what is your favourite visual artist at the moment

[emm7]

what is your favourite visual artist at the moment eg. painter, photographer, cinematographer , etc., (must work with images)

also is there a visual artist whose work has made you cry?

also is there a visual artist whose work has made you laugh?

also is there a visual artist whose work has disturbed / scared you?

ok for me:

I would love to own a drawing by Lewis Chamberlain right now. But am also feeling very drawn to Vettriano & Hopper paintings as well.

who has made me cry: Frieda Kahlo (went to see her paintings in London) and the paintings somehow made me to feel very emotional and sensitive and cry! Especially the one where she cut off her hair with a pair of Scissors! Lucky that I went to that one on my own!

who has made me laugh: some of the funny French guys like Duchamp who painted his name on a French urinal and handed it in as art but the funniest one is his "greatest hits" (that's what I call it, don't know what the real title of it is) which is a box he made with miniature versions of his favourites in and one of them is a mini version of the urinal! I couldn't stop laughing when I saw that That "greatest hits" box just tickled me!

who is compelling in a sinister way (and disturbing): French photographer who did the shoe photographs (Guy Bourdin). Went to see retrospective of these and something about them is like a magnet to the eyes but they have all got an undertone of bloody scary they remind me of Burgess's book "Clockwork Orange" for some reason.

ok your turn now.

[The Duke]

what is your favourite visual artist at the moment eg. painter, photographer, cinematographer , etc., (must work with images)

Bunuel. Just watched Un Chien Andalou and L’Age D’Or.

Without these films so much of medoern cinema just wouldn’t have happened. The close cutting, image association, dream sequences.

The Andalousion Dog is much siimpler and rawer with the Fraudian themes not deeply explored.

The music (although not part of the original release and performed live in the cinema) of The death of Isolde and The Parisian Tango take you on a magical journey.

also is there a visual artist whose work has made you cry?

Yes there are times when I look at Van Gogh and can feel his torture.

Matisse can be make me weep with happiness and simplistic joy.

Mannet’s Olympia stirs me with her beauty.

also is there a visual artist whose work has made you laugh?

How can you not go for L. S. Lowery? Every time you look at a Lowery there is something to make you smile.

Duchamp who painted his name on a French urinal and handed it in as art but the funniest one is his "greatest hits"

Oh Emm, Emm, Emm. You are missing a couple of important things here. Firstly, it was not a urinal. It was a urinal turned on its back and disconnected from the plumbing. In what sense is it still a urinal? How does it function? It’s function is now intellectual and not utilitarian.

Duchamp gives us other clues. It is signed (not as Duchamp but as an R. Mutt), dated (1917) and even titled (Fountain).

The piece is important as completing a process, which had really begun 40 years earlier with Cezanne, that began to change the balance in art between artisanship and intellectualism.

In “Fountain” Duchamp’s contribution is entirely intelectual: all physical skill has been removed from the artist.

It is important not to view this as a “wimsey”: it is not Duchamp toying with the Society of Independent Artists – he was after all a board member.

Fountain is a genuine attempt to once more find relevance for art in a world that has photography and international communications. A world that has been torn apart by the hoorers of the great war. A world that has been mechanised filled with death and routine opression. A world that has lost the agricultural idyll. A world that has, in fact, lost the God it always thought to be there.

In this new world the beauty of the Romantics, the allegory of the Classicists, and the piety of the Renaiissance seemed lost.

Fountain stands as a absolutely pivotal piece in The Cannon.

[Crash]

Edward Burne-Jones, Evelyn De Morgan, Maxfield Parrish and Boris Vallejo are a few of my favorite artists.

[helmut]

my favourite artists would have to be van gogh, egon schiele and edvard munch. im sure if i saw some of the original works in the flesh i would get emotional!!

i also get quite freaked out by max ernst's 'two children are threatened by a nightingale', its a spooky picture!!

this thread makes me want to do high school art again

edited for spelling

[The Duke]

my favourite artists would have to be van gogh, egon schiele and edvard munch. im sure if i saw some of the original works in the flesh i would get emotional!!

i also get quite freaked out by max ernt's 'two children are threatened by a nightingale', its a spooky picture!!

this thread makes me want to do high school art again

You like your expresionism.

Yes, Schiele's control of line is truly wonderful and his work quite "candid".

The Ernst painting is titled in French "Deux enfants sont menacés par un rossignol". I much prefer this; the use of the word "menace" adds a lot and I feel that the dadaist in Ernst would want to see the title actually adding to the work.

Threatened" suggest, to me, that the nightingale is acting for gain, while the word "menace" suggest intimidation for no reason. It's just menacing those kids for the hell of it!

It's strange because The Nightingale is such a small inoffensive bird that it does not sit well with the term menace. But, the little buggers do have a way of hovering over you and chiding in a way that is a liitle scary.

Do you enjoy the LopLop King of the Birds series by Ernst as well?

How about the work of Chiam Soutine and James Ensor? They are two other expressionists who sit outside the major schools of Der Blaue Reiter and Die Brücke. What do you think of those?

[runrevolt]

Duke,

I don't know if this is true, but i was under the impression that "The Fountain" was a found object, then altered, but recently i was told that Duchamp actually casted and created the "fountain" and therefore there was a matter of artistic creation in the process, instead of it being a solely intellectual endeavor. have you ever heard this?

and i'm still a raving fan of Yves Klein.

[helmut]

i like the way schiele seems to mix death and beauty!!

ive not heard of loplop king of the birds, i dont know much about max ernst, but i am looking it up now *googles*

ooh i was just googling chaim soutine, and came across this one that i particularly like:



haha its entitled 'the mad woman'

thanks duke, i am enjoying this thread

[emm7]

have been looking at the work of these artists, excellent

Van Gogh -- Starry Night


Matisse -- The Music Lesson


Manet -- Olympia


L.S.Lowry -- The Football Match


Ernst -- Deux enfants sont menacés par un rossignol


Edward Burne Jones -- Galataea


Egon Schiele - Scornful Woman


Evelyn De Morgan -- Eos


Maxfield Parrish -- Cinderella


Boris Vallejo (am putting wiki link here as it says some of these are a bit saucy !)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Vallejo

Edvard Munch -- Separation


Max Ernst -- Birds


Chaim Soutine -- After the Storm


James Ensor -- Masks Confronting Death

[emm7]

helmut what is it about the Chaim Soutine image of the woman that draws you to it, eg. is it the colours etc.,

[The Duke]

Duke,

I don't know if this is true, but i was under the impression that "The Fountain" was a found object, then altered, but recently i was told that Duchamp actually casted and created the "fountain" and therefore there was a matter of artistic creation in the process, instead of it being a solely intellectual endeavor. have you ever heard this?

and i'm still a raving fan of Yves Klein.

Duchamp actually ordered the urinal from a company called Motts (hence play on name for signature!). He called it a "readymade". The Fountain itself is not from a production batch and, even if turnmed upright, could not be plumbed. Many of Duchamps readymades do appear to have been custom made, but custom made by independant artisans rather than the artist.

The term found object or objet trouvé was more associated with Pacabia and Man Ray a little later.

I understand your point whether it was a completely intellectual exercise.

In answer I will offer this. Duchamp selected the object, he handled the object, he signed the object. He did indeed interact with the object at several points.

But, by the artistic standards of the time, this can be seen as radically non-interventionist.

It is true that since then artists have left completely to chance the selection, arangement, and exhibition of their pieces.

[ninearms]

Jeff Wall


A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai)


Dead Troops Talk (A Vision after an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986)


Wolfgang Tillmans


Louisiana 1996


Jasper Johns



Untitled (Skull)


Luc Delahaye


Dead Taliban Fighter


Jenin Refugee Camp 2002


Baghdad

[emm7]

yes Duke and runrevolt it sounds like from what you are saying that Duchamp's Fountain was not quite as non-interventionist as objets trouves , but a lot more non-interventionist than was common practice at the time.

The surrealist objet trouve art work that sticks in my mind is one that has a woman's glove as part of it, can't remember whether the glove was a white glove? Can't remember the artist or the name of the work, just remember the glove.

Also am thinking now of the Picasso drawing in realist style (photographic) pencil and almost peach-coloured paper, the drawing is of a woman's hands. I love this drawing very much.

There is an innocence and elegance and beauty about the woman's hands in the Picasso drawing.

In the surrealist art work of the glove the glove is an absence of hands, it looks so lonely, just one glove not a pair. You know when you see a child's glove abandoned and propped on a railing, lost..... it has a lonely forlorn and abandoned look just like that.
But the glove is beautiful at the same time because it is from a byegone era when women wore gloves in public and were elegant.
Like a shell for the hand but the hand has gone, like an empty sea shell was a home for the scallop but now the scallop is dead and gone!
Mysterious and Poignant is the word I'm looking for I think.
What happened for the lady to drop the glove.
BTW dropping a glove in Renaissance theatre plays is the lady's way of propositioning the gentleman, I believe?

ninearms am curious you haven't said why you chose those particular photographs, am interested to know why for you personally they are so powerful.....

[The Duke]

nice to see this thread get some legs.

Emm ... is the glove painting by Magrite?

[emm7]

yes I'm glad too.

Can't remember I just remember it was a woman's glove by itself as the focus, it may have been a painting or a drawing or just the physical glove. But it was only the glove.


Found this cool Surrealist "This is not a glossary" web site with this on it

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~rmutt/di ... Words.html

The Vice of Surrealism

Rene Magritte:

I have few illusions; the cause is lost in advance. As for me, I do my part, which is to drag a fairly drab existence to its conclusion.
I despise my own past and that of others. I despise resignation, patience, professional heroism, and all the obligatory sentiments. I also despise the decorative arts, folklore, advertising, radio announcers' voices, aerodynamics, the Boy Scouts, the smell of naphtha, the news, and drunks.

I like subversive humor, freckles, women's knees and long hair, the laughter of playing children, and a girl running down the street.
I hope for vibrant love, the impossible, the chimerical.
I dread knowing precisely my own limitations.

Painting bores me like everything else. Unfortunately, painting is one of the activities--it is bound up in the series of activities--that seems to change almost nothing in life, the same habits are always recurring.

I am unaware of the real reason why I paint, just as I am unaware of the reason for living and dying.

[The Duke]

The Hokusai refered to by Jeff Wall's work.