01 Aug 2015
Joanna Woodall on Cooking Artists in Dark Rooms
Many are the ways to demonstrate that a given picture represents the artist in his or her mind: resemblance, pose, apparent errors, "nonsensical" shading, tools expressed in metaphor, etc. We have shown you at least thirty different methods, mos
10 Jul 2015
Hair, Brushes and Art
In pointing out yesterday that George Romney’s The Clavering Children (above) is more about Romney and his art than his young sitters, I left out a few points. Hair and its resonance.
Hair resembles a paintbrush and is brushed and,
16 Jan 2015 | 2 Comments
The Centrality of Tools
Art sometimes seems like a meditation on the brush. Certainly visual metaphors for art's tools abound from, say, Edouard Manet’s early Boy with a Sword (in effect he holds a giant paintbrush, see explanation) to Diego Velazquez’s Portrait
03 Dec 2014
Claws, Paws and Prints
Many animals, like cats, dogs or the mythical griffin, have sharp claws. Let loose in a house, some of these charmers will engrave table legs, floor boards or virtually anything wooden. Artists who naturally have acute visual perception often re
24 Sep 2014 | 2 Comments
Reading Art: Manet, Picasso and Alfonso Ponce de Leon
My vision, like most people’s, is often cloudy which is why when the sun breaks and I gain some understanding, I get excited. You must excuse me. It may sometimes seem as if no-one before me has made similar observations. After all, all my ent
20 Aug 2014
The Craftsman’s Christ
This is a scene by an unknown 16th-century artist, probably Flemish, at a time when artisanal effort was admired not just for the perfection of the end-product but for the artisan’s closely-guarded knowledge of materials. Wood, stone, minerals,
13 Apr 2014
The Artist is Always Present
Very few novels use the first person pronoun, most using an impersonal narrator to describe the scene. The author David Henry Thoreau noted that, with the ‘I’ omitted, the reader forgets that it really remains there because the novelist is c
03 Mar 2014
The Brush-Sword of Mattia Preti
After the recent post on a new book of cartoons, Daggers Drawn, this one is on the same subject 350 years earlier.
Mattia Preti (1613-1699) was a major Italian artist who is little-known because he spent much of his life on the islan
23 Feb 2014
Daggers Drawn
Daggers Drawn. A new compendium of a political cartoonist’s 35 years in the business and on the cover he stands at his desk, pen drawn, facing the dictators and democrats he has followed, all with daggers drawn too. The conclusion is simple to
12 Feb 2014
Note on Palette Sounds
My recent post on artists using stringed instruments as metaphoric palettes was restricted to guitars so I did not use this image. Perhaps I should have because while musicians may think lutes and guitars are very different, in artworks they are
26 Jan 2014 | 1 Comments
Trees as Paintbrushes
Looking out my study window in Italy something struck me that you might only notice in life not paint. Not far from the house, lower down, is a row of cypresses. When the wind blows, the pointed tops move back and forth over the distant landscap
26 Nov 2013 | 2 Comments
Tips to Tell Art from Illustration
My definition of art, as I've said before, is not as wide as that used by the public and most scholars. I do not believe, for instance, that children create art nor the vast majority of adult painters. True artists paint themselves; they paint i
20 Nov 2013
Picasso Hid a Sword in Nazi Loot
Sometimes I do no work at all. Things just pop in my face. I suppose I'm so used to looking for certain features that my eyes know what to look for subconsciously. That's what appeared to happen last week as I read the news that the Germans
28 Sep 2013
How Manet and other artists shoot their paintings
Have you ever shot your mother? Directors shoot movies and nearly everyone has made a snap-shot with a camera but few imagine that artists shoot paintings. In fact they have shot nearly every canvas with a gun in it since the devilish implements
21 Sep 2013
Pens, Palettes and their Visual Metaphors
Thoth was an Egyptian god best known in art as having the head of an ibis (above left). He had many functions but was perhaps most celebrated as the scribe of the gods, the inventor of heiroglyphs and writing, and who, when people died, wrote do
20 Apr 2013
Do you know what it means to come home?
Think differently. The old ways are often dull and didactic. Take, for instance, paintings and prints that seem to illustrate Bible stories. Why treat them as a narrative when mystical Christians, among whom must be counted many great Western ar
26 Mar 2013
When Degas made a boob ...on purpose
In a new entry published today you can see for the first time ever how Edgar Degas turned his friend, Edouard Manet (above), into the driver of a carriage holding his whip as a paintbrush flecked with white paint. He then transformed the artist&
18 Feb 2013
1+1=1: The Divided Self in Manet’s Railway
What is the girl up to? Who are they? What's happening? Why do they wear the same color clothes? Why is the girl's hair so odd?
In my explanation two years ago of Edouard Manet’s The Railway (1873) I noted that the extended arm of the
29 Jan 2013 | 5 Comments
2nd Self-Portrait Found in Same Met Gallery!
After discovering a self-portrait by Picasso four days ago (see blog), I think I've discovered another one, this time by Bonnard.....hanging right opposite the other one at the Metropolitan Museum! The "coincidence" demonstrates, if nothing else
25 Jan 2013 | 3 Comments
Picasso’s Unseen Portrait at the Metropolitan Museum
I was going to write about how the objects most frequently depicted by the Cubists in their café still-lifes – pipe, bottle, glass and guitar – were used not primarily as items characteristic of café-life as Rosalind Kr
01 Dec 2012
Pointing at the Edge
If you cruise the various interpretations on this site, you might have noticed a tendency to explain a figure with an arm or hand pointing to or touching the edge of the image as the artist himself painting a self-portrait. Michael Fried first n
21 Sep 2012
Impressionism and Fashion
Impressionism and Fashion is the title of a new exhibition opening at Paris' Musée d’Orsay this coming Monday. The key image on the catalogue’s cover and the Museum’s website is Manet’s Young Lady of 1866
30 Aug 2012
Manet’s Modern Methods
I was crossing the road when a delivery truck owned by a prominent online grocery in the New York area stopped at a light. It displayed a poster of their managers holding a blow-up of the product each specializes in (right). One of the meat mana
30 Jul 2012
Have I Made Up Art’s Metaphors?
"Female stars have been rushing to publish photos of themselves without makeup" notes the New York Times. Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Jennifer Love Hewitt and others have started a trend whereby even women known for their makeup want their fans to see t
25 Jul 2012
Manet’s Little Cavaliers
Major artists are often inspired by earlier masterpieces yet when the young Edouard Manet entered the Louvre to copy whatever he wanted he chose an insignificant little painting. Yes, it was then attributed to Velazquez but Manet, with an in-dep
12 Jul 2012
Ink Flies in a Mind
If anyone doubts that St. Sebastian holds a special place in the creative mind as a symbol of the artist’s self and the idea that every painter paints himself, then take a look at Jaff Seijas’ self-portrait above. It is not proof but it is t
11 Jul 2012
Bless you! It’s Art
Keep your eye open for a handkerchief or white cloth. They can be highly significant. My own experience suggests that those who are not painters themselves are relatively unaware that a cloth is almost as important to the craft of painting as a
26 Apr 2012
Canvas is Canvas
Most of the visual metaphors for an artist’s implements revealed here are related to their referent in art through their form, their function or some other more abstract link. A rifle or sword is long and thin like a paintbrush. They must be a
22 Apr 2012
Alpers on Rembrandt’s Lucretia (1666)
It’s always encouraging when I can cite another art scholar without comment, a historian in this instance who has so understood what is happening allegorically in Rembrandt’s Lucretia that no further explanation is necessary. This is
01 Apr 2012
Eureka! My Last Judgement on Michelangelo’s
Eureka!
For years I have struggled with the meaning of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. The essay “Michelangelo’s Art Through Michelangelo’s Eyes” explains my overall understanding of the Sistine ceiling and the altar wall on whi
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