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Who's your favorite painter and why?

lionking

In the Peanut Gallery
lionking
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I searched for a similar title but can't find one.

For many years my favorites have been the Impressionists, particularly Monet, Renoir and Manet.

I have seen many of J M W Turner's paintings in London's National Gallery and found his paintings to be atmospheric and moving, and it's easy to see his influence on impressionism. But it was only after just watching an episode of Simon Sharma's "The Power of Art" on Turner that I saw another dimension of his work. He really challenged early 19th century English society with works like "Hannibal Crossing the Alps" and, particularly, "The Slave Ship", which was roundly ridiculed. He rose above the criticism to become one of the 19th century's great artists.

Turner's my number one (for the moment at least).

By the way, Sharma's series is well worth catching. I have learnt to appreciate styles of art I had not taken a lot of notice of, like the Abstract Expressionists.

So, favorite painters please.
 
Franz Marc: I love the way he gets the essence of animals, even though they are far from realistic. His use of colour and the way he captures pose and personality.....what can I say? I just love his work
 
lionking said:
I have seen many of J M W Turner's paintings in London's National Gallery and found his paintings to be atmospheric and moving, and it's easy to see his influence on impressionism. But it was only after just watching an episode of Simon Sharma's "The Power of Art" on Turner that I saw another dimension of his work. He really challenged early 19th century English society with works like "Hannibal Crossing the Alps" and, particularly, "The Slave Ship", which was roundly ridiculed.
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Many years ago, I went to an exhibit on John Ruskin, the one defending him against the ridicule. :)

I don't care for the Impressionists. I understand what they were trying to do, and I can respect that, but they just never emotionally connect with me. Except for Van Gogh.

I like a lot of painters, for many reasons. One of my favourites is Pieter Bruegel the Elder. I love "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" - how he shows this allegedly epic event of mythology as nothing more than a little splash in the corner the world fails to notice. I like most of his paintings of peasants, for similar reasons. I don't know if or how much he was exposed to Chinese landscapes, but they are similar in that they show humans as small little creatures living, working, and moving in a vast world that barely notices.

I love the detail and the scale of "The Tower of Babel".

That's probably good for a start.
 
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Piscivore said:
I like a lot of painters, for many reasons. One of my favourites is Pieter Bruegel the Elder. I love "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus"
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I can't think of that one separate from the auden poem mentioned in your link: two remarkable works. I love that they are equally good (IMO). Don't know of any other pairs like that. I would like to know about them if there are others though
 
Michelangelo, who is something of a cliche answer to this question... for a reason. His representation of the human figure has never been equaled, IMO, in terms of his expertise at rendering not only the body's anatomical features (which M. had committed to what was almost certainly a photographic memory), but also its power and grace, its almost limitless capacity for expression (of character, of emotion, of thought, of action), its beauty and its ugliness. His rendering of skin, of flesh and musculature in all its luminous chiaroscuro, remains peerless to this day.

M. was not a painter by choice (he preferred sculpture, for which he is also justly famous), but he was a painter by profession, and his contribution to and influence on Western art from about 1513 (The Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel) cannot be overstated. He became a model for centuries of painters who came after him, but the richness and complexity of his work remains utterly unique.

My favorite work of his is The Last Judgment (unveiled 1541), the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, which has rightly been called a "sanctuary to the theology of the human body".
 
Vortigern99 said:
Michelangelo, who is something of a cliche answer to this question... for a reason. His representation of the human figure has never been equaled, IMO, in terms of his expertise at rendering not only the body's anatomical features (which M. had committed to what was almost certainly a photographic memory), but also its power and grace, its almost limitless capacity for expression (of character, of emotion, of thought, of action), its beauty and its ugliness. His rendering of skin, of flesh and musculature in all its luminous chiaroscuro, remains peerless to this day.

M. was not a painter by choice (he preferred sculpture, for which he is also justly famous), but he was a painter by profession, and his contribution to and influence on Western art from about 1513 (The Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel) cannot be overstated. He became a model for centuries of painters who came after him, but the richness and complexity of his work remains utterly unique.
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Second that.
 
Jim. He worked cheap for cash and my wife thinks I did the living room.
 
Edgar Degas but I do like more surrealistic work like Dali and Peter van Oostzanen.
Andrew Wyeth, Henri Rousseau and the above mentioned...
 
The most powerful non-musical aesthetic experiences of my life involved seeing various Renaissance paintings in person.

The Uffizi is organized chronologically, and after countless rooms of interesting but obviously kind of primitive medieval works, the first thing you see in the Renaissance section is The Birth of Venus. It's so vibrant and beautiful, it's like watching the human mind wake up and shake off the sleepy confusion of the medieval mind.

It's not a painting, but David is overwhelming, as well.
 
I suppose it's a fair commentary on the state of society and culture right now, where a thread about great paintings is being trumped by a thread on Civilisation V.

Not that I can say too much as I posted in that thread as well.
 
lionking said:
I suppose it's a fair commentary on the state of society and culture right now, where a thread about great paintings is being trumped by a thread on Civilisation V.

Not that I can say too much as I posted in that thread as well.
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Meh, it's not much of a "comment", really. Even the contemporaries of the artists we're talking about weren't, as a rule, nobly absorbing all this refined "culture"- they were more interested in having a pint at the end of the day and maybe betting on the cockfights than appreciating art, as a rule.
 
Damien Evans said:
Jacques-Louis David, the French revolutionary and neo-classical painter, most famous for his works The Death Of Marat, Napoleon Crossing The Alps, Oath of the Horatii and The Tennis-Court Oath.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques-Louis_David
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_at_the_Saint-Bernard_Pass
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Marat
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Good one. There's an episode of Shama's "Power of Art" about David on Foxtel in a couple of days time. You must watch it.
 
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