It is said that “A picture is worth a thousand words”. We use words to express what we feel or what we need. However, when it comes to images you don’t need words anymore. The image is the one that can capture a feeling: sadness or happiness. You become absorbed in the feelings that live before you. The artist can make you feel sad or happy. The artist is the one that can and will play with your feelings, even if he or she is not near you. Artists can do that by just creating a painting that can change the way you feel only by looking at it. The free will inside you is not so free anymore. The choice of what you should take is not yours anymore. You are just a person at the crime scene, and you can’t take your eyes from it. It is mesmerizing. In the same time, an artist can make you sense what he is feeling.

Frida Kahlo is an artist who could lay her feelings on canvas. She described with images what she was going through since the accident on September 17th 1925. It was the exact day of the Mexican independence. In the years that passed, she described the accident by painting it. She also wrote: “I sat on the edge, near the descent. Moments later the bus was hit by a tram line Xochimilco. The Tram crashed the bus on the corner of the street. It was an odd blow. It wasn’t violent, but dull, slow, injuring everyone. Especially I.” She suffered a triple fracture of the spine, clavicle fracture, dislocation of left shoulder, triple fracture of pelvis, abdomen and pelvis perforation and dislocation of her right leg. Virtually, the accident stopped time for Frida, who was, as she described in her memoirs, a wanderer.

The list health problems will continue throughout her life. However, Frida is the worthy example of someone whose body is weak, but whose interior is strongly. In the long days she had to wait to walk again Frida made the first significant painting of her work, Self portrait in a Velvet Dress. It is influenced by the Renaissance painters whom she studied with passion during convalescence. Besides her work is represented by the self-portraits, the only person she knew best so she could spread feelings on canvas. She was the only person who could stand still long enough that she could surprise even the most hidden feelings. People can only see glimpses of the person you really are, but they can never look within yourself to see your hidden thoughts.

Sometimes even you cannot see the hidden part of you. I fell in love with Frida not only for her original paintings, but because of the whole package, her life. I think that you can’t understand the significance given by the artist to his paintings if you don’t know his life. Because Frida lived in much of her life in bed in a room with four walls, her paintings are full of solitude. We can see this by the fact that the main character is placed in the middle of the paintings, all alone. Sadness in the eyes of the character also surprises. She shows loneliness and sadness as they are, without a curtain. The artist’s suffering can be seen especially in the painting The Broken Column, made in 1944. Admired in Frida is that for a moment, she did not hide the sadness and suffering that had gone through her life. Frida is for me a worthy artist. She wrote towards the end of her life “I hope the exit is joyful, and I hope I never come back.” Most people fear of death, but she would look right into its eyes.

Perhaps the harsh and sincere reality of her paintings resonates so much with the viewer precisely because it describes exactly what the world feels: that we struggle alone with our own suffering.
Frida shows that you don’t need words to reflect how you feel just as you don’t have to reveal your wound for people to understand your pain. You only need a painting.

Picasso defied any supposition that an artist had to practice one form of art or paint one type of subject matter over the course of his life. He took on many styles, but also fathered one — Cubism. Cubism to the the artist is much like the rendering of a map from a cartographer’s perspective. An expanse of various surfaces, textures, spatial depth, shapes, and sizes. How would you render that on a two dimensional surface? Cubism does leave many of Picasso’s portraits looking like he painted on a mirror, shattered it, and reassembled the fragments.

They say it takes about 22 muscles to smile and 37 muscles to frown. The human face has a myriad of expressions and viewpoints. Cubism, to Picasso, reduced the difficulty of depicting this complexity. Princess Margaret once commented that it was easier to feel his work and not have to put as much work into thinking about what every little symbol meant.

Cubism reigned from 1907 until around the end of World War I and began when Picasso was in Paris, working in partial inspiration from Cezanne’s flattened depiction of space. An early depiction, much closer to realism than later pieces in this movement, of Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (1907) is said to be the seminal Cubist creation. This piece is interesting because shapes and space aren’t just blocked out, characteristic of the Cubist movement, but the paint strokes are also prominently achieving the same effect, hardly seen in Picasso’s other works.

Notice the figures on the right. They appear very different from the other women, less like women in fact. The almost-masks are echoes from Picasso’s play with Primitivism and African sculptural influence.

When you look at those two women, elements of their faces seem to be rendered from various points of view. It can be disconcerting to the viewer. Picasso understood this in his use of color and often employed bright, primary color hues in his portraits.

Picasso used bright and dark hues to set a mood, usually dualistic, and in unusual ways to block space.

In Nude Woman in a Red Armchair (1932) Picasso shows us the view of the woman from the side and front, echoed in the positioning of the breasts. The figure’s left thigh is in a natural position to reflect either perspective.

It’s interesting to note that many of his similar rendered portraits, the object is usually a solitary figure and lover of Picasso.

Even though a viewer can easily understand this much, we still have to ask, “Why the weird faces Picasso?” If you want to show your child the meaning of, “Your face will freeze that way,” show him a Cubist portrait by Picasso; that might do the trick.

Art is passion. Art is passion for those who make it and for those who look at it.

When you create you are absorbed, you don’t realize the time passing, you don’t need a human near, you are preoccupide by just creating, you even forget about yourself.

When you view art, you are absorbed into someone else’s creation, you search for a meaning, for your own vision, for an answer, as small as it may be. Art is freedom, the freedom to create, to dream for the impossible and to put it on a paper, to look at it and to search for your own imagination.

Such freedom maybe what Vincent Van Gogh searched for. Is it so that madness is a prison or maybe the freedom of the mind? What is interesting is that the mad painter, Van Gogh, never forgot to follow his passion, painting, even when he had his first breakdown, on the 23rd of December 1888. On that night Van Gogh cut his ear and sent it to a lady companion, named Rachel. Signs of his personality disorder are found in his boderline behavior. On the one hand he had a strong religious fanaticism and on the other hand he had failed love experiences. He was also deeply disappointed in life and felt non-integrated in his own environment.

About all these sufferings he wrote to his brother before the “ear” incident. He said that his deep disappointment is caused by the “despair in which I live due to failure of each action I undertook so far and for which I deserve a thousand reprimands”.

Despite his bouts of madness, Van Gogh never stopped painting. His famous Starry night was completed a year after, in June 1889. That for me is proof that no matter how lost a painter is he will never lose his passion for art, he might loose his mind, but he will never lose his talent.

In the period he painted this masterpiece he was confined to the Saint Remy Asylum. The painting represents an impressive demonstration of the uniqueness of how he perceives and interprets nature. In that period at Saint Remy he lost his faith so in order to find his inner peace he used to paint at night.

Van Gogh might be the artist who best represents the myth of misunderstood genius, a genius that could never paint in such a way if he had been a normal person and not a mad man.

The body of Picasso’s works were stashed in a garage for forty years until a letter was written to Picasso’s son, asking about the worth of the collection. This letter was written last November by Picasso’s ex-electrician, Pierre Le Guennec, who claimed the collection had been gifted to him by Picasso and his second wife Jacqueline. It was only recently that Le Guennec was formally indicted with possession of stolen property. Le Guennec will appear before a judge later this month on charges.

According to Var Martin, the Le Guennecs were also gifted with 540,000 francs in 1983. The information was revealed by the Picasso Administration in a formal document. This gift occurs ten years after Le Guennec’s employment as an electrician (1970-1973) with the Picasso family. Inside the collection are never seen before drawings, Cubist works, and a rare painting from the Blue period.

However, Le Guennec is not the only one undergoing investigation. Picasso’s ex-driver, Maurice Bresnu, who himself possessed over a hundred of his employer’s works. Bresnu is Le Guennec’s cousin. Police did retain works from an auction of Bresnu’s own collection this June, but investigation has not lead to any evidence of connection between the cases, except for the obvious and unusual factor of familial relation and stolen goods.

overstockArt.com released today its Father’s Day Top 5 list. The list names this year’s most popular oil paintings for dads. Topping the chart is Vincent van Gogh’s masterpiece “Starry Night.” Oil paintings by William Bradford, Wassily Kandinsky and Pablo Picasso also made the list.

overstockArt.com used visitor interactions on their website to measure the site usage of male adults over the age of 35. Recording more than 5,000,000 sessions revealed that “Starry Night,” was the most sought after painting clicked by male adults 37 percent of each session. Second, was “Café Terrace at Night” which garnered 23 percent of the clicks.

The oil paintings that made the “Dad’s Favorites: Top Five Oil Paintings for Father’s Day” list are:

1. “Starry Night,” Vincent van Gogh – This masterpiece by van Gogh was named the best-selling oil painting of the last decade by overstockArt.com. The oil painting depicts the view outside van Gogh’s sanatorium room window at night.
2. “Café Terrace at Night,” Vincent van Gogh – Van Gogh’s famous painting of the small coffee shop in Arles has caused it to become one of Southern France’s most sought after attractions.
3. “The Old Guitarist, 1903,” Pablo Picasso – This sorrowful portrait of an old man playing his guitar is one of the famous paintings Picasso created during his Blue Period (1901-1904).
4. “A Sunset Calm in the Bay of Fundy,” William Bradford – This painting, created by Bradford in 1860, depicts full-sailed ships heading out to sea with the brightly peaked sun on its horizon.
5. “Farbstudie Quadrate (Color Study of Squares),” Wassily Kandinsky – Kandinsky’s tour de force is one of overstockArt.com’s bestselling paintings, bursting with bright colors and a contemporary design.

“Data mining our knowledge base gives us a unique perspective on the art market,” said David Sasson, founder and president of overstockArt.com. “Our unique insights and ability to forecast what people love on their walls enables consumers to make easy gift selections that will be cherished by the recipient for years to come.”

I wanted to share with you an article I found on the ARTISTbe.com facebook page about a study done on 9-month-old babies exposing the children to art at (an extremely) young age, specifically Monet and Picasso:

Taste in art is, of course, highly subjective. Personality, education and the norms of one’s culture all influence why one person craves Kandinsky while another has a crush on Renoir.

But what about babies, whose minds have yet to be shaped by any sort of cultural indoctrination? Newly published research finds they prefer the imagery of Pablo Picasso to the impressionism of Claude Monet.

For babies, “a painted canvas is simply a visual pattern,” writes a University of Zurich research team led by psychologist Trix Cacchione, “and some patterns appeal to them more than others.” Their partiality to Picasso’s patterns was uncovered in a series of experiments described in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts.

A group of 24 babies ranging in age from 269 to 332 days took part in the study, which consisted of five experiments. In the first, half the infants were shown a series of works by Picasso, while the others viewed a variety of Monets.

Immediately afterward, the young participants were shown side-by-side images of two paintings – one by each artist. Experimenters observed how much time they spent gazing at each.

Those who had been looking at Monets preferred the Picasso. This was not a surprise; it was something different and interesting. But those who had been looking at Picassos also focused on the Picasso, suggesting “a spontaneous preference for his work overrode the appeal of novelty.”

“This preference appeared to be highly robust,” the researchers write, “and was observed (in follow-up experiments) even in the absence of very obvious artistic features such as bold colors, sharp contrasts, and the presence of figurative object-like elements.”

Even when his paintings were shown in black and white, and his sharp contours were blurred, Picasso remained the infants’ clear choice.

The researchers can’t explain this definitively, but they make a strong case that Picasso’s luminance – that is, the brightness of his colors — explains his appeal to the ‘diaper-wearing’ demographic.
“Picasso used sharp and accentuated contrasts in luminance,” they note. “Monet, on the other hand, used equiluminant colors to create blurry, shimmery effects. It is possible that infants prefer paintings with clear contrasts in luminance.”

Why would this be? “Variances in luminance constitute the most basic and essential visual information about a visual scene,” the researchers write. “It is possible that infants preferred paintings by Picasso because they were easier to process, and afforded the most stimulation to their still-developing visual system.”

One can draw at least two conclusions from this research. First, if you’re decorating a new baby’s bedroom, skip the water lilies and go for the Cubist masterpieces. (You’ll probably want to avoid Guernica, which has been known to cause nightmares.)

Second, it arguably provides insight into the success of Thomas Kinkade, the much-derided “painter of light.” His nostalgia-drenched imagery may be saccharine, but the man knows something about luminance. Picasso he ain’t, but in light of this research, it’s easy to see how his work could appeal to our inner infant.