The other Mona Lisa

When Leonardo da Vinci died in France at the age of 67, he had been working on the Mona Lisa, on and off, for about 16 years, carrying the painting around Italy and France on his travels. The Mona Lisa we know is of a certain age.

But there is a second Mona Lisa, this one called La Gioconda. In this one the sitter is much younger, much more charming and much more beautiful. I would estimate her age at about 13.

La Gioconda

La Gioconda – the smiling one. The smiling one suggests that there is another one who does not smile. This is my feeling about the Louvre version.

A lot of speculation surrounds these two paintings but there is no need for that. Both paintings are carbon dated to the lifetime of Leonardo da Vinci and the style is clearly his. At the time there was no other artist who had the skill to copy the Mona Lisa, never mind create a better picture of the same subject.

I see the story as a simple one.

From his 15th year the young Leonardo worked in the studio of Verrocchio, until he was about twenty-five. This is the age for a young artistic soul to fall deeply in love, and a beautiful unattainable young woman would cast a spell on him. Certainly he never forgot her, even until his death. The setting of the two paintings is also worth noting. When Leonardo was 20, he painted the beautiful angel in Verrocchio’s Annunciation. Not only the angel, but also the background… I may be wrong, but the strange unfinished dark shape in La Gioconda points towards the beautifully designed trees in the Annunciation.

If La Gioconda is an manifestation of love, the Mona Lisa is a loving memory.

If we could choose, which one would you rather have?

Read Full Post »

Result v process

Painting individual brushstrokes is a process, a searching for truth.

When individual brushstrokes become the goal in themselves, they have no beauty. They are a gimmick. As Rodin said, “All that is false, is ugly.“

Work for truth of colour at every point.

Thick paint is ugly.
Truth is beauty. Keats.

Let us be aware of the importance of flatness in art.
All great art has a tendency to flatness. Ruskin.

Rembrandt by himself

There is no thick paint in da Vinci. Nor in Vermeer. Nor in Degas. Nor in Sargent. Name your favourite artist. Even in Rembrandt’s famous self-portrait the are only two thick passages, the white cap on his head and around his throat…

The only painter to use a lot of thick paint was Van Gogh.

Keep your paint thin, your surfaces flat and your colour true, particularly in the shadows.

As our painting develops our paint by necessity gets thicker by the process of building up, just to cover. But always keep your paint as thin as possible. Let the buildup happen naturally.

Do not think of some result. Concentrate on the process.

Read Full Post »

Carel Weight. The professor and the gazillionaire

Professor Carel Weight was one of the greatest artists of the 20th Century. His humility was legendary.

His masterpieces were intended for people like you and me, struggling families or pensioners. This purity of mind was anathema to certain people, who believed that art should belong to the rich.

Carel Weight. Broken trellis

The richest and most powerful art collector of our time is Charles Saatchi. About him and his excesses, the least said the better. But he heard about the noble professor Weight, and decided, “Integrity? I want that! What is the price of his integrity?”

Saatchi sent his art agent, a man called Jacobson, to make the professor an offer. An offer he could not refuse. The catch was that Saatchi wanted all the paintings Professor Weight produced and he was willing to pay for it.

Professor Weight refused.

His paintings were intended for middle class and even poor people and he did not want his prices to make it impossible for pensioners and lovers of art to buy them.

Having failed, Jacobson was sent right back with an improved offer. The professor refused again.

Now Saatchi instructed Jacobson to go directly to the individuals and families who had bought paintings by professor Carel Weight, and to buy their works at hugely inflated prices, and to buy all new work put on open exhibition. I have now idea how this ugly scheme worked, and what effect it had on professor Weight, both professionally and personally.

All I know is that this is one of the nastiest and ugliest project ever launched, even by the man who is responsible for some of the ugliest art ever produced, by people like Damien Hirst.

Now Charles Saatchi has set up a website to help struggling artists.

Thanks, but no thanks.

Read Full Post »

The world’s best artist – Frederik Cuming

The two best living artists are Frederik Cuming and Bernard Dunstan. I’ll post a tribute to each on my Patreon page, http://patreon/rynoswart

For years I have been watching out for them to be granted the recognition they deserve, in vain. Both men are getting on in years. And the British honour system, with its lords and barons and knights and dames ad OBEs and all its other meaningless dross, will not even deign to purchase one of their pictures, much less honour them. Thank God.

A studio interior by Fred Cuming

The art Mafia: Academia, and even more so, the industries that runs art, have been promoting through their sponsorships the art of shlock. Their motivation is to make the general public; university professors, practising artists, scientists, philosophers, you, me, your mother, your father, your doctor and your plumber, give up on appreciating or, God forbid, loving art. This leaves art and its promotion in their hands.

The Art industry delights in the defeated phrase of the lovers of art and beauty, “I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like.”

Therefore, by definition, any art that is appreciated or loved by the public, is bad art.

And we are complicit. By not looking for good art, and particularly, by not supporting good artists by buying their work, we doom them to poverty and obscurity and to despair.

For decades, Fred Cuming has taught at the top art schools in the U.K. and has produced work of exquisite beauty and depth and sincerity. You cannot hope to be a good artist if you are not first a good person.

Read Full Post »

Ingres’ violin

Ingres was one of the finest draughtsmen in history, and a great neo-classical painter. He was also an accomplished violinist.

At the age of 13 he was second violinist in his local orchestra, and later, when he was Director of the French Academy in Rome he played with Franz Liszt on a regular basis.

La grande baigneuse

He was so proficient at his music that a new expression entered the French language, ‘un violon d’Ingres’, meaning a hobby at the level of a second career.

Music took a lot of words from art, such as tone, colour, composition, light and shade, nocturne, harmony, melody line, notes and chords; and applied them to sound, enriching their meaning.

That is where they remained.

Could we artists reclaim our words? Could we get a richer meaning to our old word, line, or tonality?

When I explored various concepts such as harmony in art, I decided to take lessons in the viola. In art “line” usually means outline, but in music it has a melodic quality, weaving in and out through the colours of the orchestra.

In the tired old arguments about whether art should be abstract or realistic, I believe that art should have the qualities of music.

Composition, harmony, chiaroscuro, attack, finish, texture, fields, transitions and edges, these are the elements that fascinate me. When in the end I found the true meaning of, for example, harmony, I found it in the visual world.

From music, I learnt that we can either play a note or a chord, and that in art, likewise, we can paint either a note or a chord or a passage.

The task of the artist? Making visual music.

Read Full Post »

Botticelli. Lover of Venus

‘The birth of Venus’ is Botticelli’s most famous painting. But the story behind the painting is as fascinating as the picture itself.

In 1453 a baby girl was born in the village of Portovenere (the port of Venus and long accepted as the birthplace of the Goddess) and as we can tell from the paintings of her, she was a genuine beauty. At the age of 16 she married into the powerful Vespucci family of Florence. It was her husband who introduced her to Botticelli.

Birth of Venus, detail

Although wealthy and powerful, she chose the career of artist’s model and was much in demand by all the great artists of the city, particularly Botticelli. Everybody, including Giuliano de Medici fell in love with her. The prince of Florence was a keen sportsman who loved competing. In 1475, when Simonetta was 22, Giuliano took part at a jousting tournament with a standard he had commissioned Botticelli to create, a portrait of Simonetta Vespucci with the legend ‘La Sans Pareille” (the unequalled one). The poor artist, then 30 years old, was himself head over heels in love with her. Giuliano won the tournament and nominated Simonetta ‘the Queen of Beauty’. A year later, Simonetta was dead, and two years to the day after her death, Giuliano de Medici was assassinated.

Botticelli painted her, often in the nude. The Birth of Venus was only finished some eight years later. Simonetta lived on in Botticelli’s mind. He asked to be buried in the church where her body lay so that he could spend eternity at her feet.

His last wish was granted.

Read Full Post »

The brushwork of Edgar Degas

One of the great masters of composition, one of the great colourists, one of the best draughtsmen that ever lived, it is Degas’ perfect brushwork that sets him apart.

That, and his unstinting honesty.

“Why do you make women so ugly,” he was asked.

“Because, Madame, in general, women are ugly.”

Beauty is truth, truth beauty. Degas never idealised. The truth of Degas’ art has more beauty in it than any other painter of the human figure. One of his great aphorisms on the subject of art is:

All great artists have the same style; no style.

Style is a trap for the talentless. Sargent, Rembrandt, Bouguereau, Tiepolo, Titian, Velasquez, Klimt, all paint in simple honesty.

In this simplicity lies their glory.

Read Full Post »

The queen of the underworld

The dark domain. The underworld, home to mice and moles and snakes and bats, volcanos, roots, vegetable growth, and Pluto.

Greek gods are personifications of natural phenomena; or projections of human consciousness (the self) into aspects of nature.

Venus is you, so is Apollo; wherever your mind chooses to dwell.

Pluto in his cavern sat,

illumined by the sulphrous glow

Feeling now the dread impact

Of Venus and her Cupid’s bow.

Pluto represents the darker aspects of my art and of myself, for what we visualise, that is who we are.

Demeter, goddess of the harvest, and Zeus, had a daughter, Persephone. She was gathering flowers when Pluto burst through a crack in the earth and abducted her.

Demeter, in her agony, neglects the earth and causes all growth to cease. Eventually Zeus persuaded Pluto to return Persephone to her mother, but Pluto managed to have her spend half the year with him in Hades where she is the queen of the underworld.

The part of the year when Persephone is in Hades, is our winter, but to my mind, during that time it is spring in the underworld, and a time of joy.

Dark joy, like serious music.

Read Full Post »

My favourite British artists were Italian!

As a child and as a teenager and as an adult I loved the Air Ace Picture Library and the War Picture Library.

One of my favourite covers from the 60s

I delighted in the well drawn comic strips and the magnificent covers of Spitfires and Hurricanes battling Messerschmidts and Focke-Wulfs. I have searched for the names of the artist for years and yesterday I found a lot of them. But to my shock, they all turned out to be Italian!

These artists had such love for aircraft and pilots that they ignored their history and created glorious tales of heroism and sacrifice.

Many artists of my generation found their inspiration in their work and this is my small thank you to them.

To paraphrase Churchill: “Never in the field of human endeavour has so much been owed to so few.” They just happen to be Italian… Not only Italian, but Venetian. And there were many more.

Alberto Breccia
Raffaele Paparella
Enrique Breccia
Angel Ruiz Pardo
Guido Buzzelli
Ivo Pavone
Amador García Cabrera
Vitor Peon
Kurt Caesar
Jordi Penalva
Renzo Calegari
Carlos Pino
Angel Badia Camps
Garcia Pizarro
Antonio Canale
Renato Polese 
Massimo Carnevale
Hugo Pratt

Read Full Post »

Paris for sale

I am besotted with beauty.

When I was a young man, in 1980, I walked all the way around the beautiful Opera Garnier, named after its creator. I had no interest in going inside, having no desire to see a modernist Chagall over its original roof painting. I hate Modernist crap.

What I was fascinated by, was the ring of lampposts running around the perimeter, what Garnier called his ring of light.

Each lamppost was a bronze sculpture in the Classic Greek style, a young woman holding a lamp above her head.

One of the original lampposts of the Opera in Paris.

I was entranced. The sculptures, 22 of them, were positioned at a variety of angles on the high walls each more sensual and elegant than the next.

This was when I started my career as a fine artist by saving enough to stay in France for one year, and the caryatids of the Opera were a major inspiration.

---

Today, when I looked for images of the lamps, I was in for a shock.

These masterpieces are being restored, and in the process they are being sold to pretentious sponsors. 900 individuals and companies paid 1.8 million euros for own their individual artwork.  Paris is being sold and the price is an average of 2000 euros. You will be greeted with the names of the sponsors but you will search in vain for the name of the artists who created them.

Read Full Post »