Vincent van Gogh

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

I'm not a huge fan of Vincent van Gogh, to be entirely honest, but some of his paintings just hit me, and this is one of them:

This is Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night Over the Rhone from 1888. It's hanging at the Musee D'Orsay in Paris and there's a postcard of it currently hanging on my wall.

So what do you think?

Katherine

Cenni di Pepo (Giovanni) Cimabue

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
Scott Adams

I felt like this quote was particularly relevant to today's work of art as this one involves what several people in the art world regard as a mistake. I give you Cimabue's Crucifix of 1287-88 as it looked several decades ago:

And as it looks now:


Sorry for the poor quality of that last bit. It was taken in person and the lighting was not so good.

Anyway, the crucifix was made/painted by Cimabue in the late thirteenth century, like I said. It hung in the Basilica at Santa Croce in Florence, Italy for centuries, although it wasn't too popular or well-taken care of. In 1966, when the city was badly flooded, the crucifix was horribly damaged. In fact, it ended up face-down in the mud that had piled up in the Basilica. As the story goes, volunteers (Florence's "mud angels") collected paint chips from the crucifix into a paint bucket, which was unknowingly dumped into the trash by a fellow worker. So restorers were left with more than half of the original paint missing from the crucifix.

The debate over the restoration of the Crucifix centered around what to do with the missing chunks and this lasted for decades. Should they leave it blank as a sort of tribute or try and fill in the missing spaces with paint matching the original, thereby negating the effect the flood had on the work? Eventually, two restorers decided to move ahead with a kind of crosshatch pattern to, well, fill in the blanks. The result is a kind of green-ish looking color that one's eyes are supposed to glance over. This has been, supposedly, scientifically proven to cause the mind to fill in the gaps with what is meant to be there and not to focus on what isn't present any longer. I was a little skeptical about this technique when I first read about it, but I saw the Crucifix in person last fall and was surprised to find that it does sort of work! Maybe it doesn't work as well for me because I know what it's supposed to do, but the crosshatching did fill in the blanks in a way that doesn't distract you very much from the paint that remains. It would be interesting to see what a viewer thinks who knows nothing about the restoration techniques used...

Cimabue's Crucifix became ridiculously famous in the years following the flood of '66 as a symbol of the devastation caused by the flood in terms of art. It's not exactly a shining example of Cimabue's work, but the story behind its restoration interests me enough to post it here.

So what do you think? Have you seen the Crucifix for yourself? Does this kind of restoration technique work or do you think there was a better solution?


Katherine

Henri Matisse

I want to reach that condensation of sensations that constitutes a picture. ~Henri Matisse

For any of you who know me, you know that Henri Matisse is my favorite artist. I have read several biographies concerning him over the past few years and I consider him to be a kind of kindred soul. (If anyone is interested, Hilary Spurling's two-volume biography is particularly comprehensive and very well-written.)

I debated for a long time over which painting/cut-out of Matisse's to post here. After much deliberation I settled on my most recent favorite of his, a cut-out that is hanging in the Pompidou Centre in Paris and of which I just bought a print the other weekend when I was there. I present: Le lanceur de couteaux, or for those of us who do not understand French: The Knife Thrower.


This cut-out is from 1947, when Matisse was 78 years old. He switched from painting to doing mostly cut-paper compositions as he grew older and his health failed, but Matisse's love of color and shape is entirely evident here as it is in all of his works, regardless of medium. As far as abstractions go, this is one of his more realistic cut-paper works, believe it or not, as is obvious from the fact that you can actually see the shapes of people in action. I love it mostly for the shapes but what do you all think? Let me know.

Katherine

Introduction

I am a horrible blogger and I can easily admit that. However I am full of ideas for blogs which presents me with a horrible conundrum: to blog or not to blog?

In this case, the answer is to blog.


I created this particular site in order to share my love of art with the world. I am not expecting it to get many views, and in that sense it is purely a personal joy. But if anyone does decide to read this, know that it will make me very happy, even if you think the whole idea is stupid.

On that note, an explanation: I will try and post every weekday with a new work of art that means something to me. I will not try and "explain" any of them, although I may offer a comment or two. The point is left up to you, the reader, to decide. Please leave comments if you do or do not appreciate the work, what you think about it, if you want to see more of the same, etc. Any suggestions of any kind are appreciated. I understand that my artistic tastes are personal and that not everyone will share them.

This blog is a sort of pet project for me. I know what art means to me, and I would like to know what it means for everyone else. Or anyone else.

Enjoy,

Katherine