Basquiat

Starring: Jeffrey Wright, David Bowie, Benicio del Toro, Gary Oldman

Release: 1996

The career of the Neo-expressionist painter Jean-Michel Basquiat is the subject of the film Basquiat, released just seven years after the painter’s death of a heroin overdose. The son of a Puerto Rican mother and Haitian father, Basquiat’s art reflected his ethnic heritage and the New York street scene, incorporating graffiti into his anatomically interested images. The film follows the painter’s uncomfortable journey from homeless street artist to member of the New York art elite.

Basquiat was a part of a circle of artists who incorporated multiple media into their works, and he performed music and DJed, while also selling homemade postcards to support himself early in his career. As the art community started to recognize his unique voice and viewpoint, the film represents him as drifting further away from his friends and musical collaborators, until he is left with very few close relationships. As the film nears its conclusion, Basquiat’s only lasting relationships are with Andy Warhol (played here by David Bowie) and characters played by Benicio del Toro and Gary Oldman.

Goya's Ghosts

Starring: Natalie Portman, Javier Bardem

Release: 2006

From Andrei Rublev, audiences do not really get a coherent and accurate biography of the life of Russia"s most famous painter of icons, but, what they do get is a fairly honest sense of the nature and quality of life Medieval Russia and how that experience is reflected in orthodox art of the period. In Lust of Life, viewers of the film can glean a fairly accurate understanding of the circumstances surrounding and the overall arc of the life of Van Gogh, as long as they don"t get to hung up on the details.Goya"s Ghosts, meanwhile, deals with a plot and story that are complete contrivance -- a made up tale and a good a sordid story. Like the previous two films discussed in this list, the film assumes the premise that the artist, in this case Spain"s Francisco Goya, captures in his unique style the zeitgeist of his era.His surroundings and environment directly influence his work.Yet, Goya"s Ghosts is decidedly more concerned with the year it was released (2005) than it is with 1797, the year in which it is set.

Andrei Rublev

Starring: Anatoly Solonitsyn, Ivan Lapikov

Release: 1971

The first film on the list (which is not ranked; these artist portraits are presented in no particular order) is Andrei Rublev (1966), about the medieval icon portrait painter and Russian Orthodox saint of the same name. Little is known about Rublev, who died in the early 15th century, so the film's director, Andrei Tarkovsky, took the slim facts and expanded from there. Initially the film's religious and political content led the Soviet government to squash its release, but over the next seven years, cut versions made their way to the Cannes Film Festival and throughout the Soviet Union. It was many years before the film was available in its totality – and quite a totality it is, at about three and a half hours long.

My husband studied Andrei Rublev back in college, and I was wary when, before we watched the movie, he announced, "I'm going to warn you – it's a little…tangential. And long." Obviously, a warning like that is unsettling and cryptic to say the least, but it's actually pretty on target.

Night photography with a digital camera can be a very difficult but rewarding. During the holiday season, when days get shorter, we often want to capture photographs of outdoor moments, such as Christmas caroling or our home light displays. However, these desires are often frustrated when all our digital cameras capture is blackness or unintelligible blurs. Depending on the type of camera you own, there are different ways to approach the problem.

Some simple consumer grade cameras come with a preset night mode, but the resulting pictures are oftentimes blurry with streaky color. This effect can be good if you want to pretend to take pictures of ghost or enter an art contest for high schoolers, but it’s less than thrilling for those of us who want to capture an actual moment. An easy solution is to invest in a tripod or monopod, or simply rest the camera on a surface more stable than your hand. A flat, steady surface is a necessity for quality night photography taken on a simple digital camera.

For my work Christmas party last year, we were all invited to bring in a picture of ourselves as children doing something seasonal, for a game of match-the-employee-to-the-childhood-photo. Unsurprisingly, there were a lot of Santa pictures in the mix. What was unexpected, though, was a strange trend that I noticed – of the Santa pictures on the board, very few showed good, sweet children smiling at the camera from Santa’s lap. Instead, most people brought in a picture of a screaming kid trying to wriggle away from a weary St. Nick.

Why, when a bunch of adults went to their parents and requested a festive picture, did they all turn up with photos of themselves hollering and crying? Did none of us ever take normal pictures with Santa? I don’t think that’s the case. No, it seems that somewhere along the line, either my coworkers or -- more likely -- their parents sorted through a stack of old Santa pictures and deemed that the best ones, the ones worth keeping, were the ones where the tiny versions of their adult children look like complete and absolute brats.

Or, more accurately, I think, they picked the pictures where their kids didn’t look unrealistically perfect. They picked the pictures where their kids looked like themselves, skinned knees, runny noses, temper tantrums, and all. And my coworkers themselves, as adults looking back at pictures of themselves pushing a tired old man in the face, picked those pictures over their other options, too. They all preferred a “bad” Santa picture to a “good” one.