Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio; draw and don't waste time!

Went to the British Museum yesterday to catch an exhibition before it closes: 'Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings.' Quite busy and with drawings everyone wants to get their head up close. Worth seeing though, particularly intrugued by some of the allegirical pictures by Giovanni Antonio da Brescia, with whom I was not very familiar before.

Critique and Technique.

I went to the second of two day art classes today, given at the Rebecca Hill Modern Art gallery by local artist Ali Cockrean.
I was quite inspired by her work in acrylics, and learned a bit about applying paint with more texture. It's always useful to find out about other artists and their different styles and ways of doing things. We did a bit of colour mixing this morning which was something I needed to learn more about. Later I produced a quick painting of a dragon flying over some mountains. It's only small, but this is my first vaguely presentable picture done in acrylics in a long time. I was always fonder of oil and have made the transition to digital of late, though I like to keep my hand in with traditional art.

Gerome and Knight's review

I'm not local or loaded enough to see the Gerome show at the Getty.



I was just reading the below-linked rather scathing review by Christopher Knight of the Los Angeles Times. Knight accuses Gerome of inventing the 'sword and sandals' genre that is now has its home in Hollywood epics. There is some truth in this although the implication that this is somehow a low-brow 'populist' manifestation represents only modernist critical snobbery, and a warped set of artistic priorities. Why should drama, history, spectacle and narrative content be banished from the art gallery and exiled to the cinema? It makes no sense to me. I have often said, indeed, that the movie industry is the true heir of the great western art tradition, that which the modernist artists and critics consciously sought to bring to an end. Contrary to Knight's opinion it seems to be this lot rather than the classicists who lack a clue. Thanks to the denigration of the likes of Gerome a world of skill and knowledge was all-but-lost.

Knight accuses Gerome of a 'disengagement with art's possibilities.' A prejudice aginst the academic painters is revealed throughout Knight's review. An example is the irrelevant note that the winners of the Prix de Rome were always males. In fact one of the most notable winners, Bouguereau, would later do much to open up academic studios to female students (and eventually married one). There were as many female classical painters as there were in any other movement, many of them very successful.