wow! Did you really paint this? It has your trade-markings all over, but the style is quite different. Wonderfully sensitive treatment of body and clothing. Great transformation of negative space to positive form. Love it. Makes me want to get to know this person, or the circumstance of the painting.
البرجوازي العراقي
She looks Iraqi woman to me. This is the shape of the casual Iraqi woman that I know from my district in Baghdad. Anyway,
Dear Iraqi Aristocrat, thank you for adding me to the Iraqi Blog Index. You added me under iraqi blogs from USA, I don't live in the USA, I live in Canada.
Shoes For Iraq, thank you for your super sweet comment.
AGA
Call me crazy, but what appears to me is unquestionably Czechoslovakian. 🙂
AGA
With Canadian coloring to be sure, I might add.
ihath
AGA, lol, you sound like my mother 🙂
Shoes for Iraq
This is really an inspiring painting to write about. I have to have another comment. The entire composition seems to be an amalgamation or interpretation of the 19th century's most influential modern painters. Your use of paint in the background and on the figure is especially interesting. Technically, to impart distance, a more conservative painter might use large brush marks in the foreground and smaller brush marks in the background – to create an optical illusion suggesting perspective (the human eye is used to seeing larger things close-up and this can be mimicked with the size of a brush stroke). But what you have done is almost the opposite – you have used smaller markings on the dress and large strokes on the "wall paper", while using a third much broader kind of sweeping stroke on what could be a floor and to paint the limbs. Logically, what you have done should flatten the canvas (as Matisse often deliberately did) – but instead the effect is the exact opposite! By perhaps an accidental master-stroke the markings on the clothing perform the same role that more formal tricks with perspective might. Drapery and under form are reproduced beautifully by simply allowing dots to follow the direction of the fabric's pattern, where the fabric has fallen or been folded over the body. This treatment of foreground and background has created a dynamism in what might seem at first a restive figurative stance. I love the way the portraitee stands with her hand on her hip. In a left-to-right reading society her gaze directs us "back in time" to the left of the page. Far from being a mute model the figure implies an expressive act of commentary (and perhaps a collaborative conversation with the painter).
The title and style infer three of the most well known paint genres of the 19th and early 20th centuries (impressionism, pointillism and expressionism) while at the same time invoking post-peace (or continuing war) sentiment in the 21st century. You often seem, perhaps without knowing, to combine 19th and 20th century influences in a way that is becoming uniquely your own. For example I have noticed many expressive and impressionistic dots in your paintings. Early pointillists who experimented with the dot technique were never expressive at all (in fact expressionism had yet to be invented when they began experimenting). Their dots were produced from a more mechanical point of view (very like the first cubist abstractions produced by Picasso and Braque). Seurat, a pointillist, was more interested in creating deliberate optical illusions and his dot theory developed at a time of growing awareness among his 19th century contemporaries, following new work in the fields of science and technology. While Seurat was painting with dots, 19th century physicists were making significant advances in particle theory – including the discovery of subatomic particles. Dot theory (or pointillism) became the premise upon which off-set printing meshes were based, and later the pixel. Yet, far from miming Seurat's nearly clinical approach, your dots have a life of their own – sometimes morphing into bug-like almost aphis type infestations and at others decoratively describing form. You seem unconcerned with Seurat's mechanics and apply your dots in a style that could owe more to the romantics, the impressionists, Van Gogh, or Klimt.
A life drawing expert might suggest a painter of people look at fingers and toes, but for some reason instead of looking like an amputee the exclusion of the model's legs from the knee down suggests a life outside the frame. And her confidently rendered, straw-like, fingers are "just right" for their position.
This painting works for so many reasons, your best yet! Produce more paintings of this calibre and I will try to return as your raving art critic.
ihath
Shoes for Iraq,
You seem to know lots about the art world, perhaps you are an artist in your own right. You comment made my day.
Shoes for Iraq
No no, I am not an artist. I am a great pretender though – sometimes I pretend war and violence might be discontinued. Other times I pretend all of the people will get along swell. Occasionally I pretend that if I have made one person's day, then perhaps I have not wasted so much time composing what others might call a highly inefficient comment with too many keystrokes. And I really like your paintings, they make procrastinating by surfing weblogs and reading crash courses in stage one modern art worth every moment.
ihath
In that case, Shoes For Iraq, pretend that you are a great artist, the greatest artist in the world today. What work of art would you produce?
Shoes for Iraq
What work of art would I produce? An artistic appraisal of the wall between Palestine and Israel. I would remark on the unforeseen collaborative nature of the wall. I would invite art appreciators to become visitors and ask that they might think of the wall as a giant off-line web-log, Israelis having donated the framework and structural materials on which creatively minded exterior decorators in Palestine have produced an extraordinary number of "posts". I would cover the use of the wall in moving image media, as musical backdrop, and as stage set for what eventually could become a peace between two populations who might begin to focus on structural and decorative efforts through use of the wall. I would point towards a possible alternative future, citing the idea that descendents of the two populations might one day decide to join one another in mutual agreement and tear down the wall. I would cover the notion …that the wall elicits a kind of dedication from its builders and decorators in comparison to the drive-by lack of discipline that one can sometimes observe in online forum. After all, it takes some planning to design and carry out a wall based project. As the biggest bull-artiste of the century I would add no decorative measure of my own – producing a thesis on the subject as an artwork instead and maintaining a civil distance from the Palestinians and the Israelis emerging discourse.
wow! Did you really paint this? It has your trade-markings all over, but the style is quite different. Wonderfully sensitive treatment of body and clothing. Great transformation of negative space to positive form. Love it. Makes me want to get to know this person, or the circumstance of the painting.
She looks Iraqi woman to me. This is the shape of the casual Iraqi woman that I know from my district in Baghdad. Anyway,
I am happy to tell you that your blog is added to the list of
IRAQI BLOG INDEX
http://iraqiblogindex.blogspot.com
iraqiblofindex@gmail.com
Dear Iraqi Aristocrat, thank you for adding me to the Iraqi Blog Index. You added me under iraqi blogs from USA, I don't live in the USA, I live in Canada.
Shoes For Iraq, thank you for your super sweet comment.
Call me crazy, but what appears to me is unquestionably Czechoslovakian. 🙂
With Canadian coloring to be sure, I might add.
AGA, lol, you sound like my mother 🙂
This is really an inspiring painting to write about. I have to have another comment. The entire composition seems to be an amalgamation or interpretation of the 19th century's most influential modern painters. Your use of paint in the background and on the figure is especially interesting. Technically, to impart distance, a more conservative painter might use large brush marks in the foreground and smaller brush marks in the background – to create an optical illusion suggesting perspective (the human eye is used to seeing larger things close-up and this can be mimicked with the size of a brush stroke). But what you have done is almost the opposite – you have used smaller markings on the dress and large strokes on the "wall paper", while using a third much broader kind of sweeping stroke on what could be a floor and to paint the limbs. Logically, what you have done should flatten the canvas (as Matisse often deliberately did) – but instead the effect is the exact opposite! By perhaps an accidental master-stroke the markings on the clothing perform the same role that more formal tricks with perspective might. Drapery and under form are reproduced beautifully by simply allowing dots to follow the direction of the fabric's pattern, where the fabric has fallen or been folded over the body. This treatment of foreground and background has created a dynamism in what might seem at first a restive figurative stance. I love the way the portraitee stands with her hand on her hip. In a left-to-right reading society her gaze directs us "back in time" to the left of the page. Far from being a mute model the figure implies an expressive act of commentary (and perhaps a collaborative conversation with the painter).
The title and style infer three of the most well known paint genres of the 19th and early 20th centuries (impressionism, pointillism and expressionism) while at the same time invoking post-peace (or continuing war) sentiment in the 21st century. You often seem, perhaps without knowing, to combine 19th and 20th century influences in a way that is becoming uniquely your own. For example I have noticed many expressive and impressionistic dots in your paintings. Early pointillists who experimented with the dot technique were never expressive at all (in fact expressionism had yet to be invented when they began experimenting). Their dots were produced from a more mechanical point of view (very like the first cubist abstractions produced by Picasso and Braque). Seurat, a pointillist, was more interested in creating deliberate optical illusions and his dot theory developed at a time of growing awareness among his 19th century contemporaries, following new work in the fields of science and technology. While Seurat was painting with dots, 19th century physicists were making significant advances in particle theory – including the discovery of subatomic particles. Dot theory (or pointillism) became the premise upon which off-set printing meshes were based, and later the pixel. Yet, far from miming Seurat's nearly clinical approach, your dots have a life of their own – sometimes morphing into bug-like almost aphis type infestations and at others decoratively describing form. You seem unconcerned with Seurat's mechanics and apply your dots in a style that could owe more to the romantics, the impressionists, Van Gogh, or Klimt.
A life drawing expert might suggest a painter of people look at fingers and toes, but for some reason instead of looking like an amputee the exclusion of the model's legs from the knee down suggests a life outside the frame. And her confidently rendered, straw-like, fingers are "just right" for their position.
This painting works for so many reasons, your best yet! Produce more paintings of this calibre and I will try to return as your raving art critic.
Shoes for Iraq,
You seem to know lots about the art world, perhaps you are an artist in your own right. You comment made my day.
No no, I am not an artist. I am a great pretender though – sometimes I pretend war and violence might be discontinued. Other times I pretend all of the people will get along swell. Occasionally I pretend that if I have made one person's day, then perhaps I have not wasted so much time composing what others might call a highly inefficient comment with too many keystrokes. And I really like your paintings, they make procrastinating by surfing weblogs and reading crash courses in stage one modern art worth every moment.
In that case, Shoes For Iraq, pretend that you are a great artist, the greatest artist in the world today. What work of art would you produce?
What work of art would I produce? An artistic appraisal of the wall between Palestine and Israel. I would remark on the unforeseen collaborative nature of the wall. I would invite art appreciators to become visitors and ask that they might think of the wall as a giant off-line web-log, Israelis having donated the framework and structural materials on which creatively minded exterior decorators in Palestine have produced an extraordinary number of "posts". I would cover the use of the wall in moving image media, as musical backdrop, and as stage set for what eventually could become a peace between two populations who might begin to focus on structural and decorative efforts through use of the wall. I would point towards a possible alternative future, citing the idea that descendents of the two populations might one day decide to join one another in mutual agreement and tear down the wall. I would cover the notion …that the wall elicits a kind of dedication from its builders and decorators in comparison to the drive-by lack of discipline that one can sometimes observe in online forum. After all, it takes some planning to design and carry out a wall based project. As the biggest bull-artiste of the century I would add no decorative measure of my own – producing a thesis on the subject as an artwork instead and maintaining a civil distance from the Palestinians and the Israelis emerging discourse.