beside the easel

Vulcan Presenting Venus with Arms for Aeneas,1757 Born September 29th in 1703, the Master of the Rococo, François Boucher is the painter associated with warm skin tones, vivid cool backgrounds and clothing, and probably for the first time in art history, painting nude women for the sake of beauty and nothing else. In direct contrast to the dark realism of Caravaggio and the Baroque, Boucher is about art for art's sake , which irritated many of his critics, but his style is not as easy to categorize as we might think. Boucher's landscapes are idyllic and lush, providing a backdrop for his subjects, and yet he is among the first to really introduce a natural, erotic element to his women that seems innocent at the same time. Technically, Boucher was an incredible draftsman and he fully embraced every medium of his day, his influence carrying into the decorative arts also, such as porcelain and tapestry all throughout Europe. While he may have had less of an impact on art than ...

I remember when I was younger I had photocopied self-portraits of all my favourite artists tacked to the wall in my basement studio...stern black and white faces looking at me...it made me feel safe, like I was surrounded by the All-Stars of Art, encouraging me silently to get over making mistakes and get past them. It was great support for a self-taught artist! And I needed all the support I could get back then. When we think of self-portraits by famous artists, the usual suspects come to mind...Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Kahlo, or maybe Velazquez or Da Vinci, and it is interesting to note that the Renaissance was where the self-portrait really became popular. With the idea of the artist as more than just a faceless member of a guild (as was the case in the Middle Ages) artists began to study nature and, with better quality mirrors, themselves. This was not a conceit. The publicity machine back then was not quite as state-of-the-art as today, and I'm sure most people could not attach a ...