Art Blog - Art In History

This is a subject I have worried around before (see for example "Significant Art: What does it Signify?") because it gets to the heart of those subconscious doubts I have about the value of my work. Though I am going to look at it here from the persepctive of art history, I clearly care about it as a kind of self-justification. My art is not an art of innovation. What uniqueness it has comes unconsciously and inevitably from the personal vision which each of us has, not from any attempt to break new ground. I am not even an experimental artist (a much less demanding standard); many artists who never break new ground nevertheless experiment with different styles and media, doing work that is new for them if not for art as a whole… Continue reading… 4 comments

After my recent post on landscape painting of the Romantic period, I want to do a more general piece on the appeal of landscape. I believe this appeal is grounded in the appeal to our age of scenes in nature, and that painted landscapes depend in large part on capturing this appeal. This appeal has many sources, but for me, two of them stand out: empathy and nostalgia. Even without these two elements, which we bring to nature from within ourselves, landscape would have plenty going for it. It is infinite in variety of texture, form and color, infinite in its possibilities for order, composition and movement. But these possibilities have always been there, and can't explain the immense appeal of landscape in the modern era… Continue reading… 7 comments

I have been picking out artists who are my favorites, and who also deserve to be called great because of the nature of their enterprise. Many of my favorite artists are not "great" in this sense; they are modest and unassuming in their scope and intentions. A good example is the artist with whom I feel the greatest natural affinity: John Constable. But before turning to Constalbe, I thought I should give homage to his truly great English contemporary, William Turner. It is hard to like Turner as a human being; is was rather a nasty man, secretive, suspicious, paranoid… Continue reading… 8 comments

When we think of the naturalistic tradition in English landscape painting at the beginning of the 19th century we immediately think of the work of John Constable. Constable's work, done almost entirely in the Dedham valley of his youth, with excursions to nearby Salisbury and Brighton, is a celebration of the ordinary. With its marvelous sensitivity to the nuances of everything familiar, known and loved, he raises to the level of high art that which we see everyday and normally find unremarkable. But we are less likely to connect his great contemporary Turner to the naturalistic tradition. His work is so far from our day-to-day experience of nature, and so exciting in its foretelling of later abstract art, that we can easily ignore its essential naturalistic roots… Continue reading… 0 comments