It wasn’t all that long ago that we all cheered on Kristy Yamaguchi as she skated for Gold in the Olympics in ’92. Following her victory at the 1992 Winter Olympics, Kristi founded the Always Dream Foundation to support the lives of children through educational and recreational initiatives. For almost 20 years, Kristi has championed the Always Dream Foundation, continuing to inspire children and supporting the local community.
Now she’s turned her talents to writing children’s books and the main character of her stories is a pig named Poppy. She sat down and discussed her books today at Book Expo in New York. She explained how kids inspired her to write a children’s book. She chose to use her life and reflect it in Poppy’s stories.
In the books, Poppy the Pig has big dreams—lots of them! But following her dreams isn’t always easy, and whenever Poppy thinks it might be time to give up, her family reminds her to “Dream Big!” While on a “pig’s day out,” she has so much fun ice skating that she doesn’t even notice those around her who think pigs can’t skate…and without even knowing it, she achieves her dream while doing something she loves! The artwork for the two books “Dream Big Little Pig” and “It’s a Big World, Little Pig” is done by Tim Bowers a very stylish and humorous illustrator. He has illustrated over thirty children’s books, including The New York Times bestseller, Dinosaur Pet by Neil and Marc Sedaka. His work has been published in children’s magazines, his illustrations have been used on a wide variety of products and his characters have appeared on hundreds of greeting cards. Each year, Tim travels to schools and libraries to promote literacy and share his artwork with students.
The combination of these two great talents makes for fun reads and embedded lessons which don’t talk down to kids but inspire them. A lot of celebrity children’s books have been vanity pieces that have no redeemable qualities and artwork that fails to match storylines. Yamaguchi’s efforts are right on and her messages coming from who she is and her experiences resonates loudly with parents and kids alike. Dream Big, Little Pig has garnered rave reviews, tremendous media attention, sold more than 15,000 copies through bookscan and debuted at #2 on the New York Times bestsellers list.
Ok, so how does that relate to us, the illustrator looking for the next great project to work on? Here it is …Be careful who you hook up with when you take on projects. Those of us who are lucky enough to be offered a celebrity project should be aware of how “real” the writer’s effort is and how much control the publisher has on the project. If you’re doing artwork for Madonna you better believe she is making all the decisions and she is one major diva so you better get ready. Don’t be so quick to jump on board. Ask questions, make sure that the committment and the story itself is there. Sometimes the money (I have made this mistake a few times) seduces you into making a foolish decision that will later implode on you. You find yourself in the middle of a project you wish you had never taken. You wish you never heard of that certain celebrity. On the flip side if someone like Kristy Yamaguchi comes your way jump on that asap and do your best work ever!
When I was a young kid reading King Arthur and other books illusterated by NC Wyeth I had no idea who he was. All I knew was his paintings made the words in the book come to life. My experience of those books were dictated by his incredible artwork. As I read the words in the story his images came to life and the imagery danced in my brain making the reading whiz by as if the words weren’t even there. When someone’s artwork does that to you you know he’s communicating on a level most illustrators never get. So it’s appropriate that the initial illustrator featured here at the Illustrators Journal blog would be Wyeth.This picture of Wyeth was taken around 1903 in his studio. The robust confidence of Wyeth comes across in this artist pose.
N.C. Wyeth was born in Needham, Massachusetts. His ancestor, Nicholas Wyeth, a stonemason, came to Massachusetts from England in 1645. Later ancestors were prominent participants in the French and Indian Wars, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the American Civil War, passing down rich oral histories and tradition to N.C. Wyeth and his family and providing subject matter for his art, which was deeply felt. His maternal ancestors came from Switzerland, and as a child, his mother was acquainted with literary giants Henry David Thoreau and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. His literary appreciation and artistic talents appear to have come from her.
He was the oldest of four brothers who spent much time hunting, fishing, and enjoying other outdoor pursuits, and doing chores on their farm. His varied youthful activities and his naturally astute sense of observation later aided the authenticity of his illustrations and obviated the need for models: “When I paint a figure on horseback, a man plowing, or a woman buffeted by the wind, I have an acute sense of the muscle strain.”
His mother encouraged his early inclination toward art. Wyeth was doing excellent watercolor paintings by the age of twelve.[6] He went to Mechanics Arts School to learn drafting, and then the Massachusetts Normal Arts School and the Eric Pape School of Art to learn illustration, under George Loftus Noyes and Charles W. Reed.
When two of his friends were accepted to Howard Pyle’s School of Art in Wilmington, Delaware and Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, Wyeth was invited to try to join them in 1902. Howard Pyle was the “father” of American illustration, and Wyeth immediately meshed with his methods and ideals. Pyle’s approach included excursions to historical sites and impromptu dramas using props and costumes, meant to stimulate imagination, emotion, atmosphere, and the observation of humans in action—all necessities for his style of illustration. Pyle stressed historical accuracy and tinged it with a romantic aura. But where Pyle painted in exquisite detail, Wyeth veered toward looser, quicker strokes and relied on ominous shadows and moody backgrounds. He probably picked up his glazing technique from Pyle.
Wyeth’s exuberant personality and talent made him a standout student. A robust, powerfully built young man with strangely delicate hands, he ate a lot less than his size implied. He admired great literature, music, and drama, and he enjoyed spirited conversation.
A bucking bronco for the cover of The Saturday Evening Post on February 21, 1903 was Wyeth’s first commission as an illustrator. That year he described his work as “true, solid American subjects–nothing foreign about them.”
It was a spectacular accomplishment for the 21-year-old Wyeth, after just a few months under Pyle’s tutelage. In 1904, the same magazine commissioned him to illustrate a Western story, and Pyle urged Wyeth to go West to acquire direct knowledge, much as Zane Grey had done for his Western novels. In Colorado, he worked as a cowboy alongside the professional “punchers”, moving cattle and doing ranch chores. He visited the Navajo in Arizona and gained an understanding of Native American culture. When his money was stolen, he worked as a mail carrier, riding between the Two Grey Hills trading post and Fort Defiance, to earn enough to get back home. He wrote home, “The life is wonderful, strange — the fascination of it clutches me like some unseen animal — it seems to whisper, ‘Come back, you belong here, this is your real home.’ ”
On a second trip two years later, he collected information on mining and brought home costumes and artifacts, including cowboy and Indian clothing. His early trips to the western United States inspired a period of images of cowboys and Native Americans that dramatized the Old West. His depictions of Native Americans tended to be sympathetic, showing them in harmony with their environment, as demonstrated by In the Crystal Depths (1906).
Upon returning to Chadds Ford, he painted a series of farm scenes for Scribner’s, finding the landscape less dramatic than that of the West but nonetheless a rich environment for his art: “Everything lies in its subtleties, everything is so gentle and simple, so unaffected.” His painting Mowing (1907), not done for illustration, was among the most successful images of rural life, rivaling Winslow Homer’s great scenes of Americana.
He married Carolyn Bockius of Wilmington and settled in Chadds Ford in 1908 to raise a family on 18 acres near the historic Brandywine battlefield. By now, he had left Pyle, and commissions were coming in quickly. His hope had been that he would make enough money with his illustrations to be able to afford the luxury of painting what he wanted; but as his family and income grew, he found it difficult to break from illustration.
N.C. Wyeth created a stimulating household for his talented children Andrew Wyeth, Henriette Wyeth Hurd, Carolyn Wyeth, Ann Wyeth McCoy, and Nathaniel C. Wyeth. Wyeth was very sociable, and frequent visitors included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Hergesheimer, Hugh Walpole, Lillian Gish, and John Gilbert. According to Andrew, who spent the most time with his father on account of his sickly childhood, N.C. was a strict but patient father who did not talk down to his children. His hard work as an illustrator gave his family the financial freedom to follow their own artistic and scientific pursuits. Andrew went on to become one of the foremost American artists of the second half of the 20th century, and both Henriette and Carolyn became artists also; Ann became an artist and composer. Nathaniel became an engineer for DuPont and worked on the team that invented the plastic soda bottle. Henriette and Ann married two of N.C.’s protégés, Peter Hurd and John W. McCoy. N.C. Wyeth is the grandfather of artist Jamie Wyeth and musician Howard Wyeth.
By 1911, N.C. Wyeth began to move away from Western subjects and on to illustrating classic literature. He painted a series for an edition of Treasure Island (1911), by Robert Louis Stevenson, thought by many to be his finest group of illustrations. The proceeds from this great success paid for his house and studio.[13] He also illustrated editions of Kidnapped (1913), Robin Hood (1917), The Last of the Mohicans (1919), Robinson Crusoe (1920), Rip Van Winkle (1921), The White Company (1922), and The Yearling (1939). He did work for prominent periodicals, including Century, Harper’s Monthly, Ladies’ Home Journal, McClure’s, Outing, The Popular Magazine, and Scribner’s. His early works were sold outright at a handsome price, but only much later did he receive royalties. Wyeth would read a book thoroughly before doing the contracted illustrations, and he specifically created scenes that were thinly described in the book, adding details and mood of his own, as in Old Pew (1911).
By 1914, Wyeth loathed the commercialism upon which he became dependent, and for the rest of his life, he battled internally over his capitulation, accusing himself of having “bitched myself with the accursed success in skin-deep pictures and illustrations.” He complained of money men “who want to buy me piecemeal” and that “an illustration must be made practical, not only in its dramatic statement, but it must be a thing that will adapt itself to the engravers’ and printers’ limitations. This fact alone kills that underlying inspiration to create thought. Instead of expressing that inner feeling, you express the outward thought… or imitation of that feeling.”
Wyeth also did posters, calendars, and advertisements for clients such as Lucky Strike, Cream of Wheat, and Coca-Cola, as well as paintings of Beethoven, Wagner, and Liszt for Steinway & Sons. He painted murals of historical and allegorical subjects for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the Westtown School, the First National Bank of Boston, the Hotel Roosevelt, the Franklin Savings Bank, the National Geographic Society, and other public and private buildings. During both World Wars, he contributed patriotic images to government and private agencies.
His nonillustrative portrait and landscape paintings changed dramatically in style throughout his life as he experimented first with impressionism in the 1910s (feeling an affinity with the nearby “New Hope Group”), then by the 1930s veering to the realistic American regionalism of Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, painting with thin oils and occasionally, egg tempera. Wyeth worked rapidly and experimented constantly, often working on a larger scale than necessary, befitting his energetic and grand vision, which often harked back to his ancestral past. He could conceive, sketch out, and paint a large painting in as little as three hours.
By the 1930s, he restored an old captain’s house in Port Clyde, Maine, named “Eight Bells” after a Winslow Homer painting, and took his family there for summers, where he painted primarily seascapes. Museums started to purchase his paintings, and by 1941, he was elected to the National Academy and exhibited on a regular basis.
In 1945, N.C. Wyeth and his grandson (Nathaniel C. Wyeth’s son) died in an accident at a railway crossing near his Chadds Ford home.
One More Step, Mr. Hands by N.C. Wyeth, 1911, for Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson.
At the time of his death, Wyeth was working on an ambitious series of murals for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company depicting the Pilgrims at Plymouth, a series completed by Andrew Wyeth and John McCoy.
In June 1945, he received the honorary degree of master of arts from Bowdoin College. N.C. Wyeth was a member of the National Academy, the Society of Illustrators, the Philadelphia Water Color Club, the Fellowship of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Art Alliance, the Chester County Art Association, and the Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts.
Significant public collections of Wyeth’s work are on display at the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, and in Maine, at the Portland Museum of Art and the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland. The Brandywine River Museum offers tours of the N.C. Wyeth House and Studio in Chadds Ford. The home and studio were designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1997.
Other resources:
Wyeth Collection at The National Museum of American Illustration
N.C. Wyeth Biography
Bronco Buster, Cream of Wheat advertisement 1906 or 1907, courtesy Minneapolis Institute of Arts
N C Wyeth / Newell Convers Wyeth artwork can be viewed at American Art Archives web site
N.C. Wyeth Catalogue Raisonné An online catalogue raisonné from the Brandywine River Museum
Brandywine School
National Museum of American Illustration
A brilliant brilliant painter whose work is fresh,lively and natural. Sublime brush stroking and line work are the hallmark of Michel’s work.
Kikoine was born in Rechytsa, present-day Belarus. The son of a Jewish banker in the small southeastern town of Gomel, he was barely into his teens when he began studying at “Kruger’s School of Drawing” in Minsk. There he met Chaim Soutine, with whom he would have a lifelong friendship. At age 16 he and Soutine were studying at the Vilnius Academy of Art and in 1911 he moved to join the growing artistic community gathering in the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris, France. This artistic community included his friend Soutine as well as fellow Belarus painter, Pinchus Kremegne who also had studied at the Fine Arts School in Vilnia.
For a time, the young artist lived at La Ruche while studying at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts. In 1914, he married a young lady from Vilnia with whom he would have a daughter and a son. Their son, Jankel Jacques, born in France in 1920, also became a painter. The same year as his marriage, Kikoine volunteered to fight in the French army, serving until the end of World War I.
With the outbreak of World War II and the subsequent occupation of France by the Germans, Michel Kikoine and his Jewish family faced deportation to the Nazi death camps. Until the end of the War they stayed near Toulouse. After the Allied liberation of France, he moved back to Paris where his paintings were primarily nudes, autoportraits, and portraits. In 1958 he moved to Cannes on the Mediterranean coast where he returned to landscape painting until his death November 4, 1968.
Michel Kikoine had his first exhibition in Paris in 1919 after which he exhibited regularly at the Salon d’Automne. His work was successful enough to provide a reasonable lifestyle for him and his family allowing them to spend summers painting landscapes in the south of France, the most notable of which is his “Paysage Cezannien,” inspired by the great Paul Cézanne. He died in Cannes, France.
In 2004, at the university in Tel Aviv, Israel, a new wing in the Genia Schreiber University Art Gallery, was dedicated to the memory of Michel Kikoine.
Here are four dog sketches I did from photos I took at the Silver Lake Dog Park in Los Angeles. They are part of a series I am putting together. I’m curious to see whether dog lovers will be interested in the art in prints or on other items. I am also thinking about doing dog portraits for dog parents. Let me know what you think. Am I on the right track?
Ray Howard-Jones was born in 1903 in Lambourn, Berkshire, and died in 1996 in London. She largely grew up, however, in Penarth. In the early 1920s she studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. At first, in part due to illness and family commitments, Ray Howard-Jones’s career was slow to take off. During the Second World War, however, she secured commissions from the War Artists Advisory Committee and some of this work is in the Imperial War Museum. After 1949, she spent a great deal of time in Pembrokeshire, alone or with the photographer Raymond Moore until they split up in 1971. She is particularly well-known for her Pembrokeshire coastal work.
David Moore (click here), who knew the artist in her last decade following a period working for Pembrokeshire Museum Service, has been researching her life and work.
In 2010 he published an illustrated and comprehensive article about her mosaics in Andamento, the Journal of the British Association for Modern Mosaic, Volume 4. This was entitled ‘Bleeding Fingers & Bach Fugues: The Mosaic Work of Ray Howard-Jones’. Copies are available from the BAMM website (www.bamm.org.uk) under ‘Education & Resources’.
He is currently preparing a book about the artist and hopes that, eventually, there will be an exhibition at National Museum Cardiff and/or the National Library of Wales with a comprehensive catalogue. He has tracked down important work, much of which is in private hands, and would be pleased to hear from anyone who knew, has work by or information about Ray Howard-Jones.
David Moore may be contacted at: The Crooked Window, 90 Struet, Brecon, Powys, Wales, LD3 7LS or e-mailed on: davidmoore@phonecoop.coop.
David Moore explains: “Ray Howard-Jones was a significant Welsh landscape artist, a contemporary of Graham Sutherland, John Piper and Eric Ravilious. Long overdue for critical reassessment, she was extremely prolific over a life of ninety-three years and has left a considerable legacy of work. Much of her best work is in private hands although she is represented in many public collections. While studying at the Slade School of Art in London, she was taught by Henry Tonks, Philip Wilson Steer and Tancred Borenius. As a War Artist she recorded coastal fortifications and merchant shipping being prepared for D-Day.”
He continues: “Ray is best known for her remarkable use of colour in impressionistic and often deeply spiritual Pembrokeshire seascapes and coastal scenes. Many were painted on Skomer and around Marloes. She also sketched and painted the coastal wildlife. She had a strong sense of design and produced two outstanding mosaics, one on the newspaper office Thomson House in Cardiff and the other an altarpiece in Marchmont St Giles’ Church in Edinburgh.”
In her obituary in The Guardian in 1996 Roger Worsley wrote: “Ray Howard-Jones, an artist of considerable but perhaps still under-appreciated talent, has died at the age of 93. She spent much of her long life struggling against what she experienced as the disadvantage of having been born a woman. She was a mass of contradictions, a very feminine woman who signed her work “Ray”, partly to disguise her gender (her Christian name was actually Rosemary). She was convinced that her technical abilities as an artist, were as good as those of her male contemporaries. In the end, she had the satisfaction of seeing her work in public and private collections around the world. Her stays on Skomer showed her that nature and her deep inner spiritual life, as well as Celtic mystery and legends, were sources of inspiration.”
Commissions: 1958 mosaic for Thompson House, Cardiff; 1964-5 mosaic for Grange Church, Edinburgh.
A marvelous touch with the pen or the brush Brock Cole’s work is light airy and fun. A perefect match of writing and illustration.
Brock Cole was born a year before the Second World War in a small town in Michigan. Because of his father’s work, his family moved frequently, but he never regarded these relocations as a hardship.
“I thought of myself as something of an explorer, even though my explorations never took me very far. I had a deep and intimate acquaintance with woodlots, creeks, lakes, back streets, and alleys all over the Midwest.”
He attended Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and received a doctorate from the University of Minnesota. After teaching philosophy for several years at the University of Wisconsin, he began writing and illustrating books for children.
“I had always wanted to write, and I loved to draw. I had small children, who were a wonderful audience. Children’s books seemed a perfect fit.”
His first book, The King at the Door, was published in 1979. Among his other picture books are The Winter Wren, The Giant’s Toe, and Alpha and the Dirty Baby.
He now lives in Buffalo, New York, where his wife, Susan, teaches at the State University of New York. His sons both live in Athens, Georgia. Joshua teaches French history at the University of Georgia, and Tobiah is a painter and works as a waiter. Joshua is married to Kate Tremel, a potter and a teacher, and they have a little boy named Lucas.
Brock Cole’s acclaimed first novel, The Goats, was published in 1987. It is set in the Michigan countryside of his childhood and captures the story of two loners’ struggle for self-identity and inner strength after being made the targets of a cruel prank. In a Horn Book Magazine editorial, Anita Silvey wrote: “The Goats reaffirms my belief that children’s literature is alive and thriving.” Betsy Hearne, editor of The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, lauded The Goats as “one of the most important books of the decade.”
Since he began his writing career, Brock Cole and his wife have traveled a good deal, living for one year in Washington and another in Germany, as well as spending frequent summers in Greece and Turkey.
“To be honest, I simply tag along after Susan. It’s her research which takes us all over the place. I enjoy it immensely, though. There’s something about sitting down to work at a rickety table in a strange city that clears the head. It’s the best thing for a writer, or for this
I came across this rather remarkable story as I was cruising to find something that covered “art” of the Gulf War and I came across an article in the National which shows how sometimes artists will go to extremes to create significant imagery. My hat is off to Wafaa Bilal an instructor at NYU, and his willingness to step into an area few will go.
From December 30, 2010 written by Sharmilla Devi
NEW YORK // Wafaa Bilal said the idea to install a camera in the back of his head to record his daily life for one year was born after he fled his native Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War.
“Certain images stuck in my mind, of Kufa or Najaf, of smoke rising after the [Shiite] uprising,” said Bilal, 44, who was raised by a Shiite family in Najaf but forced to flee as Saddam Hussein crushed a Shiite rebellion that had erupted across the south after his forces had been driven from Kuwait.
After spending two years in a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia, he obtained asylum in the United States and he fulfilled his desire to study photography as a New York-based artist.
But he could not stop thinking about what he had left behind in Iraq, about the fading memories and images.
“I began to understand how subjective or how much control we have when raising the viewfinder and pressing the shutter of a camera,” he said in a telephone interview. “And I wanted to use the body, rather the eye or finger, to capture images about the state of surveillance we now live in.”
He underwent a “painful” procedure under local anaesthetic to have the camera installed in his head last month at a New York body modification studio, which usually does tattoos and body piercings, after doctors contacted by Mr Bilal refused to perform the procedure. He did not reveal the cost or the technician who installed the camera.
The interactive/performance art project, called The 3rd I, was commissioned by Qatar’s Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, which is displaying live images captured every minute from Mr Bilal’s camera on the website http://www.3rdi.me.
Mr Bilal recently returned to New York from Qatar where he attended the preview of the exhibition Told/Untold/Retold at Mathaf, which features 23 contemporary works and opens today.
He found more freedom in Qatar than at New York University, where he is an assistant art professor at the Tisch School of the Arts and which demanded that he wear a lens cap when he is on campus to protect the privacy of students and teachers.
“No restrictions were placed on me in Qatar, which was a really big step for them to take. It’s kind of funny given the stereotypes of the Middle East that it was NYU that had concerns,” he said. “The only time I was stopped in Qatar was at the airport – security had to suspect something when they saw a wire coming down my neck but they were fine when I explained it to them.”
Three titanium plates were inserted under a large flap of skin on the back of his head. The skin was then reattached but three posts were left sticking out and they act as the base for the 10-megapixel camera. He will wear the camera, which is 5cm in diameter and less than 2.5cm thick, for a year until next December 15.
He has become used to wearing the camera, saying “the body has a great ability to adapt to a foreign object,” and he is continuing his normal life with no unusual events planned.
He was glad of the Christmas holiday period, which allowed him to take things easy before returning to work in the New Year.
He said his girlfriend had raised no objections about the camera although she would be seeing it for the first time when he visited her in San Diego during the holidays. Meanwhile, he noticed a decline in dinner party invitations from friends since the camera was installed.
The pictures captured this week and displayed on the website show the snow heaped on New York during the blizzard. Many other pictures are mundane and repetitive but have proved personally illuminating for Mr Bilal.
“No one would ever frame and display many of these images,” he said. “But there’s one picture taken in the night showing a burst of light from a lamp that I always keep on. I’ve struggled with sleepless nights and nightmares since leaving Iraq and this picture showed that.”
Much of Mr Bilal’s previous work has highlighted the devastation in Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion. His brother was killed by a missile at an Iraqi checkpoint in 2004. His siblings still live in Iraq, which he visited in 2009. His mother died there recently.
In a live event called And counting… earlier this year, two tattoo artists covered Mr Bilal’s back with a map of Iraq and individual dots to represent each Iraqi and US casualty. The dots for 5,000 dead Americans were in permanent black ink; the 100,000 Iraqis were represented by green ultraviolet ink only visible under black light to represent the Iraqi deaths as mostly invisible to the US public.
His 2008 project Virtual Jihadi was a video game in which an avatar of Mr Bilal as a suicide bomber was seen hunting for George W Bush, the former US president.
If you haven’t stood in front of this massive painting (10 feet by 12 feet) you cannot feel the intensity and power of the painting. I have stood in front of it for a while and admired the passion and brilliance of this painting and felt humbled by it’s brilliance of staging, painting skill and the message portrayed.
Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (26 April 1798 – 13 August 1863) was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school. Delacroix’s use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of colour profoundly shaped the work of the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspired the artists of the Symbolist movement. A fine lithographer, Delacroix illustrated various works of William Shakespeare, the Scottish writer Walter Scott and the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
In contrast to the Neoclassical perfectionism of his chief rival Ingres, Delacroix took for his inspiration the art of Rubens and painters of the Venetian Renaissance, with an attendant emphasis on colour and movement rather than clarity of outline and carefully modeled form. Dramatic and romantic content characterized the central themes of his maturity, and led him not to the classical models of Greek and Roman art, but to travel in North Africa, in search of the exotic. Friend and spiritual heir to Théodore Géricault, Delacroix was also inspired by Lord Byron, with whom he shared a strong identification with the “forces of the sublime”, of nature in often violent action.
However, Delacroix was given neither to sentimentality nor bombast, and his Romanticism was that of an individualist. In the words of Baudelaire, “Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible.”
Delacroix was born at Charenton (Saint-Maurice, Val-de-Marne), in Île-de-France, near Paris.
There is reason to believe that his father, Charles-François Delacroix, was infertile at the time of Eugène’s conception and that his real father was Talleyrand, who was a friend of the family and successor of Charles Delacroix as Minister of Foreign Affairs, and whom the adult Eugène resembled in appearance and character. Throughout his career as a painter, he was protected by Talleyrand, who served successively the Restoration and King Louis-Philippe, and ultimately as ambassador of France in Great Britain, and later by Talleyrand’s grandson, Charles Auguste Louis Joseph, duc de Morny, half-brother of Napoleon III and speaker of the French House of Commons. His father, Charles Delacroix, died in 1805, and his mother Victoire (daughter of Jean-François Oeben) in 1814, leaving 16-year-old Eugene an orphan.
His early education was at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and at the Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen where he steeped himself in the classics and won awards for drawing. In 1815 he began his training with Pierre-Narcisse Guérin in the neoclassical style of Jacques-Louis David. An early church commission, The Virgin of the Harvest, (1819), displays a Raphael-esque influence, but another such commission, The Virgin of the Sacred Heart, (1821), evidences a freer interpretation. It precedes the influence of the more colourful and rich style of the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), and fellow French artist Théodore Géricault (1791–1824), whose works marked an introduction to Romanticism in art.
The impact of Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa was profound, and stimulated Delacroix to produce his first major painting, The Barque of Dante, which was accepted by the Paris Salon in 1822. The work caused a sensation, and was largely derided by the public and officialdom, yet was purchased by the State for the Luxembourg Galleries; the pattern of widespread opposition to his work, countered by a vigorous, enlightened support, would continue throughout his life. Two years later he again achieved popular success for his The Massacre at Chios.
In 1838 Delacroix exhibited Medea about to Kill Her Children, which created a sensation at the Salon. His first large-scale treatment of a scene from Greek mythology, the painting depicts Medea clutching her children, dagger drawn to slay them in vengeance for her abandonment by Jason. The three nude figures form an animated pyramid, bathed in a raking light which penetrates the grotto in which Medea has hidden. Though the painting was quickly purchased by the State, Delacroix was disappointed when it was sent to the Lille Musée des Beaux-Arts; he had intended for it to hang at the Luxembourg, where it would have joined The Barque of Dante and Scenes from the Massacres of Chios.
From 1833 Delacroix received numerous commissions to decorate public buildings in Paris. In that year he began work for the Salon du Roi in the Chambre des Députés, Palais Bourbon, which was not completed until 1837. For the next ten years he painted in both the Library at the Palais Bourbon and the Library at the Palais du Luxembourg. In 1843 he decorated the Church of St. Denis du Saint Sacrement with a large Pietà, and from 1848 to 1850 he painted the ceiling in the Galerie d’Apollon of the Louvre. From 1857 to 1861 he worked in the Chapelle des Agnes at St. Sulpice. These commissions offered him the opportunity to compose on a large scale in an architectural setting, much as had those masters he admired, Paolo Veronese, Tintoretto, and Rubens.
The work was fatiguing, and during these years he suffered from an increasingly fragile constitution. In addition to his home in Paris, from 1844 he also lived at a small cottage in Champrosay, where he found respite in the countryside. From 1834 until his death, he was faithfully cared for by his housekeeper, Jeanne-Marie le Guillou, who zealously guarded his privacy, and whose devotion prolonged his life and his ability to continue working in his later years.
In 1862 Delacroix participated in the creation of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. His friend, the writer Théophile Gautier, became chairman, with the painter Aimé Millet acting as deputy chairman. In addition to Delacroix, the committee was composed of the painters Carrier-Belleuse and Puvis de Chavannes. Among the exhibitors were Léon Bonnat, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Charles-François Daubigny, Gustave Doré, and Édouard Manet. Just after his death in 1863, the society organized a retrospective exhibition of 248 paintings and lithographs by Delacroix—and ceased to mount any further exhibitions.
Eugène Delacroix died in Paris, France and was buried there in the Père Lachaise Cemetery.
I was doing some analytics this morning and I noticed that the last few days I had been getting “hits” on my post back in November of 2011 of What’s It Going To Take: Part One. I realized there was some interest in this subject and perhaps I should follow it up. So here is Part Two.
The painting above is from the first book I illustrated. It’s called The Small Potatoes Club written by Harriet Ziefert. The book was a re-issue of her original book which came out in the early 1980’s. As I mentioned in the original post I did an ok job but without a strong and good art director to help me I was overburdened with decisions in very little time to finish the work itself. I also had to deal with a very disgruntled Ms.Ziefert, who at one point told me “No one cares about Lon Levin, just finish the work!” I believe I was two weeks late on delivery of thirty or more illustrations and was bad rapped by Ms. Ziefert thereafter. Suffice to say Ms. Ziefert is no Maurice Sendak. All I can say about her is quantity is not quality. Such is life.
The point is know who you are dealing with. Don’t take a project just to be working, choose wisely or you can do harm to yourself. I was to learn this lesson a few times when I first started illustrating children’s books. Take into account who you are dealing with, the project, the deadlines, the publisher. Ask yourself how is this project going to help me reach my goal. Now you would think a seasoned pro like me, who has been an art director and a creative director would be able to know all these things when I made a decision. But, each area you work in is new if you’ve never done it before so it is necessary for the artist to know his or her limits and only take projects you know you can do. That doesn’t mean be safe, it means make your decision based on careful evaluation and honesty with yourself. I regularly take projects that challenge me and push me farther than I have pushed before, but I do that knowing I have the skills sets to solve issues that may come up.
At the same time that I took on Ms. Ziefert’s project I had another project given to me that offered more latitude and control with a smaller publisher. The problem with that project was it didn’t pay up front and I would have to wait for residuals to get any money. However, the book was written by the wonderful Lisa Willever (Franklin Mason Press) who wrote the project to match my skills and interests. The final deal was I would provide all the illustrations in my own timeframe and I owned all the rights other than printing rights. The book took me two years to complete in between other projects and I got to design the book as well as illustrate it. I was happy with it but I realized doing work over such a long period of time tends to make the artwork inconsistent at times. Again, art directing myself was hard. The book called ‘There’s A Kid Under My Bed” has sold relatively well and Lisa has paid me residuals and I never have to ask for an accounting. She is one of the best and most honest people I’ve met in the business of children’s books. In 2010, a wealthy Canadian art enthusiast and lover of the book bought all the original art from me and while I miss the art I am glad that it was appreciated enough to be acquired. I didn’t mind the extra cash as well.
Now here’s where the synergy started to take place…Based on my work on ‘There’s A Kid Under My Bed’ I was offered another book.
A project was brought to me called “Monster Boy” a six part book series about a boy who has monster parents even though he looks normal. Only when he loses his temper does he become a monster. I liked the books and the concept and the idea of doing multiple books. I accepted a price that was too low per book and a schedule that was almost impossible to meet. But at that moment, it was about the “body count” to me. I was late into the children’s book world and my thinking was the more books I have to my credit, the easier it will be to get better book projects with better money. This was a double edged sword which would come back to haunt me later. The series of “Monster Boy” books was written by Carl Emerson. I never spoke with Mr. Emerson about the book and his vision. All my direction came from an art director, who was very specific about what she wanted. I was actually pleased with her approach and I think she got the best out of me (at the time). The only rub was I proposed a style of working that was expedient but not my first choice. I went whole in digital with an airbrush licensing look rather than a painterly look which would have been a lot better. But I didn’t have the time to do the book traditionally and I didn’t know enough about digital painting at the time to commit to a painterly digital approach. So I proposed the airbrush style because I knew I could do it and do it quicker than any other way. The problem was I made all the creative choices based on money and not what would serve me and the project best. Another live and learn situation.
I finished the first six books and decided I didn’t want to do any more work on Monster Boy because it didn’t align with my goals as artist. But, I put good sense aside later on when I was offered six more books to do at the same price. For me it was still about the “body count”. I thought to myself ” How impressive am I? After this project I will have illustrated 25 books in three years!” And to tell the truth some people were impressed but in the long run it didn’t matter, because it took me down a path I didn’t want to end up on. All the work I had done was for trade books not the high brow Maurice Sendak, Marla Frazee type books I wanted to do. So now what, where do I go from here, I thought.
The answer came from my agent, Ronnie Herman. Write your own book and illustrate it. Below is a piece of artwork from my book “PT and the Little General”
I will follow up sooner this time with what happened next..
Massimo Taccon (born May 19, 1967 in Rome) is an Italian painter, sculptor and writer who, during his ‘Ismahel period’ (1997–2002), signed his artworks with the pseudonym ISMAHEL He is the founder, thinker and theoretician of an art movement called Critical Meditavism (Meditavismo Critico), whose manifesto was posted to blogspot.com in September 2010.
Born in Italy, Taccon lives and works mainly in Rome. He was present at the Rome International Biennale in 1998, and in 1999 he was one of the 462 artists, from across the world, who participated in the second edition of the ‘Florence Biennale’ exhibition of contemporary art. In 2000 his work was shown at the Langhkawi International Festival of Arts 2000, held by the National Art Gallery, Ibrahim Hussein Museum and Culture Foundation.[
On 14 September 2010 in Rome at the studio “La Taccon Arte” in presence of few intimate friends, Taccon dictated the basic pillars of a new art movement: The “Critical Meditavism” (Meditavismo Critico) and posted it as a manifesto to blogspot.com.
His work has been covered in several art reviews in Italy, Spain and Germany.