Pietro Antonio Rotari Portraits

 

Pietro Antonio Rotari was an Italian painter (1707-1762) of the Baroque period.

Here are some of his unusual portraits of young women -shyly peeking out from behind a book or a cape, dozing and crying. There is something wonderfully modern about these compositions.

Art history never ceases to amaze me. I keep on discovering.

Out with the new and in with the old.

 



Armory Arts Week ArtSlant Feature: Amy Crehore

 

Armory Week is important to me because it is the 100th Anniversary of the 1913 Armory Show in NYC. That particular show opened American eyes to a "Modern Art" movement that was happening in Europe at the time. Organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, it also travelled to Chicago and Boston. ArtSlant did a special feature on me to help me celebrate and I could not be more thrilled. Check it out!

Here's the LINK.

"Song of the Sea" was painted for my L.A. solo show, "Dreamgirls and Ukes".
I have a signed, limited edition print available: LINK
Inquire about collecting my original work: amy@amycrehore.com
 

See also: Amy Crehore ArtSlant profile.

The Art of Amy Crehore

Art of Amy Crehore

And, thanks, boing boing 

Song of the day

Shammy and Famous Ruis Family- "I'm Just A Little Girl" 

Another Look at Margaret Kilgallen

I love this little film of artist Margaret Kilgallen. (Art21)
Her Wikipedia entry says: "Kilgallen was an avid reader and thinker, looking to Appalachian music, signage, letterpress printing, freight train vandal art, and religious and decorative arts to inform her work. Her work demonstrates her respect for and engagement with craftsmanship and the stories of everyday peoples' lives. She was especially interested in "the evidence of the maker's hand."

She explained- "I like things that are handmade and I like to see people's hand in the world, anywhere in the world; it doesn't matter to me where it is. And in my own work, I do everything by hand. I don't project or use anything mechanical, because even though I do spend a lot of time trying to perfect my line work and my hand, my hand will always be imperfect because it's human. And I think it's the part that's interesting, that even if I'm doing really big letters and I spend a lot of time going over the line and over the line and trying to make it straight, I'll never be able to make it straight. From a distance it might look straight, but when you get close up, you can always see the line waver. And I think that's where the beauty is." Quote from Wikipedia 

She died at 33 years of age in 2001 of breast cancer, 3 weeks after giving birth to her daughter Asha. 

Llyn Foulkes at the Hammer Museum

Llyn Foulkes will play his Machine at 7:30 pm tonight at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. I wish I could go to this. His retrospective, which opened this month, will be at the Hammer through May 19th, 2013. (10899 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA)

 

Here is a clip of him on the Machine-
Llyn Foulkes at dOCUMENTA 2012 from Kent Fine Art on Vimeo.

Watch film clips of Llyn Foulkes working on his amazing piece The Lost Frontier (1997-2005, collection Hammer Museum).
 

Half Moon Banjo Ukulele

Unusual banjo uke from University of Leipzig - Museum of Musical Instruments 
(Thanks twitter, @ShelleyRickey and @UkeHunt)

Celebrating Renoir's Large Bathers on his birthday

Here's my favorite Renoir painting, The Large Bathers 1884-1887 (Philadelphia Museum of Art). I actually like the combination of styles in this painting better than his works that have his trademark, brushy-style throughout.
It has great form and beauty. The smooth skin of the figures, contrasted with less-defined impressions of nature, makes sense to me. Shown below it is one of the sketches that he did in preparation for the painting. You can see how he changed the position of the girl with the braid in the final work.
Happy Birthday, Renoir!