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Alchemy: 3 – oils in the northern Renaissance
As Sir Ernst Gombrich so clearly pointed out, the Renaissance in northern Europe primarily used oil paints to explore light, form, and texture. This is perhaps first fully expressed in the mature works...
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Into the Light: Arturo Michelena, a Venezuelan master
Try naming just one South American painter and most of us would draw a blank. Yet in the late 1800s, the eclectic Académie Julian trained artists from all over the world, including Francisco Arturo...
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Funnels, Jewish hats, and wizardry: the influence of Bosch’s visual inventions
Hieronymus Bosch’s works are among the most visually intense paintings, packed with hordes of his distinctive visual inventions. They may at first seem overwhelming, but as you get to know his...
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Storyspace Reader: a tutorial, 1
Reading hypertext is very different from browsing web pages, or reading a book using iBooks or Kindle. Hypertext can have a very simple structure, but it can offer sophistication at a level which you...
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Alchemy: 4 – how oils came to Italy
By the middle of the 1400s, oil painting had been used for artistic works in northern Europe for over 200 years, and in the workshops of the van Eycks and their contemporaries it had flourished in ways...
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Into the Light: Louise Upton Brumback, all things bright and colourful
If the odds are still stacked against success for women artists, think what they must have been like in the early twentieth century. It took a very special kind of woman to succeed in painting then,...
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Storyspace Reader: a tutorial, 2
In my first tutorial, I concentrated on the tools and features which support reading and navigation through hypertext documents in Eastgate‘s free Storyspace Reader app. This article moves on to...
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Into the Light: George Bellows, up to 1914
In the summer of 1891, William Merritt Chase (whose centenary we celebrate this autumn) ran the first of his summer schools in the Shinnecock Hills on Long Island. Five years later, he opened the Chase...
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Into the Light: George Bellows, after 1914
The first article in this two-part series told the story of George Bellows (1882–1925), his life and painting up to the outbreak of the First World War. George Bellows (1882–1925), Builders of Ships /...
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Into the Light: Marsden Hartley, 1 experiments to 1921
I’ll admit that I was put off Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) by his early abstracts, but a little further research showed that he actually painted many landscapes, particularly later in his career. In...
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Into the Light: Marsden Hartley, 2 mature landscapes
In the first article, I traced the career and paintings of Marsden Hartley (1877–1943), until he returned to Europe in 1921. He then travelled quite widely, although based in Aix-en-Provence between...
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Alchemy: 5 – the High Renaissance, canvas, and counting brushstrokes
By the late 1400s, the layered technique of oil painting which had originated in the north had become well established throughout Europe. Paintings normally started with an underdrawing, which could be...
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Storyspace Reader: a tutorial, 3
My first two tutorials should have given you a good idea of how to use Storyspace Reader’s tools, how to work your way through a hypertext document, and how to customise its settings. This tutorial...
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Into the Light: Emma Lampert Cooper, the invisible wife
Known today only as the first wife of Colin Campbell Cooper, Emma Lampert Cooper (1855-1920) was as highly regarded as a painter, but since her death her works have all but vanished. Emma Lampert, as...
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Into the Light: Edward Charles Volkert, the pastural painter
Farm animals, particularly cattle, have long been accepted as a strong sub-genre of landscape painting, with its exponents such as Constant Troyon widely celebrated. Oddly, the American Impressionist...
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Into the Light: Ella Sophonisba Hergesheimer and Dora Wheeler Keith
The end of the 1800s and early 1900s was a time when many women trained to be painters, and pursued successful careers afterwards. Although most are completely forgotten now, two of the more eminent of...
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Into the Light: Charles Demuth, Precisionism, and flowers
No time can ever have been an easy one for a professional painter, but the early twentieth century was more turbulent than most. If an artist did not reinvent and restyle their work every few years,...
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Alchemy: 6 – Rubens and control of paint viscosity
By the end of the Renaissance, most of the materials and techniques of classical oil painting were well established, and their limitations understood. However, the use of more painterly styles which...
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The Eclectic Light Company gets a Liebster award
I am honoured that Nicholas Peart has nominated this blog for a Liebster Award: thank you Nicholas. The Liebster award is online recognition by bloggers to new and up and coming bloggers. When...
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Alchemy: 7 – Rembrandt and surface texture
In the five hundred or so years which had elapsed since drying oils had first been used to make artistic paintings, virtually no use had been made of the surface texture of the paint layer. The...
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