Facebook Crosspost: 2020-June-8

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Looking for inspiration for your “Portraits of the Pandemic” exhibition submission? What about some inspiration from art history?

Featured Historic Self Portrait: Elizabeth Vigee-LeBrun

French artist Élisabeth Louise Vigée-LeBrun (French, 1755–1842) was best known as Marie Antoinette’s favorite painter for a decade. She also enjoyed the patronage of European aristocrats, actors, and writers and was elected to art academies in ten cities.

Trained by her portrait painter father, Vigée-LeBrun demonstrated a gift for the arts at an early age. By age 15 she was earning enough money to support her widowed mother and siblings. At 21 she married Jean-Baptiste-Pierre LeBrun, a painter and art dealer who helped her gain valuable access to the art world.

By the 1770s, she was taking clients. By 1783, she had claimed one of the four seats reserved for women at the Academy, due to direct intervention from Queen Marie Antoinette, her most famous subject, and King Louis XVI. Because of her high-profile relationship with Marie Antoinette she was forced to flee the country at the time of the French Revolution.

Image was vital to Vigée Le Brun’s promotion as an artist, and her self-portraits are a skillful combination of fine art and advertising. They depict a self-confident artist who is aware and worthy of the tradition of the Old Masters.

Feeling inspired? For information on how to submit your self-portrait, click the link below:

Portraits of the Pandemic

Artists and Their Pets: 2020-June-8

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Artists and Their Pets:
Emily Newton Barto

Emily Newton Barto (1896–1968) was an American children’s book illustrator, writer, craftsperson, writer, and designer.

In 1937, as part of the New Deals Federal Art Project Barto painted the mural, “Animal Tales” for the Fordham Hospital in New York City. A docile tabby cat served as Barto’s model as she brought to life the nursery rhyme There Was a Crooked Man:

‘There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile;
He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.’
Emily Newton Barto (1896–1968)

What’s Cooking: 2020-June-6

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What’s Cooking? Vincent Price

Vincent Price, THE star of campy horror films for six decades (House of Wax, The Tinglers, and Edward Scissorhands, etc) was also an art collector, food historian and a gourmet chef who authored several cookbooks, including A Treasury of Great Recipes and Cooking Price-Wise, which was based on his television show. In addition, Price released cooking tutorials on vinyl; and demonstrated his cooking skills on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, where he poached fish in a dishwasher.

Price came to cooking naturally. His grandfather invented one of the first cream of tartar-based baking powders, and his father was the president of the National Candy Company. Remarked Price, “There are three things which really turn me on…one is work, another is art and the third is food.”

Here is his recipe for the unlikely pairing of bacon and mousse. For the daring palate:

Bacon Mousse

  • ½ lb. leftover bacon, finely chopped
  • 4 tablespoons horse-radish sauce
  • 2 tablespoons mayonnaise
  • ½ teaspoon dry mustard
  • 1 tablespoon gelatin
  • ¼ pint cold water
  • ¼ pint cream

Dissolve gelatin in the cold water. Heat for 10 minutes, add to cream and mayonnaise. Beat well together and add remaining ingredients. Mix and turn into moistened mold. You can vary this to taste—unmold onto lettuce hearts and watercress.

Vincent Leonard Price Jr. (May 27, 1911 – October 25, 1993) 

Facebook Crosspost: 2020-June-6

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Looking for inspiration for your “Portraits of the Pandemic” exhibition submission? What about some inspiration from art history?

Featured Historic Self Portrait: Paula Modersohn-Becker

German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) was best known for her expressionistic self-portraits, scenes of children with their mothers, and brooding landscapes. Painted in luminous colors and crude brushstrokes, her works were inspired by Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh. Modersohn-Becker was one of the first German artists to work in a style that became known as Expressionism.

Modersohn-Becker made numerous self-portraits, in countless variations. She was likely the first modern woman artist to have painted nude self-portraits.

Despite selling only three paintings during her lifetime, her distinct style, perseverance in overcoming considerable barriers to women artists, and daring subject matter made her an artist few could ignore. Undaunted by the scant recognition she received, she felt she had made a leap forward with her large-scale nudes and self-portraits, writing that through this highly personal body of work, “I will make something of myself.”

One of her last paintings, Self-Portrait with Two Flowers in Her Raised Left Hand (1907), was painted while she was pregnant. Later that year, she died of complications just 20 days after giving birth to a daughter. She was 31 years old.

Inspired to submit? Click the link below:

Portraits of the Pandemic

Misplaced by History: 2020-June-5

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Misplaced by History: Artists Worth Knowing
Jean Metzinger

French painter Jean Metzinger (1883-1956) may be one of the least known Cubist painters, but he was the first to write a major treatise on the topic, Du “Cubisme” in 1912. A prominent member of the French avant-garde, the cerebral Metzinger relentlessly examined systems and strategies in his art throughout his career.

Metzinger was born in Nantes, France in 1883. At the age of twenty he moved to Paris to pursue a career as a painter. Not long after he met a notorious group of Bohemian artists, poets and writers, among them Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Georges Braque, who sought to change the course of art history. The leader of the group, Pablo Picasso, was to have a profound influence on him.

An early interest in mathematics led Metzinger to Cubism. In 1910, he was the first to explain it by pointing out that Picasso and Braque had dismissed traditional perspective and merged multiple views of an object in a single image. They understood that as humans we view the world in a Cubist manner, from a variety of angles, simultaneously, our minds putting images together cohesively. Said Metzinger, “The visible world only becomes the real world by the operation of thought,”

In 1911 Metzinger participated in the controversial Salle 41 at the Salon des Indépendants, the first formal group exhibition of Cubist painters. His work was represented at the Salon d’Automne in Paris that same year.

Metzinger was a gifted and versatile critic, poet and writer that argued passionately against traditional approaches in art and the need for portraying multiple perspectives to better understand reality and time.

Serving in the army during World War I, Metzinger returned in 1919 to Paris, where he lived for the remainder of his life. His work went through several phases and he continued to exhibit throughout his life.

Metzinger died in 1956 in Paris. Today, his works are included in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, among others.

Jean Metzinger (1883-1956)

Facebook Crosspost: 2020-June-1

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Looking for inspiration for your “Portraits of the Pandemic” exhibition submission? What about some inspiration from art history?

Featured Historic Self Portrait: Jacob Lawrence

American artist Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) was best known for his dynamic and vibrant depictions of African American life and history. Unlike many artists, he rarely engaged in self-portraiture. In a rare self-portrait Lawrence portrayed himself as an artist in his studio in Seattle, Washington. The artist is surrounded by his tools and materials–tubes and jars of paint, clamps, a drill, a lathe, and a hammer. On the left, one of Lawrence’s paintings hangs on the wall. It is an image of Harriet Tubman leading slaves to freedom, originally executed for a children’s book, Harriet and the Promised Land.

Jacob Lawrence, Self-Portrait, 1977. Gouache and tempera on paper.

In a self-portrait rendered in ink over graphite on paper, Lawrence concentrated his appearance into a few essential lines and shapes. A black arc describes the shape of his skull. His mustache is a complex of wavy lines flanked by heavier curves evoking folds of aging flesh. Lawrence left most of his face white to set off the abstracted black shapes of his nose, eyes, mouth, and mustache.

Jacob Lawrence, Self-Portrait, 1993, Ink over graphite on paper

Feeling inspired? Click the link below for information on how to submit your self-portrait:

Portraits of the Pandemic

Artists and Their Pets: 2020-June-1

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Artists and Their Pets: Ai Weiwei

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei produces sculptural installations, architectural projects, photographs and videos. He is known for the frequently provocative and subversive dimension of his art, as well as his political outspokenness, which has triggered various forms of repression from Chinese authorities.

Ai lives with more than 30 cats in his Beijing studio. Offering him daily solace, he often posts pictures of them on social media. He has a profound connection to animals writing in a blog post, “The cats and dogs in my home enjoy high status; they seem more like the lords of the manor than I do. The poses they strike in the courtyard often inspire more joy in me than the house itself.”