The Public Opinion Soapbox

cookieclaygirl · Joined: 03 Dec 2007 Posts: 1650 Location: shippensburg

btw---the people i threw out we're painters...just artists in general. meant to make that addendum last night and forgot. remembered it around 4 a.m. tho. haha.

painterwise....let's see.

i love lucien freud. any of the wyeths. balthus is big in my world (there's a thread for discussion). jerome witkin (amazing painterly quality---beautiful and mesmerising to look at....check him out if you haven't heard of him or seen his work...impressive)...phil pearlstein. um...who else---there are so many!

i guess for me my 'true loves' which got me started in art were: van gogh (duh, everyone likes him for the most part), degas, hieronymus bosch, and the usual: da vinci, michelangelo, etc etc.

as for the crazy part of the 'mad-artist' theories (thinking specifically of van gogh)...rumour has it that a lot of the 'crazys' came from the paint itself, say the cadmium of yellow which when built up internally in your system it can make you a tad, well, goofy. and if, in van gogh's case, he was out painting his beautiful sunflowers, paused, to wipe something off his canvas and put the end of his brush in his mouth- et, voila!-cadmium ingestion. enough of that over time would not help the crazys (yes, i know he had some crazys in him before...and hey--excess quantities of Absinthe in those days didn't help much either...lol)

more later. i need to think about it some more. it's been a while since i had to pull up who i like....and the whys.

bosch is cool---check him out too if you don't know his work--he was surreal before surreal was surreal (he painted in the 15th and 16th centuries---waaaaay before dali)....one of his gems is in the national gallery in D.C. by daVinci's ginevre de benci.....if you are there, be sure to check it out (ginevre is a two sided painting--very cool)

off my soap box for now. i can keep going and going and going and going....lol