Portrait of a Young Man

My online museum travels led me to another old-time favorite. "Portrait of a Young Man" by Bronzino. ( also known as Agnolo di Cosimo di Mariano) Painted in the 1530s I find this an arresting portrait. It has always stopped me in my tracks and forced me to take a second, third and fourth look.

Branzino's portrait figures are often read as static, elegant, and stylish exemplars of unemotional haughtiness and assurance. I can think of no greater example of his work than this portrait. The way this man carries himself, his intense and yet disinterested gaze... they entice me to look further. There is also the interesting fact that no one seems to know who this young man is. There is much speculation, but no definitive proof. He has been painted with a book in his hand. Was he a scholar? Perhaps a poet? (Bronzino himself was a poet so it would make sense that he would be around other poets) I love making up a story for this unknown man. Why is he looking at me in that way? What makes him feel as if I am beneath him? Or not worthy of his interest?

Even more interesting are the odd faces within the furniture in this piece. They are described by the Metropolitan Museum as being rather grotesque in nature. They also state (though it's difficult to see this online) that there is a  third "mask"  suggested in an insistent pattern resembling a face within the drapery of the lower part of the costume.Why had he taken such care to include these faces within this painting? They are painted with almost as much care as the sitter himself. I could go on and on about this painting. It fascinates me so much. There is also extensive discussion on the Met's website about the discoveries made from some X-radiographs that were taken of this painting. The various changes that this painting went through and the fact that they believe this painting to have been started perhaps many years before it was actually finished. 

I love amusing myself by pretending someone, years in the future, has done some x-radiographs of MY artwork. Some of my pieces were painted over entirely different paintings. Some of my pieces were started and not finished until years later or were changed drastically over the course of their creation. What theories would they devise from their findings?

Metropolitan Art Museum

An Unearthed Treasure

I recently stumbled across this and just had to share. It's so very true! Lately I have been pondering this very idea. I work at a very ritzy restaurant where I see some of the wealthiest people in the world. Hardly any of these people seem genuinely happy. Quite often their health has suffered from the stress and unhealthy lifestyles that their jobs have required of them. They suffered this way so that they could make money but now that they have all of this money they end up spending so much of it on their health. What a waste! 

I have so many friends who keep looking to the future and forget to pay attention to the present. I myself have spent the past two years looking forward to a future that I have deemed to be better than my present. What if I never make it? What if right now is all that I have? Am I really going to waste what could possibly be the last few minutes, hours, days, weeks, months of my life looking to a future that I never even get to reach? I am trying very hard to make the most of the here and now. It's not easy, but I think that it makes life A LOT more enjoyable when you take the time to make an effort.

The Girl Who Doesn't Want to Grow Up.

Lately I have been looking back on my childhood and my inevitable progression into adulthood. It happens so gradually that you don’t realize that you’ve matured or grown until it’s long since happened. I remember myself as a child eating a bowl of some overly sweet cereal like Lucky Charms and being so disgusted by my parents choice of healthy and taste free nonsense. I declared that when I grew up I would still eat sweet cereals and not give a hoot.

Years and years have passed since then and all of a sudden I have realized that I am eating healthy and non-sweet cereals. Worse, I can’t even stomach eating Lucky Charms! What the heck happened here? When did this change happen?! How is it that I ALLOWED this to happen?!

This change happened so stealthily that I didn’t even realize it until it had already happened. Like a thief in the night, my childish ways were stolen from me and replaced with the common behavior of most adults. How horrible! This has begun to make me nervous about other things that might change as I get older and older. I recently finished re-watching the Avatar: Last Airbender series. The movie left such a bad taste in my mouth that I had to remind myself of why I had loved the series in the first place.
I am one of the few adults I know of who still enjoy watching cartoons. (This would be another one of those things that I vowed to never give up as an adult. Also, I am not including adults with children. They have a lovely excuse for watching the cartoons that their kids enjoy)

While I have (so far) stayed true to this vow I am beginning to wonder… Will I wake up one day and realize that I haven’t watched a cartoon in years? Will my favorite thing to watch become the news?! When you’re a child, you look forward with eager anticipation to the days when you will finally be deemed an adult. As an adult, you dread the unending progression and cling to whatever memories of your youth you can. What a funny thing life is sometimes!

The Lady of Shalott

Lately I've been really missing my days back in college where my knowledge, talent and intellect was constantly growing and being challenged. I especially miss my art history classes where the knowledge learned often inspired artwork within me. I've decided to spend a few minutes once a day going to museum websites and choosing one painting to examine and learn about. I decided to go to the Tate Museum as my first online art museum "outing" and couldn't resist going to visit one of my favorite paintings in their collection. I was fortunate enough to see this painting in person at the Tate over 2 years ago and it was a life changing experience.

                                           1888


John William Waterhouse's  Lady of Shalott is often deemed to be one of the most famous and well-known paintings of this period. This painting illustrates Alfred Tennyson’s poem The Lady of Shalott. Waterhouse was so enamored with this tale that he painted three different versions of this character, in 1888, 1894 and 1916. Draped over the boat is the fabric the lady wove in a tower near Camelot. But she brought a curse on herself by looking directly at Sir Lancelot.With her right hand she lets go of the chain mooring the boat. Her mouth is slightly open, as she sings ‘her last song’. She stares at a crucifix lying in front of her. Beside it are three candles, often used to symbolise life. Two have blown out. This suggests her life will end soon, as she floats down the river.

For your own enjoyment, I have included the two other versions that he painted of this character...

                                                           1894

                                                     1916


For your own museum outing to the Tate...http://www.tate.org.uk/collection/

Shockingly Unshocking

                                            Ingres (1780- 1867)

                                                      Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901)

Is sex really a source of shock in our society? I have been thinking about this for awhile and it was exacerbated by the ”Shock Art” episode on Bravo’s Work of Art. ( I realize that this was aired awhile ago but I have been out of town and dealing with more important family matters lately) I have included a link to the artwork from this show for anyone who doesn't watch the show.http://www.bravotv.com/work-of-art/season-1/photos/rate-the-work/episode-4-rate-the-work A majority of the artists on this show chose to do something sex-related as a way of shocking their audience. America is one of the few countries who still seem to find sex and our sexuality “shocking”. For most countries this is simply a daily activity. For centuries artists have shocked their audiences with sexually based artwork. I have included some within this blog and trust me when I tell you that this is in no way even scratching the surface. If this is the case, is it really shocking still? Seriously? After all of this time?

                                                          Schiele (1890- 1918)

I almost wish that Work of Art extended themselves to include artists from other countries. I feel pretty sure( though I may be wrong) that their shock related art would be about quite different subject matters. I personally think that the atrocities of war or tyrannical governments are shocking. The fact that we have become so desensitized to violence and that we want to see actual live executions broadcasted on the television is pretty shocking. The buying and selling of young girls for sex is pretty shocking. The lengths to which we are willing to go for beauty and sex., the disfiguration, pain and even death… these are shocking ideas. Yet no one seemed to touch these ideas. I see it time and time again whenever an assignment like this is given to artists at school and now I’m seeing it yet again with artists who have long since graduated. The world is falling to pieces around us and is progressing in new and sometimes dangerous ways, but all we can think about is what’s in our underpants.

                                                       Beardsley (1872-1898)

A Study of Crawling

I am currently on vacation visiting my little sister and my 8 month old niece, Coralie. She has recently started to try her hand at crawling and I feel so lucky to be here to witness it. I watch her little legs shaking as they strain to propel her forward. I see her fall, or lay down and cry in frustration. She's doing a wobbly crawl at best right now,but she continues to push herself forward and always gets to her destination no matter how long it takes her. Her perseverance is astonishing.

I think that there is something to be learned from this. We all, at one point in our lives, were just like her. We all started off having to learn how to do everything. We all pushed ourselves through the bumps, bruises and frustrations to get to our destination. We were fearless and tenacious. What happens to us as we get older? How do we all of a sudden let fear stop us from getting to our goals? Fear of rejection, of failure...

We often think only of the things that we have to teach our children but I definitely think that we should be paying more attention to the things that they can teach us.

Some Thoughts About Beginnings and Ends

My grandmother is unfortunately not doing very well. I had visited her at the nursing home and noticed a slight discoloration on one of her cheeks. The nurses later realized that this was the beginning of jaundice. Since then we've discovered that she has pancreatic cancer so hospice has been called in to care for her. Obviously this is a horribly conflicted time for myself and my family. On one hand my grandmother has been slowly slipping away with dementia so her passing away can easily be viewed as a blessing. We believe that there is a heaven after death and therefore see death as a way to reach better things. However that doesn't stop us from mourning the imminent loss of one so dear to us.

On one of my recent visits with my grandmother I decided to do some sketches of her. She tends to sleep most of the time that you are with her so it can be a tad boring without something to do. I didn't have much in the way of supplies with me. Just a pen and my sketchbook. So I decided to just do some simple studies of her poor arthritic hands. It's horribly brutal sometimes how aging can affect our bodies. When I was home looking over the sketches I realized that I had used the page directly across from a quick color study that I had done for a painting that I am working on. The painting is for a friend who wishes to have it to celebrate the upcoming birth of her grandson. The amazing contrast between these two images stunned me momentarily. It's amazing how we all begin as these beautiful glowing perfect little babies and then end up so fragile and deformed as we reach our death. Another thought that crossed my mind is what if we are really just making a complete circle in our lives? Going from being birthed into this new world as a helpless creature, living life and then ending up a helpless creature yet again before we are "birthed" into the next life.