My style of being artistic

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      Do we have one dominant artistic style all our life? Can we have several? Can they change over time? Do we just continue trying out new things until we hit something we love and that is unique? Then what? Practice and practice more to make it completely our own.  Maybe I should start by thinking about what I would like this goal to mean, and take it from there instead. My style could be recognizable, my style to be unique, and my style to come naturally to me without too much effort. You are not really just creating art, but working to create a market. The famous artists weren't just good, but they were able to match their product to a market.

      Other artists stick to their style because it makes them money, and are scared to try different things but I try different to have a new knowledge about arts. I also believe art is merely a shadow, a poor reflection of the real art, which is how you live your life. Your style must come out of your mind, heart and soul. And don't be worried about influences, we can see further by standing on the shoulders of giants. Sometimes I’m paying attention to other artists that may be copying who I like more than I realize. It's not that it's a truly bad thing but at the same time you don't get that all important voice of your own. Pay less attention to them and more to you. The trick to it is tweaking the idea to truly fit what we do and make it more your own. Eventually you will come up with something that is more you than someone else but I can just stop looking at the work of others. Take a bit of this and a bit of that and you start seeing a bit more of you come through.

       My artistic style is I’m trying to combine what I know into one style. It's kind a like putting blinders on, you can only see what's in front of your face but when you really start paying attention to you and not others things will change a bit in what you do. I worked hard at giving an art that look it does and finally can be happy with how things are going.  I have an advantage over others work in that fact that I can don't limit what I like. My style choice has been very much a conscious decision. My artistic style is I’m trying to imagine and imagine and imagine. Sometimes, I’m copying from the others work but I’m trying to have my own version. I think a personal style is a good thing, but it has to keep evolving and growing .It suggests a confidence in their own work. Try not to think about it so much and just let your cards fall where they may. You may be pleasantly surprised by what you come up with.

Vincent Van Gogh; life and his work

Starry Night: The Style of Vision of Vincent Van Gogh

Largely self-taught, van Gogh started his career copying prints and reading nineteenth-century drawing manuals and books. His technique grew out of the idea that to be a great painter you had to master drawing first. Van Gogh felt it was necessary to master black and white before working with color, and so he focused on learning the essentials of figure drawing and depicting landscapes in correct perspective. It was only when he was satisfied with his drawing technique that he began adding in colors and his bold palette became one of the most recognizable features of his later work. Many people consider Van Gogh's letters to be another form of artwork because they include sketches of works that he was focusing on at that time or had just finished. These sketches are proof of van Gogh's growth and they show the progression of his masterpieces. Vincent van Gogh painted over 30 self-portraits between the years 1886 and 1889, reflecting his ongoing pursuit of complementary color contrasts and a bolder composition. His collection of self-portraits places him among the most productive self-portraitists of all time. Van Gogh used portrait painting as a method of introspection, a method to make money and a method of developing his artistic skills. According to the Van Gogh Gallery, his early paintings were dark and traditional in comparison to the works he completed later in life.

            Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh has risen to the peak of artistic achievements. Although Van Gogh sold only one painting in his life, the aftermath of his work is enormous. Starry Night is one of the most well known images in modern culture as well as being one of the most replicated and sought after prints. From Don McLean's song 'Vincent' (Starry, Starry Night) (Based on the Painting), to the endless number of merchandise products sporting this image, it is nearly impossible to shy away from this amazing painting. Although known for his colorful paintings of cypresses and sunflowers, Vincent van Gogh art encapsulated a range of styles. Whether or not this religious inspiration is true, it is known that the piece is not the only Starry Night painting that Van Gogh ever created. Gogh was quite proud of a piece he had painted earlier in Arles in 1888 that depicted stars reflecting in the Rhone River. Like Starry Night this previous piece shares many of the qualities that have made Starry Night such a popular painting. His insistence that the canvases were not a return 'to romanticism or to religious ideas', though somewhat puzzling at first, was intended only to show that the works had nothing in common with earlier mystic paintings. He had once admired religious subjects from ancient art, but he now considered that the feeling of solace should primarily be evoked by the colour and design of representations of nature.

           

            Van Gogh depicted the view at different times of day and under various weather conditions, including sunrise, moonrise, sunshine-filled days, overcast days, windy days, and one day with rain. The hospital staff did not allow Van Gogh to paint in his bedroom, but he was able to make sketches in ink or charcoal on paper, and eventually he would base newer variations on previous versions. The pictorial element uniting all of these paintings is the diagonal line coming in from the right depicting the low rolling hills of the Apelles Mountains. In fifteen of the twenty-one versions, cypress trees are visible beyond the far wall enclosing the wheat field. Van Gogh telescoped the view in six of these paintings, most notably in Wheat Field with Cypresses and The Starry Night, bringing the trees closer to the picture plane. Gogh's discipline was as firm as his genius was unruly, and he taught himself all the elements of classical technique with pains­taking thoroughness. He copied and recopied lessons from a standard academic treatise on drawing until he could draw like the old masters, before letting his own vision loose in paint. Although he knew he needed the utmost technical skill, he confessed to an artist friend that he aimed to paint with such "expressive force" that people would say, "I have no technique."While stopping short of calling the painting a hallucinatory vision, Naifeh and Smith discuss The Starry Night in the context of Van Gogh's mental illness, which they identify as temporal lobe epilepsy, or latent epilepsy. Although The Starry Night was painted during the day in Van Gogh's ground-floor studio, it would be inaccurate to state that the picture was painted from memory.

Leonardo da Vinci the painter of Mona Lisa

The Artistic Merits of Mona Lisa and the genius of Leonardo da Vinci

            Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was renowned as primarily painter. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived. His genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal. Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance man, a man of "unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly inventive imagination". Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance man, a man of "unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly inventive imagination". Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. Among his works, Mona Lisa is the most famous parodied portrait and The Last Supper the most reproduced religious painting of all time, with their fame approached only by Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam. Leonardo's drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also regarded as a cultural icon. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings have survived the small number because of his constant, and frequently disastrous, experimentation with new techniques, and his chronic procrastination. Nevertheless, these few works, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of painting, compose a contribution to later generations of artists rivalled only by that of his contemporary, Michelangelo.

Apparently, Leonardo carried the Mona Lisa painting with him for the remainder of his life and he travelled extensively after the painting’s completion. So, either this painting was of value to the artist, or the woman in the painting was someone very special in the artist’s life. Or, the conspiracy theories have some merit and there was a hidden message in the painting. The Mona Lisa is a monumental work – not in its physical size, but rather in the grandeur of the female figure that dominates the space of the painting. It is actually a very small painting, listed at the Louvre Museum as being 77 cm (height) by 53 cm (width) – that’s about a little over two feet high and less than 2 feet wide. The painting is significant, not just in the life and work of da Vinci, but in the history of Renaissance painting in Italy in the early sixteenth-century. According to Scailliérez at the Louvre Museum, the Mona Lisa “is the earliest Italian portrait to focus so closely on the sitter in a half-length portrait. The painting is generous enough in its dimensions to include the arms and hands without them touching the frame. The portrait is painted to a realistic scale in the highly structured space where it has the fullness of volume of a sculpture in the round.” Pater’s typical nineteenth-century romantic dialogue certainly served to heighten the romance and the mystery behind the woman in the painting.

There is a science behind Leonardo’s depiction of the woman’s smile. He was a mathematician and a scientist as well as an artist, so it stands to reason that his creative endeavours would incorporate some of his mathematical and scientific knowledge. Her smile is so emblematic, ambiguous, and even coy. It is almost a half-smile, one corner of the mouth lifted slightly higher than the other. It is,” as Scailliérez points out, “a visual representation of the idea of happiness suggested by the word ‘Gioconda’ in Italian. Leonardo made this notion of happiness the central motif of the portrait: it is this notion which makes the work such an ideal.” The smile is not the only thing that attracts the observer. The casual pose of the woman in itself is intriguing. The positioning of the hands is particularly casual, not a usual pose for a portrait in the early sixteenth-century. In this painting, Leonardo challenges both himself and the observer to question their vision of the ideal woman.

Art Histories

ART AND HISTORY: What is the connection?

      Connecting Art Histories seeks to strengthen art history as a global discipline by fostering new intellectual exchanges among scholars in targeted regions whose economic or political realities have previously prevented collaboration. Art is important to the study of history because the objects created by man show how humans were reacting to the world around them. You could think of it in terms of cause and effect. Art history spans the entire history of humankind, from prehistoric times to the twenty-first century. Art and history has emerged as a discipline that specializes in teaching people how to evaluate and interpret works of art based on their own perspective. It has frequently been criticized for its subjectivity because the definition of what is beautiful varies from individual to individual. Learning to evaluate what you see by building on the art forms you already know can develop your aesthetic understanding. Combining exposure to art history with the desire to foster art appreciation in others represents a happy medium. Art and history requires you to study and describe what you see in terms of the design elements of line, shape, color, value, and texture.

      Connecting of Art Histories aims to increase opportunities for sustained intellectual exchange across national and regional borders.Whether you like to observe caveman paintings or Botticelli angels, you can find visual arts that challenge your creative side and inspire you to find beauty in man made forms. Art and history go hand in hand. It springs from the recognition that all forms of art historical study will be stronger when scholars from around the world inform each others ideas and methodologies. Connecting Art Histories seeks to strengthen art history as a global discipline by fostering new intellectual exchanges among scholars in targeted regions whose economic or political realities have previously prevented collaboration. Connecting Art Histories also seeks to enhance the preparation of younger scholars in countries where art history is an emerging discipline. At its most basic level, art history is the study of how art has developed across time. Art history seeks to explain art's influences and changes within its historical, religious, and social contexts. The history of any activity or product that made by humans in a visual form for aesthetic or communicative purposes, expressing ideas, and emotions. Arts in our history act as an evident that they use art to tell a story for us to see. Art history is distinguished from art criticism, which is concerned with establishing a relative artistic value upon individual works with respect to others of comparable style, or sanctioning an entire style or movement; and art theory or "philosophy of art", which is concerned with the fundamental nature of art. The common usage referring to works of art and architecture.

         Art and history requires you to study and describe what you see in terms of the design elements of line, shape, colour, value, and texture. Once you write a response to one work of art, you can compare it to another work of art. An alternative is to make comparisons and contrasts between artists and their artistic works with the mind’s eye. As you explore the fascinating world of art, a beautiful collection of thousands of years of human experience, you will want to travel farther from your home to see works of art in person. Throughout history, it has always been the case that art has the power to change society, especially when new media are used to express an idea. Anytime you view or read about a particular artwork, you are gaining an understanding about art history. Creating art is an important part of experiencing life. It allows us the opportunity to express ourselves in a unique form. Art history is not only a biographical endeavor. Unfortunately the current disciplinary gap between art history and the philosophy of art often hinders. The history of art is a multidisciplinary branch of the arts and sciences, seeking an objective examination of art throughout time, classifying cultures, establishing and observing the distinctive and influential characteristics of art.