He woke with a start, a police siren blaring past the open window. HIs arm waved blindly in the dark searching for the electric alarm clock placed on a pile of old newspapers and magazines. The neon numbers informed his groggy eyes and pounding head that it was 04:30 a.m. His mouth felt like sandpaper and tasted like vomit. He gave a quiet groan, pushed his hands into a dark tangled mess of hair, as though trying to make his head cave in, and maneuvered off the bare mattress onto the floor.
He struggled upright, knocking over a fair few bottles in the process, leaning heavily against the wall for support. His legs were always shaky in the morning. He stumbled along the wall, hands searching for the light switch. The sudden brightness forced his stinging eyes closed. After a few minutes of tightly shut eyes and massaging his temples he squinted his eyes into the light and staggered toward his latest work.
He lurched toward it, not even bothering to avoid the mess of bottles, cans, unwashed clothes, old sketches, pallets and brushes and dirty dishes that littered the room. The canvas was bathed in moonlight making it look ghostly and sad. The light showed the shadows where the paint was so thick it rose off the giant canvas. He ran a calloused hand over the rough, crusty paint. Why did he use acrylic? He should have used water colour: the acrylic was so rough; this wasn’t what he wanted; this wasn’t right. This wasn’t her.
His fingernails dug into the paint, clawing it from the canvas, scratching and scraping until the face on the canvas was unrecognisable, until his breathing was shallow and uneven, until his heart was pounding so fiercely in his chest he feared it might explode, until his fingers were raw and bleeding and unab...
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...ged himself toward the mattress, making an attempt to avoid the glass.
He collapsed on the mattress with a grunt. Sitting upright, he pulled a sketch pad and a piece of broken charcoal out of a pile. He drew a picture of himself this time, rather than her. He hadn’t drawn himself in years; it felt alien to him now, almost unnatural. He drew himself back then, back when he was happy, back when his muse was with him. He drew until exhaustion took over.
His vision began to fade as he fell unconscious, black seeping into his eyes until sight was obscured completely. This was when he was happy, when he was able to remember. It was hazy and foggy but at least she was there even if he was forgetting her face. She could never abandon him here. It was him and his muse, nobody and nothing could get in his way. With a final glance at the man he once was, he fell asleep.
The face of the portrait is detailed, and more naturally painted than the rest of the composition. However, the left iris exceeds her eye and extends past the normal outline. The viewer can see every single brush stroke resulting in a unique approach to the capturing human emotion. The streaky texture combines with the smoothness flow of the artist’s hand creating contrast between the hair and the face. The woman’s hair is painted with thick and chunky globs of paint. The viewer can physically see the paint rising from the canvas and flowing into the movement of the waves of hair. Throughout the hair as well as the rest of the portrait Neel abandons basic painting studies and doesn’t clean her brush before applying the next color. Because of the deliberate choice to entangle the colors on the brush it creates a new muddy palate skewed throughout the canvas. Moving from the thick waves of hair, Neel abandons the thick painting style of the physical portrait and moves to a looser more abstract technique to paint the background. Despite the lack of linear perspective, Neel uses a dry brush technique for the colorful streaks in the background creating a messy illusion of a wall and a sense of space. The painting is not clean, precise, or complete; there are intentional empty spaces, allowing the canvas to pear through wide places in the portrait. Again, Neel abandons
...hese repeated vertical lines contrast firmly with a horizontal line that divides the canvas almost exactly in half. The background, upper portion of the canvas, seems unchanging and flat, whereas the foreground and middle ground of the painting have a lot of depth to them.
Some of the largest canvases contain thousands of squares; Close completes all of his paintings by hand. Given the painstaking nature of this work, some of the earlier large-scale paintings took up to fourteen months to complete.Close's work falls into two periods, the early and the middle, in which he is now fruitfully engaged. It is easy to divide the two periods on either side of Close's 1988 stroke that left him unable to hold a brush. (He paints with his brush tied to his hand by a metal and Velcro device.) Close started to work with bolder, more expressive and colorful marks before his great physical trauma. The new work is both the same; they're recognizable as works by Close and could be by no one else He still uses the grid and he still paints heads. Although the amount of information the new pictures carry is less than the old, the characters depicted seem warmer, more immediate, and more exuberant.Close's repertory of marks has changed dramatically.
2 is otherworldly. Because the subject matter, emotion, is an entity that cannot be observed, its depiction results an equally confusing and incomprehensibility. Seen under the same light used to see the world, the image cannot be more ambiguous: it resembles nothing. But there is an artistic purpose to this madness. While Kandinsky seeks to capture music, Pollock aims to capture his changing emotional states. The incomprehensibility, however, adds another dimension to the painting. Faced with nothing familiar, the viewer is forced to question not the painting but the painter’s mind itself, leading to a deeper understanding of the depicted emotions. What could he have possibly been
The first thing to notice about this painting is how incredibly involved and realistic the brushwork is. The couple’s faces are so delicately rendered. Every wrinkle is visible and every hair strand is in it’s place. The soft folds and patterns of their clothing, and the grain of the vertical boards on the house, are highly developed and reveal Wood’s incredible attention to detail. The man, especially, appears to be nearly photorealistic.
Acrylic paints have become so very popular since its introduction into the public market in the 1950’s. For hundreds of years, the artist had to contend with the peculiarities of their chosen medium. The watercolorist had to contend with paintings very easily damaged by moisture, and the oil painter had to wait an interminable amount of time for his painting to dry. Acrylic paint …………..
As The Narrator recovers from his coma caused by an object falling on him he is attending physiotherapy sessions in order to regain his memory of movement and action. This therapy is causing The Narrator to think out each retraction and relaxation of muscles in a given task. As The Narrator does this it is becoming imprinted on his mind that he has to think out everything h...
Pioch, N. (2002, Jul 16). WebMuseum: Pollock, Jackson. Retrieved 3 30, 2014, from Pollock, Jackson: http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/pollock/
When I imagine an artist, I picture a Parisian dabbing at a sprawling masterpiece between drags on a cigarette seated in an extravagantly long holder. He stands amid a motley sea of color, great splashes of vermillion and ultramarine and yellow ochre hiding the tarp on the studio floor. Somehow, not one lonely drop of paint adorns his Italian leather shoes with their pointed toes like baguettes.
From the creation of art to its modern understanding, artists have strived to perform and perfect a photo realistic painting with the use of complex lines, blend of colors, and captivating subjects. This is not the case anymore due to the invention of the camera in 1827, since it will always be the ultimate form of realism. Due to this, artists had the opportunities to branch away from the classical formation of realism, and venture into new forms such as what is known today as modern art. In the examination of two well known artists, Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock, we can see that the artist doesn’t only intend for the painting to be just a painting, but more of a form of telling a scene through challenging thoughts, and expressing of the artists emotion in their creation.
As I regained my consciousness, my face was throbbing with pain and my nose was bleeding. I tried to clean the blood off my face, but realized my hands and legs were tied up. I sat upright and looked around me. My house was a mess; everything was either broken, or gone. . . . I had been robbed.
...de its appearance and preserved... [t]he painter's way of seeing [and] reconstituted … the marks he [made] on the canvas or paper." (Berger 9-10) The fact that this concept is still relatable to a modern audience illustrates the magnitude of this work’s meaning.
She reached her hands up to her eyes to wipe away the sleep. She twisted to stretch her back, feeling the soreness of falling after running into Caesar. She replayed the conversation that they had yesterday. Caesar was lying, she knew how much he needed her. At Caesar's other life he was abused and he had just recently gotten out of depression. If she left and she set him into a backward spiral she wouldn’t be able to live with herself. Noticing the late time, she pulled herself out of her thoughts and lazily pushed away the rough, vintage comforter and tiptoed across the cold wooden floor over to Ben's bed. She shook him awake trying to be gentle as he awoke softy to reveal his chocolate brown eyes. Ben let out a soft groan and rolled
The third maddening buzz of my alarm woke me as I groggily slid out of bed to the shower. It was the start of another routine morning, or so I thought. I took a shower, quarreled with my sister over which clothes she should wear for that day and finished getting myself ready. All of this took a little longer than usual, not a surprise, so we were running late. We hopped into the interior of my sleek, white Thunderbird and made our way to school.
My understanding of action painting coming into this class was nonexistent. I had heard the name Jackson Pollock before and had seen some of his different paintings, but I hadn’t heard the term ‘action painting’ before. It wasn’t until this last week that we reached the portion in the book that even mentions Jackson Pollock or action painting. Despite how new the term is to me, and how little I had really looked at any of Pollock’s work, it’s honestly a fascinating style of art.