Pop Goes the Artist!

Well, this artist is certainly putting a whole new spin on the pet portraits genre: NoblePets. You like sumptuous portraits of royalty? You like your pet? Put the two together and see your pet (who probably rules the house anyway) painted in a pose and outfit reminiscent of Hans Holbein the Younger’s portrait of Henry VIII. It’s certainly a unique take on things.

(Link courtesty of the Art News Blog.)

In other news, I am still working on transferring my archives from Adventures in Art to this website. I’m more than halfway done, but it’s still going slowly. I’m still figuring out the quirks of adding photos to posts in WordPress, so even once it’s all done I’ll probably have to go back through and do some adjusting. Also, the sidebar continues to be a work in progress. I may make another visit to the support forums, which were pretty helpful last time I had a problem.

My current template struggle is to add a “quotable” section to the sidebar, featuring a different art-related quotation every month. So far, I’ve successfully added the header, but I can’t seem to format the text within the section. And, in the process of trying, I’ve done something weird (no idea what or how) to the buttons and Technorati text at the very bottom of the sidebar. I am totally lost as to how it happened, which means I’m even more lost as to how to fix it. It may be time for another visit to the WordPress support forums. I’m pretty sure that if they don’t know the answer, it doesn’t exist.

Anyway, here’s the quotation I’m trying to add for November:

“If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.” (Vincent van Gogh)

One of my favorite art quotations of all time.

As far as I’m concerned, the Book of Kells is one of the finest pieces of artwork in the world and quite possibly the pinnacle of medieval artistic achievement. (The “Dark Ages”? I think not.) Sure, I’m biased–I’m a medieval studies major, after all. But any way you look at it, it is a phenomenal artwork.

It dates from about AD 800 and was created by monks in Ireland. It contains all four gospels in Latin (it was still several hundred years before people would begin trying to translate Scriptures into the local languages), as well as some commentary. Although it is called the Book of Kells, it was probably created (or at least begun) at another monastery (probably at Iona) and moved to the Abbey of Kells to protect from the wave of Viking invasions that swept Ireland in the early Middle Ages. It is now on permanent display at Trinity College in Dublin, where they turn a new page of it every day.

Not all of the pages are as lavishly illuminated as the one I’ve posted here, which features the Chi Ro symbol (this page is from near the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew), although I am pretty sure there are no pages entirely without decoration. (Not all of the decoration has been completed, though–the manuscript was never completed.) The Book of Kells contains ten full-page decorations, including portraits of each of the four evangelists and a portrait of the Virgin and Child. Unlike many medieval manuscripts, the Book of Kells and many other Irish manuscripts contain no “true” illumination with gold leaf, but they do feature a wide range of pigments, many of them rare and expensive.

Irish manuscript illumination is unique and easily distinguishable from that of mainland Europe because of the heavy Celtic influence that can be seen in the imagery. When the missionaries (St. Patrick and others) came to convert Ireland, they made a great effort to incorporate and “Christianize” as much of the existing culture as possible. This is part of the reason the conversion of Ireland produced virtually no martyrs. So instead of pursuing a “red martyrdom” of blood, Irish monks sought a “white martyrdom” of self-denial, contemplation, and solitary wandering in the wilderness. The swirling and complex imagery of the Book of Kells and other Irish manuscripts from the same period reflects this rich inner spirituality, inviting the viewer on a visual journey that is somewhat analogous to the physical and spiritual journeys undertaken by Irish monks and mystics.

However you interpret it, it is a fascinating marriage of Christian and pagan imagery, of beauty and practicality, a spectacular artistic achievement, and a feast for the eyes.

(Image and some facts courtesy of Wikipedia, which has a pretty nice article on the Book of Kells, as well as some of the other major Irish manuscripts, like the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Durrow.)

Well, almost as soon as I wrote that last post, I decided that playing around with templates and CSS was way more fun than any school work I had to do, so I’ve spent the last few evenings going nuts with the template. (As you can see.)

I decided to scale back, at least for now, my ambition to design this site completely from scratch and instead am (heavily) modifying the template I was using before. I feel like it’s very close to the way I eventually want it. The sidebar needs some more work, but on the whole, I’m extremely pleased with the way the blog looks so far, especially the header photo, which I took myself.

Once I get the template mostly done (I will never stop tinkering), I think I’ll switch to posting new entries here, instead of at Adventures in Art and, if a solution to the “import posts” problem doesn’t materialize soon, I’ll start shifting my archives over.

Post by post.

It will be grand fun.

Well, I realized that no matter how long I sit and do nothing, a new template for this website will not write itself.  Which means that if I’d like to have one anytime in this lifetime, I should maybe start trying to learn CSS.

So I went into Google and searched “CSS tutorials”, bookmarked a couple pages, and sat back, satisfied that I’d made plenty of progress for one day.  Perhaps later, when I’m trying to avoid writing a philosophy paper, I’ll look more closely at it, and when (if) I have money again I’ll buy a book on the subject.

I have been painting and drawing, though, which is very good.