lucia Anguissola (1535/6-1625; 1546/8-1565), Sober, contemplative and self-aware portraits; and Mary Beale(1633-99), An unknown famous Restoration painter. As in the first series I can’t ignore altogether those women artists whose work has been paid a great deal of attention to, at least at times, and if not uniformly respectfully. So we come to Angelica Kauffman, one of two women to help found…

Source: Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807): the artist as businesswoman | Romantic Illustration Network

This Artist Recycles Old Watch Parts Into Incredible Steampunk Sculptures.

Susan Beatrice is a talented artist who creates these beautifully intricate sculptures from old vintage watch parts. She says that her recycled sculptures are “Earth-friendly and artistic items sensitive to the limits of our natural resources.”…

Source: This Artist Recycles Old Watch Parts Into Incredible Steampunk Sculptures.

Artist Nina Hamnett, Jazz Age’s Wildest Party Girl | A R T L▼R K

On the 14th of February 1890, Welsh artist, writer and bohemian party girl Nina Hamnett was born in Tenby, Pembrokeshire, Wales. Her emerging artistic skill helped her escape an unhappy childhood. She moved to London where she studied at Pelham Art School, then the London School of Art and in 1914 she went to Montparnasse, Paris, to study at Marie Wassilieff’s Academy. Her social life and artistic career rapidly took off.

“A natural rebel, with her tall, boyish figure, short hair, unconventional clothes, and flamboyant behaviour, Hamnett rapidly became a well-known bohemian personality. A self-appointed artistic ambassador between London and Paris, friends and mentors included Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Amedeo Modigliani, Walter Sickert, Roger Fry, and Augustus John. She benefited from…

Source: Artist Nina Hamnett, Jazz Age’s Wildest Party Girl | A R T L▼R K

Artists: Tamara De Limpicka, The Art Deco Queen

stuartshieldgardendesign

paris 1919-1939

Tamara Łempicka, commonly known as Tamara de Lempicka (16 May 1898 – 18 March 1980) was a Polish Art Deco painter and “the first woman artist to be a glamour star”. Influenced by Cubism, Lempicka became the leading representative of the Art Deco style across two continents, a favorite artist of many Hollywood stars, referred to as ‘the baroness with a brush’. She was the most fashionable portrait painter of her generation among the haute bourgeoisie and aristocracy, painting duchesses and grand dukes and socialites. Through her network of friends, she was also able to display her paintings in the most elite salons of the era. Lempicka was criticized as well as admired for her ‘perverse Ingrism’, referring to her modern restatement of the master Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, as displayed in her work Group of Four Nudes (1925) among other studies.

Life

She was born Maria…

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People : Bloomsbury , Dora Carrington | stuartshieldgardendesign

Originally posted on stuartshieldgardendesign.

Dora de Houghton Carrington (29 March 1893 – 11 March 1932), known generally as Carrington, was a British painter and decorative artist, remembered in part for her association with members of the Bloomsbury Group, especially the writer Lytton Strachey.

Early life

The daughter of a Liverpool merchant, she was born in Hereford, England, and attended the all-girls’ Bedford High School which emphasized art. Her parents also paid for her to receive extra lessons in drawing. She went to the Slade School of Art at University College, London where she subsequently won a scholarship; her fellow students included Paul Nash, Christopher R. W. Nevinson and Mark Gertler. All at one time or another were in love with her, as was Nash’s younger brother John Nash, who hoped to marry her. Gertler pursued Carrington for a number of years, and they had a brief sexual relationship during the years of the First World War.

From her time at the Slade onwards, she was commonly known simply by her surname. She was not well known as a painter during her lifetime, as she rarely exhibited and did not sign her work. She worked for a while at the Omega Workshops, and for the Hogarth Press, designing woodcuts.

Career and personal life

Carrington was not a member of the Bloomsbury Group, though she was closely associated with Bloomsbury and, more generally, with “Bohemian” attitudes, through her long relationship with…

via People : Bloomsbury , Dora Carrington | stuartshieldgardendesign.

Camille Claudel | History and Women

 “A revolt against nature: a woman genius”…Octave Mirbeau

Camille Claudel

8 December 1864 – 19 October 1943

Camille Claudel was a French sculptor and artist. Her fascination for clay, stone, and dirt, began when she was a young child, and as she came of age, despite the protestations of her mother, her father supported her to study art. Around 1884, she started working with Auguste Rodin and before long became his lover and confidante. Obviously her family was outraged by the affair.

After 1905, she was afflicted by a mental illness. In the throes of her paranoia, she destroyed much of her work. Today, only 90 pieces exist. She disappeared for long periods of time, which alarmed her family. She came to believe that Rodin had stolen her all her ideas and he would soon kill her. As a result, she hid from the world, locking herself in her workshop to work. In 1913, her brother convinced her to voluntarily enter a psychiatric hospital where she had numerous outbursts. Despite her agitation, whenever engrossed in creating art, she was always…

Read original History and Women.

First Night Design | Self-Taught Artists: Georgia O’Keeffe

Georgia O’Keeffe [1887-1986] by Alfred Stieglitz

“I found that I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say in any other way — things that I had no words for.”

Blue and Green Music 1919-1920

“I have things in my head that are not like what anyone taught me — shapes and ideas so near to me, so natural to my way of being and thinking.”

Take care and keep laughing!

First Night Design | Private Mystery in John Craxton’s Paintings

One from the archive, an article about the artist John Craxton, taken from the New Statesman.

First Night Design

via The world of private mystery in John Craxton’s paintings.

Islands of edgy light: Galatas (1947)

They may not like it but it is the fate of artists, as with all interesting creatures, to be labelled. John Craxton, a friend of Graham Sutherland, Paul Nash and John Piper, has duly been filed under “neo-Romantic”. These were the painters who in the years before the Second World War rediscovered the mystical work of Samuel Palmer and William Blake and reacted to the lowering mood of the times by conjuring up a British Eden of shepherds and overgrown green lanes among billowing hills that could be pulled close like an eiderdown. Craxton refuted the label, but grudgingly accepted a more accurate one: “Arcadian”.

Dark and fecund lands: Llanthony Abbey (1942)

This separation from his fellows was not just a question of taxonomy. From 1946 he lived largely in Greece, a place…

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First Night Design | I Give You Schéhérazade, Léon Bakst & the Ballets Russes

Léon Bakst 1867-1924 — Self Portrait 1893 [Wikipedia]

Who can resist the work of Léon Bakst? Not I. The Russian artist was responsible for the gloriously exotic costumes worn by the dancers of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes and the accompanying illustrations that adorned the programmes.

If you’ve come to know me at all, you will not be surprised that I have now restored the Wikimedia image of the Schéhérazade programme that I uploaded for yesterday’s post about Diaghilev and have made it available on cards, posters and prints.

The programme is for the 1913 production of Shéhérazade with Michel Fokine and Vera Fokina. While I’m sure that the original background was as white as could be achieved at that time, the patina of age has its own charm. I have restored it to a certain extent such as blocking in the border where it had faded and enhancing the colours and contrast but I decided not to make the background white but simply even out the dirt of decades into a yellowy cream.

Scheherazade, LeŽon Bakst & the Ballets Russes Cards, Posters, Prints

A final treat —

Photograph from 1914 of Fokine and Fokina in Schéhérazade [Wikimedia]

Related articles

• Michael Fokine Estate Archive

• Leon Bakst – Victoria and Albert Museum

• On this Day | Sergei Diaghilev

Take care and keep laughing!

First Night Design | Private Mystery in John Craxton’s Paintings

via The world of private mystery in John Craxton’s paintings.

Islands of edgy light: Galatas (1947)

They may not like it but it is the fate of artists, as with all interesting creatures, to be labelled. John Craxton, a friend of Graham Sutherland, Paul Nash and John Piper, has duly been filed under “neo-Romantic”. These were the painters who in the years before the Second World War rediscovered the mystical work of Samuel Palmer and William Blake and reacted to the lowering mood of the times by conjuring up a British Eden of shepherds and overgrown green lanes among billowing hills that could be pulled close like an eiderdown. Craxton refuted the label, but grudgingly accepted a more accurate one: “Arcadian”.

Dark and fecund lands: Llanthony Abbey (1942)

This separation from his fellows was not just a question of taxonomy. From 1946 he lived largely in Greece, a place where, he wrote, “I find it’s possible to feel a real person – real people, real elements, real windows – real sun above all. In a life of reality my imagination really works. I feel like an émigré in London and squashed FLAT.” But in finding an authentic Arcadia in Crete he also distanced himself from the art and artists of the postwar world and so slipped out of the story. “A World of Private Mystery: John Craxton RA (1922-2009)”, a small but choice exhibition at the Fitzwilliam, is an overview and reminder of the career of this unfashionably joyous painter.

Read more…

Take care and keep laughing!

Related articles

• A World of Private Mystery – The Fitzwilliam Museum