Rasa Foundation

26/02/2021

https://indianexpress.com/article/india/rarely-seen-van-gogh-painting-exhibited-ahead-of-auction-7204873/lite/?utm_campaign=fullarticle&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=inshorts

Sotheby's auction house said the work, painted in 1887, has remained in the same family collection for more than 100 years –– out of the public eye.

16/05/2020

FINDING ROCKY

By Sylvester Stallone

“Usually I try to visualize something before I put it into words. Words are very difficult and sometimes unforgiving. So if I could see what Rocky looked like, then perhaps I could write about him. As I began to work on this image, I didn’t want to use a brush because I felt that the character was made out of industrial tools. He was a man that was forged by the hardships of life. So I put this image up there and I started to actually carve it with a screwdriver. Then I took newspaper clippings which would reflect what it would be like to be a very poor, unsuccessful man, especially a boxer, and then, all of sudden, the image came alive. I remember saying, ‘OK, this is a character I would like to see written about because he looked interesting visually.’ If he looked interesting visually, then I think that he would translate through to literature and then cinema. I know it sounds ambitious but this was the genesis of Rocky.”

This painting was done in the early 70’s as a study and device to help develop the character of “Rocky” for a screenplay. In addition to the main figure being (literally) carved into the painting, we can clearly see the collage of fight headlines behind the character as well as the skyline of a city behind him.

-- https://www.stalloneart.com/product/finding-rocky/

13/02/2020

The Isleworth Mona Lisa

While there are still numerous unsolved mysteries shrouding the Mona Lisa hung at the Louvre, few people know that there is another version of La Gioconda - the Isleworth Mona Lisa, which is believed to belong to Da Vinci's brush too. This one, however, is believed to have been painted years earlier. The picture was found in a private collection more than a century ago and is now exhibited in the Prado Museum in Madrid. Perhaps one day, this painting will help decipher the answers to the questions that the Mona Lisa holds.

https://www.ba-bamail.com/content.aspx?emailid=24843

11/02/2020

Surprised

Henri Rousseau - 1891

Henri Rousseau was a post impressionist painter, well-known for his invention of portrait landscape genre. His paintings are based on illustrations, exotic cultures and naïve paintings. Surprised! is the portrait of a tiger in the jungle, a surreal depiction of forces of nature. As one of the most famous animal paintings, it has strong symbolism and it connects the nature with the deep instincts and the wild side of human psyche.

https://www.widewalls.ch/famous-animal-paintings/henri-rousseau-surprised/

02/02/2020

On White II

Artist: Wassily Kandinsky
Created: 1923
Period: Abstract art
Art form: Painting kandinskypaintings.org

Kandinsky’s On White II expresses an intelligent combination of the two main colors in the painting: black and white. Kandinsky used color to represent more than just shapes and figures in his paintings. In this painting the many dimensions of the color white is used to represent the many possibilities and opportunities available in life. The color black, on the other hand, represents non-existence and death. Kandinsky expressed the color black as the silence of death, and in this painting, the black cuts through the white background with a riotous effect, shattering the peace of the colorful combination of colors, or as it were, opportunities in life.

28/01/2020

Hawaiian Longboard Surfing

By LeRoy Neiman

LeRoy Neiman was an American artist who blended a Pop Art sensibility with impressionistic brushwork and vibrant color. “I do not depart from the colors borrowed from life,” he once said. “But I use color to emphasize the scent, the spirit, and the feeling of the thing I’ve experienced.”

During his life he sometimes performed on television, captivating audiences by drawing or painting portraits live on air. The prolific and popular artist donated a substantial donation to Columbia University School of the Arts in 1995, which helped to create its LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies. Neiman died on June 20, 2012 in New York, NY at the age of 91. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, among others.

21/01/2020

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884

Artist:
Georges Seurat
French, 1859-1891

“Bedlam,” “scandal,” and “hilarity” were among the epithets used to describe what is now considered Georges Seurat’s greatest work, and one of the most remarkable paintings of the nineteenth century, when it was first exhibited in Paris. Seurat labored extensively over A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884, reworking the original as well as completing numerous preliminary drawings and oil sketches (the Art Institute has one such sketch and two drawings). With what resembles scientific precision, the artist tackled the issues of color, light, and form. Inspired by research in optical and color theory, he juxtaposed tiny dabs of colors that, through optical blending, form a single and, he believed, more brilliantly luminous hue. To make the experience of the painting even more intense, he surrounded the canvas with a frame of painted dashes and dots, which he, in turn, enclosed with a pure white wood frame, similar to the one with which the painting is exhibited today. The very immobility of the figures and the shadows they cast makes them forever silent and enigmatic. Like all great master-pieces, La Grande Jatte continues to fascinate and elude.

20/12/2019

Spy Booth

By Banksy

Murals are a way of expressing one's thoughts, emotions and opinions through art that is out in the open for everyone to behold. And time and again, artists have used them to speak their mind in ways that can rarely go unnoticed. They've showcased what the feel about political issues, social issues and world problems, while also showcasing their mesmerising art at the same time.

While many may think of murals as a form of vandalism, it is in fact just another art form that we need to appreciate.

Banksy is probably one of the world's most famous murals creator. This design, which was also one of the most popular murals on the pages of Widewalls was made in Cheltenham, UK. It depicts three people trying to spy on a telephone call.

17/12/2019

The Lion’s Den

Famous mural by Lee Quinones

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10 MOST FAMOUS GRAFFITI ARTISTS IN THE WORLD
By Anirudh -October 7, 20175244 5


Graffiti are writing or drawings that have been scribbled, scratched or painted illicitly on a wall or other surface, often within public view. The word graffiti, or its singular form “graffito”, come from the Italian word graffiato which means “scratched”. While the practice of creating graffiti has existed since ancient times, it come to the forefront as a modern art movement in the second half of the 20th century. Darryl McCray, known by his tagging name Cornbread, began the to write on the walls in Philadelphia in the late 1960s. The movement spread to New York City and blossomed into the modern graffiti movement, which reached its peak in the U.S. in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and then spread to Europe. Cornbread is widely regarded as the father of modern day graffiti. Today graffiti art is hugely popular and some of the best known artists in the world are street artists. Still graffiti is considered vandalism by authorities and many graffiti artists choose anonymity as a way to prevent arrest. Here are the 10 most famous graffiti artists in the world along with pictures of their best known works.




#10 LEE QUIÑONES
Nationality: Puerto Rican

Born: 1964

The Lion's Den mural by Lee Quinones
The Lion’s Den – Famous mural by Lee Quinones
The New York City Subway graffiti movement which took place in the 1970s and 1980s went on to have a massive local, countrywide and international impact on graffiti being recognized as an art form. George Lee Quinones was one of the innovators of New York’s street-art movement and is considered by many to be the single most influential graffiti artist to emerge from that era. He began painting graffiti on subway trains in 1974 and within a few years attained legendary status in this new field. Quinones often left poetic messages on his art pieces like “Graffiti is art and if art is a crime, please God, forgive me”. He created some of the most admired graffiti pieces at the time but unfortunately much of his finest work is lost forever. Quinones was one of the first artists to move from graffiti to canvas based paintings. Today he is a well established artist with his paintings housed at permanent collections of museums.

16/12/2019

Tea house at Koishikawa. The morning after a snowfall

By Katsushika Hokusai

Hokusai's print; Tea at Koishikawa - the morning after a snowfall, is a wonderful example of Hokusai's ability to evoke an image of the changing nature of the environment. Hokusai highlights the effect of a single snowfall on the landscape; no surface escapes the simple white blanket.

Katsushika Hokusai is the Japanese master artist and printmaker of the ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”) school. His early works represent the full spectrum of ukiyo-e art, including single-sheet prints of landscapes and actors, hand paintings, and surimono (“printed things”), such as greetings and announcements. Later he concentrated on the classical themes of the samurai and Chinese subjects. His famous print series “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji,” published between 1826 and 1833, marked the summit in the history of the Japanese landscape print.

14/12/2019

Untitled (Buddha)

By Jamini Roy

Buddha is terracotta sculpture, created in 1953 by the famous indian painter Jamini Roy.

Walk into an average middle-class art-loving household of West Bengal, and chances are that you might come across a well-preserved portrait of Jamini Roy. While most of the Indian painters of the 20th Century were excited about modern art, which fetched them good returns, Jamini Roy stood out for his love towards Indian roots.

Influenced by the simplicity of Kalighat paintings (Indian folk art), Jamini Roy gave up on modern art and stuck to his roots, winning millions of hearts in the process. He also gave up on using European paints and even canvases to replace them with suitable alternatives. In 1954, the Government of India honored him with Padma Bhushan for his contribution towards art.

29/07/2019

Water Lilies

Claude Monet

Water Lilies is a series of approximately 250 oil paintings by French Impressionist Claude Monet. The paintings depict his flower garden at his home in Giverny, and were the main focus of his artistic production during the last thirty years of his life.

The aim of his large Water Lilies paintings, Monet said, was to supply “the illusion of an endless whole, of water without horizon or bank.” While his garden in Giverny, his water-lily pond, and the sky above are the subjects of this monumental triptych, his representation of them can be seen to verge toward abstraction. In the attempt to capture the constantly changing qualities of natural light and color, spatial cues all but dissolve; above and below, near and far, water and sky all commingle. In his enveloping, large-scale canvases Monet sought to create “the refuge of a peaceful meditation in the center of a flowering aquarium.”

12/07/2019

Madonna with Child

Filippo Brunelleschi

The Madonna with Child was casually discovered two years ago in Fiesole. During its restoration, an accurate research on the artwork was executed, which resulted in its attribution to Brunelleschi, one of the most influential artist of the 15th century in Italy.

The bust is the original prototype of a number of sculptures, made of terracotta or stucco, now held at the Hermitage Museum, at the Berlin Museum, at the S. Mark Museum in Florence and in the Chigi-Saracini collection in Siena.

Filippo Brunelleschi considered to be a founding father of Renaissance architecture, was an Italian architect and designer, recognized to be the first modern engineer, planner, and sole construction supervisor. He is most famous for designing the dome of the Florence Cathedral, a feat of engineering that had not been accomplished since antiquity, as well as the development of the mathematical technique of linear perspective in art which governed pictorial depictions of space until the late 19th century and influenced the rise of modern science. His accomplishments also include other architectural works, sculpture, mathematics, engineering, and ship design. His principal surviving works can be found in Florence, Italy.

10/07/2019

Urban Art

Urban art combines street art and graffiti and is often used to summarize all visual art forms arising in urban areas, being inspired by urban architecture or present urban lifestyle.

Although urban art started at the neighborhood level, where a lot of people of different cultures live together, it is an international art form with an unlimited number of uses nowadays. Many urban artists travel from city to city and have social contacts all over the world. The notion of 'Urban Art' developed from street art which is primarily concerned with graffiti culture. Urban art represents a broader cross-section of artists that, in addition to covering traditional street artists working in formal gallery spaces, also cover artists using more traditional media but with a subject matter that deals with contemporary urban culture and political issues. In Paris, Le Mur is a public museum of urban art.

06/07/2019

Nautilus

By Edward Weston

Nautilus is a black-and-white photograph taken by Edward Weston in 1927 of a single nautilus shell standing on its end against a dark background. It has been called "one of the most famous photographs ever made" and "a benchmark of modernism in the history of photography."

Edward Henry Weston (March 24, 1886 – January 1, 1958) was a 20th-century American photographer. He has been called "one of the most innovative and influential American photographers..." and "one of the masters of 20th century photography." Over the course of his 40-year career Weston photographed an increasingly expansive set of subjects, including landscapes, still lives, n**es, portraits, genre scenes and even whimsical parodies. It is said that he developed a "quintessentially American, and specially Californian, approach to modern photography" because of his focus on the people and places of the American West.

As of 2013, two of Weston's photographs feature among the most expensive photographs ever sold. A n**e taken in 1925 was bought by the gallerist Peter MacGill for $1.6 million in 2008. Nautilus of 1927 was sold for $1.1 million in 2010, also to MacGill.

02/07/2019

Apple Tree, I (1912)

By Gustav Klimt

At first glance Klimt's landscapes would seem to show a smoother line of development than his figural works. While they evidence a parallel transition from silky Impressionism to the more crystalline painted mosaic style, the latter phase is not distinguished by the rigid geometricity and harsh metallic colors found in the portraits and allegories. Klimt's passage into his last, most painterly period thus also transpired more organically in the landscapes, for the landscapes had never altogether succumbed to the linearity of the middle stage. In fact, it may be said that landscape was the wellspring from which much of his revitalized later art sprang, and even his portraits benefited from spatial devices perfected in this genre.

Klimt was a master of tricks that simultaneously created and destroyed the illusion of depth, and in a painting such as Apple Tree I, one can logically distinguish at least four distinct planes: the larger flowers in the foreground, the field between them and the tree, the tree itself, and the lush foliage beyond. Yet the overall pattern of brushstroke insistently informs us that this is a sham, the painting is as flat as the canvas that supports it. Such deliberate manipulation of the picture plane catered to the abstractionist tendencies that had always been inherent in Klimt's approach to landscape. Indeed, whereas in his portraits convention (not to mention the sitter's vanity) demanded a persistent loyalty to volumetric verisimilitude, Klimt in his landscapes was freer both in his manner of seeing and in his ultimate goals. The landscapes (with no one to please but Klimt himself) are the most purely artistic works in his oeuvre, evidencing a painter's delight in form, color, and texture for their own sakes. Particularly in his more abstract late landscapes, Klimt achieved a unity of conception that brings these works, like the last landscapes of Claude Monet, to the very forefront of Modernism.

29/06/2019

The School of Athens

by Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino

The School of Athens (Italian: Scuola di Atene) is a fresco by the Italian Renaissance artist Raphael. It was painted between 1509 and 1511 as a part of Raphael's commission to decorate the rooms now known as the Stanze di Raffaello, in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican. The Stanza della Segnatura was the first of the rooms to be decorated, and The School of Athens, representing Philosophy, was probably the third painting to be finished there, after La Disputa (Theology) on the opposite wall, and the Parnassus (Literature). The picture has long been seen as "Raphael's masterpiece and the perfect embodiment of the classical spirit of the Renaissance".

28/06/2019

Pyramid of Skulls

Paul Cézanne

"For me, life has begun to be deathly monotonous"

Pyramid of Skulls is oil painting by French Post-Impressionist artist Paul Cézanne. Painted in a pale light against a dark background, Pyramid of Skulls is exceptional in the artist's oeuvre, for in no other painting did Cézanne place his objects so close to the viewer.

Considered by many as the father of modern art, but Paul Cezanne was anything but common. Like El Greco, he made significant contributions to Cubism.