ArtCorner

Any guidance about cleaning an oil painting that is covered in filth or grime must come with a major red glaring warning sign. Unlike other sort of DIY projects, cleaning oil paintings should be performed by professional conservators. However, if your painting is not terribly valuable to you (monetary wise or sentimental value…), there are some tips to make it look cleaner and brighter.

Up until the Forty’s of the last century, paintings of oil on canvas were often covered with a layer of varnish to add gloss and protect the thick layer of paint, called the impasto. Yet varnish tends to crack and yellows up over time. It can make the oil painting seem dull and discolored.

The good news is that underneath the varnish the thick layer of paint might still be in good shape. Try applying a mild solvent called conservation liquid. Art supply stores might sell a “mix” designed to clean and remove varnish. Be prepared that the solvent might damage the oil paint underneath. If you are willing to take that chance, smear the emulsion with a cotton ball very delicately. Try testing the reaction of the solvent on one corner before moving on to the entire canvas.

For more recent paintings, the build up of dirt and other particles on your masterpiece is more likely to be the issue. In this case, check if the paint has any cracks, this will indicate if the paint is glued well to the canvas. Then you can carefully dust the surface with a very soft brush, such as a shaving cream brush.

For those of you who are not afraid to experiment, there are some unorthodox ways to restore oil paintings. One method that has been explored is by means of white French bread. Ball up a piece of French bread and gently stroke it against the canvas. You’ll see it darken like an eraser. For pet hair on thick textured paintings, I found that a low suction vacuum with a brush nozzle does the trick.

Restoring oil paintings is an art form all on its own. It is an enduring task that should be left to the hands of skilled professionals. The great conservators have methods that are secretly passed down generations. However, Most of us don’t have thousands of dollars to get a professional restoration job done on our family portrait. If you decide to do-it-yourself keep in mind, that altering true valuables always decreases their value, whether or not the end result is satisfying.

Art is the soul of human nature. Our passion for art and the beauty it brings to our world makes us strive for a better tomorrow and unites us all under its enchantment.

What makes someone or his masterpiece a great piece of art? Van Gogh didn’t think very highly of himself I’m sure after such a discerning life… He sold one painting in his lifetime and would probably be in shock to find out how much only one of his masterpieces is valued today…

Art can come in many shapes and forms, but over all it’s all about doing the right thing with what you have…

Have an opinion about What is Art? Do share…

Three men with ski masks strolled into a the E. G. Bührle private Collection museum in Zurich, Switzerland in broad daylight, snatched four 19th-century Impressionist masterpieces, tossed them into a moving van and made their getaway, making it one of the largest and most daring art raids of all time. The crazy thing is it was the second art heist in a 30 mile radius in less than a week…strange ha…

On the first raid, the robbers took two masterpieces by Picasso worth an estimated $4.4 Million. The second time around, they sped off with four masterpieces by four different artists totaling $163 Million:

• A beautiful and lavish 1890 Vincent Van Gogh masterpiece – “Blossoming Chestnut Branches.”
• An 1879 extravagant Claude Monet masterpiece – “Poppies near Vetheuil.”
• An 1871 Edgar Degas portrait – “Count Lepic and his Doughter” (less important than the other three)
• A popular and one of the most admired Paul Cezanne’s in history – the 1888 “Boy in red Waistcoat”.

Their is still no apparent connection between the two robberies other than the vicinity. The problem the thieves face now is to sell these oil paintings on the market, which is virtually impossible, raising the question why did they do it? Was it an ordered job by a private collector? Was it some calling card dare to prove they are up to a bigger challenge? I guess only time will tell…

Edward Hopper‘s classic works captured the authenticity of urban and rural American life with emotions and beauty that have placed them among the lasting and popular images of the American 20th century landscape.

Edward Hopper was born July 22, 1882, 25 miles north of New York City. After a short stretch in the Commercial Art school in New York City, Hopper transferred to the New York School of Art, founded a few years back by the American Impressionist William Merritt Chase. Hopper continued to study illustration but also learned to paint from the most influential teachers of that time, including Chase, Robert Henri and Kenneth Hayes Miller.

Hopper was eager to keep learning the trade and traveled to Paris so he could get inspired by the Impressionist movement that took Paris by storm. He visited Europe three times from 1906 to 1910. After returning to the United States in 1910, Hopper never visited Europe again. He was set on finding his own way as an American artist, and the transition toward an individual style can be detected in the works that followed like Room in New York, painted in 1932.

Painting didn’t come easy for Edward Hopper. Each canvas represented a long, painful conception spent in solitude. There were no sweeping brushstrokes from a fevered mind, no electrifying “Van Gogh like” stroke of genius. He painstakingly considered, added and took out ideas for months before he squeezed even a drop of oil onto his palette.

Despite his extensive consideration, Hopper created more than 800 known paintings, watercolors and prints. His best works are of purified yet eerie scenes in remote New England towns and Off-Broadway New York City scenes and architectures. His bleak yet warm interpretation of early 20th century American life, are melodramas submerged with vigor.

Hopper is arguably the best and most admired American realist of the 20th century, encapsulating a generation’s memories so vividly that we can hardly look at a toppled house, or gas-station near a deserted road except through his eyes. His ability to relate to both rural America and to the wild urban scene of New York City in the same stroke of solitude and vitality unites us all under Hopper’s palette.

This video includes footage of Edward Hopper’s works and places that inspired him in New York’s Greenwich Village, including his studio on Washington Square, where he lived and painted for over 50 years.

Hopper was influenced by various sources including French impressionism and even the 1930’s gangster scene.

It is interesting to note the specific location of the Dixie Dinner, famously depicted in Hopper’s most renowned oil painting the Nighthawks (1942). Like a true masterpiece, it has taken on a life of its own in pop culture, with its movie star glitter igniting many urban legends. The figures portrayed in the scene, customers at a late-night dinner, look like specimens of the 1950’s preserved in formalin. Like characters in a pop-fiction novel, the figures seem trapped in a world without a getaway car…

Though considered by many as a Surrealist, René Magritte was in essence a highbrow painter; his artworks served as vessels for the transformation of abstract thought into visual expression. Magritte was obsessive in redoing his previous oil paintings, ever changing and attempting to portray thoughts through the introduction of subtle compositional changes. Such thoughts were abundant, and Magritte was and still is considered an extraordinary painter, creating more than a thousand oil paintings over the course of five decades.

Magritte was born in 1898, in Belgium, the dull landscape and gloomy skies may well have influenced his flat, moody creations. He began to paint at the age of twelve, and studied art at the Academy in Brussels from 1916 to 1918. In 1926, while earning a living designing advertisements and posters, Magritte joined several friends in the formation of the Belgian Surrealist group. Magritte and his associates showed contempt to the misuse of Freudian theories in art. The group wanted to expand conscious understanding of reality by displaying utterly improbable scenes. The fantastic compositions that resulted were made even more absurd by Magritte’s witty charm.

Rather than paint the conscious world, Magritte created an inverse world, carrying us with him through the looking glass in search of bizarre settings, weird objects of absurd scale, and distortions of the laws of time and matter. He reveled in making the ordinary appear strange, tearing objects from their usual contexts and planting them into utterly inappropriate settings. His legacy is apparent mostly in the works of later contemporary Pop artists like Andy Warhol, who borrowed familiar images and icons from the mass cultural landscape and presented them in a new context, thereby injecting them with new meaning. Magritte painted in the abyss between our visions and the physical world, between our attempts to rationalize every phenomenon, and the absurdity that continues to encompass life despite all efforts to suppress it.

Magritte’s most famous work, Son of Man, is actually a self portrait of Magritte. The painting portrays a man in a suit and a bowler hat (a reacurring motif in Magritte’s creation) standing in-front of a small brick wall. In the horizon is an ocean and cloudy skies. The man’s face is largely covered by a hovering green apple. The painting depicts the biblical story of Adam and Eve, and how the modern businessman is faced with the same temptation Adam faced soon after the creation. About the painting Magritte said, “Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it is impossible. Humans hide their secrets too well…”

I know not all of us can take part in this sale, but we can all appreciate the art that Sotheby’s London has on display. I also love the way they are selling the art works. They really tell a story about the art that is a very significant part of the sale…

Specialists Helena Newman and Alexander Platon introduce six highlights of the Impressionist and Modern Art Auction in London, to be held on the Evening of 5 February.

I really love the Franz Marc piece and the Renoir… too bad I don’t have the cache to own it… oh well, I guess I will just have to do with art reproductions…

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