Goya’s The Family of the Infante Don Luis. I saw it a year or so ago in a Goya exhibition at the National Gallery in DC. It’s a bit obscure, but the moment I saw it, I was attracted to it. I think the part that got me was the guy second from the right, with the bandage on his head, who seems to be smiling at you. It’s like he knows he’s being watched. I also love the fact that Goya put himself into the painting (left foreground).
Rembrandt’s The Mill, also in the National Gallery, is also impressive.
I also like T.E. Breitenbach’s The Temptation of St. Anybody and Proverbidioms. Sure, they owe a lot to Bruegel and Bosch, but they are immensely clever. I was in a meeting room where Temptation was on the wall (full size) and you couldn’t keep your eyes off it. “Proverbidioms” and the sequels are impressive in how many proverbs could be portrayed at one time.
Finally, there’d Dali’s Enigma of Hitler. The web image does not do it justice: the photo of Hitler looks like it was a real photo pasted on.
My favorite painting is Marc Chagall’s I and the Village and I have a big print of it in my office. It took me way longer than it should have to notice the line between the villager’s eye and the creature’s. Man after my own heart
Ah, now I remember the work that Bruegels “The triumph of Death” inspired me to find. It was Bosch’s works that I find Savoldo’s works must have been inspired from. With his nightmarish monsters. “Hell”, “The Temptation of Saint Anthony”, “The Hay Wain” and “The Garden of Earthly Delights”. I have had the opportunity to view all four of these pieces and they are absolutly amazing. I spent hours exploring each piece. Type Bosch in a search and you will see what I mean.
another trip to the philly art museum with my mom and we came across this Pre Raphaelite painting…i can’t remember the name, i dont know the artist, i should have written it all down but i do remember this:
it was Joan of Arc as she was receiving a message from God through an angel. And it was incredible creepy because the angel’s head was poking through these tree branches and everything looked so REAL (except for the shrubs)…Joan looked like she could walk right out of the painting and the angel seemed as though he could speak to someone in the gallery. After a while we couldn’t look at it anymore because the detail (that is so characteristic of Pre Raphaelites) was overwhelming…and we were just getting freaked out, Joan’s face was so - for lack of a better word - spaced out.
incidentally, if anyone can help me find the name or artist of that painting, i would be ever so appriciative. i realize it’s vague but…Pre Raphaelite and Joan Of Arc is the most i can offer you.
When I was interning at the Heinz Center, there was an exhibit featuring the work Croatian born artist Maxo Vanka. There was one absolutely HUGE painting of a leper colony. Naked individuals rotting away-the main figure in the foreground had a face that was half skull.
Here is an article from the Post-Gazette about the exhibit. They don’t show the one I mentioned, but the one that was next to it.
Nothing really beats the feeling of experiencing a picture in the flesh, so to speak. The thing I love about it, is you are mere inches away from genius- something unique to the visual arts, and painting in particular. I love to stand in front of a picture, and look really carefully at all the brushstokes, and imagine the artist standing exactly where I am standing and painting it. Even if the painting is hundreds of years old and the artist long dead, it’s an incredibly intimate moment between artist and viewer.
Works of art I like can have a very powerful effect on me when I see them in a gallery. It’s kind of hard to describe, but it’s like nothing else exists in that moment except me and the painting, and I’m totally drawn into it, and hypnotised by it. Countless works of art have had this effect on me, but the artists most likely to produce it are: Turner, El Greco, Rothko. Of course, by just talking about painting we are limiting ourselves a bit, as the most powerful reaction I’ve ever had to a work of art was when I first laid eyes on Michelangelo’s David. Not the original actually, but the replica in the V and A in London. I was literally awestruck by the sensuous beauty and grace. (I got to see the original a few years later, but it didn’t have nearly such an impact- my heart will forever belong to the copy in London- which kind of contradicts what I said earlier, but hey, I look at art with my heart, not my head.)
There are many paintings I love, but over the years only a few that I truly cannot forget. One, I saw only once, on the cover of a magazine of all places. The artist is Richard Schmid, and the work is called “Nancy Guzik Painting.” I’ve never seen it online, and prints of it are apparently unavailable. I can’t even remember which magazine I saw it on.
What I do know (because I’ve learned it since) is that Nancy Guzik is Schmid’s wife, and is (not surprisingly) also a painter. The painting I saw is a portrait of her, kneeling on the floor, in front of a canvas, brush in hand. It’s such a perfect representation of the artist at work, and at the same time clearly a portrait of love of a husband for his wife. I remember it clearly today, even though I last saw it eight years ago.
The other I used to walk by almost every day, in the window of a small gallery in downtown Seattle. It was a painting of a young girl, about the age of my eldest daughter, drawing at a table, the sun streaming over her shoulder and onto what she was working on. Gorgeous light and shadow, and the resemblance the girl in the painting bore to my own daughter was remarkable. Sadly, the painting was an original, and the price tag was well out of my range… I also neglected to learn the name of the artist.
However, Ragen Mendenhall is one of my favorite artists, and a charming girl to boot. Though I really like a number of her paintings, I find Rosa particularly memorable.
Also Wheat Field Under Threatening Skies by Van Gogh. This was in Los Angeles a few years ago, at the very end of the travelling Van Gogh exhibit. The entire exhibit led up to this painting, hung on the far wall of the final room. My wife and I went through the entire exhibit, using the magic CD player that talks about each painting, and which, in this case, included excerpts from his letters, and from letters by his brother and, I believe, sister. It was very well done, and the result was to cause the final painting to deliver a remarkably intense feeling of . . . . sadness? melancholy? Not quite despair. Really moving, blew me away.
shelbo, I saw a similar exhibit at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, complete with the guided tour by CD leading up to Wheat Field Under Threatening Skies, and it was stunning.
His portraits of the insane and studies of dead bodies and severed heads and limbs are hands down the most chilling images I’ve ever seen in my life (and even the figures in Raft of the Medusa to an extent). They’re beautiful and horrible at the same time. Just amazing.
That sounds a lot like Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc. Not exactly Pre-Raphaelite (since Bastien-Lepage is French, although the painting does have certain similarities with PR paintings by Millais and Holman Hunt), and it’s at the Met rather than the Philadelphia Museum of Art… but it matches your description pretty well. It is an incredibly realistic work–almost photographic in appearance–and is truly unforgettable.
Though I can’t find the exact picture I remember, stuff like this and this by Gerhard Richter blows me away, as does Palle Nielsen’s The Crash (although admittedly not a painting & in a crappy resolution).
BTW, the museum here in town has a graphic research library with prints and drawings by a lot of artists, including an almost complete set of Rembrandt’s prints. You get a librarian to bring what you need from storage in big portfolios, and then you can examine them (under supervision, of course). It was quite an experience to see the Rembrandts that close, even handle them!
I’ll be going back there soon to check if they have any Escher - those are worth seeing ‘in the flesh’.
My best friend would cry with joy to hear so many people speaking well of Edward Hopper. She is somewhat obsessed with him. As a result of rooming with her for several years, I, a fairly art-illiterate ignoramus, know strange and detailed things about Hopper.
One of my favorite works is his Cape Elizabeth, which is a pastel piece. It’s hanging (okay, a print of it is hanging) above my bed. There’s such a peace about it; I love looking at it in the morning.
I also fell in love with Village at Night by Lazzerini, for unknown reasons.
I appear to really like pictures of houses. Wonder what that means … :dubious:
There is one painting in the British National Gallery that I cannot forget. I do not know the title or the artist, but it is of a colonial (1700s) family being entertained by an old man who is suffocating a bird in a vacuum tube to the horror and delight of various family members.
