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by Marc Chagall.
Chagall is best known for his joyous paintings of love and folk life. His happy childhood in Belarus, the memories of his father, his uncle and other family members, show clearly throughout these warm and whimsical expressions.
His work often includes domestic animals, remembered figures and fantasy figures as well as biblical references and these interact in surreal, celebratory or intimate ways bringing to mind the fairy tales and fables which we all carry with us from childhood.
Family and romantic love win out against poverty and struggle. Colour seeps out through the greys.
My painting is called Late sun over the harbour, St Ives.
I like to think of this as a cheery picture. It certainly was a warm and beautiful day.
If you’d like to see more, please go to http://julian-rowe.com
by Giovanni Battista Piranesi.
This captivating print, one of a series of etchings depicting imaginary interiors – the Carceri or prisons, is my personal favourite.
The Carceri show great vaults, passageways, chains, stairways, statues and other structures which occupy huge labyrinths. These spaces might be wondrous or horrifying depending on how you receive them but they are always utterly fascinating. Piranesi uses his knowledge of architecture to build convincing, receding chambers, pillars and walls of almost Escher – like complexity adorned with stern and mighty carvings; heads, figures, animals and strange, unexplained mechanisms.
Published in 1750, these marvellous examples of the printmaker’s art remain a great inspiration to those wishing to explore the inner realms of the imagination.
My painting explores a woodland realm.
This is called Wodwo after the poem by Ted Hughes. Hopefully it has a certain atmosphere of its own though not as dark and strange as either the Carceri or the poem.
by Herbert James Draper.
Here is a clear use of simplification and contrast in figure painting giving us one of those near iconic images that makes us (me anyway) think “Oh… wish I’d done that”.
The dark profile – bit of a classic – against a pale wall. The dark halo of uplifted hair also and, against the black dress, the neck lit brightly. It’s stark and hard but very sweet and the tumbling rose petals seem to flow out from the statuesque woman to spill toward us and over the picture plane and into your room.
Draper’s dates are 1863 to 1920. In his early career, he concentrated, as was the fashion of the day, on mythological subjects. His painting “The Lament For Icarus” from 1898 won the gold medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900. He later worked largely on portraits and became well known for this .
My painting is called On the Lookout. It shows a Black Backed Gull atop the Lookout along Smeaton’s Pier in St Ives. In his own little way, he’s a bit statuesque too.
I often paint the town’s gulls. The reflections on their brilliant white plumage can be very pretty and I never grow tired of them.
by John Martin
John Martin was a great one for huge scale fantasy landscape depicting cataclysm, Pandemonium, mountain and volcano. This absolute stunner painted between 1851 and 1853 faces us with a fiery apocalypse as the material world is destroyed.
You can run, but what’s the point? Gigantic blocks of mountainside are hurled over into lakes of slurping lava all shown with a grandeur and terrifying detail over an enormous depth of space that fair boggles. Here is an artist able to move mountains using a knowledge of mass and lighting to construct paintings of views way beyond anything ever seen down here. Remember the first time you saw those Hubble nebulae? Martin’s work gives me the same sense of awe. Look up to top left as the flash from a lightning bolt fans out from under a great boulder like the beams of searchlights.
Here’s a landscape of mine called Fowey field with Beech and cows.
Everything’s quite nice here.
by William-Adolphe Bouguereau.
For me, Bouguereau’s most stunning work, this is a wonderful lesson in complex composition and lighting. It was painted in 1873 and depicts a group of bathing nymphs who, having discovered a naughty satyr spying on them, drag him into their pond to teach him a lesson. One of their number is calling for reinforcements. The whole cluster of bodies is like a knot of tension as force and counter force are beautifully painted through the bodily attitudes and points of contact. That said, the nymphs show no great muscular definition – not Bouguereau’s style, he was very much the classicist.
It was this traditional approach which led to Bouguereau being attacked by the French avant garde notably by the impressionist Degas who used the term “Bouguereauté” to criticise slick, traditional painting.
Bouguereau remains, however, one of the most technically accomplished painters of the human form, particularly the female, throughout art history.
More countryside and another body of water but my painting Colour of Spring III is rather more impressionistic.
I’m happy with the fresh, sparkle of this piece. Couldn’t resist letting a bird rise up from the ground. In this case, it’s a Hobby; a beautiful falcon and a master of aerobatic flight.
by John White Alexander.
Alexander was a Pennsylvanian orphan who at the age of 18 moved to New York to work as an illustrator at Harper’s Weekly. After studying in Europe, he returned to America where he found great success as a portrait painter.
Repose was painted in 1895. It reflects the fashion for the sensuous portrayal of women in portraits of the time. Here Alexander’s model looks almost lascivious, showing the length of her body with curves and stretched limbs under the fabric of her voluminous dress. To me, the diagonal streak she forms on the canvas almost resembles a comet shot across an evening sky and this is the great strength of this composition. Her body seems to stretch away enormously, an effect emphasised by the shadow across her torso. She seems a woman very confident in her powers. I like the way the dress just touches the polished floor, not enough to form a fold.
My painting is called In the garden of Buddleias.
This one also involves a big dress. It is a slightly dreamlike idea with a certain sense of drama.
The buddleias are from our own garden. I’d been waiting for a chance to paint them.
by Stanhope Forbes.
Stanhope Forbes is known as the father of the Newlyn School. This Cornish group of artists was an internationally recognised colony and today is one of the most important of historical Cornish art fraternities.
The work of the Newlyn school is characterised by a somewhat impressionistic ruralism which depicts fisher folk and other working people in the Cornish towns and villages. Themes often dealt with were sentiment, hope and loss. This study shows Forbes’ great figure painting facility as well as his deft handling of light. The faces and clothing are laid in with brisk and confident blocks of paint. Each face of the group is intent upon the distant boats, the tight knit family lives of the Cornish people poetically demonstrated in this image of unity and loving expectation.
My painting is a scene from St Ives. A little less pregnant with emotion, it’s called Outside Bumbles tea room and shows a typical sunny April scene at this corner of town.
by Sir John Arnesby Brown.
Here is a sublime pastoral snapshot by Brown, a landscape painter born in Nottingham in 1866. Livestock feature heavily in Brown’s work, including a scene of herded sheep at the sand dunes of Hayle in Cornwall with St Ives in the background across the bay; an area much frequented by my wife and myself.
Here the moulding of the bullock’s muscular bodies is very effective, yet quite simple. Look at the reddish tones in the neck shadow of the animal closest to us. It’s all summery heat. But it’s more than that. A real emotion is very difficult to capture in landscape, I mean a palpable feel of the place. Here we have music, maybe Elgar or Delius. There is thickness, bulk and not just in the animals, in the distant rolls of trees and above in the clouds, also rolls and layers.
Here is another summer’s day. This time it’s a painting of mine showing a house near to the National Trust’s Lanhydrock in mid Cornwall.
by Maxfield Parrish.
Maxfield Parrish was a commercial artist born in 1870 in Philadelphia.
He became very successful in his own time as a painter of fantasy scenes, often including fairy tale – like figures in idealised landscape settings. His work is still highly popular today, you see calendars of Parrish prints everywhere and posters of his work sell well. Hardly surprising considering his mastery (and originality) within the genre.
Garden of Allah is a prime example of Parrish’s use of a limited palette of glazed and overlaid colours to create a dazzling painting whilst retaining a powerful mood. Tranquility reigns supreme in this richly dappled setting. See the complex shadows of trees cast on the pots and how they are stretched around the bulbous clay. Parrish’s trademark blossom is moulded nicely around the bushes though, as usual with him, not highly worked with texture. You can see where many of the early hollywood set designers went to for inspiration when an exotic, palatial effect was desired.
Here is In the Lemon Grove, a painting of mine, also quite sun – dappled though different in treatment.
If you would like to see more of my work, here is my site: http://julian-rowe.com/
by Neil Pinkett.
I’ve known Neil for many years and he is decidedly my favourite Cornish Landscape artist.
His work tends to be informed by solid, substantial structure, skillfully blocked in with the palette knife. This painting shows his ability to create a remarkable sense of atmosphere, full of coruscating light effects and heat. The smeared-in blue/greens in the shadow tones are very beautiful. The sunlight breaking in over the rooftops and along the road surface seems to wobble in a haze. This impressionistic treatment suits the Cornish subject admirably.
Neil also paints extensively out of county and tends to work from watercolour sketches on site, building the final oil paintings in the studio.
Here is a link to his site: http://www.neilpinkett.co.uk/index.php
Here is a solid, sculptural looking painting of mine called Duloe stone circle.
This shows the ancient monument near to Looe. It is the smallest stone circle in Cornwall and is built from remarkably bright and glittery white quartz.
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