Friday, December 02, 2016

FIGURE PAINTING

I have a lot of work to do around the house but when I take a break it's fun to go through my files of clippings from old art magazines. Here's (above) an interesting artist I just rediscovered. Sorry, I don't know his name. 

His technique resembles Del Sarto's (above), the Renaissance painter who liked to use wide fields of relatively flat color. Sarto's color was was so striking that it dominated his pictures. 

  
This modern artist (above) pushed that technique even farther. He gives no emphasis at all to his model's personality. She's just a color field like everything else in the picture. Well...sort of. She does have a nuanced fleshiness that makes her stand out.


For comparison, here's (above) a picture by Lucien Freud. I'm not a fan of Freud's art, though his skill is undeniable. He's just too cold for me. Anyway, It's another work where technique dominates the subject matter. Maybe that's the secret of some of the better figure painters.  



1 comment:

Lucas Nine said...

I had the luck to be able to study one of the Del Sarto´s original paintings... The surface on this example resembles the later work of Signac or Seurat ("les pointillistes"),only he made the whole thing far smaller... amazing.