Pop Goes the Artist!

I had a post about Edward Hopper planned, but that will have to wait till later, because I just found this cool YouTube video that traces the portrayal of women in Western art from the late medieval period through the 20th century. It’s really fascinating to watch as one face morphs into the next.

I’m having trouble embedding the video directly in this post, so until I figure it out, you can find it here on YouTube.

I found the link through the Artists’ Magazine blog.

Two more related quotations:

“I paint with shapes.” (Alexander Calder)

and

“As a painter, we need to take a baby’s approach–painting shapes, not things. Painting is putting correct shapes of color notes in the right places.” (Andries Veerman)

I actually found most of these sites weeks ago, but was too busy with the end of the semester to sit down and make a post about them.

First is one of Worth1000’s Photoshop contests, this one requiring contestants to alter a famous(ish) work of art into an advertisement. Ok, so maybe it’s the sort of thing that makes purists cry, but it made me laugh. Some of my favorites are the Shout advertisement using Artemisia Gentischeli’s painting of Judith Beheading Holofernes, Michelangelo’s David as Ronald McDonald (so wrong!), and a painting of Henry VIII’s fifth wife, Catherine Howard, as a Mastercard ad (”Keeping your head: priceless”). Some of the entries are fantastic, some are uninspired, but it’s worth checking out if you’d like to waste a few minutes.

I don’t remember how I stumbled across this second link (probably the mixed media forum at WetCanvas, but who knows?), but it’s an art blog post about a really interesting idea: 1″ square collages. Granted, it would probably be a dangerous undertaking for me, given my historic inability to fill an entire sheet of paper with a drawing, but what can I say? I really like working small.

On a mostly unrelated note, I’m adding two more pages to James’ altered book, one for the dance we went to at school at the beginning of the month and one for the spectacular concert we went to see a couple weeks ago (Damien Rice and Swell Season–amazing!). Unfortunately, I left all my paints and brushes at school, so I think I’ll be doing both pages entirely in cut paper. Should be a challege, but I’ll post them here when I’m done with them.

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.