Month: February 2015

Jean Andre Castaigne

Jean Andre Castaigne, Untitled, (Men Dressing), Graphite on Paper

French artist Jean André Castaigne was an important figure during the Golden Age of Illustration, producing paintings and both book and magazine illustrations in France and America. His work influenced a generation of illustrators with its sense of realism and drama, vivid story-telling, and attention to accurate detail.

A master of composition and form, Castaigne was equally at ease drawing humans, animals, architecture and landscapes. As a youth, he read prodigiously and studied classic Greek, Latin, French, and German literature from books provided by his grandfather, the librarian of Angoulême. Castaigne expressed an early gift for art, sketching imaginary scenes inspired by these books.

At the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, under Alexandre Cabanel and Jean-Léon Gérôme, Castaigne trained to become a painter in the Salon tradition.  His paintings were first exhibited in America at the New Orleans Exhibition of 1884. The first of his many illustrations appeared in “The Century” magazine around 1891.

As the principal draftsman for French president Felix Faure, Jean André Castaigne was awarded the ribbon of the Legion of Honor. In 1901 he returned to America as an official representative of the Imprimerie Nationale to study American printing plants in various cities. Castaigne’s travels throughout the United States gave him an opportunity to create a series of illustrations reflecting America in the early twentieth century.

Brian Biedul

Paintings by Brian Biedul

Brian Biedul was born in Colorado Springs in 1955. He soon thereafter moved to Europe with his family, where he spent the better part of his youth. While living in Paris he studied art under the instruction of Siegfried Hahn. Later, after returning to the United States and settling in Los Angeles, he received his BFA from Art Center College of Design.

Biedul is currently developing a series entitled “Spaces.” This series seeks to articulate what the artist calls “theoretical architecture.” It consists of three phases – Rectangles, Squares and Cubes. In the first two phases, Biedul uses the traditional medium of oil on canvas, conveying to the viewer the structure, dimension and tension of the theoetical 3-dimensional space. To assist in communicating these interconnected properties, Biedul uses a universally understood quantity – the human figure.

The third phase – Cubes – is to be a series of large-scale sculpted bronze cubes.  The Cubes will further the artist’s concept by similarly employing the human figure to depict space inside set perameters. Biedul hopes to begin the Cubes in early 2008.

Diego Rivera

Diego Rivera, “Portrait of Adolfo Best Maugard”, 1913, Oil on Canvas, 1615 x 2275 cm, Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City

Born in 1891, Adolfo Best Maugard came of age as Mexico was emerging for a period of dictatorial rule. He was part of a generation of Mexican artists and writers who sought inspiration in both Mexico’s pre-Columbian past and the European avant-gardes in order to fashion a new national identity. Many of Maugard’s contemporaries – Rivera, Miguel Covarrubias, Rufino Tamayo, José Vasconcelos – have themselves become part of the fabric of Mexican cultural identity, whereas Best Maugard’s work remains decidedly less celebrated.

Best Maugard’s most well-known work is the 1926 “A Method for Creative Design”. In it, the author provides a series of lessons on how to draw utilising instinctive methods and simple forms. Far from being a dry, didactic text, the book is full of imaginative and creative designs through which the student “will dream his work out of his own imagination, and his work will be the only one of its kind on earth.”

Best Maugard’s designs bear the influence of both classical and pre-Columbian art, and indeed he was fascinated by the art of indigenous Mexicans, seeing in it shared structures, which he referred to as ‘archetypes’, upon which the artistic will of the individual could impose its own creativity. Best Maugard’s pedagogical methods became influential in the Mexican education system, but his ideas were also important for his more illustrious peers – in its synthesis of the classical, the pre-Columbian and the avant-garde,

Diego Rivera was living in Paris at the same time as Best Maugard, who had been in Europe since 1912 for the purpose of making copies of Mexican archeological artifacts that were on exhibition in European museums. In 1913, Rivera met Maugard and executed his metaphoricall “Portrait of Adolfo Best Maugard”. The static, elongated, elegantly dressed protagonist is portrayed in the foreground, standing on a red-railed balcony that distances him from, and raises him above the urban scene in modern Paris of the time.

A modern train, factories whose chimneys billow forth clouds of smoke, Cubist-styled urban buildings, and a spinning wheel of fortune are shown in the scene. The wheel of fortune is reminiscent of the one built for the 1900 Universal Exhibition, and symbolizes technological progress. Rivera succeeded in connecting these two spaces, depicted in different styles, by using perspective to provide a visual link between the protagonist’s forefinger and the center of the wheel of fortune, suggesting that man, from a higher plane and acting as a demiurge,  an artisan-like figure, directs and promotes progress.

The “Portrait of Adolfo Best Maugard”, (also known as ‘Young Man on the Balcony’), was shown at the Paris Salon des Indépendents in 1913. The painting was made known to the Mexican public through a photograph in the ‘El Universal Ilustrado’ magazine, on the 24th of May, 1918. This painting has formed part of the MUNAL collection since 1983.

Claudio Bravo Camus

Claudio Bravo Camus, “Noureddine (Portrait of a Young Man)”, 1983, Oil on Canvas, 57.5 x 45 Inches, Private Collection

Born in 1936, Chilean-born artist Claudio Bravo initially established himself as a society portrait painter in Chile and Spain, but he became better known for his vibrant still lifes of such everyday items as packages, crumpled paper, and draped fabric. Although he lived in Morocco for many years, it was the Spanish classical masters who inspired the provocative style of his hyperrealist paintings.

Though Bravo had some training under Chilean artist Miguel Venegas Cifuentes, he was primarily self-taught. He was only 17 years old when he had his first exhibition in 1954 at Salón 13 in Valparaíso. In the early 1960s Bravo moved to Spain, where he made his living painting portraits on commission, including pictures of Gen. Francisco Franco’s family members.

Bravo had his first New York City show in 1970. Two years later he settled in Tangier, Morocco, where he began to paint landscapes and animals as well as still lifes and portraits. His paintings regularly sold for impressive sums, with his 1967 “White Package” fetching more than $1 million in 2004. Bravo was, although, little known in Chile until a 1994 retrospective exhibition of his work at the Chilean National Museum of Fine Arts. Claudio Bravo Camus passed away in June of 2011 in Taroudant, Morocco.

Nathaniel Hawthorne: “It is a Good Lesson for a Man to Step Outside of the Narrow Circle”

Photographer Unknown, (Jeans and Sneakers)

“It is a good lesson – though it may often be a hard one – for a man… to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at.”

― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

Image reblogged with thanks to https://jean2nimes.tumblr.com

Andrew Potter

Paintings by Andrew Potter

Andrew Potter is an artist who paints in a classical style. Following his initial training, he had worked for the Royal Academy of Arts in London for many years as a researcher. The knowledge he possesses informs many of his pictures and contributes to the classical form of his paintings.

He is an elected member of the United Society of Artists and his paintings are regularly exhibited in exhibitions at major London galleries. His paintings are characterised by solid composition, strong colours and a wide narrative content.

Andrew Potter moved in 2015 to Felanitx on the Balearic Island of Mallorca. In December of 2018, he opened The Andrew Potter Gallery, his own gallery and a studio space, in the town center of Felanitx.