On this episode of Art Institute Essentials Tour, take a closer look at Nighthawks, painted by Edward Hopper in 1942. Inspired by “a restaurant on New York’s Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet,” Hopper’s painting, one of the best-known images of 20th-century art, has a timeless, universal quality that transcends locale.
Peggy Cyphers has a persistent vision of nature that she translates into richly colored and textured quasi-abstract paintings. She pours and lightly brushes countless layers of paint and sand onto the canvas until she achieves luminous and sumptuous surface. Approaching each canvas as a kind of garden where organic and geometric elements intermingle with intense light, she nurtures elaborate hybrid forms. David Ebony, ArtNet Magazine
Peggy Cyphers (born 1954) is an American painter, printmaker, professor and art writer, who has shown her work in the U.S. and internationally since 1984. Since Cyphers’ move to New York City over 30 years ago, her inventive and combinatory approaches to the materials of paint, silkscreen and sand have developed into canvases that explore the “Politics of Progress” as it impacts culture and the natural world.
Lucy Chiswell, the Curatorial Fellow for Paintings 1600-1800, explores a day in the countryside through paintings by Rubens, Constable and Corot.
Paintings mentioned
0:50 Peter Paul Rubens ‘An Autumn Landscape with a View of Het Steen in the Early Morning’ 🎨 https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/pa…
4:19 John Constable, ‘The Hay Wain’ 🎨 https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/pa…
8:03 Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot ‘The Four Times of Day: Night’ 🎨 https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/pa…
While the Denver Art Museum is temporarily closed, we are sharing this look at the Homer and Remington exhibition. Hear from DAM curators Thomas Brent Smith and Jennifer R. Henneman.
In the summer of 1891, Claude Monet began to paint a row of poplar trees that lined the river Epte near his house at Giverny. The trees were auctioned off for timber shortly thereafter, but Monet made a deal with the purchaser to delay cutting them so he could continue to paint the trees through the autumn. Using a shallow rowboat that had slots in the bottom capable of holding several canvases at once, Monet painted twenty-four pictures of the poplars from his floating studio.
The resulting pictures reflect the view at different seasons and times of day and were known as the “Poplar Series” when they were exhibited in February 1892.
From Visual Pleasure Magazine (April 19, 2020):
I often find myself observing classic paintings that can inspire compositions, or fashion that can inspire the choice of a color palette. At a certain point everything 
is united in a very natural way in a creative concept. My artistic research is a constant blend between the worlds of architecture, painting, photography, graphic design, and fashion. At the base of my work, then, there is an artistic background very much linked to the Gestalt principles of visual perception. I try to avoid looking for inspiration only within the confines of my sector: I find that this often leads to a flattening of the creative result.
Having always been fascinated with sensational spaces, Cristina Lello now visualizes the most striking scenes that tell a clear story. As she describes herself, her studio “creates high-impact images from the intersection of interior styling, set design and 3D art.” After graduating with honors in Set Design at the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice, she also started a Master’s degree in Interactive Media for Interior Design while working for Elisa Ossino Studio.
From Christie’s article (April 16, 2020):
Sage is renowned for her empty, enigmatic, eerily lit landscapes. Human figures are markedly absent — their presence felt only by the monolithic, architectural structures and unidentifiable, draped objects they seem to have left behind. In this respect, 1945’s Other Answers is a quintessential Sage painting.
In 1939, with clouds of war hovering over Europe, Kay Sage returned to the United States after more than two decades away. Her lover and fellow Surrealist, Yves Tanguy, soon followed her across the Atlantic, despite the fact that both of them were married to other people. In Sage’s case to an Italian prince — her official title was La principessa di San Faustino.
In the summer of 1940, Sage had her first solo show, at the influential Pierre Matisse Gallery in Manhattan. Then, in early 1943, she was part of the landmark Exhibition by 31 Women, curated and staged by Peggy Guggenheim in her Art of This Century Gallery.
From The Iris (Getty Museum – April 17, 2020):
To work out the details of all the figures in pen and ink would have been extremely labor-intensive, and sharpening quills and mixing inks would’ve added an additional distraction. Drawing in chalk necessitated great skill, but it also allowed Michelangelo a flexibility. He could create subtle tonal variations by applying more or less pressure onto the chalk or by wetting it. The red chalk also provided an immediate mid-tone on the paper and could be easily blended when modeling and shading forms. Being a naturally occurring material that was available to artists in sticks that could be sharpened as desired, it was also convenient and portable.
During his lifetime, Michelangelo likely produced tens of thousands of drawings. But being protective of his ideas, and to give an impression of effortless genius, he destroyed many of them. Today only about 600 drawings by the Renaissance artist survive. A Getty exhibition highlighted 28 of them, giving viewers a window into Michelangelo’s artistic process. “He used drawings to record his observations, to explore certain ideas, to further develop these ideas, to reconsider them entirely,” said Assistant Curator Edina Adam.
The exhibition included a relatively high number of drawings in red chalk, which prompted the question: Why did Michelangelo use this particular drawing material?
In Van Gogh Questions, our researcher Bregje Gerritse answers the most frequently asked questions about Vincent van Gogh.
From Apollo Magazine article (April 13, 2020):
Minton had gone on to produce a series of spectacularly colourful oil paintings of Corsica on his return to London, exhibiting them at the Lefevre Gallery in 1949. Many of them depicted fruit and fish and other ingredients for Mediterranean cuisine, and so confirmed Minton as the obvious choice for the David commission.
David delightedly recalled that: ‘In the shop windows [Minton’s] brilliant blue Mediterranean bay, his tables spread with white cloths and bright fruit, bowls of pasta and rice, a lobster, pitchers and jugs and bottles of wine, could be seen far down the street.’
Variations on these two images were used for the double-page spread on which the title appeared in David’s second book, French Country Cooking (1951), while the wrap-around image on the dust jacket depicted the interior of a well-stocked kitchen, many of its utensils borrowed from the author to ensure accurate representation.
Francis John Minton (25 December 1917 – 20 January 1957) was an English painter, illustrator, stage designer and teacher. After studying in France, he became a teacher in London, and at the same time maintained a consistently large output of works. In addition to landscapes, portraits and other paintings, some of them on an unusually large scale, he built up a reputation as an illustrator of books.
In the mid-1950s, Minton found himself out of sympathy with the abstract trend that was then becoming fashionable, and felt increasingly sidelined. He suffered psychological problems, self-medicated with alcohol, and in 1957 died by suicide.
From Wikipedia
Boomers Daily 