Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Paint Your Own Masterpiece


Frida Kahlo, Self Portrait
Painted Palette Fine Art Studio and Art Gallery

824 Tenth Street, Huntington, WV 25701

304-416-2081


Paint your own Masterpiece!


Paint your image in a famous portrait painting from history. You will analyze how the master worked and also learn from the master. It’s a very exciting project and you will paint your own masterpiece.

Paint you own Masterpiece
Class - Saturday 11-AM-2 PM

Classes are open registration, which means you can join the oil painting class at any time, but you must register for the class, seating is limited.paintedpaletteartstudioblogspot.com





Vincent van Gogh, Self Portraiti
General Oil Painting Class
Monday, 6-9 PM

*Registration- Open - You can join the Oil Painting class at any time, but you must register for the class, seating is limited. At this time there is (3) - three openings remaining for this class. For more information and to register for the class email  paintedpaletteartstudioblogspot.com. 



Portrait Painting
Saturday -  11 AM-2 PM 

*You can join this class anytime, but you must register for the class, seating is limited.
For more information and to register for the class: paintedpaletteartstudioblogspot.com. 






*(This is an open class, which means you can register at anytime, providing the class is available and is not filled) .


We accept all Credit Cards











Monday, August 4, 2014

Judith Leyster: Women in Art History

Judith Leyster, Self portrait, c 1630

Judith Leyster entered into the Saint Luke’s Guild of Haarlem as an independent master in 1633.  As a master in her own right, a rarity for a female artist at the time, Leyster established her own workshop and had paying students.

Baptized on this day in 1609, Dutch painter Judith Leyster was remarkable.

As a woman living in the seventeenth century, Leyster was a successful artist who liked to paint energetic scenes, had her own studio and taught several students. Leyster’s career flourished prior to her marriage, from the late 1620s to the late 1630s. She was described by a contemporary writer as a “leading star” – a pun on her name which means lodestar or comet.

Upon her death in 1660 Leyster’s name was largely forgotten and her works were attributed to other artists. Since her rediscovery in the 1890s, scholars have been able to re-attribute both signed and unsigned paintings to her hand.

Judith Leyster, "Self-Portrait," c. 1630, oil on canvas http://1.usa.gov/OyrCez

Sunday, August 3, 2014

Seven Legendary Mistresses in Art History

by Graham Fuller, Friday, July 4, 2014

A collection of paintings depicting kept women and mistresses may raise eyebrows since it implies a celebration of female sexuality as a commodity. That is not our intention. The works below offer a range of perspectives on the experience of maintaining a relationship with men who, for whatever reasons, find it convenient to pay for sex. Some of these women are regretful, some are empowered—in complete control of their circumstances. And one of them has just realized that she is going to break free and live her life on her own terms—society permitting, of course.


William Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience (1853).
The most famous Victorian morality painting captures the moment when a young woman realizes that she’s ruining her life being kept, in nouveau-riche clutter, by her complacent lover. Hunt drew inspiration from Daniel Peggotty’s search for his niece Emily after she runs off with the seducer Steerforth in David Copperfield. The love nest in the Pre-Raphaelite work is crammed with symbols of the mistress’s entrapment— including a cat tormenting a bird and a clock under glass that indicates stopped time. Hunt’s fiancée, Annie Miller, was about 18 when she sat for the painting; they parted acrimoniously before they could marry. The male sitter may have been the artist Augustus Egg. His 1858 morality painting Past and Present—a triptych depicting the sundering of a family because of the wife’s adultery —was inspired by Hunt’s.

William Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience (1853)
Photo: Public domain.


Hans Makart, Marble Hearts (circa 1880).
 
Hans Makart, Marble Hearts (1880).
Photo: Museum Syndicate.
The Austrian academic history painter Makart, famed for his aestheticism and known as “the magician of colors,” was the dominant figure in the Viennese art world of the 1870s. His portraits of high-society ladies were often tastefully sensual, his mythical paintings more blatantly erotic. Klimt revered him. The key to understanding this painting of two languid femme fatales—whose luxurious lifestyle is not attributable to hard work and honest endeavor—is the malicious overstuffed cat perched on the pillow behind the fair woman’s head.


Tukioka Yoshitoshi , Looking Itchy – The Appearance of a Kept Woman of the Kansei Era (1789-1801) (1888).
The 19th century Japanese took pride in deciphering character traits from facial features. They would have been able to tell—more easily than contemporary Western art-lovers—the mindset of this voluptuous concubine drowsily emerging from a mosquito netting in a state of post-coital disarray. Number 16 in Yoshitoshi’s “Thirty-Two Aspects of Customs and Manners” series, the exquisitely nuanced “Looking Itchy” demonstrates his mastery of the Uyiko-e genre of woodblock printing and painting.

Tukioka Yoshitoshi, Thirty-Two Aspects of Customs and Manners, Looking itchy: The Appearance of a Kept Woman of the Kansei Era (1789–1801) Number 16 (1888), Oban.
Photo: Toshidama Gallery.

Ivan Kramskoi, Unknown Woman (1883).

A woman in her early 20s sits alone in a carriage in a Russian city lightly dusted with snow. Her clothes are fine, as is her blue-ribboned muff and her white-feathered hat. She wears red lipstick and a gold bracelet (possibly two) on her left wrist. She has been painted from a slightly low angle, which emphasizes the downwardness of her direct gaze, as her narrowly lidded eyes emphasize her haughtiness. The expression has long fueled speculation that the sitter was a woman who had risen in society by selling her favors to a wealthy man—or does that amount to a slur on the reputation of a virtuous young bourgeois who thinks rather too much of herself? A leader of the Russian democratic art movement of 1860–80, Kramskoi championed clarity, humanism, and psychological realism. He painted peasants as well as imperious city girls.
 
Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoi, Portrait of a Woman (1883).
Photo source: Public domain.



Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta,The Reluctant Mistress (date unknown).

Madrazo (1841–1920), the technically brilliant Spanish genre painter, was taught by his father, the historical artist Federico de Madrazo y Kuntz, and influenced by his brother-in-law, Fortuny. His witty, elegant portraits capture in rich color the ease and frivolity of bourgeois existence. Aline Masson, the mistress he painted obsessively, sat for this unusual painting, which perhaps reflects her own feelings about her married lover. A mistress has received a bunch of flowers and a letter from the man who has recently left her rumpled bed. Her sense that she is being used is palpable.


Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta, The Reluctant Mistress (date unknown).
Photo: Public domain.

George Romney, Emma Hart as Circe (circa 1782).

A serial kept woman, the vivacious Emma Hart would become the mistress of Lord Nelson in 1798 or 1799. If that was her most famous role, she also shone as the creatively involved muse of Britain’s most fashionable portrait painter of the day. She sat for Romney over a hundred times, their sessions resulting in some sixty paintings. She was 17, already an accomplished adventuress, when she posed as the mythological enchantress Circe. Romney’s brushwork captures the luxuriousness of Emma’s famous auburn hair; her expression of surprise is emphasized by the half shadow on the left side of her face.


Hart was married to Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador to Naples, when she first met Nelson in 1893. She was a celebrity hostess and poser of classical “attitudes,” and he was the national hero, recent conqueror of Napoleon’s fleet at the Battle of the Nile, when their affair began. It produced a scandal and their daughter Horatia, and lasted until Nelson’s death at Trafalgar in 1805. The establishment wrote her out of his history. She died impoverished in Calais in 1815.


George Romney, Emma Hart as Circe (circa 1782).
Photo: Tate.


Thomas Gainsborough, Portrait of Grace Elliott (circa 1778).

photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Thomas Gainsborough, Portrait of Grace Elliott (circa 1778).
Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The scandalous early career of the Scottish socialite and royal courtesan Grace Dalrymple Elliott (1758–1823) would have made a rollicking Fielding or Richardson novel. It involved teenage adultery, her kidnapping by her brother, and numerous liaisons with powerful men. The Prince of Wales, later George IV, possibly fathered her daughter. Gainsborough painted this portrait and a full-length study of the patrician beauty when she was about 20.


A decade later she was witnessing the French Revolution. Whereas Grace was a monarchist, her onetime lover Philippe Duke d’Orléans was a Jacobin who sought the king and queen’s executions. Despite Philippe’s Republican allegiance, he himself was guillotined as a Bourbon in 1793. Grace was imprisoned but survived the Terror. Napoleon allegedly proposed to her. She died in 1823, the rich mistress of the mayor of Ville-d’Avray. Lucy Russell played her in Eric Rohmer’s tense costume drama The Lady and the Duke(2001), based on her untrustworthy Revolution memoir.


Source:  NewsArt.net