Author: mentler
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Giovanni-Battista-Piranesi – Master Draughtman
“Piranesi and the Temples of Paestum: Drawings from Sir John Soane’s Museum,” This is a link to the Newington-Cropsey Cultural Studies Foundation which is an important resource for all artists who share an interest in preserving and promoting cultural lineage. Click the link to read an excellent article by Gail Leggio from American Arts Quarterly.…
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InFORMation
As has been acknowledged many times that Platonian idealism resides beyond nature, and the Aristotelian principle concludes that the ideal can also be found in life. Plato was relying on a knowledge base that would allow the artist to go beyond nature. Aristotle stressed observing life to add inFORMation to one’s memory bank. These are…
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The Nature of Abstraction
There were only a few really great teachers of painting in the 20th century among them Robert Henri and Hans Hofmann. Many would put them in different genres of substantive imagery, but that is not the case. What both men taught was living a life of art, and that painting is pure design. Both were…
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STATE OF THE ART ARTIST MATERIALS
TSOFA TESTED • The Society of Figurative Arts and The Venerable Association of Artists (VAoA) will field test and review artists materials in the TSOFA TEST LAB to provide the Fine Art Professional and serious amateur with the product information they need to make informed purchase decisions. We visit industry trade events such as Namta…
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NONFINITO – The Art of Unfinished
The idea of a finished work of art is very transient and illusive. I once heard the famous sculptor Jacque Lipschitz respond to the question of “how do you know when a work is finisted” his response was “when I stop working on it.” Of course Lipschitz worked in a more abstracted genre which made…
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Beaux-Arts Tradition
CLASSICAL TRADITION “For me a work of art must be an elevated interpretation of nature. The search for the ideal has been the purpose of my life.” – William Adolphe Bouguereau – Not my favorite painter from the Beaux-Arts tradition, but as I have said many times, he and his contemporaries vision of classcism was…
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Saint Petersburg Academy of the Arts (Repin Academy)
There are many schools out there the claim they are teaching in the classical tradition who are not teaching anything remotely close, and have little or no direct linage to those traditions.The Gold Standard in traditional training in Architecture, Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture, with a 250 year linage, is the Repin Academy in Saint Petersburg,…
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Prix de Rome
These are not exactly house hold names and most of them have long since faded away. That’s what happens when you let the state dictate taste. There are a few good painters in the bunch who did decent works apart from official salons and there are those who are enamored with craft and mimesis that champion the history painters of the…
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The Figurative Arts Defined
What is Figurative Art – Here is the Term Definition from the Tate The term has been particularly used since the arrival of abstract art to refer to artists that retain aspects of the real world as their subject matter, though in a general sense figurative also applies retrospectively to all art before abstract art. Modern figurative…
