One artist whose work caught my eye in the Arsenal at ILLUMInations, the Venice Biennale 2011, was German artist Annette Kelm.
Kelm showed several series of photographs. Â The particular one that interested me was entitled Driftwood Lamp, a series of six images of a drift wood lamp on a white background.
There is something beautiful about the process of forming of ideas, thoughts, and art. At a gallery or museum one can sometimes see the development of a series by viewing its parts, but this process is still fairly opaque with only a showing of the final work. Thankfully artist blogs are full of studies showing their process. Below I have a series of images showing a glimpse of my process as I created three of my recent butterfly paintings.
Inspiration in Munich
While walking through the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, the painting, Jerusalem (Golgatha, Consummatum Est, Crucifixion) by Jean-Léon Gérôme caught my eye. It did not catch my eye because of the style, but due to the treatment of the subject. This is an interesting painting because it is the classical crucifixion theme redone in a way that I have not seen before. The cross itself is not visible. Instead one views the shadows of the three laden cross as they fall across the rocky ground. Christ is not in the picture, but does that weaken the story?...
Art has the power to teach us something new about the mundane in life. Sometimes art portrays the beautiful, sometimes the ugly. This past fall when I had the opportunity to walk through several museums in the Netherlands and Germany, I came across four paintings that presented the biblical account of the crucifixion of Christ in unexpected or at least different ways. They present four artist perspectives from painters who lived in four different centuries. Perhaps the oldest Crucifixion image that entranced me while visiting museums last fall was a painting done in 1512 by Hans...