Art Musings & Mysteries

Unbelievable colors. That’s the first thing I noticed about this painting in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow. The second thing was the total lack of a distinguishable theme. It is a landscape, but it does not have a well-defined foreground, middle, and background. Instead, this landscape shows you all of them at once, as it were, swirling with the soft yellows, browns, and greens, which, in turn, are eclipsed by the dazzling blue of the sky and its reflection in the lake. The staggering azure of the sky is heightened by wispy white clouds.   Modern Italy: The Pifferari . (1838). Joseph Mallord William Turner Only after experiencing the shocking richness of the colors do you notice the people on the left and right side of the painting. I didn’t read the museum label, and my first impression was that the figures on the left represented the Holy Family; the woman in white and blue resembles the classical portrayal of the Virgin Mary, with the dark-robed figur...

“The Ninth Wave” is a stunning Romantic seascape. It was painted by one of the most famous marine artists in the history of art. Ivan Aivazovsky was an Armenian painter, who lived and worked in the Russian Empire, creating over 6,000 seascapes during his lifetime.  “The Ninth Wave”. 1850. Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky Who Was Aivazovsky? Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky (1817-1900), was one of the most famous painters of the Russian Romanticism. He was Armenian, born Hovhannes Aivazian, and he grew up in the Black Sea port of Feodosia, Crimea. Aivazovsky became one of the leading marine painters of the 19 th century. His amazingly vivid seascapes made his hometown Feodosia famous across the Russian Empire and beyond. In fact, he was one of the rare Russian painters to have an exhibition in London in 1881. After completing his education in St Petersburg, Aivazovsky travelled all over Europe, including Italy. He was later appointed the official painter of the Russian Navy, ...

“We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.” ― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods   Albert Bierstadt’s beautiful landscapes have become a symbol of the American West. They’re also somewhat controversial. Idealized and stunning, today they are often seen as part of the Manifest Destiny propaganda. But is this truly all there is to this German-born immigrant’s masterpieces? Capturing the Dream of the American Frontier in Paint         “The Ore gon Trail”. 1869. Albert Bierstadt , The Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) was born in the Rhine Province, Germany, and in his heyday became one of the most famous American painters. His large-scale paintings depict the st...