Today when we think of women artists, it is inevitably Georgia O
Artist Spotlight
09
September
2010
"The spectacle of the sky overwhelms me. I'm overwhelmed when I see, in an immense sky, the crescent of the moon, or the sun.
25
August
2010
Piet Mondrian was terrible at landscapes. 
In Chicago's Art Institute the Modern Wing holds one of his pre-masterpieces, a muddy landscape depicting a house and a knobby, dying tree. It looks like an amateur Van Gogh. A kindergarden knock-off. Impressionism, was not Mondrian forte. But, he would eventually find his genius. It was hidden in, of course, those blocks of primary color that are at once so perfect, so hard to get our of your head.
A Mondrian is a favorite for interior design. Instantly recognizable and so graphic, a Mondrian is a painting that seems totally okay to have a reproduction of. The paintings have been reproduced millions of times from pop artists to clothing designers.
But don't write it off as just pop or kitch. There is more to the works that meet the naked eye.
02
June
2010
Johannes Vermeer was a painter in the classic sense. 
I don't mean because he painted “light” in the 17th century or because his paintings are super realist with an attention to the mundane. I mean this because when he died he left his family penniless and was a forgotten artist, erased by time, for decades to come.
He was rediscovered in the 19th century and is now considered one of the masters of the Dutch Golden Age. Vermeer led a pretty middle class existence and in his day was regarded as a moderately successful genre painter.
His wife's family had more money than he and she went on to have 14 children. The couple moved in with Vermeer's mother in law, who owned a spacious house. Vermeer went on to paint day in and out on the front room of the second floor.
19
May
2010
I can't decide if Jackson Pollock is totally overrated or actually a bit underrated.
He is a house-hold name, even kids know who Jackson Pollock is. But the name Jackson Pollock, I think, it is often written off as: Oh yeah the splatter painting. Insert eye roll.
But to see a Pollock painting, to stand in front of one, is to witness a rainbow of a composition. One that strikes through the soul in an instant storm of lightning.
Pollock is famous for not painting on the canvas but by dripping paint on the work. Yet his paintings weren't just random splotches of paint thrown here and there, as seems to be thought in passing conversation. Looking at the compositions they are incredibly complex, balanced and exactly how he got the paint on canvas can still incite wonder.
05
May
2010
René Magritte: Some may call him the master of the absurd, I call him the closest thing to a philosopher the art world has ever seen. 
You may know his works as those deliciously impossible paintings: a train coming through a fireplace or the suit without a man. This is how Magritte did surrealism, in dream-like, poetic imagery that carries impact.
He worked in a field of seeming opposites. But his work was actually were a take on the world and the artist's place in the world. His painting, The Treachery of Images exemplifies this idea. The painting is in an almost early-pop art style of pipe and the text below reads “this is not a pipe.” This seems at first glance to be a contradiction, but it is one that is right. It is a painting of a pipe, not a pipe. This could be seen as a comment on realism in art and how the artist can never truly depict the object they are after.
21
April
2010
Paul Klee is hard to classify. His works are instantly recognizable and belong in a category of their own. 
They are abstract, expressionist, Bauhaus, cubist, surrealist but when trying to describe his work one ends up grasping for something more. His work does not fit into any box of art history but rather it seems to be a natural extension of himself.
When stumbling upon his works in museums, the word childlike is sure to appear on many lips. This quality is quite whimsical, romantic and even a bit humorous. It makes it hard to not instantly love Klee.
In his early years, Klee struggled with art-school. Color was the hurdle. He seemed to lack a natural sense of using color, but he continued with art. Klee was also a gifted musician but felt that he had something to add to abstract art not music. It was this element of avant garde in art that excited him, he did not sense this in music.
It was when Klee met famed artist, Kandinsky that he began to open up to the possibilities with color. This turning point reach it's clarity when he quipped “Color has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever. That is the significance of this blessed moment. Color and I are one. I am a painter.”
07
April
2010
In the 1960's English painter, David Hockney fell right into Pop-Art. His work that initially took off was not his paintings, but photographs. 
While other artists used fish-eye lenses and similar tricks to take pictures of an entire room (in order to paint it), Hockney disagreed with this practice, as the image that resulted was warped. Trying for a more realistic view, he began taking multiple polaroids of a single space.
He realized that what resulted was a piece of art in itself, a patchwork narrative of the subject, another dimension to photography. He called the pieces the joiners.
In the early 60's while still in art-school Hockney had a rash of luck in meeting Andy Warhol and getting introduced to the entire pop-art crowd. He was able to sell some work and live for a year in America. But it was not New York that Hockney had set his sights on, California would be it.
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