Blog Post 3 – Elizabeth Lin

March 5, 2019April 7, 2019

A Good Mixture of Humanity

Boa Mistura:

Boa Mistura is a street art group consisting of 5 artists from Madrid, Spain who decorate public spaces around the world with imaginative ways. Formed in 2001, Madrid, these artists were 15 years old when they first met while painting the walls of their neighbourhood.

The term “Boa Mistura” comes from the Portuguese meaning of “good mixture”, a reference to the diversity of backgrounds and point of views from each member. The members- Javier Serrano Guerra, Juan Jaume Fernández, Pablo Ferreiro Mederos, Pablo Purón Carrillo, and Rubén Martín de Lucas- are a multidisciplinary team with roots in graffiti art. However, in addition to graffiti, they also do mural painting, graphic design, and illustration.

January 25, 2019January 25, 2019

The Golden Age Part 1: Hergé (1907-1938)

Hergé:

Hergé (Georges Prosper Remi) was a Belgian cartoonist who was best known as the creator of the comic series, Adventures of Tintin. One of the most influential comic creators in history, he single handily launched the Belgian comics industry with Adventures of Tintin. He was a master at crafting suspenseful page-turners where humour was never far away and had the latest political, cultural, and scientific inventions of the time mirrored in his work.

Through his comics, he developed his own graphic style, “Ligne Claire” (Clear Line). This style had thin, bright, and clean lines and avoided the use of hatches, shadow effects, or excessive details. This gave his work the clarity of readability. Decades later, when he started adding colours, they were applied in his open outlined areas and were flat and plain. Hergé insisted that his drawings’ line quality formed the true structure of his work, which is why he used a light pastel palette to help his lines stand out and allow more complex images to be easily read.

September 27, 2018September 27, 2018

Baroque: Claude Lorrain

Claude Lorrain:

Claude Lorrain was a French painter of the seventeenth century. He is best known for being one of the greatest masters of ideal landscape painting, an art form that seeks to present nature even more beautiful and harmonious. While his works were tributes to the beauty of nature, they usually represented historical or mythical scenes. Originally, he drew from nature, but around the beginning of 1640, he started to make his compositions more Classical and monumental. Lorrain infused the tradition of idealized landscape painting with observed accuracy and created a new method of landscape painting; he worked outdoors, painting from detailed observation and blending classical idealism with naturalistic detail. He also emphasized the dramatic contrasts of light and shade, giving his paintings a powerful feeling of the ephemeral and eternal. Through these contributions to landscape painting, Lorrain laid the foundations for a historical landscape tradition that dominated French and English paintings for at least the next 150 years, becoming influential in his life as well as in England in the mid-eighteen to mid-nineteenth century.

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