Meet The Artist: Victor Bregeda

I prefer not to provide precise instructions on how my paintings should be interpreted. In meta-realism, it is more important to experience magnetism and light.  – Victor Bregeda

 Victor Bregeda was born in 1963 in Taganrog, Russia, into a family of painters. The artist has stated that he has been painting for as long as he can remember.

After attending an art school in Russia, Bregeda made a decision to move forward with his personal interpretation of creative art, putting himself in sharp contrast with his academic art training. This rebellious move proved victorious as Victor’s art quickly gained recognition in local and international contests.“The key genres of my artwork are plein aire landscapes, still life compositions and portraits performed in a metarealistic style with strong roots in subconscious philosophy. I use a variety of techniques and materials while trying to invent new ones. I attempt to reveal the true nature of things hidden from empirical understanding,” — V. Bregeda

Metarealism is synonymous to metaconscience, which means beyond psychological consciousness, beyond a subjective psychological polarized view of reality. Metarealism seeks to depict the reality which exists beyond that psychological subjective perspective. Metarealism proposes not only to communicate further than the pictorial aspect of the perception of other dimensions of reality, but also the essence of those dimensions and their relation to us as human beings.

“I have been particularly influenced by the smooth techniques espoused by the Dutch school of painting. The artists who inspired me the most were Leonardo Da Vinci, Hieronymus Bosch, Peter Bruegel, Max Ernst, and Nikolai Rerikh. I like the French school of the 18th – 19th centuries as well as the works of Andrew Wyeth. I grew up in a strong creative environment. My artistic abilities are in my blood, thanks to my forefathers.” — V. Bregeda.

See more of Victor Bregeda on his official website.

 

Meet The Artist: Tof Vanmarque

La fêtes des voisins

Born in 1981, Tof Vanmarque grew up in Lanrivoare, Breton countryside.  After being bored at the Technical High School in Brest, he’s off into the world, trying  a good number of odd jobs, tiler and  shepherd among them. Always drawing, he enrolls into the Pivaut School in Nantes in 2003 to learn the art, craft and technique of creating cartoons.

«J’ai gagné en technique, perdu en imagination. Je n’avais plus de coeur, plus d’âme, j’étais lobotomisé. L’école formait des travailleurs, pas des créateurs,» Tof says, roughly translated in English as “I gained in technique, lost in imagination. I had no heart, no soul, I was lobotomized. The school trained workers, not creators.” 
He paints and hangs in the bars of Nantes “easy canvases, food. Bouquets of flowers, portraits of old people, elephants; sale brought me enough to survive.” Then he discovers surrealism, reads André Breton. Fantastic characters arise. Back in Brest, thanks to the advice of choreographer Patrick Le Doaré, he embarks on creating of rather ambitious paintings. First exhibition, in 2010, then his participation at the MAC Paris show the following year,  exhibit in galleries in Cabourg and Belgium… Thus the adventure has begun.

 

See the gallery here to find the names (in French) of the artworks above.

Meet The Artist: Vladimir Stakheev

Vladimir Stakheev, born in 1963, is a Russian painter from Moscow, member of the Union of Creative Artists of Russia.
He restored frescoes and wall paintings in ancient temples, worked in mixed technology, combining pencil, pen, brush, needle (scratching the top layer of paint), airbrush, and different materials: watercolor, ink, gouache, tempera.

He collaborated with various publishing houses — artistic design of books, newspapers, magazines, illustrated  V. Bianchi, N. Zadornov, S. King, D.R.R. Tolkien.

At the same time — surprise or not — he is the author of several famous graphic series in the style of HARD KITCH.

Here is his FUNNY CATS series:  airbrush, pen, brush, pencil, acrylic, watercolor.

 

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Hard kitch, all right. I like cute kitties as much as millions of others. His, in my opinion, combine an amazing tenderness and elegance of composition with an absolute ironic desperation of content.

Stakheev’s illustrations of The Lord of the Rings: 

 

 And some of his other works:

 

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Ivan the Terrible Looks Terrible Right Now

Iliya Repin. Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on November 16, 1581. (1885)

The press service of the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, Russia, reported on Saturday, May 26, of the vandal attack on Friday evening that damaged the painting of Ilya Repin (1844 – 1930) “Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan on November 16, 1581”. 

Ilya Repin

 

“As a result of the blows, the thick glass that protected the work from fluctuations in the temperature-humidity regime was broken,”  the gallery’s officials said in a statement.

“The painting is badly damaged, the canvas is ripped in three places in the central part…. The falling glass also damaged the frame. […] Luckily, the most valuable images, those of the faces and hands of the tsar and prince were not damaged”.

37-year-old man from the town of Voronezh was arrested by police shortly after the incident. The suspect declared that he had acted the way he did because of the falsehood of the depiction of historical facts on the canvas — his words in my translation.

Tretyakov Gallery

By preliminary estimation, the restoration of the painting might take a few years.

 

In 1885, upon its completion, the painting made a furor both in St. Petersburg and in Moscow.  Everyone whose opinion counted, admitted to having an utterly depressing impression both during and after observing the painting. The ladies fainted and had hysterics. Children cried inconsolably.  Repin’s masterpiece was deemed harmful and by the order of the sovereign was banned from being exhibited.

Pavel Tretyakov, businessman, patron of art, collector and philanthropist (who gave his name to the Tretyakov Gallery) acquired the painting. It took awhile but the wrath was changed to mercy and  the permission to exhibit the canvas in the gallery was granted.

The recent assassination of the famous painting was not the first one.  On January 16, 1913,  “Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan on November 16, 1581”, a rather well known icon painter, crying out “Enough blood!” lunged on the painting with a knife and in three strokes pierced the faces of Ivan and his son. The madman was restrained and confined to the mental institution. After learning about the incident, the curator of the Tretyakov Gallery, the kindest and beloved by all  Yegor Khruslov, committed suicide by trowing himself under the speeding train.This is a newspaper article where the incident was first reported. Titled Damage to the painting by I. Repin carries the photographs of the damaged part of the painting, of the artist and the small inset is the photo of Abram Balashov, the vandal.

Interesting that the public opinion of the time was firmly on the side of the madman! Crazy Balashov was declared a victim of Repin’s “bloody, disturbing, violent” masterpiece.  Such is the power of art.

Mysteriously and, well, terribly, Ivan the Terrible affected the fate of Repin’s models who selflessly set for his Ivan the Terrible.  Repin was very particular and obsessively picky in choosing his models. Artist Grigory Myasoyedov and composer Pavel Blaramberg were asked to pose as Ivan the Terrible.  Grigory Myasoedov  once in anger nearly killed his little son, also named Ivan.
One of models for the head of the Prince was writer Vsevolod Garshin with his permanently teary eyes. A fragile and vulnerable person, the author of many wonderful fairy tales, he fell into a severe depression and during one of the anxiety attacks jumped from the fourth floor into the stairwell. He died in agony after five days, only 33 years old. Repin said about his choice of Garshin as his model, “I was struck by an utter doom written on Garshin’s face: he had the face of a man fated to perish before his time, which was excatly what I need for my prince.”

 

Soon thereafter, the terrible ailment struck the artist himself. Incongruously, his right arm withered away. Until the end of his life Repin had to paint and write with his left hand. The artist’s contemporaries recall that Repin could not even cross himself properly.

And, in conclusion, while hoping sincerely that Ivan the Terrible will be restored to its bloody, violent, mystical glory, here is the poster where Repin’s Ivan the Terrible behaves terribly toward the Russian Venus by Boris Kustodiyev. 

Meet The Artist: Ivan Marchuk

He is compared to Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Pavel Filonov, called “maestro of the highest prestige”, Rembrandt of our days. Not always even fully comprehending his works, people are drawn to them. Who is the genius of the brush?Ivan Marchuk  is the only Ukrainian artist recognized by International Academy of Modern Art in Rome as the member of the “Golden Guild”Ivan Marchuk was born in 1936, a family of a weaver, in a Western Ukrainian village. He studied applied art in Lviv till 1965.
The artist works tirelessly to create his own pictorial style. He finds inspiration in the most ordinary things.In the late 1980s he emigrated to Australia, then traveled to Canada and the USA. But, he was always drawn back to his native land.

“I have to see beauty everywhere, and I want to recreate it. Nowhere in the world is there such a beautiful land as here.” 
“Give me a thousand more years and I’ll paint heaven.”
He has created his own art technique, which he calls “Pliontanism”  (from the Ukrainian “pliontaty” – to weave, knit). Instead of painting with the usual strokes, he traces and weaves amazing lace networks on his canvas.“There were times when people stood in front of a painting for half an hour. It’s abstract, but it’s done with the hands of a skilled jeweler. We sense a 3D effect.” says Maksym Voloshyn.After years of intensive work, Ivan Marchuk admits that art is both a revelation and a lot of hard work. He dreams of resting and relaxing, but returns to his studio every morning.“If you look at a painting from a distance, you’ll see an ordinary landscape, but when you come a little closer, you notice that unusual threads are woven throughout the painting.” says  Maksym Voloshyn, director of Mystetska Zbirka Art Gallery.In October 2007, Marchuk was included in Britain’s list of  top living geniuses, drawn up by the Daily Telegraph. This curious list, however, deserves its own post…

Dada, Surréalisme et au-delà

On 21 October in Paris, Sotheby’s offered for sale the collection of Dr. Arthur Brandt, whose passion and appreciation for Dada and Surrealism is reflected in this auction. Highlights include numerous works by Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters as well as a major work by Francis Picabia and others by Yves Tanguy, Man Ray, and Max Ernst.

The auction has now ended, with a grand total of €21.5 million.

All right then. Let’s take a look at Dada, Surréalisme et au-delà, particularly at the two out of several works of  Marcel Duchamp. Above is his “L.H.O.O.R”. Quoting Wikipedia:

In 1919, Duchamp made a parody of the Mona Lisa by adorning a cheap reproduction of the painting with a mustache and goatee. To this he added the inscription L.H.O.O.Q., a phonetic game which, when read out loud in French quickly sounds like “Elle a chaud au cul”. This can be translated as “She has a hot ass”, implying that the woman in the painting is in a state of sexual excitement and availability. It may also have been intended as a Freudian joke, referring to Leonardo da Vinci‘s alleged homosexuality. Duchamp gave a “loose” translation of L.H.O.O.Q. as “there is fire down below” in a late interview with Arturo Schwarz. According to Rhonda Roland Shearer, the apparent Mona Lisa reproduction is in fact a copy modeled partly on Duchamp’s own face.^[33] Research published by Shearer also speculates that Duchamp himself may have created some of the objects which he claimed to be “found objects”.

On October 21, L.H.O.O.Q fetched a whooping 631,500 euros. Gasp.

Dada artists are known for their use of ready-made objects — everyday objects that could be bought and presented as art with little manipulation by the artist. The use of the ready-made forced questions about artistic creativity and the very definition of art and its purpose in society.

Indeed, L.H.O.O.Q manifests remarkably little manipulation by the artist upon the ready-made object — a cheap print of La Joconde! Just harping.

Boîte-en-valise, yet another Duchamp, is a portable museum containing 68 of his most famous works, either reproduced or miniaturised, has been sold  for €319,500.

Dada was the first conceptual art movement where the focus of the artists was not on crafting aesthetically pleasing objects but on making works that often upended bourgeois sensibilities and that generated difficult questions about society, the role of the artist, and the purpose of art.

And what a remarkably cheap and time-and-effort-consuming method to achieve such a noble goal! Makes me, a skeptic lacking of appreciation for Dadaism, wonder if Dadaists themselves defined their intentions while “crafting their art”.  Numerous art critics say yes and more:

So intent were members of Dada on opposing all norms of bourgeois culture that the group was barely in favor of itself: “Dada is anti-Dada,” they often cried.

The video clip below features the entire Collection Arthur Brandt : Dada, Surréalisme et au-delà, courtesy of Sotheby’s site:

//players.brightcove.net/104524641001/default_default/index.html?videoId=5604643841001

Meet The Artist: Joel Rea

Joel Rea, 32-year-old artist from Australia, works in an unusual genre, combining photorealism with surrealism.
He paints portraits and landscapes, animals and the ocean and it seems that there is no such theme on the basis of which he could not create his picture.Joel prefers to work with canvas and oil, perfecting every smallest detail.

“It is very easy to smile when you win, but for me the most interesting thing is exactly what people do in the darkest hours of their lives, because it is at such moments that you show up as a person,” says the artist.

Smoldering Stone: Gian Lorenzo Bernini

Continued from previous post.

Self-portrait of Bernini, 1623

Passion is like a tornado, its frenzied whirlwind is felt in Bernini’s every sculpture. Bernini’s marble breezes passion, feeling known to him only so well.

He had a mistress, you see. She was a beautiful married woman named Constance. Some well-wisher told Bernini that Constance was cheating on him with his brother Luigi, no less. Furious, overcome with jealousy, Bernini informed everyone that he was leaving town for a few days. By the day’s end he showed up at Constance’s house. The rumor, unfortunately, turned out to be true.

Betrayed, enraged, Bernini would have killed his own brother, but the guards arrived and prevented murder about to occur. Then he sent his servant to exact an awful punishment on his cheating lover. The servant cut Constance’s face with a knife, ruining the woman’s beauty forever.

The year was of Our Lord 1640. By his late teens, Bernini had already established himself

Gian Lorenzo Bernini in 1665, painted by Giovanni Battista Gaulli.

as a prodigious artist. He received his first major commissions from rapacious art lover Cardinal Scipione Borghese. The early works executed for the Cardinal won Bernini such acclaim that praise and accolades began to pour in. In 1621, Bernini was knighted, and in 1629, he was named the Official Architect of Saint Peters, one of the highest honors an artist could wish for. The artist frequented papal and royal circles, and was fervently admired even outside of Italy.

Thus punishment for all his crimes was far from harsh — Bernini had to pay a modest fine. And then the pontiff, who considered the sculptor to be his friend, sentenced him to… marriage to the most beautiful girl in Rome.

However, the dark streak wasn’t over. In 1646, the bell tower Bernini created for the façade of St. Peter’s had to be demolished after it developed worrisome cracks, and the shame of this failure proved almost too much for the artist to bear: contemporary sources say Bernini took to his bed and fasted almost to the point of death.

Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. 1647-52

Then Bernini created The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa, and immediately revived his career. It was a success that started a new era in Bernini’s artistic life and popularity that lasted until his death in 1680.

Blessed Ludovica Albertoni. 1671-73

Indeed, “The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa” and “Blessed Ludovica Albertoni” are the two masterpieces that did not allow Bernini to fade into obscurity in the declining years, as happened with many great ones.

A wild and miraculous cocktail it was, mix of carnal passion and spiritual desire. Look at these young nuns, not at all burdened with asceticism, and you will understand why Bernini was kindly treated, despite his criminal episode and epic failures.

Meet The Artist: Gregory Scott

Gregory Scott, designer, artist, photographer.

Disconnect

Most of my life I worked as a graphic designer and creative director. I owned a design firm in Chicago and it was a great ride. But eventually I began to want something different. I began to play around with art in my free time, painting and shooting photographs.

Bound

[…] The idea I had tested was to take some paintings I made during a figure painting class and fill in missing parts of the painted figure with myself. I thought it was fun and different, but didn’t really have any plans for what to do next, if anything at all.

Thank You Jeff Koons and Art Rogers

Framed

Homage

Storybook

 

“all by himself with leaves, trees, mud and rabbits”

Christ in the Wilderness. Driven by the Spirit. And immediately the Spirit driveth him into the wilderness.” Mark 1:12

Stanley Spencer (1891 – 1959), a great English artist, joined in his work expressionism and primitivism, mysticism and grotesque. The cycle of his paintings “Christ in the Wilderness” (1939-54) literally overturns traditional notion about Christ and his relationship with the Earth.
IN middle age, eccentric British painter Stanley Spencer changed his obsession from religion to sex — with disastrous consequences. He divorced his homely first wife Hilda Carline and shacked up (or tried to) with glamorous lesbian Patricia Preece, who turned out to be mainly interested in his money. The potboilers he painted in the 1930s were done to keep Preece in furs and jewels; and he made the mistake of signing over his house to her. Not long after their wedding, Preece let out the house, making Spencer homeless.The director of the Tate Gallery found ­Spencer lodgings near Swiss Cottage Tube station in north London. It was in this bedsit that the artist embarked on a series of paintings called Christ in the Wilderness, which included this panel, Consider the Lilies.

“Consider the lilies how they grow,” runs the line in the Gospels to which the title refers. “They toil not, they spin not, and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not ­arrayed like one of these.” Like most of Spencer’s works, however, the biblical scene has been transposed to the Berkshire village of Cookham where he grew up, and which he considered a sort of paradise on earth — these are not lilies but daisies and wild grass flowers of the sort that grew on Cookham common in his youth. (from Stanley Spencer confronts the self, alone in Christ in the Wilderness.)

Many dismissed the artist as an eccentric crank. He identified himself with religious figures, dwelling in contemporary village. Still, it’s exactly this very eccentricity that Spencer’s works so powerful, art lovers and art critics alike agree.Christ In The Wilderness: the hen. This painting illustrates Matthew 23:37 ‘…how often would I have gathered my children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings…’ 

Where else in the Bible does man appear in such union with the beasts, with no fear and alienation? Obviously, in Eden, where Adam resided before the fall. Christ, who came to save mankind from the curse of original sin, is the new Adam, as described in the Epistles of the Apostle Paul. Therefore, the desert where Spencer’s Jesus find himself, is not only the place of fasting and prayer, but also the image of the restored paradise, where man is reunited with God and the universe created by him. The desert is the tiny remnant of Eden, which once extended to the whole Earth, and at the same time the foretaste of a new Earth, where humanity will enter through the saving sacrifice of Christ.

Therefore, Jesus peacefully dwells among animals, birds, plants and with childish curiosity he peers at them, for this firstborn Son of God has found his human nature, similarity with earthly being. As a creature “from another planet”, Jesus gets used to this world, delicately delves into it, amused and delighted. (My free interpretation of the excerpt from the Russian article by M. Epstein, an Anglo-American and Russian literary theorist and critical thinker, S. C. Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University.) 

Christ in the Wilderness. The Scorpion. “Behold, I give unto you the power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you.” Luke 10:19.

There were meant to be 40 panels in the series, one for each day Christ spent in the wilderness. They should have covered the vault of the ceiling of a church, so that the Jesus’ whitish robes would take on the appearance of clouds in a mackerel sky.

Spencer finished only eight panels of the series. Historian Simon Schama described them as “the least elaborate and most affecting things he had ever done”. In 1983, all eight (plus one half-finished canvas) were bought by the Art Gallery of Western Australia for $600,000, the museum’s entire annual budget. It was a wise decision.  Christ in the Wilderness paintings are popular with gallery visitors and much in demand for loans.