Who are your favorite and least favorite painters?

[Tricky]

And why? (I've specifically limited this to painters so it will be apples-to-apples comparisons.)

I was just watching some of the hysteria over on the thread in SInCE about Thomas Kincaid. Wow, people take their art pretty seriously here. I've never been one to get overly excited about art, though I enjoy much of it. Some not so much.

As for me, though, I guess my favorite style is surrelism, and thus, my favorite artist is probably Salvadore Dali. I like my art to look like something, but I don't want it to be boring. Portrait art is slightly interesting, but not so much as something that makes you wonder what was going through his mind when the artist made those images. I can get absorbed in the detail of a Dali work and look at it for hours, trying to figure out what (if anything) he was trying to say. And Yes, I like Roger Dean too.

Other art, especially some kinds of modern art, leave me cold. I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would look twice at Mark Rothko, especially the ones that are just a strip or two of color. And frankly, I've never understood why Van Goph is so elevated in lofty art circles. His brushwork looks crude to me. Good, but not great.

Now I'm sure art majors could explain to me why so-and-so is just marvelous and others (like Thomas Kincaid) are crap, but if try to tell me that I have no business liking it or that I am a cultural caveman, then save your breath. I don't care. I like what I like.

 

[bruto]

Hard to pin it down, because I like a lot of painters, but I think if I had to say Cezanne it wouldn't hurt too much.

 

[Tiktaalik]

I never liked Van Gogh until I saw one in person. Photos don't do them justice, at all. I was pretty amazed. They are paint sculptures.

I also like the Dutch masters.

 

[ronin688]

I don't have an art taste refined or educated enough to know many lesser known painters so I tend to gravitate towards the best known artists.

Monet is a favourite of mine, Rembrandt is great though one does get tired of seeing dour dutchmen. Van Gogh.

For me personally art appreciation is visceral. I can walk through a museum and 90% of what I see doesn't elicit anything other than curiosity. Then I'll walk past something that just grabs my attention. I won't be able to vocalise why I like it in most cases, but something about it will resonate with me.

It's my personal feeling that any truly great art will bring out those feelings in educated and uneducated alike. An educated person may be able to explain why they like it more clearly, but I think a great piece of art should speak to you whether you have an educated eye or not.


ETA: As for least favourite.. well I hate to lump everyone into the same group, but the glut of religious stuff in the renaissance just overloads me. I mean sure there were fantastic artists in that age, but after a few trips to Europe I've seen enough virgin marys to last a lifetime. I know that the church was funding all of it and the art would not have been possible without that patronage, but it's just too much for me.

 

[BravesFan]

Diego Velazquez and Vermeer are probably tied for my fave painters. The skills they demonstrated so tastefully done and yet it doesn't looked forced at all. Their paintings leap off the canvas in person and IMO, they are the two finest painters of all time.

Least favorite? Andy Warhol.... I have to say that i think that his "factory" helped to develop the new age of crappy art done by untalented hacks yet promoted as "avant garde" by the establishment. This was fine when there was difference between the two. But now the freaks have become the establishment and IMO, the entire art world has suffered. The "cause" behind a painting seems more important than the quality of it in this modern art world.....meh

 

[Coffee]

My favorite artists: Francisco Goya, Frank Frazetta, Peter Jones, H.R. Giger, Salvadore Dali, Rembrandt, Julie Bell, Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell - just to name a few. (Goya is my all time favorite especially the stuff he did during his "crazy" years).

I like those artists because I can look at their paintings and get caught up in them. There's a story there and they provoke thoughts, feelings and spark my imagination.


My least favorite: Roy Lichenstein, Andy Warhol, Thomas Kinkade and James McNeill Whistler.

I look at their work and I see it as sterile and flat. It provokes nothing in me. I might as well be looking at a blank canvas.

 

[Tricky]

I don't have an art taste refined or educated enough to know many lesser known painters so I tend to gravitate towards the best known artists.

Monet is a favourite of mine, Rembrandt is great though one does get tired of seeing dour dutchmen. Van Gogh.

For me personally art appreciation is visceral. I can walk through a museum and 90% of what I see doesn't elicit anything other than curiosity. Then I'll walk past something that just grabs my attention. I won't be able to vocalise why I like it in most cases, but something about it will resonate with me.

It's my personal feeling that any truly great art will bring out those feelings in educated and uneducated alike. An educated person may be able to explain why they like it more clearly, but I think a great piece of art should speak to you whether you have an educated eye or not.


ETA: As for least favourite.. well I hate to lump everyone into the same group, but the glut of religious stuff in the renaissance just overloads me. I mean sure there were fantastic artists in that age, but after a few trips to Europe I've seen enough virgin marys to last a lifetime. I know that the church was funding all of it and the art would not have been possible without that patronage, but it's just too much for me.

I have never seen a real Van Goph, so I'm just going to have to take it on the word of serious art scholars that he is fantastic. I know that it helps to know something of his life to make the paintings a real story.

I do like Rembrandt though. Andy Warhol? Meh. I never saw what all the fuss was about. As for religious art, I can understand the Virgin Mary burnout, but there is some religious art I like, though nothing leaps to mind. Maybe that one with God reaching out to touch fingers with Man.

 

[ronin688]

As for religious art, I can understand the Virgin Mary burnout, but there is some religious art I like, though nothing leaps to mind. Maybe that one with God reaching out to touch fingers with Man.

There is a bunch of great religious inspired art out there don't get me wrong. My wife did some art history in college and has the giant books to prove it. A lot of it is really amazing but I just lose the ability to appreciate more than the masters like Michaelangelo, Da Vinci, Bottechelli (sp?) etc.

 

[lionking]

In particular, many of the Impressionists, with Monet and Renoir at the top. Another vote for Vemeer as well. I had the good fortune to see many of their works when I went gallery crawling in Paris and London a few years ago.

 

[Tsukasa Buddha]

Liang Kai and da Vinci are my favourites. Least favourite would be anything in the Museum of Modern Art .

 

[AlBell]

Dutch masters, Dali, Goya.

least, Warhol.

 

[Retrograde]

My least favorite: Roy Lichenstein, Andy Warhol, Thomas Kinkade and James McNeill Whistler.

Those are names one rarely sees in the same sentence!

My favorites include French court painter Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun (I like how her subjects look directly at the viewer) and Dutch genre painter Jan Steen, but if I could take one picture from a major museum (and had the space for it) it would be Gustave Caillebotte's "Le Place de Europe, Temps de Pluie" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gustave_Caillebotte_-_Jour_de_pluie_%C3%A0_Paris.jpg ) but I'll settle for one of El Lissitzky's proun paintings, or a Kandinsky. I'm not particularly partial to Impressionists as a rule, but I wouldn't mind Van Gogh's Irises for the hall. And some Bosch or Breughel (Peter, that is) for the living room.

 

[MLynn]

Some of my favorite artists: Maxfield Parrish, Gustav Klimpt, Dali, and many others. Appreciating any art is a subjective kind of thing. Sometimes I appreciated TKincade's works - I could "walk into them" and forget my hard times.

 

[dasmiller]

Vermeer, Van Gogh (I never think of myself as being a particular fan, but I have more Van Gogh prints on my walls than the next 2 artists combined. Go figure), Magritte, Monet, Escher (though he didn't actually paint much AFAIK), Parrish, Cezanne, Sisley, Vettriano, Hokusai, Dean . . . Maybe a little Bougereau and Rockwell now and then . . . Some of those could fairly be called "illustrators," I suppose.

Goya creeps me out. Which isn't a bad thing, so an honorable mention there. Giger to a lesser extent.

 

[dasmiller]

For my view on Kinkade, I thought they made good jigsaw puzzles.

Seriously, there were times in my life when I did jigsaw puzzles, and I thought his pictures were well-suited to that sort of thing. Maybe a step up from a photo of a puppy wearing a bandana.

 

[bruto]

I have never seen a real Van Goph, so I'm just going to have to take it on the word of serious art scholars that he is fantastic. I know that it helps to know something of his life to make the paintings a real story.

I do like Rembrandt though. Andy Warhol? Meh. I never saw what all the fuss was about. As for religious art, I can understand the Virgin Mary burnout, but there is some religious art I like, though nothing leaps to mind. Maybe that one with God reaching out to touch fingers with Man.

Seeing a painting in its proper form and proper dimensions can help a great deal. One example in my experience was Grandma Moses. Now we've all seen prints of her stuff, and it's quaint and nice and all that. But I went to an actual Moses exhibition, and seeing the paintings themselves was quite different. Her stuff was really really good. The same may be true for those who haven't seen a Van Gogh in its proper size and texture.

This goes for a lot of art, I think, including modern art and abstract stuff that challenges your ideas of what is good, or what is art at all. Often when you see it as it was meant to be seen, it communicates in a way that illustrations of it simply cannot.

I must confess I love to go to museums, even little ones that I've gone to many times, and one thing I especially like is to see art that is out of my comfort zone and try to see what it's about. If you go into it with the assumption that these damn modern artists are all a bunch of charlatans and my kid could paint that, etc. your world gets a little smaller. I prefer to make it a little bigger.

But I think I will reaffirm Cezanne as my number one choice. I think I was about seven years old when I got hold of a book of Cezanne paintings. I don't think I ever tired of staring at those paintings. There were a lot of art books in the house, with good stuff from ancient to contemporary, and I enjoyed them all, but I kept drifting back to Cezanne. He took me to another place and another way of looking at the world and of thinking about art. You can't do much better than that.

 

[Scopedog]

I detest the implication by "art experts" that there is some aesthetic dimension to reality that I am not privy to and that my life is poorer for it. I believe a formal art education lends as much credence to the objective quantifiability of what constitutes "real" art as a formal education in the Bible lends credence to the objective truth of Christianity. I can only imagine that a formal art education could only possibly help me understand why I like the art I like but I could never be fascinated by most "fine art" (unless it involved robots fighting each other). I can tell a good science fiction painting from a bad one even if I'm not partial to the subject matter and I can probably tell a good Rembrandt from a bad Rembrandt but I'm sure I would consider the two sci-fi paintings better than any Rembrandt. I don't see any reason that this nebulous, mystical thing called "fine art" should be placed on a different unassailable plane compared to any other form of paint-based human expression. I like some and I don't like others but I'm too ignorant and pedestrian to know how ignorant and pedestrian I am.

 

[angrysoba]

I like Miro. Nice use of blue.

Goya was good too. Especially his etchings. I suppose that isn't painting, though.

Dali was interesting and I take my hat off to his talents but a little too much attention-seeking for my tastes.

I like Kandinsky too.



I don't like Norman Rockwell. Oh dull! Folsky and dull! Folksy, earnest and dull!

I don't like Pollock either. Load of old Pollocks!

 

[Pardalis]

I hate Gauguin, he draws like a child, and his use of colors gives me hives. I don't think he's that good, but that's subjective, his paintings don't do anything for me.

I have too many favorites to name just one, Franz Marc, John William Waterhouse, Caravaggio, Andrew Wyeth, Francis Bacon... They are very evocative and their techniques are flawless.

 

[angrysoba]

Oh, and although not painters, I hate Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, that knobhead whose "art" was to place all his belongings on a conveyor belt which moved towards a big crusher thing, pretty much anyone who has ever won a Turner Prize and all of that pretentious wank.