Art's Themes
The best way to change your perception of art is to familiarize yourself with the underlying themes that repetitively appear regardless of the apparent subject. All of them reflect a process in the artist’s mind because, as revealed here, every painter paints himself and it is your job as the viewer to find out how. Do so, and your perception of art will never be the same again. Remember: you are not the patron seeing what you ordered or the contemporary spectator seeing what interests you; you are the artist seeing what you, the artist, have created. It is the only way to see art; all else is illusion.
Top Themes on EPPH
Every painter paints himself, a saying first documented in the early Renaissance, has been mentioned by artists ever since. Both Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci used it, as Picasso did too; Lucian Freud and other contemporary artists still cite variations today.
Every Painter Paints Himself
Self-Identity
Painting is a performance. Every day artists enter their studio and stand in front of their easel, brush in hand, ready to paint. They are alone, like an actor on a stage. No-one can help them. See how this aspect of painting is so deeply ingrained in the creative mind that it affects our understanding of art from all centuries.
Art On Stage (Theatre)
Great masters, and lesser ones too, often identify with an earlier great master with whom they feel at one. Once you become familiar with this theme, the many references in art to earlier art take on new meaning.
Artist as Other Artist
One of several themes running through art concerns the artist's relationship with a great poet. He or she not only considers the poet a muse but identifies with him as well, aspiring to become as great in visual art as the poet is in literature.
Artist as Poet
Find out how artists, feeling at one with nature, turn themselves into animals and plants
Artist as Animal
The Renaissance tendency to describe great artists as “divine” is usually considered a rhetorical device to express society’s admiration for the inexplicable talents of a great master.
The Divine Artist
Poetic Mind
Despite the patriarchal construction of "Every Painter Paints Himself", poetic painters within the Western tradition always consider their minds to be androgynous and they demonstrate it. Learn here the ways they do so.
Androgyny
All true art is literally a mirror of the artist’s mind, a reflection of the artist's imagination at work. While this is generally the primary level of meaning, it is rarely seen because so many viewers remain deluded by the superficial setting.
Artist’s Mind
An artist's struggle to place meaning in art can result in a full-scale battle within the psyche. Learn how that struggle is the central theme of many artworks expressed through visual metaphor.
Creative Struggle
Even today we speak about “executing a painting” or “the artist’s execution of the work” so it should be no surprise that execution is one of the most important allegorical themes in art.
Executing Painting
Art’s Optics
If compositions appear in an artist's imagination, where else would you expect them to be than behind the artist's eye?
Behind the Artist’s Eye
Art’s Craft
Almost all these hidden themes (few ever seen before) hark back to the idea that every painter paints himself. One of the most common is the depiction of the artist holding his or her art.
The Artist with His Art
One of the longest-running, little-known traditions in Western art is the use of visual metaphors for the tools of the artist’s trade, most commonly brush and palette.
Brush and Palette
Great portraiture is one of art’s many surprises. Portraits, of course, have long been considered historical documents of what the sitter looked like. Are they really that accurate?
Portraiture
Visual Metamorphosis
Universal Spirituality
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