The Adobe Museum of Digital Media (AMDM)

Adobe Museum of Digital Media, www.adobe.com/adobemuseum

 

The Adobe Museum of Digital Media (AMDM) is a unique virtual space designed to showcase and preserve groundbreaking digital work and to present expert commentary on how digital media influences culture and society.

The museum is an ever-changing repository of eclectic exhibits from diverse fields ranging from photography to product development to broadcast communications. To inspire fresh conversation on the constantly evolving digital landscape, exhibits are overseen by guest curators, each of whom is a recognized leader in the field of art, technology, or business.

The AMDM is a space unlike any created before. Because it is entirely digital, it is an ideal gallery for displaying and viewing digital media, as well as revealing the innovation and artistry within the work. It is open to the public 365 days a year and is accessible from anywhere in the world. source: http://www.adobe.com/adobemuseum/

de Kooning: A Retrospective - MOMA

This website includes selected paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints from the MoMA exhibition de Kooning: A Retrospective (September 18, 2011–January 9, 2012) and related publication, both devoted to the full scope of the career of Willem de Kooning (American, b. the Netherlands, 1904–1997). Among these are some of the artist’s most famous, landmark paintings—including Pink Angels (c. 1945), Excavation (1950), and the celebrated third Woman series (1950–53)—plus examples from all of his most important series, ranging from his figurative paintings of the early 1940s to the breakthrough black-and-white compositions of 1948–49, and from the urban abstractions of the mid-1950s to the artist’s return to figurations in the 1960s, and the large gestural abstractions of the following decade. text and image source: http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/dekooning/

Link Credits

Chris Jordan

Gyre II, 40x56 and 60x76. Depicts 50,000 cigarette lighters, equal to the estimated number of pieces of floating plastic in every square mile in the world's oceans. 

Chris Jordan is an artist based in Seattle, Washington who is best known for his large scale works depicting mass consumption and waste, particularly garbage. He has been called "the 'it' artist of the green movement".

Many of Jordan's works are created from photographs of garbage and mass consumption, a serendipitous technique which started when he visited an industrial yard to look at patterns of color and order. His industrious passion for conservation and awareness has brought much attention to his photography in recent years. Jordan uses everyday commonalities such as a plastic cup and defines the blind unawareness involved in American consumerism. His work, while often unsettling, is a bold message about unconscious behaviors in our everyday lives, leaving it to the viewer to draw conclusions about the inevitable consequences which will arise from our habits. source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Jordan_%28artist%29

Draw A Stickman

www.drawastickman.com

Bonnard and Japan

 
Brilliant Colors: The Impact of Japanese Prints on Pierre Bonnard as a Colorist
 by Suzanne H. Westbrook, Princeton Class of 2008

“One thing is necessary in painting: heightening the tone” —Pierre Bonnard

 Color as Logic

...It was this central element of color that led to his later, more thorough exploration of color in his subsequent paintings of the 1890s, in conjunction with the increasing presence of Japanese compositional techniques in his work. By 1892, two years after his first experimentation with Japanese styles, he had gained the confidence to rely solely on color to highlight the subject, abandoning traditional European concepts of depth and three-dimensionality. He expressed this idea in his journal in the following words:

Using only one color as a basis, you structure the entire painting around it. Color represents a logic that is just as unrelenting as the logic of form. (Bonnard, qtd. Phillips)

Here, Bonnard reveals his core theory of colorism: that color can be used as the principal means of organizing a painting. He equates color with form in terms of logical importance, a far cry from the old-fashioned European use of color primarily as a compliment to form...

Letter from Southern France: First Impressions : The New Yorker

Link - The New Yorker Article

The Nature of Nothingness - New Scientist

 

 New Scientist

Link - New Scientist Article

Neil Welliver - Painter, PBS Video

Watch Welliver on PBS. See more from MPBN Specials.

Neil Welliver (July 22, 1929 - April 5, 2005) was an American-born modern artist, best known for his large-scale landscape paintings inspired by the deep woods near his home in Maine.

Welliver was born in Millville, Pennsylvania. He graduated from the Philadelphia College of Art (now part of the University of the Arts) and then received an MFA from Yale University. At Yale, he studied with the abstract artists Burgoyne Diller and Josef Albers, whose theories on color were influential.[1] Welliver taught at Cooper Union from 1953-1957, at Yale from 1956 to 1966, and in 1966 began teaching at, and eventually became chairman of, the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Fine Art, from which he retired in 1989.

While teaching at Yale, Welliver's style evolved from abstract color field painting to the realistic transcription of small-town scenes in watercolor. In the early 1960s he went to Maine, where he began painting figures outdoors, the large oil paintings often focusing on his sons canoeing or female nudes bathing. In 1970 he moved permanently to Lincolnville, and by the mid 1970s the figure as subject had given way to the exclusive study of landscape.

His mature works, often as large as 8 by 10 feet, are at once richly painted abstractions and clear representational images of intimate Maine landscapes, taking as their subjects rocky hills, beaver houses, tree stumps, and rushing water, occasionally opening out to blue cloud-laden skies. Carrying his equipment on his back, Welliver hiked into the woods to make plein-air sketches. His equipment-laden backpack weighed seventy pounds, and included eight colors of oil paint: white, ivory black, cadmium red scarlet, manganese blue, ultramarine blue, lemon yellow, cadmium yellow, and talens green light.[2] These plein-air studies usually took about 9 hours, and were painted in 3 hour increments, after which time the light would change too much to continue.[3] Welliver insisted that he was uninterested in trying to copy the exact colors of objects, desiring instead to find "a color that makes it look like it is, again, surrounded by air."[4] He often painted out of doors in winter, and enjoyed the crystal quality of the air and luminosity created by light reflecting off snow, but acknowledged that the process was not easy...

       source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Welliver

Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement, Royal Academy of Arts, London

"This landmark exhibition focuses on Edgar Degas’s preoccupation with movement as an artist of the dance. Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement traces the development of the artist's ballet imagery throughout his career, from the documentary mode of the early 1870s to the sensuous expressiveness of his final years. 

The exhibition is the first to present Degas’s progressive engagement with the figure in movement in the context of parallel advances in photography and early film; indeed, the artist was keenly aware of these technological developments and often directly involved with them." 

source: http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/degas/

Chardin - Painter

Basket of Wild Strawberries, Chardin, 1761

"Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin (1699-1779) was one of greatest masters of Still Life in the history of art. The painting style of the establishment in his day was Rococo: a pretentious style crammed with allegorical images from classical mythology swirling with ornate decoration. To Chardin this theatrical approach reduced art to some kind of intellectual conversation piece. It was totally alien to the world that he constructed - a simple world of truth, humility and calm played out in a few square inches on the wall.

The items he portrayed from his own home were selected for their shapes, textures and colours, rather than for any symbolic meaning they may have had. They were simply painted to convey the visual pleasure he experienced in looking at them. As his friend, the critic Diderot put it, “To look at pictures by other artists it seems that I need to borrow a different pair of eyes. To look at those of Chardin, I only have to keep the eyes that nature gave me and make good use of them.”

What Chardin strove for was an overall effect: a unity of tone, colour and form. His still lifes reveal themselves slowly, with his objects gradually emerging from their subtly toned background, summoned as the writer Marcel Proust puts it, “out of the everlasting darkness in which they have been interred.” "

- source:  http://www.artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/still_life/chardin/chardin.htm

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