The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

Agree/disagree?

matthewsgallery

Style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style. They can't be separated.

Jean luc Godard

More art musings.

matthewsgallery

I paint with my back to the world

Agnes Martin

Learn about the artist mystic who disappeared into the desert here.

More amazing women artists.

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philamuseum

www.philamuseum.org

Happy birthday to Mary Cassatt. As a woman, Cassatt was ineligible for admission to the École des Beaux-Arts. Perhaps this is why her taste in art was much more adventurous than that of any other young American expatriate artist. “A Woman and a Girl Driving,” 1881, by Mary Cassatt

matthewsgallery

Happy 171st bday, Cassatt!

“I think that if you shake the tree, you ought to be around when the fruit falls to pick it up.”

More trailblazing women artists here.

matthewsgallery

Flowers and flames. And colour. Colour as colour, not as volume, or light,—only as colour. The last mad throb of red just as it turns green, the ultimate shriek of orange calling upon all the blues of heaven for relief or for support; these Georgia O'Keeffe is able to use. In her canvases each colour almost regains the fun it muse have felt within itself, on forming the first rain-bow."

Charles Demuth on Georgia O’Keeffe, 1927.

More art musings.

matthewsgallery

Go on working freely and furiously and you will make progress.

Paul Gauguin

Learn about Gauguin.

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huariqueje

Young Painter at his Easel - Theodore Gericault

French 1791-1824

Musee Bonnat, Bayonne, France

matthewsgallery

Life of an artist. Peer behind-the-scenes in our gallery and our artists’ studios here.

matthewsgallery reblogged

arthistoryminor

“We were a piece of him: he was, perhaps the embodiment of our ambition for absolute liberation and a secretly cherished wish to overturn tables of crockery and flat champagne. We saw in his example the possibility of astounding freshness, a sort of ecstatic blindness.”

- Alan Krapow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” (1958)

matthewsgallery

Amazing quote on Jackson Pollock. More on abstract expressionism here.

matthewsgallery reblogged

ottersunday

Something to remember when looking at or making art:

this

(Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, Attese, 1968)

is no less of a painting than this

(Peter Paul Rubens, The Massacre of the Innocents, 1611-12)

matthewsgallery

Agree to disagree?

More art musings.

Source: ottersunday

matthewsgallery

I never really separated painting and literature.

Cy Twombly

More art musings.

matthewsgallery

Autobiography reveals gaps, and not only gaps in time and space or between the individual or the social, but also a widening divergence between the manner and matter of its discourse. That is, autobiography reveals the impossibility of its own dream: what begins on the presumption of self-knowledge ends in the creation of a fiction that covers over the premises of its construction.

Keith Moxey

Is autobiography nothing but fiction? Keith Moxey on the death of the subject in art, here.

matthewsgallery reblogged

radzbismonte

Knowing the history of art is a great foundation to create a new form of art.

matthewsgallery

Rethink rethink rethink rethink. If we can interpret art in a million different ways, then we can rewrite art history over and over!

More art musings.

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huariqueje

Valley Creuse and the Effect of the weather ….

1889 Valley of the Creuse (Grey Day)

1889 Valley of the Creuse at Sunset

1889 Valley of the Creuse

1889 Valley of the Creuse, Afternoon Sunlight

1889 Valley of the Creuse, Evening Effect

1889 Valley of the Creuse, Sunlight Effect

1889 Valley of the Creuse, Sunset

1889 Valley of the Petite Creuse

1889 Valley of the Creuse, Grey Day

matthewsgallery

Monet paints the same scene 9 times. Fascinating.

More art history.

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pixography

Salvador Dali ~ “Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire”, 1940

Slave Market is one of Dali’s most effective double image paintings. Without the slightest change in the details, the composition flips back and forth between two contradictory yet fully developed images.

On the left, Dali’s wife Gala leans on a red velvet tablecloth, gazing at a sculpted bust of the French philosopher Voltaire. Before her very eyes (and ours), Voltaire’s face dissolves into a group of figures. Looking closely, one can see a couple dressed in old-fashioned clothing with large white collars. They are merchants standing in a slave market, and their figures create the illusion of a sculpture of Voltaire’s head and shoulders.

Dali felt that Voltaire’s philosophy of rational thought enslaved the mind to the ordinary and stripped life of its mysteries. He maintained that, “Through her patient love, Gala protects me from the ironic and swarming world of slaves. Gala in my life destroys the image of Voltaire and every possible vestige of skepticism.” <source>

matthewsgallery

Dali's double images. Trippy.

More art history.

matthewsgallery

There is nothing ugly; I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, – light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.

~John Constable

More art musings.

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dannie-x-o-blog

Traits of Postmodernism

Irony

noun

The expression of one’s meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect.

Ambiguity

noun

The quality of being open to more than one interpretation; inexactness.

Appropriation

noun

The act of taking something for your own use without permission

Pastiche

noun

A work of art that imitates the style and/or materials of another artist or period.

matthewsgallery

Recipe for postmodernism. Would you add any ingredients?

More art history.

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nickkahler

Art history is not predictable, it’s not linear in that way. Unexpected youth will always change the course because they will always transgress those who came before.

Richard Serra, Interview with Charlie Rose, 2001 (via nickkahler)

More art history.