Ragged Claws Network » Fine Art

Look Here: Two Self-Portraits from 1914, by Egon Schiele

RC — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 20:25:42 +0000

Look Here: Untitled Watercolour by DeWitt Hardy

RC — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:58:39 +0000

I mentioned a couple of messages ago that my wife and I own a piece of original art by American watercolourist DeWitt Hardy; however, since I doubt many people (especially here in Canada) know the name, I thought that today, for your (and my!) enjoyment, I would post an image of our purchase:

Sorry the image is a bit soft, but the painting was too big for our scanner. Also, our digital camera is not the best.

Call and Response: Whistler, Bastien-LePage, and Jeffrey Jones

RC — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:25:29 +0000

In a recent reply to my blog entry entitled Call and Response: Franz Von Stuck and Jeffrey Jones, a reader suggested that I should “take a look at Jeff Jones’ ‘Chastity’ painting from 1978 and Bastien-LePage’s ‘Jeanne d’Arc’ (or ‘Joan of Arc’) from the late 1800s. The female figure’s pose was taken directly from the famous Symbolist/Naturalist painting hanging in NYC’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

So, having a longstanding interest in the channels, permutations, and anxieties of influence, I immediately went and took a look, and now I’m here to say, if you’re a Jeffrey Jones fan, I think you should take a look, too. Thus, this post…

However, not to be outdone in the “spot the visual allusion” game, I’ve added the image of a second famous work that I think shaped Jones’s interesting-though-not-entirely-successful little painting just as much as, if not more than, Bastien-LePage’s obsessively detailed work.

Look Here: “Snow Queen” by Jeffrey Jones

RC — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:57:46 +0000

You are definitely going to want to “Click Image to Enlarge” this one:

On 02 August 2007, the above painting sold at auction for US$17,327.50.

Look Here: “The Gulf” by Jeffrey Jones

RC — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 20:36:42 +0000

Another landscape painting created en plein air by you-know-who:

Click here to view more landscapes by the same artist.

Look Here: Jon Jay Muth’s Portrait of Jeffrey Jones

RC — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 22:18:04 +0000

Like it? Enough to buy it? If your answers are yes, and yes, you’re in luck, because the current owner has it listed for sale at US$600. Contact information is available on this Comic Art Fans page.

Look Here: Arnold Böcklin’s “Isle of the Dead” Paintings

RC — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 14:56:44 +0000

Whenever I see SF paperback covers by Paul Lehr like the nine I posted yesterday, and the many others he created in a similar vein, I immediately think of Arnold Böcklin’s “Isle of the Dead” paintings and, to a lesser extent, ”The Sacred Wood”:

I was tempted to file the comparison between Böcklin and Lehr under “Call and Response,” but I guess I am just not quite convinced myself that there’s any direct influence from one to the other — although the impossibly jagged cliffs in Lehr’s cover for Zelazny’s Isle of the Dead (strange coincidence!) are tantalizingly similar, visually, to the trees in Böcklin’s “Isle of the Dead” variations. Or maybe I’m just seeing things!

Call and Response: Pulp-Fantasy Artists and Lucian Freud

RC — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 01:46:04 +0000

It’s a stock scenario in pulp-fantasy illustration: the man is the hero, the woman is the prize beyond price; the hero is armed, or at least, poised, for battle, the woman is under threat but too delicate to defend herself; the hero stands ready to sacrifice himself for the woman’s protection, the woman cowers, preferably sprawled right at the hero’s feet, preferably with as few clothes on as possible; the hero… well, you get the picture, and it’s not exactly “progressive.” So imagine my surprise when I saw the following painting by the great British realist painter, Lucian Freud:

(Compare the above with any of the Frazetta covers in my previous two posts; note, however, that among the images I have posted here, the subject appears in its most iconic form, with the naked heroine on the ground with her arm around the hero’s leg, the enemy in attack mode, and the hero poised to take on all comers, in The Return of Jongor. See also Jeffrey Jones’s cover for Sons of the Bear-God, by Norvell W. Page.)

Freud’s The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer is the sort of painting in which the artist wants to have cake and eat it: on the one hand, as a rich and famous heterosexual artist, he clearly loves the idea of naked women at his feet, and the truth is — we know it, and Freud definitely knows it — that many beautiful and famous women would leap (and have lept) at the chance to model for him, but on the other hand, Freud also wants us to know that he is aware of the absurdity of the situation, that he (unlike the model herself, apparently) is a paragon of self-control, that he is a dedicated observer and recorder, before all else. When the artist is at work, he is all focus and intensity, and neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet, nor a naked woman fondling his leg, shall keep him from his appointed task.

Is Freud himself aware of the visual and thematic connection between The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer and pulp-fantasy art? I have no idea. But it would be hilarious if he isn’t!

BONUS LINK:

Daily Express: Lucian Freud the Lothario (Friday, May 16, 2008), by Simon Edge — “He’s the irascible, reclusive creator of the world’s most expensive painting by a living artist, has a legendary appetite for much younger women and has as many as 40 children.”

Look Here: “Pine Grove” by Jeffrey Jones

RC — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 17:21:53 +0000

Here’s a somewhat juicier image of a landscape painting by Jeffrey Jones that I posted a few days ago:

Notice the new information about the title, date, and size. That’s always great to have.

Call and Response: Giovanni Segantini and Barry Windsor-Smith

RC — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 01:57:54 +0000