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| "Cascade," oil on panel, 9x12 |
As a bonus offer, "Cascade" is now available via email bidding starting at $200. If you've an interest, contact me by email: gary@garyhoff.com. Highest bid win. (Follow the link to see the usual price. You could own this one, framed, at a bargain.)
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| "The Golden Hour," oil on panel, 16x12 |
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| Self Portrait, ca. 1542 |
Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543) is not only a favorite of mine but probably of many others. Many have seen his astonishing portraits from the court English King Henry VIII, but his oeuvre includes many other astonishing works. Studying his works--particularly his portraits--the first thing that strikes me is the utter acuteness of his vision. Holbein has an truly astonishing eye for telling detail, besides making what appear to be incredibly realistic images.
He was German, born in Augsburg though most of his working life was spent in Basel, Switzerland, and in England. He was taught first in his father's workshop in Augsburg and later as apprentice to Hans Herbster in Basel. He may have visited Italy at some time during youth as well. With his elder brother Ambrosius, he became a journeyman painter in Basel around or before 1515 and began a busy career, designing woodcuts, painting portraits, and other works. With his father, who was a master painter and draftsman, he undertook a long project in Lucerne, painting murals, in 1517.
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| "Erasmus of Rotterdam," 1523 |
Certainly, it was his portrait of Erasmus (and a letter of introduction from the subject) that gained him work in England, where he went in 1526. Holbein's situation in Basel seems to have been less successful by then, possibly owing to the Lutheran revolution in northern Europe. Whatever the reason for his move, Holbein was quite successful in England as well. Hosted by Thomas More he had access to much of the Royal Court despite being a foreigner, and painted quite a few members. His most important commission was a portrait of his host, who would become Lord Chancellor. Holbein only stayed in England for two years before returning to Basel and his family, having earned a great deal. The atmosphere in Basel was difficult, though, owing to religious ferment. Iconoclasts destroyed religious imagery, including some by Holbein, and there was a reduction in commssions for religious work.
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| "Sir Thomas More," 1527 |
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| "Thomas Cromwell," 1533 |
It was during these years that some of Holbein's greatest works were made. Perhaps the most praised and most puzzling is "The Ambassadors," a double, life-size portrait of two Frenchmen, one the actual ambassador to the English court of Henry VIII and the other a priest who would later become Bishop of Lavaur. Holbein larded the painting with metaphor and allusion. Most prominent is the anamorphic skull--that grey smear across the bottom. If you can approach the picture from high on the right or low on the left the smear becomes a toothless skull, a "memento mori." There are musical instruments, scientific instruments, a globe, books, rich draperies and a thick rug, and all of them have significance in the context of the sitters' identities and the religious and social turmoil of the time.
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| "The Ambassadors," 1533 |
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| "Charles de Solier, comte de Morette," 1534 |
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| "Henry VIII of England," 1536 |
Although subjects like flowers, wine bottles and glassware, fruit and the like are traditional in still life, there are many other possibilities. A few years ago one of my own interests was kitchenware. That is, implements and appliances you might find in someone's arsenal. Some of the objects chosen at the time were humble, some were antique, and some were just for the fun of it.
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| "Alone," oil on panel |
"Alone" is very small at 8x6 and monochromatic. A study of a salt shaker, painted on a gessoed panel, it was done with raw umber and white. From this small beginning grew several years of small quick paintings, often with a food- or kitchen-related subject.
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| "Creamer," oil on composition board |
A good example of the work of those years is "Creamer," another small oil, painted on an archival composition board. It's about 9x6. The composition and opportunities for interplay of color and edges were what drew me to this particular subject.
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| "Breakfast," oil on panel |
As the weather has warmed, time for outdoor painting has expanded. With good sun and no rain it's possible to go out practically every day. The first couple of week of June have been particularly good for plein air painting. And of course the Saturday group goes weekly, like clockwork.
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| "North Shore," oil on panel, 9x12 |
With "North Shore" I began going out earlier in the day, looking for that beautiful slanting light that sets things aglow. This particular plein air painting was done on the northern shore of Gray's Lake, less than a mile from my home studio, in two early morning sessions. As I nearly always do I used a 9x12 panel, thinly washed with burnt sienna to do away with the blinding white of the priming. Starting at the top and working down I washed in colors thinly at first and then with more bodied paint. The red-tinted surface served as a middle value and a nice complement to the myriad greens of the landscape. After letting thin paint set for a few minutes I painted the greens, mixing the color from various blues, yellows and black. As an exercise, I tried very hard to make a stroke of paint and then leave it unblended, particularly in the top three-quarters. The foreground water was blended to smoothness to suggest a still surface.
Although the season is still officially spring, the past few days have certainly felt more like summer. The spring has been damp and often cool but now a warm spell has settled down, spurring verdant growth and sudden sweat. Today the high temperature at our place was 99 degrees, and the humidity was a similar number. Gardens are lush.
The Saturday sketchers met last weekend after a morning of rain was followed by partly blue skies. We elected to gather in the formal rose garden behind the Des Moines Art Center, where we usually meet to decide the day's location. The roses are in full flower, filling the formal beds with reds, pinks, yellows, a beautiful bed of pure white roses, and more. The roses are flanked by stone and by two small shady pavilions. We sat just outside the formal beds and painted. At one point I got up to stretch my legs and walked into the mass of flowering plants. The scent of roses was nearly overpowering in the warmth and humidity.
Drawing in ink with a steel-nibbed dip pen is an admittedly old-fashioned medium of expression. But pen and ink has a long and distinguished career, likely dating into prehistory. Certainly pen and ink drawing was used in ancient Egypt and other parts of the ancient world. In the middle ages and into the ferment of the Renaissance, drawings with pen were used as preliminary layouts for paintings and can also stand alone as art. In the modern era just over a century ago pen and ink was widely used in illustration, then the most widespread published art. But with photography, movies, color print reproduction and so on, drawing with a pen--whether the traditional dip pens mentioned above or more contremporary technical pens--has fallen into disuse.
Once the market for ink illustrations faded, there was still cartooning. Even into our own era, cartoonists of various sorts have used ink as their medium of choice, whether laid down using a technical pen, a dip pen, a brush, or some other implement. But as computer generated drawing has become more and more intuitive and less technical, even older cartoonists do much of their work using a computer and a drawing tablet.
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| "Home Place," ink on paper, about 7x12 |
This view of the Raccoon River and the pedestrian/bicycle bridge (a repurposed railroad bridge) are brightened here by the late May sunshine. The river is mostly slow-moving and sluggish until the farmland upstream is deluged. Then it becomes a real torrent. Just now, as the sun rises higher in the sky, the distant foliage has turned a yellower green and even the rusty old bridge seems more trim and shiny.
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| "Bridge on the Raccoon," oil on panel, 9x12 |
For decades the idea of computer-created art has been discussed or predicted or even heralded as having arrived. There are computer programs that generate colored images, based on programming of course. Some of those programs actually produce physical paintings when coupled to another machine. Now, of course, we have robots, artificial intelligence, and a great deal more technical expertise than even five years ago.
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| Ai-Da and self portrait |
So the question becomes, are the images made by Ai-Da art? There are likely to multiple answers, of course. A number of art critics deny the images are art, even if they seem artful since the machine is neither a person, nor self-aware. Ai-Da cannot be an artist because although its machine eyes record what is before them, the program doesn't "see" in the sense that humans do. Perhaps so. But Ai-Da has already had shows, a featured website and a great deal of publicity.
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| Ai-Da "Algorithm Queen" |
For me, the AI behind the rubber face hasn't quite gotten there yet. Instead Algorithm Queen and the self portrait above are both more like digitally manipulated photos than drawings or paintings. There are quite a few, though, who are hailing this as the beginning of true independent computer artists.
Perhaps.
