Category: 131

Vanessa Stockard is a renowned contemporary Australian painter. She is known for whimsical and weird atmospheres paired with a mischievous levity in her work. Stockard was born in 1975 in a small town in Australia. She spent most of her childhood engaged in creative past times such as drawing and playing the piano. Both her mother and grandmother were painters and she commonly frequented art galleries. She graduated from the College of Fine Arts in Sydney in 1998 with a BFA. She then kicked off her career by exhibiting both locally and internationally. She has been described by her contemporaries and critics as one of the most dangerous artists in the Australian and international scene.

Stockard’s art is rife with colour and texture. Her paintings have a unique way of eliciting people’s emotions may they be unsettled or swooning from the cuteness. Stockard has been noted to say her art is mainly inspired by her slow country life. She really strikes a chord with her audience, drawing them into her weird but quiet world.

Stockard is most known for her reoccurring character she sneaks into her art, the cat Kevin! She grew up with a black cat and finds that cats are endlessly amusing. Kevin isn’t based on a real cat but instead one day she mistook a sock as a cat from a distance and that was the illogical inspiration for Kevin.

I personally really love Stockard’s entire line of work. My favourite works of hers is the Kevin series! I think Kevin captures the ethos of cats perfectly and his round, expressive eyes remind me of my cat. I think the fact that I saw her art passing by one day years ago and her work sticking with me this whole time is a testament to how charming and memorable her paintings are.

References

Kalvelytė, J. (2021, December 12). Vanessa Stockard: Metal magazine. English. Retrieved December 12, 2021, from https://www.metalmagazine.eu/en/post/interview/vanessa-stockard.

Vanessa Stockard. JEFA Gallery. (n.d.). Retrieved December 12, 2021, from https://www.jefagallery.com/artists/vanessa-stockard/.

Françoise Gilot is a French cubist painter, she was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a commune in France in 1921. Today she is still alive and painting at age ninety-nine! Gilot’s father was a strict businessman while her mother was a watercolour painter. At a young age Gilot knew she wanted to be a painter, but her father was against this notion and pushed her into law. She started law school in her late teens. Gilot then dropped out when the Germans invaded Paris for security reasons but also to follow her true passion in art. Gilot met Picasso in a café in 1943, she was twenty-one while he was in his sixties. They started an affair that lasted ten years and had two children. But Picasso grew to be tyrannical and abusive, so Gilot chose to end it. She was notably his only mistress to be the one to walk away from him, in retaliation Picasso drove her out of France by badmouthing her to the whole industry. To escape Picasso’s influence, she moved to America and ever since has enjoyed a successful career and life.

Gilot’s art is bold and confident, much like the artist herself. She tends to gravitate making primary colours the star of the show. Many ask her if Picasso was her main influence, but she has asserted that she only studied his art as much as any other painter at the time. If anything, meeting Picasso made her retract into her own style. Picasso’s biographer John Richardson has corroborated this saying: “Picasso took from her rather more than she took from him.”.

My favourite piece of hers is this portrait. I’m drawn to her use of contrasting blue and yellow, the added square patterns is also very eye catching and interesting.

References

© Boris Lipnitzki / Studio Lipnitzki / Roger-Viollet. (2020, October 9). At home with Françoise Gilot. Curbed. Retrieved November 22, 2021, from https://www.curbed.com/2020/10/inside-artist-franoise-gilots-apartment-and-art-studio.html.

Françoise Gilot. Artnet.com. (n.d.). Retrieved November 22, 2021, from http://www.artnet.com/artists/fran%C3%A7oise-gilot/.

Guardian News and Media. (2016, June 10). ‘it was not a sentimental love’: Françoise gilot on her years with Picasso. The Guardian. Retrieved November 22, 2021, from https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jun/10/francoise-gilot-artist-love-picasso.

Jean-Frédéric Bazille was an aspiring painter and a largely forgotten member in the friend circle of notable impressionist painters such as Monet, Renoir, and Sisley. They’ve been noted to travel, work, and share studios together. Although Bazille is not often recalled in art history, he played a large part in the formation of the impressionist movement as he was active in the centre of it all. 

Bazille was born in 1841 in a city in France called Montpellier. He was born into a wealthy but strict family which would play a large part in his ethos as an artist. His father forced him into medical school which made Bazille miserable. The depressed Bazille attended med school until 1864 where he failed his exams and promptly dropped out. Monet was elated with this development while his father predictably was less amused. His father relented to letting Bazille pursue his dream as a painter but kept control of his finances.

My personal favorite aspect of his art is his intuitive sense of colours and eye for texture. It’s most prominent in his nature focused art where he uses vivid hues and delicate but loose brush strokes.

Tragically, in 1870 Bazille died in the Franco-German war, three months after one of his paintings, “Summer Scene Bathers” finally got into the Paris Salon. He only painted for seven years before dying at the young age of twenty-eight. His friends would later move on to lead the next movement impressionism, but Bazille never had the chance to flourish with them. His life was cruelly cut short when he just started succeeding in art and overcoming the hurdle of his unsupportive parents.

A man of many talents, Pierre de Cortone was an Italian decorator, architect, and painter. Living as a multifaceted creative person through the Baroque period, Pierre was best known for designing a church called “Santi Luca e Martina” and his work on a ceiling fresco at Barberini Palace. 

           Pierre was born in a town in Italy called Cortona, and studied under his father who was a stonemason during his childhood. He then moved to Florence to train as a painter with the Florentine painters Andrea Commodi and Baccio Ciarpi as teachers. His main artistic influence was Raphael’s work.

One of his first notable works was a commission for the Sacchetti family titled “Rape of the Sabine Women”. The piece itself has a high level of energy and frantic movement, perfectly capturing the horrible event. The expressions on the women juxtaposed to the unempathetic look of the men twists a knife in my chest.

Pietro was known by his contemporaries for his strong sense of colour and a strong sense of perspective. Pietro also held firmly on a philosophy that a history painting should use as many figures needed to give it a dramatic atmosphere, something that one of his rivals Sacchi Andrea vehemently disagreed with.

My favourite piece of his is “Venus as Huntress Appears to Aeneas”. I love the naturalistic colour and style. I think you can get an understanding of Pietro’s acute sense of colour from this painting. The muted colours of the surrounding characters contrasting against Aeneas’s brilliant red cloak draws your eyes to him. I am also fond of the atmosphere the scenery creates, it reminds me of the beginning of autumn. 

Pietro also was appointed head of the Academy of St. Luke in Rome, where he taught many students but his most notable student was Romanelli Giovanni Francesco. Pietro passed on his energetic compositions and love of colour, which is evident in Francesco’s work.

Reference

Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. (n.d.). Pietro da Cortona. Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved October 17, 2021, from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Pietro-da-Cortona.

Pietro Da Cortona (Pietro Berrettini) (1596 – 1669). (1996). In S. West (Ed.), The Bloomsbury Guide to Art. Bloomsbury. Credo Reference: https://ezproxy.capilanou.ca/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/bga/pietro_da_cortona_pietro_berrettini_1596_1669/0?institutionId=6884

Andrea del Sarto was a strictly religious painter who lived through the thick of the High Renaissance. He was an excellent draftsman and his work exhibited characteristics that were popular during the movement. Sarto was well known for his fine detailing, sophisticated colours and dramatic composition. Notably, his art has been said to not photograph well because of the subtlety of his details. Another key aspect of his art was the natural expressions and twisting forms; his style largely influenced the next movement: Mannerism. Sarto’s two most notable pieces were “Madonna of the Harpies” and “Nativity of the Virgin”. He was called “The Faultless Painter” after completing five monochrome frescos depicting the life of St. John for the Servites. Sarto’s most notable student was the great mannerist painter Pontormo, a testament to how influential his work was to the next movement.