Mustafa's Blog

For everyone who isn’t familiar with Peter Paul Rubens, let me just tell you that he is a very accomplished artist, but so much more. In his time, he had travelled all over Europe and learned from the great Italian and Northern European masters, incorporating their personal and regional style into his own unmistakable creations. He was a Baroque artist from Flanders, but he was also a widely respected diplomat, and spoke six languages! Needless to say, he is quite the figure, both in and outside of the art world.

Like most Baroque painting, Rubens’ work is defined by a sense of grandeur and dynamism. The Fall of Phaeton illustrates Apollo’s son unable to handle his father’s chariot, and to stop the ensuing destruction wreaked by the loose horses, Zeus destroying the chariot and phaeton falling to his death. Just listening to the story behind the painting makes you think EPIC, and the painting itself is just packed with action.

The great thing about painting the heavens or flying figures is that you’re not limited to movement in two dimensions. The characters are moving in every imaginable direction, whether fleeing from the horses or Zeus’s omnipotent thunderbolt. The sense of perspective is also very moving – look at the horses and take a moment to appreciate the skill and effect of drawing them at such different positions and angles.

You really get the sense of violent action and power Rubens is going for in the painting. Looking at the horses tossing their heads and rearing up, the peoples’ fearful expressions and exaggerated attempts to get away from the scene of the disaster: it all comes together to form a composition dominated by light, but also by a frenzied sort of movement leading your eyes down the shaft of light to the confusion below. Rubens really epitomizes the Baroque sensation for extreme drama and movement on a never-before-seen scale.

This is a very cool painting in a very cool series of paintings by Roy Lichtenstein. Everyone knows about Lichtenstein’s comic strip paintings on love and war, but he went much further into Pop Art than most people know. Apart from his more well-known works, he also had series of landscapes, nudes, and possibly my favorites, paintings of brushstrokes. Lichtenstein is able to take normal, somber, and dramatic scenes and use his “comic book style” to over exaggerate them to the point where they seem melodramatic, or even comical.

Obviously this isn’t comical or dramatic, but I find it a wonderful piece to look at. At this point in his career, he has grown very skilled at manipulating his dots, and he can even have them fade in and out to show depth and space. So he first started with a style that emphasizes the 2-dimensional aspect of painting, but managed to make these mountains look like they’re receding into space. He also has some really interesting stuff going on with bold geometric shapes that stand out against the mountains. I’m not sure what purpose they serve, but they visually pop out of the background and add mystery to an already mystical painting.

But what I like most about this and other Lichtenstein landscapes is the dreamy, ethereal quality they possess. The cool tones: the grays, blues, and white are very calming, even dreamy. You can visualize the fog in each valley, and it produces this utterly tranquil scene that I find so appealing about many landscapes. Here, Lichtenstein has taken the landscape and simplified and altered it to what I consider to be a fundamental sense of peace. I can just look at this and continue to be amazed at how simple, yet mesmerizing a series of dots can be.

When I first saw this piece, I wasn’t impressed. I walked past it, but nothing really made me stop or take a closer look. It seemed primitive, an early, unimportant predecessor to the momentous works of the High Renaissance. But we went over artwork similar to this and in the same period, and now I realize how important artwork from the early Renaissance is. This kind of connection gets me super excited, and I hope through sharing this post with everyone will result in someone who will be as excited as I am about art.

This is Giotto’s Madonna and Child, painted between 1320-30, in the treciento period of the Early Renaissance. Now this isn’t soon after the Medieval period, and so artwork of this time period is heavily influenced by the Medieval, or Gothic style. You can see this from the elongated features (it’s hard to tell in this one, but it’s most evident in the hands), the small heads, and the heavy use of gold leaf in the background and possibly the infant Christ’s robe. There’s also a distinct lack of perspective, or sense of space, once again indicative of Gothic influence.

But this painting represents a crossroads between new and old. Giotto is widely considered the most important and influential early Renaissance artist because he is the first to introduce the sense of depth that characterizes the High Renaissance style and most movements after that. He makes use shading in his subjects, and this really fleshes them out and humanizes them. The drapery also gives the figures volume and gravity, again giving the idea of real space lacking in earlier works. Artists like Leonardo and Donatello looked to earlier works like this for inspiration, and this is part of why it’s so important, and why I think it’s so important in the history and development of art.

I’m sure everyone reading this knows who Claude Monet is. But just to be clear, he was a founder of Impressionism and one of the most recognized painters in modern, actually all art. The Impressionist movement focuses on the artists’ perception of light and movement of a moment in time, especially in a plain-air setting.

I didn’t think I would spend much time in the impressionist section – everyone’s going there, and I want to see everything… but I couldn’t resist. The Stroll, Camille Monet and Her Son Jean is just a wonderful painting. It’s very forceful and dynamic, unlike typical, more placid paintings in the genre.

The first thing I noticed was the great, powerful figure of Mrs. Monet. Claude is a master at painting light, and it shows. Even though we know the sunlight is coming down from the right, it looks like she is framed by the sun rays, illuminating her and solidifying her as the dominant figure. She also has this great diagonal motion/pose that just makes her look impressive. Her dress is swirling in the wind, and curve is carried on by her glance over the shoulder, and it’s balanced by her parasol pointing the obvious way (it also makes a curious connection with the grass, being the same color). Everything comes together to make her a figure full of dynamic movement, but also of aloofness and weightlessness.

The other striking aspect of Mrs. Monet is how well it represents a snapshot in time. The viewer is looking up at her, and Claude has really captured the most fleeting, poignant scene of Mrs. Monet’s stroll. The strong, yet soft diagonals, framed by the sunlight, with the kid just hanging out… the sketchy, delicate, yet unrefined paint strokes heighten the timeless, ephemeral feeling of painting. This is a wonderful example of the power of Impressionist painting.

I saw this painting in the National Gallery. This is Turner’s The Dogana and Santa Maria della Salute, Venice, painted in 1843. It’s pretty different from Turner’s typical work, so I thought it would be interesting to share with the class.

Turner is a classic British landscapist. Most of his works are dramatic, and you can really feel the emotion in them. He paints scenes like ships tossing in a storm, sunsets and sunrises, and commanding cities and towers. Many of his paintings read like epic dramas, exciting and engrossing. A lot of them are traditional British landscape, very idyllic and British, but some of them (especially the ones I’ve described) are more destructive in nature.

This one isn’t really either. It’s very peaceful, but it definitely isn’t a British landscape. They’re usually very illusionistic and based in the countryside. Here, the Dogana and Santa Maria are dissolving into the mist. You can barely make out the buildings behind them, and the whole painting is really sketchy, like a study for an actual painting or… the later impressionist works.  What!? Yes, that’s right. Even though they had different ideas when painting, the early impressionist painters were influenced by Turner’s later works.

But I want to circle back to the main theme here – the mistiness. I don’t want to focus on anything. This just invites me to sit back and take the whole painting in, so simple in outline yet so paradoxically complex. He’s not painting in the lines. Look at the sky; there are hundreds of tiny little variations in color and shade, but there are no lines to differentiate. The colors just flow, and the sky and the city and the ocean flow so well while maintaining their distinctiveness. It’s like a dream, or someone’s romanticized first view of Venice. Either way, a very powerful painting, and one that inspires both thought and wonder.