Oil Painting

I am much too brave sometimes. When I babysit, I get five kids to play monopoly only to figure out fifteen minutes later not all the pieces are there. I bake cupcakes with children in twenty minutes without a muffin pan. And in art class, I suggest everyone do oil painting. Sometimes, I am too brave for my own good. But it seems to have worked out this time.

Pastels seem to be my favorite thing ever. In the wake of glue's betrayal, pastel crayons have become my most steadfast and loyal companion. They are the Penelope to my Odysseus and I love them. This week, everyone drew their picture in pastels then added vegetable oil to it. Yes, it sound insane, but it works like watercolors. It pulls apart the pigment and sticks it next to each other. I later got a chemistry lesson as to why this works, but I've forgotten most of it.

These are some street artists, most probably using pastels if you ask me. 

Here's a striking wild life. A cliff, an ocean, and eagles. 

The cutest and oiliest little eagles you've ever seen. 

This was a logging truck of doom. Underneath street level was tons of explosives or something.

Here's a sketch of the cutest little dog. I was told his name was Bailey. 

Even thought our class was November 4th, that didn't mean Halloween was over. 

Part of our study of Dutch art was about how Dutch art isn't a scene. It's supposed to capture a blink of something. After the blink (the painting) is over, reality sets in and people start moving again.

This picture captures the waves hitting a ship perfectly like a photograph.

A shooting stare is something that if you blink you might miss it.

Or a fish jumping. Then again, most of these blink and miss it things end up being made into art. So I guess they'd be useless if they weren't fleeting. 

Dutch Art.

I love Dutch art. J'adore it. Always have, always will. I like it perhaps more than anything else I'm teaching this year. Except maybe some impressionism soon and Andy Warhol. I have an unrequited love for Andy Warhol. For some odd reason.

Dutch art can be summed up pretty quickly. Light and scene. And there is Dutch art in a very tiny nut shell.
 There is two major Dutch artists we are going to be studying.

Rembrandt and Vermeer. The big guns.

Rembrandt was obsessed with self portraits. Google 'Rembrandt self portrait' and prepare to gasp. He painted tons of them. They show his evolution as a painter because of their spacing and his differing techniques over time.

Here's Rembrandt as a young man.

Here he is as a old man. 

Please note the lighting. This is a huge stylization that Rembrandt went on make everyone else want to duplicate. Notice how much of the detail of the younger painting is on the rivets of his collar, but when he's old and thoughtful, the emphasis is on his face. 

Vermeer, however, is my favorite. 

                  This is widely considered to be a self-portrait of Vermeer. Please note the striking resemblance to Robert Plant. 

   Vermeer and Rembrandt are both very stylized painters, but they have Dutch-ness, as I like to call it, in common. What the two mostly have in common is lighting and scenes. Dutch scene-ing. Dutch art had a type of realism centuries before neighboring art scenes did. Mostly because the Dutch's patron system worked much differently. While everyone else's patron was the Church, who thought bathing was evil at the time, Dutch patrons were butchers who wanted their shops to look nice. This gave Dutch art realism. Art paid for by the Church didn't tolerate realistic nudes, but the butcher who was giving you money wasn't going to stand for something that looked so different from what it was meant to be. 

     Because of this, Dutch had already created styles within realism when everyone was just figuring out how to depict things as they actually were. Rembrandt, who lived before Vermeer, was at the forefront of this. He created a style that closely mirrors photography. He created scenes for his paintings. 

This is arguably Rembrandt's  most famous painting, the Night Watch. It looks like someone took a photo of it. It looks like off camera everyone kept moving. It doesn't feel staged. It feels like a quick image of a fleeting moment. 

This is Vermeer's The Concert. Looking at it, you think you might be eavesdropping. It seems like a very personal moment that you just caught a quick snap of. 

And that is Dutch art and I love it. We will also see how brave I am and attempt oil painting. I think. 

Fun fact, The Concert, the painting above, had been missing since 1990. It, along with a myriad of other paintings, were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The Concert was the most expensive of the lot, which was totaled at $500 million. The robbery was the single largest property theft in recorded history. There's a reward if you've seen it. 

The Mona Lisa revisited.

For our journey into the Renaissance, we focused on the individual. Leonardo Da Vinci and the impact that he made. Of course, we swayed into Mona Lisa territory. If it's doesn't sound to be too sure of ourselves, we remade the iconic lady. We used our own individualism to individualize the image.

We used that old method of drawing in the lines of a shadow print with pastels, then crumpling the whole things up. For this one, that only had pastel black inside the lines, it made everything else gray. For the most part, I think this one looks the most like Mona Lisa.

You have to admit, she must at least be a less extroverted cousin of the other Lisa. Perhaps a Liza.

Everyone must take note of the bonfire and chains behind this lady. I was informed she was a medieval witch who was going to burn. 

This one was the carnivorous version of the Mona Lisa. Please notice her teeth, which resemble some sort of baddie from Lord Or The Rings.

She also only had one eye that was stitched over. I like to imagine she has a glass eye in the her pocket. Or at least a monocle. I also like to think this exists outside my art class and hangs in some obscure European museum and she comes to life and yells at small children who get too close to art. My student created her doppelganger from memory. Or something. 

Personally, I think the one great fault of the Mona Lisa is her lack of hair accessories. The least Picasso could have done when he was accused of stealing the painting in 1911 was threaten that he gave her a hair thingy, then be like 'dudes, you have the wrong guy. I did not steal her.' That's what I would have done. 

This one looks like it could actually be my student's head. Such realism! The Renaissance was very much about getting rid of those medieval standards of the human form.

When I saw this one in art class, it reminded me of a map. Like Lisa's hair is the ocean and the background is land. Now that I look at it, it reminds me of a camouflaged ninja. It's the eyes. 

I was told this one was made to most resemble the original. I think the way the colors are blended it probably is the closest. It also reminds me of camouflage, but in the way as if the Florentine lady were to go deer hunting. I can just see her with a flowing rob in a deer stand going, 'we're having venison tonight!' Don't lie. You can see it too. 

This was our mermaid Mona Lisa. Personally, I feel this mermaid would at least give Ariel feel inferior. Ariel might even develop an eating disorder from pure envy of Mona's ravishing hair. And that hair clip, way better than a dingle-hopper. Dingle-who? No one cares, Ariel. 

We don't have to generate that much sympathy for Ariel though. I mean really. Her bustier was totally a copy of Madonna's. Even Lady Gaga hasn't attempted that sort of imitation. Plus, all that stuff she constantly put in that cave of hers. She must be some type of mermaid hoarder. 

Or perhaps a cultural anthropologist. If that's true, I hope she beats her eating disorder and gets some legs so she walk her way into a college and get an education. She'd totally get financial aid since she lives underwater and all. Then again, her father is like King of the Ocean and all...