8.31.2007

Judith Gutierrez - Mexican Artists

Judith Gutierrez (Babahoyo, Ecuador, 1927 - Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, 2003) was a well-known master Latin American painter who worked in Ecuador and Mexico.

Gutierrez studied in the School of Fine Arts in Guayaquil, Ecuador, with her teacher Caesar Andrade Faini. A great part of her life was just spent living and painting at Mexico. Gutierrez and her husband left Ecuador, feeling like political banishes, due to the military government of the time.
Some of Gutierrez’s most significant works are: Dancer’s Memory of the Artist, Book for The Blind and The Christ of Santa Elena.

Gutierrez held many individual exhibitions and is represented in many galleries and museums at New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Pasadena, Washington, Great Britain, Osaka, Guayaquil, Quito, Mexico City, Munich, Havana, Guadalajara, Monterrey, Panama, and even at Sao Paulo.

8.28.2007

Incorporating Abstract Art into your Interior Decor



Interior decor is not just putting a picture on the wall; it’s also about capturing the essence of your mood and style.
Decorating the walls of your home with Abstract art adds touches of elegance and energizes your space. Whether you have a bare space on the wall, or a corner in desperate need of something special, abstract art will work.

Abstract art plays with light and color, shape and function. These paintings and sculptures will allow you to experiment with your modern look. Wassily Kandinsky, who many consider the father of Abstract art, used to paint his oil paintings as if he was writing a symphony: full of geometric shapes, passion and a marvelous flow of color.
Abstract art can add splashes of color and elegance to a room. It is a way to expose your visitors to something different.

Abstract art can also create different mood settings to your home, sophisticated pieces can revitalize your room and give it new meaning. “A white wall is simply a white wall… Add some abstract oil paintings and it becomes a showcase of style,”
If you are struggling to find a center piece for your space, abstract art pieces can provide the perfect focal point. Do not think that you have to situate your furnishings around the pieces. Instead, they add such drama and life that eyes will naturally flow to them. They become the center without effort.

Abstract art captures the elegance of contemporary design while also pushing into other boundaries. It can be playful, dramatic, sleek and exciting, all contained in one piece. Your home will never seem more complete, and more in style
for more oil painting.

What is Expressionism?


Expressionist artists pretty much are the most hard to define group of artists out there in the modern era. It seems as if the artists that are labeled as Expressionists more or less defined the style as they went along, following their instincts as to the use of color, specifically which colors to use and how often to use them.



Colors where important in Expressionism, but most importantly colors had to be non-realistic.
Henry Matisse who is one of the earliest expressionist painters, believed that "the invention of photography had released painting from the need to copy nature, leaving him free to present emotion as directly as possible and by the simplest means".



Even Van Gogh, the post-impressionist artist that had influenced Expressionism the most, tried to explain to his brother, Theo about the new way he uses color: "Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily, in order to express myself forcibly."



To learn more about Expressionism and artists that are considered Expressionist please checkout this great post by Breiana Cecil about the Modern Art Movement…
View more oil paintings on bigtimearts.com, all oil paintings framed in the lowest price, our aim is to let oil painting framed for home decorate is the same popular and universal as the clothes, hang on or place anywhere you can think, best gift to present.


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Frida Kahlo - Mexican Artists


Frida Kahlo is one of Mexico’s most well-known artists and even feminist icon, celebrated for her fervent incommutability in the face of life’s trials. She’s best known for her bold self-portraits portray the pain she skilled in her personal life. As a child Kahlo had polio; at the age of 18 she broke her right leg and pelvis in a terrible bus accident, foremost to a lifetime of constant pain. Partially motionless after the accident, Kahlo began painting during late 1920s.


She married famous muralist Diego Rivera during 1929 and together they traveled in United States, staying in Detroit and New York City in the early 1930s. In the late 1930s Kahlo had show of her paintings in New York City and Paris and linked with some of the well-liked painters in the world. Kahlo and Rivera were both recognized for their extramarital affairs and in 1940 they divorced for a short time before remarrying. During the ’40s Kahlo gained global credit for her colorful and sometimes grisly paintings (as well as for her bold public persona), but she sustained to have health problems. She died in 1954 just after her 47th birthday.



Rafael Lozano-Hemmer - Mexican Artists


Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (born in 1967 in Mexico City) is a Mexican-Canadian famous artist who works with his own ideas from architecture, technological theater and performance.


He created what might be the world’s biggest interactive installation, Vectorial Elevation; a work, which was installed in Mexico City during 1999, in Vitoria-Gasteiz during 2002, in Lyon in 2003 and in Dublin in April-May 2004.


He received several prizes, including an Ars Electronica Golden Nica in 2000.




Dr. Atl - Mexican Artists


Gerald Murillo (born October 3, 1875, Guadalajara, Jalisco – 1964, Mexico City) was a famous Mexican painter who signed his work “Dr. Atl”. He started to study painting at an early age in Jalisco, under Felipe Castro. At the age of 21, Murillo entered the National School of Fine Arts in Mexico City to pursue in his studies.


Dr. Atl became very lively in Mexico when he returned. He led art exhibits sponsoring the luminous painters of his time, Francisco de la Torre, Diego Rivera, and Ponce de Leon.





Luis Nishizawa - Mexican Artists



Luis Nishizawa (born 1920 in San Mateo Ixtacalco, Mexico) is a famous Mexican painter of Japanese descent.


Nishizawa’s artistic studies started when he took admission in the Academy of San Carlos in 1942 and during 1951, the date of his first display in the Hall of Mexican Plastic Art; he has been an untiring producer and advocate of Mexican art. His traditional approach and his decrease and generalization of forms ally him with such immense landscape painters as Dr Atl, Gerardo Murillo. He also gave classes at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) during 1955. Nishizawa is known as one of Mexico’s biggest landscape artists of the 20th century. He currently works and teaches in Toluca, in a late eighteenth-century house, which he has converted to a studio and museum.




Juan O’Gorman - Mexican Artists


Juan O’Gorman (July 6, 1905 - January 17, 1982) was a famous Mexican artist, both a painter and an architect.


O’Gorman was born in Coyoacán, Mexican Federal District, a community within superior Mexico City, to an Irish father, Cecil Crawford O’Gorman (a painter himself) and a Mexican mother. In the 1920s he studied structural design at the Academy of San Carlos, the Art and Architecture school at National University, Mexico. He became a renowned architect, worked on the new Bank of Mexico building, and under the power of Le Corbusier introduced modern functionalist architecture to Mexico City.


His paintings often treated Mexican history, scenery, and legends. He painted the murals in the Independence Room in Mexico City’s Chapultepec Castle.




Jose Clemente Orozco - Mexican Artists


Jose Clemente Orozco. Photo Credit: Edward WestonJose Clemente Orozco (born November 23, 1883, in Zapotlan el Grande (now Ciudad Guzman), Jalisco; died September 7, 1949, in Mexico City) was a famous Mexican social realist painter who was most specialized in bold murals.


Orozco was fond of the theme of the human vs. the mechanical. He was also a type painter and lithographer. He studied in Mexico City at the San Carlos Academy. With Diego Rivera, he was a head of the Mexican Renaissance. A significant distinction he had from Rivera was his vital view of the Mexican Revolution. While Diego was a bold, buoyant figure, touting the splendor of the revolution, Orozco was less at ease with the bloody toll the social movement was taking.


His other works comprise Prometheus (1930, at Pomona College, California), Zapata (1930), The Man of Fire (1939), and Christ Destroying His Cross (1943).





Diego Rivera - Mexican Artists


Diego Rivera (December 8, 1886 – November 24, 1957), (his full name was Diego María de la Concepcion Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodriguez) was a famous Mexican painter and muralist.


Diego is known as best by the public world for his 1933 mural, “Man at the Crossroads,” in the foyer of the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center. When his fan Nelson Rockefeller discovered, which is the mural incorporated a portrait of Lenin and other socialist imagery, he fired Rivera, and the incomplete work was finally destroyed by Rockefeller staff people. The film Cradle Will Rock contains a dramatization of the controversy.





Veronica Ruiz de Velasco - Mexican Artists


Veronica Ruiz de Velasco (born in México D.F.) is an extraordinary painter of Mexican origin living in the USA. She was a follower of Teodulo Romulo, Rufino Tamayo, Jean Dubuffet, and Gilberto Aceves Navarro.


In 1985, Ruiz de Velasco held a display at the Gallery of the Loteria National of Mexico. In 1986 she had an individual display in the Gallery of the Benito Juarez International Airport at Mexico City. In 1987 she was the youngest artist to display at the Museo de Arte Moderno (national Museum of Modern Art) in Mexico. The exhibition was homage to Andrew Lloyd Weber and had amazing reference pieces such as Cats, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Starlight Express, and as well the Phantom of the Opera. The Museo de Arte Moderno published their twenty five year celebration book and with Ruiz de Velasco as one of Mexico’s leading artists.


In 1989, Ruiz de Velasco painted a wall painting in the American British Cowdray Medical Center in Mexico D.F… This mural took approximately a year to complete. The investiture of the mural was a nationwide event in Mexico, exposed by the U.S. Ambassador in Mexico, Charles Pilliod. Prince Charles of Wales was as well present and congratulated Ruiz de Velasco on the donation of her time and effort.


In 1996, Ruiz de Velasco created a portrait for President Bill Clinton. President Bill Clinton and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton sent a letter of approval for this portrait




David Alfaro Siqueiros - Mexican Artists


David Alfaro Siqueiros (December 29, 1896 in Camargo, Chihuahua, Mexico - January 6, in the year 1974 at Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico) was a renowned painter and muralist recognized for his social realism work.


His prominent projects include his shared mural at the Mexican Electricians’ Union (1939-40), From Porfiriato to the Revolution at the Museum of National History (1957-55), March of Humanity and the Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros at Avenida Insurgentes (1965-71), and his had a main role in obtaining mural commissions for artists on the University City campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico during 1950s Mexico City.


Siqueiros was one of few famous Mexican muralists working at the time, including Diego Rivera, José Clement Orozco and Rufino Tamayo. His art honestly reflected the time period in which he actually grown as an artist. His art was intensely rooted in the Mexican Revolution, an aggressive and chaotic period in Mexican history in which different social and political factions fought for credit and power. The period during 1920s to the 1950s is recognized as the Mexican Renaissance, and Siqueiros was active in the effort to make an art that was at once Mexican and universal.


Siqueiros was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize for the year in 1966. His nephew is filmmaker David Siqueiros.



Rufino Tamayo - Mexican Artists



Rufino Tamayo (August 26, 1899 – June 24, 1991) was a famous Mexican painter. He was a Zapotec Native American and was born in the city of Oaxaca, Oaxaca.


In his paintings, Tamayo uttered what he actually believed was the traditional Mexico and did not follow the more politically based paintings, which many of his contemporaries such as José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, Oswaldo Guayasamin and as well as David Alfaro Siqueiros did. Tamayo and one more artist, Lea Remba, were the first artists to make a new type of printed artwork called “mixografía”. This consisted of artwork printed on paper but with vigor and texture. One of their most well-known mixografías is free Dos Personajes Atacados por Perros (”Two Characters Attacked by Dogs”).


Tamayo also painted murals, some of which – counting Nacimiento de la nacionalidad (”Birth of the Nationality”), 1952 – are exhibited inside Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes opera house. His art has also been exposed in U.S. museums such as The Phillips Collection in Washington and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.



Francisco Toledo - Mexican Artists


Francisco Benjamin Lopez Toledo (b. 17th July 1940, Juchitán, Oaxaca, México) was the most vital living Mexican graphic artist. He studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de Oaxaca and the Centro Superior de Artes Aplicadas del Institutor National de Bellas Artes, Mexico, where he deliberate graphic arts with Guillermo Silva Santamaria. Graficas de Oaxaca (IAGO).


His social and artistic concerns about his home state led to his contribution in the organization of an significant art library at the IAGO, and his participation in the beginning of the Museo de Arte Contemporaneous de Oaxaca (MACO), the Patronato Pro-Defensa y Conservacion del Patrimonio Cultural de Oaxaca, a records for the blind, a photographic center, and the Eduardo Mata Music Library to name a little of his projects. Toledo’s exceptional originality has been spoken in pottery, sculpture, weaving, graphic arts, and paintings. He has had exhibitions in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Spain, Belgium, France, Japan, Sweden, the United States, plus other countries. Toledo is at the same time an outstanding artist and a supporter and guardian of the arts and the crafts and architectural inheritance of his state of Oaxaca.



Mauricio Toussaint - Mexican Artists


Mauricio Toussaint (b. 1960 in Guadalajara, Mexico) is a famous Mexican modern artist. Of French and Mexican fall, Toussaint was involved in making art from a young age. Following his parents’ prospect to make a living, he enters the Universidad Autonoma de Guadalajara to get a degree in structural design (he graduated during 1985 with a Bachelor of Science degree).


During this time, he was confident by a professor from the near Visual Arts Department to make art on his own. Invited to work at the open class at the Centro de Arte Moderno, he made prints during 1982-83 and afterward, he board on a series of paintings. By the mid 1980s, he had fake relations with art experts from the center, and was soon asked to team up as a helper curator at the Instituto Cultural Cabañas—his career in architecture formally replaced with art.


In 1995 Toussaint came to the United States, tempted by friends in the music business, which confident him to join them in Miami. He has had numerous exhibits in dissimilar Mexican cities over and above other countries like Spain, France, Korea and the United Sates.



Carlos Amorales - Mexican Artists


Carlos Amorales (born 1970) is a Mexican artist who works and lives in Mexico City.


Amorales studied at Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam between 1992 and 1995 and at the Rijksakademie in 1996.


Known for his flat, bold forms, Amorales works in a wide mixture of media, including video animation, painting, drawing, sculpture, and performance. Images of his “liquid archive” - birds, spiders, trees, wolves, etc. - recur throught his work in blacks, reds, and grays. His previous works featured masked Mexican wrestlers performing in wrestling rings all over the world, including at the Tate Modern in London and the Pompidou Center in Paris. His most recent animation piece, Useless Wonder (2006) was shown at the Miami Basel art fair. Newly, Amorales has had solo exhibitions at the MALBA in Buenos Aires, the Milton Keynes Gallery in Milton Keynes, UK, Yvon Lambert Paris, and MUCA in Mexico City. The artist’s work is featured in many public and secretive collections, including the MoMA in New York, La Colección Jumex in Mexico City, the Cisneros Foundation Collection in New York, and the Margulies Collection in Miami.




John White - American artists


John White, flourishing 1585-1590, the Virginian pioneer and English colonist in America, sailed with Richard Grenville in 1585, and returned with Sir Francis Drake in 1586. White was sent by Sir Walter Raleigh as Sir Richard Grenville’s artist-illustrator on his first voyage to the New World (1585-6). During this journey he made plentiful well-known sketches of the landscape and native peoples they encountered (including the one at right). These works are significant as they pre-date the first body of “discovery voyage art” produced in the late eighteenth century by the artists who sailed with Captain James Cook.


White, “Gentleman of London,” later became head of the newly-established Roanoke Colony. In 1587 he led a band of settlers sent out by Sir Walter Raleigh. White, as Governor, with thirteen others, was included under the name of “The Governor and Assistants of the Citie of Raleigh of Virginia”.


However, a record from May of 1606 that a Bridgit White was agreed estate administrator for her brother “John White” may refer to him. A Bridgett White was also the second wife of a Robert Wight (1578 - 1617) of Hareby, Lincolnshire, England whom he married on Nov 25, 1613 at Alford. As this Robert was also the son of an obscure John Wight and the father of an Elizabeth Wighte (1606-1671) who is rarely thought to have been the ex-wife of Nathaniel Eaton (1610 -1674), the first schoolmaster of Harvard College, Massachusetts; there is a possibility that Bridgit White, the sister of John White the Governor of Roanoke Colony, and Bridgett White, the second wife of the same above-mentioned Robert Wight, are directly related to each other




Miguel Covarrubias - mexican artist


Covarrubias’s caricature of himself as an Olmec.Jose Miguel Covarrubias (November 22, 1904 - Feb 4, 1957) was a Mexican artist and caricaturist. His works and celebrity cartoons have been featured in The New Yorker and Vanity Fair magazines. The linear nature of his drawing style was highly prominent to other caricaturists such as Al Hirschfeld.


Covarrubias also did some amazing illustrations for The Heritage Press including Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Green Mansions, and Pearl Buck’s All Men Are Brothers. These editions are very required after by collectors. He also worked as an illustrator for W.C. Handy’s publications.


Covarrubias is also well-known for his analysis of pre-Colombian art of Mesoamerica, mainly that of the Olmec culture. His analysis of iconography presented a strong case that the Olmec predated the Classic Era years before this was confirmed by archaeology.




8.27.2007

Patience Wright - American artist


Patience Lovell Wright (born 1725, Bordentown, New Jersey; died March 23, 1786, London) was the first recognized American-born sculptor. She mainly created shine figures of people.


Wright was born into a Quaker farm family and married Joseph Wright in 1748. For years, she had amused herself and her five kids by molding faces out of putty, bread dough, and wax. After her partner died in 1769, her leisure became a full-time occupation as she began earning a living from molding portraits in tinted wax.


In 1772, Wright traveled to England and opened a unbeaten wax museum. Wright became known as the “Promethean modeller,” for her New World equality and often coarse speech as well as her artwork. She was patronized by George III, and sculpted him and other members of British royalty and nobility, but fell from royal favor because of her open support for the colonial cause during the American Revolution. It is commonly believed that Wright provided her rebellious former compatriots with intelligence related to British war preparations. Wright’s sculpture of friend William Pitt still stands in Westminster Abbey.





John Singleton Copley - American artist


John Singleton Copley was the son of an Irish migrant named Richard Copley and his wife Mary Singleton Copley. His parents owned and ran a tobacco shop in Boston. By 1748, Richard Copley had died, though the perfect date of this is also unfamiliar, but on May 22, 1748, Mary Copley married Peter Pelham, an engraver and teacher, and moved with her son to a quieter and more reputable part of Boston. John Singleton Copley was only about 13 years old in 1751 when his stepfather, Peter Pelham, died.


In 1774, Copley migrated to England to persist painting there. He moved on to Paris, Genoa and Rome before returning to London nine months later (1).


He began to specialize in historical narrative scenes which are sometimes dismissed by critics as lacking the vibrancy of his earlier portraits and joined the leading artistic institution, the Royal Academy of Art. Copley verified a genius, in both his American and British periods, for rendering face textures and capturing emotional immediacy. He died in London in 1815.





Gunther Gerszo - mexican artist


Gunther Gerzso Wendland (June 17, 1915 - April 21, 2000) was a Mexican artist and theater/film set and costume designer. Although comparatively unknown outside the art cognoscenti, is viewed by some critics as similar to Pablo Picasso and Joaquin Torres Garcia. He is “one of the best Latin American painters,” according to Octavio Paz, the Nobel Prize-winning Mexican author.


Born in Mexico City, Gerzso’s father, Oscar, was a watchmaker from Budapest, Hungary; his mother, Dore Wendland, a lead singer and a pianist from Berlin, Germany. His father died just six months after he was born. His mother then married another emigrant, the German owner of a well-liked jewelry store. He lost his business during the Mexican Revolution, and in 1922 the family moved to Europe.


In 1924 they returned to Mexico. After his mother divorced her second husband, during her subsequent financial uncertainty she decided to send Gunther, then 12, to live with her brother, Hans Wendland, an important art historian and dealer in Lugano, Switzerland. Wendland sold works by Rembrandt, Cézanne, and Titian, and Gerzso recalled paintings by Bonnard and Delacroix on the walls of his bedroom. Among the important visitors of the Wendland’s was Nando Tamberlani, an Italian stage set designer who became friends with Gerszo while living on the estate for a summer.



Oscar González Loyo - Mexican artist


Oscar Gonzalez Loyo, born April 11th, 1959 in Mexico City; is a comic book artist mostly known for his establishment Karmatrón y Los Transformables and creator along with his father and wife, Susana Romero, of ¡Ka-Boom! Estudio in 1994.


He is the son of Oscar González Guerrero, legendary Mexican comic book master.
As a child he was influenced by the work of Mexican comic book artists that frequented his home like Héctor Macedo, as well as from Walt Disney, Osamu Tezuka, Bill Hanna, Joe Barbera, Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng and Robert McKimson.


At age 14 he became a professional artist for Las Aventuras de Capulina.


Over the years, he has worked in titles like Las Aventuras de Cepillín, Las Aventuras de Parchís, Katy la Oruga, El Monje Loco, The Flintstones, The New Speed Racer, Tiny Toons, Looney Tunes, The Simpsons Comics and Bart Simpson Comics.


From 1996-2000 he was the Animation Director for Sesame Street Latin america.
In the year 2000, he became the first Mexican to win an Eisner Award at Comic-Con International for his job on Simpson’s Comics.



Benjamin West - American artist


Benjamin West (October 10, 1738 – March 11, 1820) was an Anglo-American painter of historical scenes around and after the time of the American War of Independence. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania as the tenth kid of an innkeeper. West told John Galt, with whom, late in his life, he collaborated on a journal, The Life and Studies of Benjamin West (1816, 1820) that, when he was a child, Native Americans showed him how to make paint by combination of some clay from the river bank with bear grease in a pot. Benjamin West was an autodidact; while excelling at the arts, “he had little [formal] education and, even when president of the Royal Academy, could scarcely spell”(Hughes, 70). From 1746 to 1759, West worked in Pennsylvania, mostly painting portraits.


In 1763, West moved to England, where he was commissioned by King George III to generate portraits of members of the royal family. The king himself was twice painted by him. He painted his most famous and possibly most influential painting, The Death of General Wolfe, in 1770, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1771. Although at first snubbed by Reynolds and others as over ambitious, the painting became one of the most frequently reproduced images of the period.


As painted by Gilbert Stuart, 1783-84In 1772, King George appointed him historical artist to the court at a yearly fee of £1,000. West became friends with the English portraitist Sir Joshua Reynolds and founded the Royal Academy of Arts with Reynolds in 1768. He was the second leader of the Royal Academy from 1792 to 1805. He was re-elected in 1806 and was president until his death in 1820. He was Surveyor of the King’s Pictures from 1791 until his death.



Rodolfo Morales - Mexican artist


Rodolfo Morales (May 8, 1925 - Jan 30, 2001) was a surrealist Mexican painter.


Morales are best known for his brightly coloured surrealistic dream-like canvases and collages frequently featuring Mexican women in village settings.



He was famous for his restoration of historic buildings in Ocotlan, Mexico and together with Rufino Tamayo and Francisco Toledo, helped make Oaxaca in Southern Mexico a centre for contemporary art and sightseeing. Up until his death in 2001, both he and Toledo had been regarded as Mexico’s best living artists for over a decade.



Charles Willson Peale - American artist


Charles Willson Peale (April 15, 1741 – February 22, 1827) was an American painter, fighter and natural scientist. Peale was born in Chester, Queen Anne’s County, Maryland the son of Charles Peale and his wife Margaret. In 1749 his brother James Peale (1749-1831) was born. Charles became an trainee to a saddle maker when he was thirteen years old. Upon reaching maturity, he opened his own saddle store; however, when his Loyalist creditors discovered he had joined the Sons of Liberty organization, they conspired to bankrupt his business.


Finding that he had a talent for painting, especially portraitures, Peale studied for a time under John Hesselius and John Singleton Copley; eventually friends raised enough money for him to travel to England to take instruction from Benjamin West.


He also had a huge interest in natural history, and organized the first U.S. scientific journey in 1801. These two major interests combined in his founding of what became the Philadelphia Museum, and was later renamed the Peale Museum. This museum was stocked with artwork supplied by Peale, as well as artifacts of natural history, such as a mastodon skeleton found on the first outing. After his death, the museum was sold to, and split up by, showmen P. T. Barnum and Moses Kimball.


Fernando Ortega - Mexican artist


Fernando Ortega is an adult contemporary singer-songwriter in contemporary Christian music. He is noted for his interpretations of traditional hymns and songs, such as “Give Me Jesus”, “Be Thou My Vision”, and many others, but also for writing clear and accessible songs, such as “This Good Day”.


Fernando grew up in a village near the banks of the Rio Grande. His family lived in Chimayo, New Mexico for eight generations; his music is influenced by those roots.From all this heritage, from his classical training at University of New Mexico, and varied life experiences, this turned into a unique sound that embraces country, classical, Celtic, Latin American, world music, modern folk and rustic hymnody.




James Peale - American artist


James Peale (1749-May 24, 1831) was an American artist, best known for his tiny and still life paintings, and a younger brother of noted artist Charles Willson Peale.


Peale was born in Chestertown, Maryland, the second child, after Charles, of Charles Peale (1709–1750) and Margaret Triggs (1709–1791). His father died when he was a child, and the family moved to Annapolis. In 1762 he began to supply apprenticeships there, first in a saddlery and later in a cabinetmaking store. After his brother Charles returned from London in 1769, where he had studied with Benjamin West, Peale served as his assistant and learned how to paint.


The total number of Peale’s landscape paintings remains indefinite, but he executed more than 200 watercolor miniatures on ivory, perhaps 100 still-life paintings, less than 70 oil portraits, and at least 8 history paintings.


Peale died in Philadelphia on May 24, 1831. Three of his six kids became talented painters: Anna Claypoole Peale (1798–1871), a miniaturist and still-life artist; Margaretta Peale (1795–1882), painter of trompe l’oeil subjects and tabletop fruit; and Sarah Miriam Peale (1800–1885), a portraitist and still-life painter




Gabriel Orozco – Mexican artist


Gabriel Orozco is a Mexican post minimalist artist. He was born in Jalapa, Veracruz, Mexico and educated in the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas between 1981 and 1984. He then sustained his education in Madrid at the Circulo de Bellas Artes between 1986 and 1987.


Exploring the use of video, drawings, and installations in addition to his photographs and sculptures, Orozco allows the audience’s imagination to explore the imaginative associations between oft-ignored objects in today’s world. His work permits a rarely allowed interface between the artwork and the audience.


For instance, visitors at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, California could play a four person game of table tennis on Orozco’s Ping Pond Table (1998). The work’s center is a lily pond with four semi-circular ping pong table pieces set in a clover shape approximately it.




Ralph Earl – American artist


Ralph Earl (May 11, 1751 - Aug 16, 1801) was an American historical and portrayal painter. Ralph Earl was an itinerant artist who decorated at least 183 individual portraits and six landscapes, including a panorama display of Niagara Falls.


Ralph Earl was born in either Shrewsbury or Leicester, Massachusetts. By 1774, he was working in New Haven, Connecticut as a portrait painter. In the autumn of 1774, Earl returned to Leicester, Massachusetts to marry his cousin, Sarah Gates. A few months later, their daughter was born; though, Earl left them both with Sarah’s parents and returned to New Haven.
Like so many of the colonial craftsmen, Earl was self-taught, and for several years was an itinerant painter. In 1775, Earl visited Lexington and Concord, which were the sites of new battles in the American Revolution. Together with engraver Amos Doolittle, he painted four of his most well-known pictures, all battle scenes.


In London, he entered the studio of Benjamin West, and decorated the king and many notables. Earl continued painting portraits in the town of Norwich. He later married Ann Whiteside, an English woman, despite the fact that he had never ended his marriage ceremony with Sarah Gates. In 1785 or 1786, Earl returned to the United States with his new wife.




Manuel Rocha Iturbide - Mexican Artist


Manuel Rocha Iturbide was born in 1963 in Mexico City; he started musical studies when he was 13 years old. In 1983, after studying musical pedagogy in Lyon France for one year, he determined to start a career as composer at the “Escuela National de Musical” of the University of Mexico. The enormously academic and traditional studies in that institution led him to explore different creative ways beyond instrumental music and so he practiced photography at “Taller de los Lunes”, a workshop organized by Mexican digital photography pioneer Pedro Meyer.


In 1988 he started using video work and in 1989 he realized his first sound sculpture at the mild stone exhibition “14 artists around Joseph Beuyce” in Mexico City along with significant Mexican artists from his generation such as Gabriel Orozco. In 1989 Rocha Iturbide travels to USA to the University Mills College in order to pursue an MFA in electronic music. There, he composes “Frost Clear”, a piece for enlarged refrigerator, double bass and electronic sounds that has been played by him through the years in different important festivals such as the “San Francisco electronic Music Festival” in 2006. In 1991, Rocha Iturbide travels to France where he studies and works as a researcher at IRCAM, and where he peruses his doctoral thesis on grainy synthesis and Quantum Mechanics in relation to sound from 1992 to 1999.


In these years, Manuel Rocha Iturbide worked with Curtis Roads and Barry Truax, two of the most important pioneers on granular synthesis computer music techniques. In 1999 the president of the jury of his doctoral thesis defense was Jean Claude Risset (The name of his thesis was “The granular synthesis techniques”). The influence of this research can be seen in different electroacustic works of this composer: “Transiciones de Fase” for brass quintet and electronic sounds (1994), Moin MOR for electronic sounds (1995), SL-9 for electronic sounds (1994), etc. At his return to Mexico after 7 years abroad, Manuel Rocha Iturbide devoted himself to sound art, being one of its pioneers and biggest promoters




Gilbert Stuart - American Artist


Gilbert Charles Stuart was born in Stewart on December 3, 1755 - July 9, 1828 was an American painter. Born in Saunderstown, Rhode Island, he grew up in Newport and was tutored by Cosmo Alexander, a Scottish painter. Stuart moved to Scotland with Alexander in 1771 to finish his studies. His mentor died in Edinburgh the following year. Attempting briefly and without success to earn a living as a painter, he returned to Newport in 1773. Stuart’s prospects as a portraitist were jeopardized by the onset of the American Revolution and its social disruption.


Following the example set by John Singleton Copley, Stuart departed for England in 1775. Unsuccessful at first in pursuit of his vocation, he then became a protégé of Benjamin West, with whom he studied for the after that six years. The relationship was a useful with Stuart exhibiting at the Royal Academy as early as 1777. By 1782 Stuart had met with success, mainly due to acclaim for “The Skater,” a portrait of William Grant. At one point the prices for his pictures were exceeded only by those of Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough.


In spite of his many commissions, however, Stuart was habitually neglectful of finances and was in danger of being sent to debtors’ prison. In 1787 he fled to Ireland, where he painted and accumulated debt with equal vigor. In 1803 Stuart open a studio in Washington, D. C. By the end of his career he had taken the likenesses of over a thousand American political figures.


He was praised for the vitality and naturalness of his portraits, and his subjects found his company agreeable. “Speaking generally,” said John Adams, “no penance is like having one’s picture done. You must sit in a constrained and unnatural position, which is a trial to the temper. But I should like to sit to Stuart from the first of January to the last of December, for he lets me do just what I please, and keeps me continually amused by his conversation.” Stuart worked without the aid of sketches, beginning directly upon the canvas.





Gilbert Stuart - American Artist

Gilbert Charles Stuart was born in Stewart on December 3, 1755 - July 9, 1828 was an American painter. Born in Saunderstown, Rhode Island, he grew up in Newport and was tutored by Cosmo Alexander, a Scottish painter. Stuart moved to Scotland with Alexander in 1771 to finish his studies. His mentor died in Edinburgh the following year. Attempting briefly and without success to earn a living as a painter, he returned to Newport in 1773. Stuart’s prospects as a portraitist were jeopardized by the onset of the American Revolution and its social disruption.


Following the example set by John Singleton Copley, Stuart departed for England in 1775. Unsuccessful at first in pursuit of his vocation, he then became a protégé of Benjamin West, with whom he studied for the after that six years. The relationship was a useful with Stuart exhibiting at the Royal Academy as early as 1777. By 1782 Stuart had met with success, mainly due to acclaim for “The Skater,” a portrait of William Grant. At one point the prices for his pictures were exceeded only by those of Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough.


In spite of his many commissions, however, Stuart was habitually neglectful of finances and was in danger of being sent to debtors’ prison. In 1787 he fled to Ireland, where he painted and accumulated debt with equal vigor. In 1803 Stuart open a studio in Washington, D. C. By the end of his career he had taken the likenesses of over a thousand American political figures.


He was praised for the vitality and naturalness of his portraits, and his subjects found his company agreeable. “Speaking generally,” said John Adams, “no penance is like having one’s picture done. You must sit in a constrained and unnatural position, which is a trial to the temper. But I should like to sit to Stuart from the first of January to the last of December, for he lets me do just what I please, and keeps me continually amused by his conversation.” Stuart worked without the aid of sketches, beginning directly upon the canvas.









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Remedios Varo - Mexican artist



Remedios Varo was born in December 16, 1908 - October 8, 1963 was a surrealist painter. She was born in Anglés Cataluña, Spain in 1908 and died from a heart-attack in Mexico City in 1963. During the Spanish Civil War she flees to Paris where she was mainly prejudiced by the surrealist movement. She met in Barcelona the French surrealist poet Benjamin Péret and became his wife. She was compulsory into banish from Paris during the Nazi profession of France and moved to Mexico City at the end of 1941. She at first considered Mexico a temporary haven, but would remain in Latin America for the rest of her life.


In Mexico she met inhabitant artists such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. However, her strongest ties would be to other exiles and expatriates, and particularly her extraordinary friendship with the English painter Leonora Carrington. Her last major relationship would be with Walter Gruen, an Austrian who had endured concentration camps before escaping Europe. Gruen believed severely in Varo, and gave her the support that allowed her to fully concentrate on her painting.


After 1949 Varo developed into her mature and extraordinary style, which remains beautifully enigmatic and instantly recognizable. She often worked in oil on Masonite panels she ready herself. Although her colors have the blend resonance of the oil medium, her brushwork often concerned many fine strokes of paint laid closely together - a technique more reminiscent of egg tempera. She died at the height of her career.
Her work continues to achieve successful retrospectives at major sites in Mexico and the United States.

William Rush - American artist


William Rush (1756 - 1833) was a U.S. neoclassical sculptor from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is measured the first major American sculptor.


He was qualified in the carving of ships’ heads in wood. This translates into sculptures that were deeply undercut and able to be seen from far away through the dramatic use of contrast and strong shadows. Rush blended American artisan tradition and neoclassical form.


Rush was one of the first to make outdoor public sculpture in the U.S. His Comedy and Tragedy was carved in 1808 for the New Theater on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia intended by Benjamin Latrobe. His Water Nymph and Bittern was created in 1809 for a Philadelphia waterworks that was also planned by Latrobe.


His statue of George Washington, imprinted in wood, is in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Rush helped found the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, viewing his interest in art beyond the American craft tradition.


Mather Brown - American artist


Mather Brown was born in christened October 11, 1761–May 25, 1831 was a portrait and historical painter, born in Boston, Massachusetts but active in England.


Brown was the son of Gawen and Elizabeth (Byles) Brown, and descended from the Rev. amplify Mather on his mother’s side. He was trained by his aunt and around 1773 (age 12) became a pupil of Gilbert Stuart. He at home in London in 1781 to further his training in Benjamin West’s studio, enter the Royal Academy schools in 1782 with plans to be a miniature painter, and begin to exhibit a year later.


In 1784 he painted two religious paintings for the church of St Mary’s-in-the-Strand, which led Brown to found a company with the painter Daniel Orme for the commercialization of these and other works through display and the sale of engravings. Among these were large paintings of scenes from English history, as well as scenes from Shakespeare’s plays. However, despite their success he began to concentrate on portraiture. His first successes were with American sitters, among others his patron John Adams and family in 1784–85; this painting is now in the Boston Athenaeum. In 1785–86 he painted the first representation of Thomas Jefferson, who was visiting London. He also painted Sir William Pepperell.


His 1788 full-length portrait of Prince Frederick Augustus in the uniform of Colonel of the Cold stream Guards led to meeting as History and Portrait Painter to the Prince, later the Duke of York and Albany. Other paintings include the Prince of Wales, later George IV (about 1789), Queen Charlotte, and Cornwallis. A self-portrait now belongs to the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.


A falling off of support in the mid-1790s, and failure to be elected to the Royal Academy, led Brown to leave London in 1808 for Bath, Bristol, and Liverpool. He established in Manchester, returning to London almost two decades later, in 1824, where, even after West’s death, he continued to imitate his teacher’s style of painting. Unable to secure commissions, Brown eventually died in poverty in London on May 25, 1831.

John Brewster, Jr. - American artist


John Brewster Jr. (May 30 or May 31, 1766–1854) was a productive, deaf-mute traveling painter who produced many charming portraits of well-off New England families, particularly their children. He lived much of the latter half of his life in Buxton, Maine, footage the faces of much of Maine’s elite society of his time.According to the website of the Fennimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York, Brewster was not an artist who by the way was Deaf but rather a Deaf artist, one in a long custom that owes many of its skin and achievements to the fact that Deaf people are, as scholars have noted, visual people.


Family and early life


Little is known about Brewster’s childhood or adolescence. He was the third child born in Hampton, Connecticut, to Dr. John and Mary (Durkee) Brewster. His mother died while he was 17. His father remarried Ruth Avery of Brooklyn, Connecticut, and they went on to have four more children.John Brewster Sr., a doctor and descendant of William Brewster, the Pilgrim manager, was a member of the Connecticut General Assembly and also vigorous in the local church.


Work as a deaf artist


Brewster probably communicates with others using pantomime and a small amount of writing. For an display of Brewster’s work, the Florence Griswold Museum describe what being a deaf portraitist would have meant in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in the United States: It is astounding then that Brewster traveled great distances, sometimes in areas that were unfamiliar, negotiated prices, decided poses and artistic ideas with his sitters, as well as living in the middle of his sitters of weeks or months at a time.Being deaf also may have given Brewster some advantages in portrait painting, according to the museum exhibit web page: unable to hear and speak, Brewster listening carefully his energy and ability to imprison minute differences in facial expression. He also greatly emphasizes the gaze of his sitters, as eye contact was such a critical part of communication among the Deaf. Scientific studies have proven that since Deaf people rely on visual cues for announcement [they] can differentiate delicate differences in facial expressions much better than hearing people.







Washington Allston - American artist


Washington Allston Washington Allston was born in November 5, 1779 - July 9, 1843 was a U.S. poet and significant painter, born in Waccamaw, South Carolina. Allston pioneer America’s Romantic group of landscape painting. He was well known throughout his lifetime for his experiments with dramatic subject matter and his bold use of light and atmospheric color.
Education and travel


Allston graduated from Harvard College in 1800, and then sails to Europe, where he exhausted the next three years studying art at the Royal Academy in London, England, of which the Anglo-American painter Benjamin West was then the president.


From 1803 to 1808 he visited the great museums of Paris and for a number of years those of Italy, where he met Coleridge, his lifelong friend. Samuel F. B. Morse was one of Allston’s art pupils and accompanies Allston to Europe in 1811. After wandering throughout Western Europe, Allston finally settled in London, where he won reputation and prizes for his pictures. He was the uncle of the artists George Whiting Flagg and Jared Bradley Flagg, both of whom intentional in painting under him.


Recognition
Flourmill’s Flight, 1819.Allston was from time to time called the “American Titian” because his style resembles the great Venetian Renaissance artists in their display of dramatic color contrast. His work greatly prejudiced the development of U.S. landscape painting. Also, the themes of many paintings were strained from literature, especially Biblical stories.


His artistic mastermind was much accepted by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Ralph Waldo Emerson was strongly influenced by his paintings and poems, but so were both Sophia Peabody-who married Nathaniel Hawthorne-and Margaret Fuller. Allston also wrote a good deal of verse including The Sylphs of the Seasons (1813) and The Two Painters, a send-up. He also shaped a novel, Monaldi.In 1818 he returns to the United States and live in Cambridge, Massachusetts for 25 years, where he died on July 9, 1843, at age 64.

Impressionist paintings are suddenly back in vogue




The world’s greatest art collectors met in London for the annual spring auctions of Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary Art.


Unlike past years, conservative taste dominated the new rich of Europe and Asia, some might call them trophy hunters. Instantly recognizable names such as Modigliani and Picasso took center stage and grabbed the most interest.


According to the New York Times, some experts say the auction results were good news for the art world. “The market is showing a return to reason,” said James Roundell, a London dealer. “After years of escalating prices for artists barely out of school, Impressionist paintings are suddenly back in vogue.”


The rejuvenated interest in the Impressionistic and Modern art comes after the big numbers paid for contemporary art in recent years. Now, the Old Masters works seem like bargains.
The works that grabbed most of the attention were a Modigliani 1919 portrait of the artist’s mistress and muse that sold for $30.1 million. An 1895 Degas pastel sold for $12.4 million. A flowery Renoir landscape from 1873 sold for $9.1 million. An 1881 Cézanne landscape was sold for $7.6 million. The top modern piece was a 1969 Picasso, “Seated Man With a Pipe and Cupid.” The hammer fell at $7.1 million.


Solomon Willard - American artist




Solomon Willard (June 2, 1783, Peter sham, Massachusetts – 1861) was a carver and designer in Massachusetts who is remembered primarily for designing and overseeing the Bunker Hill Monument, the first monumental obelisk erected in the United States. He designed it in 1825, and structure began in 1827. Willard exposed satisfactory granite quarries for the stone at Quincy, and the granite for the monument came from there.


Willard also make-believe the machinery to cut and hold the slabs of stone in what became known as the Bunker Hill Quarry, which evolved into a major industry for the town. To get the cut slabs to a wharf on the Neponset River, a reserve of two and three-quarters miles, the first commercial railway in the United States was built — the Granite Railway — over which, on the morning of October 7, 1826, the first horse-drawn cars passed, under the way of a young engineer by the name of Gridley Bryant.


Willard taught as a carpenter with his father, a farmer who did carpentry in the winters; he went to Boston in 1804, work during the day and reading books of architecture and drawing in the evenings. His handiness as a carver enhanced so rapidly that he was employed for carved architectural details for many important late Federal and Greek revival buildings in Boston, the Ionic and Corinthian capitals for the steeple of Park Street Church, built in 1810 and in the same year he carved the eagle for the pediment of the new Custom House. In 1818 he made a model of the capitol at Washington for Charles Bullfinch, than busy on the Massachusetts State House, and later did several works of this sort, among which were models of the Pantheon and the Parthenon for Edward Everett. From wood carving he twisted to stone carving, and in 1820 was engaged on the Ionic capitals and other stonework of the Episcopal St Paul's Church, the first illustration of Greek revival architecture in Boston. By 1821 Willard had become so victorious that he gave classes in architecture and drawing in his studio near St Paul's; there Horatio Greenough was a pupil. Willard added ship figureheads to his craft, from 1823.


In Framingham, Massachusetts, Willard's First Baptist Church of 1826 still stands, at the present the oldest building in the town. The Norfolk County law court in Dedham, Massachusetts is also his work. In the similar year he was also architect of Divinity Hall, Harvard Divinity School. Willard also designed the Greek Revival Framingham Village Hall. The Gothic Revival Mission Church of St. John the Evangelist on Bowdoin Street, Boston, dated to 1831, is also possibly his design.He is credited with designing some of the first hot-air central heating in an American building. In 1829 his recent pupil, the brilliant young architect Isaiah Rogers, considered the innovative Tremont House in Boston. This was the first American hotel to have indoor plumbing and it became the prototype of a modern, first-class American hotel.


In 1865 William W. Wheildon wrote a Memoir of Solomon Willard, Architect and Superintendent of the Bunker Hill Monument published by the Massachusetts: Monument Association, which is the primary source for his biographers.

Thomas Sully - American artist




Thomas Sully (June 19, 1783 – November 5, 1872) was a well-known American (English-born) painter, frequently of portraits.
Life and career
Sully was born in Horn castle, Lincolnshire, England, to the actors Matthew and Sarah Sully. In March 1792 the Sullys and their nine children immigrated to Richmond, Virginia, where Thomas's uncle manages a theater. The boys attend school in New York City until 1794, when his mother died and he returns to Richmond. By July of that year the family was in Charleston, South Carolina. After a brief apprenticeship to an insurance broker who recognized his creative talent, at age 12 or thereabouts Sully begin painting and considered with his brother-in-law Jean Belzons (active 1794–1812), a French miniaturist, until they had a falling-out in 1799. He then returned to Richmond to learn "miniature & Device painting" from his elder brother Lawrence Sully (1769–1804). After Lawrence Sully's death, Thomas Sully married his sister-in-law, Lawrence's widow, Sarah Annis Sully and not only take on the raising of Lawrence's children but have a further nine children with Sarah himself. Among the children were Alfred Sully, Mary Chester Sully (Mrs John Neagle), Jane Cooper Sully Darley, Blanche, Rosalie Sully, and Thomas Wilcocks Sully.
Sully became a professional painter at age 18 in 1801. He studied face-painting under Gilbert Stuart in Boston for three weeks. After some time in Virginia with this brother, Sully inspired to New York, after which he moved to Philadelphia in 1806, where he resides for the remainder of his life. In 1809 he travels to London for nine months of learn under Benjamin West.
Sully's 1824 portraits of John Quincy Adams, who became President within the year, and then the Marquis de Lafayette appear to have brought him to the forefront of his day. His Adams portrait may be seen in the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Many famous Americans of the day had their portraits painted by him. In 1837-1838 he was in London to paint Queen Victoria at the demand of Philadelphia's St. George's Society. His daughter Blanche assisted him as the Queen's "stand-in", modeling the Queen's costume when she was not obtainable. One of Sully's portraits of Thomas Jefferson is own by the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society at the University of Virginia and hangs in that school's Rotunda. Another Jefferson portrait, this one head-to-toe, hangs at West Point.
Sully's own index indicate that he produced 2631 paintings from 1801, most of which are now in the United States. His style resembles that of Thomas Lawrence. Though best known as a portrait painter, Sully also made past pieces and landscapes. An example of the former is the 1819 Passage of the Delaware, now on show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Sully died in Philadelphia on November 5, 1872, where he had spent the greater part of his long and successful career. He is buried in the Laurel Hill burial ground. His book Hints to young painters was published after his death. Sully was a great-uncle of the New Orleans-based architect, also named Thomas Sully (1855-1939).


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What is it about Coffee and Creativity?


More than Coffee was served”… that is the name of the new exhibition at the Gallery St. Etienne, celebrating “the role of the coffeehouse as both hangout and inspiration” for artists throughout history.

Either the coffee or the coffee house causes the artists of recent and of old to create and articulate great art. That correlation in itself is fascinating. Even the deranged Van Gogh, used Café Scenes as inspiration. The Earless café that he painted in his famous Café Terrace at Night painting is now a Mecca for South of France tourists.

Not so well known as a Café-patron, Gustav Klimt is a great example of a European artist that spent many hours on the café front, sipping on a latte and drawing loosely on his sketch pad “balanced between his knees.”
So, drink up a Cup of Joe and head down to the Gallery St. Etienne and celebrate the intriguing relationship between Art and caffeine.


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