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Showing posts from October, 2016

Claude-Joseph Vernet, French Painter of Views

A Calm at a Mediterranean Port, 1770 Born on August 14, 1714, Claude-Joseph Vernet was a French Romantic painter from Avignon. Vernet's vedute are strongly influenced by painters such as Giovanni Paolo Panini and Claude Lorrain, whom both worked in Rome. Vernet distinguished himself from his contemporaries by seeking more dramatic light effects, particularly moonlight, and early dawn as well as experimenting with weather itself including fog and rain as subjects to reinforce his Romantic themes, something foreign in most landscape painting at that time. Vernet also worked mainly from imagination, using sketches as reference and incorporating some known landmarks from Rome but combining them into his own capricci but with fishermen and marine subject matter as his main themes. In A Calm at a Mediterranean Port above, Vernet's use of light and clouds is mesmerizing. Look up close and that beautiful golden yellow glaze on the sky against the blue is superb, which he co

Leonardo Da Vinci's Drawing Materials

In this fascinating video from the Royal Collection in Windsor, Leonardo's materials are recreated using similar pigments and organic materials to give an idea of how he worked. This curator is someone whose brain I could pick for hours! Leonardo's Drawing Materials source Vimeo