Month: December 2019

Otherwise known as M.L.E. Vigée Le Brun, Madame Lebrun, or Madame Le Brun. She was born in 1755 and died in 1842 at the age of 86. She was primarily known as a portrait painter in the late Rococo period of painting with inspiration from the rising Neoclassicism style of painting. Throughout her career, she had amassed a collection of some 660 portraits and around 200 landscape paintings.

By her teenage years, she had already painted portrait professionally as seen by this painting she did that is titled Portrait of Mohammed Dervish Kahn. In this painting, we can see the Rococo style of painting through the rendering of the smooth, white garment that he is wearing. In other portraits, as featured below, we see the Neoclassical style exemplified through how elegant each portrait is depicted. I very much like this style of painting as I find the lifelike rendering of the subjects an absolute inspiration to my personal style of painting.

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Born in 1962 in Philidelphia, Lisa Yuskavage is a figurative painter who takes major influence from classical painting techniques. Techniques that were in use during the Italian Renaissance as well as Colour Field techniques by such artists, of whom she also took inspiration from, such as Giovanni Bellini, Edgar Degas, and Johannes Vermeer. However, her depictions of her figures within the paintings are done in such a way that I personally like.

In Johannes Vermeer’s work, we typically see strong shadows that are cast on the central subject of the painting. This can be seen in One, Two, Three, the painting displayed above. Over half of the figure is shrouded in shadow with a dim light source coming from the opposite end to illuminate just enough of the shadow for us to see the rest of the body. Unlike many other painters I have examined in the past, I very much like hers just in terms of how she makes her subjects look and how she handles light and colour.

I may be biased in this opinion as I draw my figures in a style that’s very similar to hers, but I still think they’re handled beautifully.

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