Favorite Artists

Almost every interview of an artist one reads will involve discussion of artistic influences. Who are your favorite artists? or painters? or writers? or whomever. Which works influenced you as you developed, and so on. Some of the same makers of the past are mentioned time and again, whether Raphael or Wyeth, Durer or Pollock. An examination of which artists are my particular favorites continues to surprise me. This series of posts is intended to explore the works of artists whom I've learned about and find most inspiring.

Vermeer, "The Art of Painting," ca1667

As someone whose work is firmly grounded in the real world, my influences are mostly artists in that world, rather than abstraction and non-representational art. Most of the artists I admire personally were or are painters, but there is a reasonable leavening of sculpture. That's not to say that artists from other eras and other "isms" haven't had influence on my own practice. These days old influences and new ones continue, but it's dreary to list one's favorites. Instead my plan is to devote a post now and then to some of my favorites, probably in no particular order.

Over the past several decades my focus has again and again returned to the masters of the 17th century particularly the northern painters. Obvious representatives are Rembrandt, Hals, Vermeer, and their contemporaries. There is something to be learned from each on every revisit to their works.

Among my other favorites from that age of painting (besides the three above) are Jan Steen, Pieter Claesz and Gabriel Metsu. These lesser-knowns were highly-skilled and very successful. And like their better-known contemporaries, they have much to teach.

Pieter Claesz, "Vanitas," 1630

Claesz is well-known for his vanitas works. Vanitas paintings are a reminder of universal mortality, containing most often a skull, perhaps a bubble (evanescent), or a snuffed candle, among other symbols of the brevity of life. Beautifully painted, the vanitas works by Claesz have stood the test of time.

Gabriel Metsu, "The Sick Girl," 1659

Gabriel Metsu was a painter of many kinds of work, including history, portraits, and my particular favorite, genre paintings. These were works depicting daily life in the era--taverns, weddings, visits to the doctor, and so on. Metsu painted a number of very sensitive works of sick children. In the painting included here a young woman is desperately, probably mortally, ill. Her mother weeps at hger bedside as the terribly weakened girl seems about to breathe her last.

Jan Steen, "The Quacksalver," 1651

Like Metsu, Jan Steen painted genre scenes as well as history, landscape, and religious allegory. Steen was a master craftsman but he also injected humor into his works. His medical scenes in partcular often have a rather macabre humor. In this painting, "The Quacksalver," the itinerant potion salesman and folk healer is extracting a tooth from a very reluctant boy as village people look on. A quacksalver was a patent medicine salesman, looked upon as little more than a fraudulent nuisance.


There were many other very accomplished, even masterful painters of the time, and all from that small part of northern Europe. One wonders how such things happen. Why did Italy in the 16th century beget so many great artists? And why did tiny Holland do the same in the 17th?

This post is the first in what will probably become a continuing series dealing with favorites and why they've been an influence. More to come.