by David Clayton on April 16, 2013
I spent Easter Week in Berkeley, CA recently and so as I always try to do when visiting a town I went to visit the local art gallery. It is amazing what treasures even a local gallery can have sometimes. Berkeley is the home of hippies and is where the Sixties began, so I was ready [...]
by David Clayton on September 18, 2012
When I decided I wanted to be an artist, I knew that I needed to train, but I had no idea where to go. I was so clueless that I started by looking for Catholic Art School under ‘C’ in the telephone directory. Pretty quickly I realised that no such place existed and as I [...]
by David Clayton on September 14, 2012
Here is a series of 18th century prints by the Japanese artist called Katsushika Hokusai(1760-1849). I saw them recently as a new display at the permanent collection of the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts. Chinese and Japanese landscape is worthy of study even by those interested in painting landscape in the Western tradition. The [...]
by David Clayton on February 11, 2011
Matera is in southern Italy (just inland from the arch in the boot-shaped country). In the later classical period and through to the Middle Ages it has been occupied by Romans, Lombards, Byzantines, Germans and Normans and the handover was usually less than peaceful. The area is known for its underground churches, rather like the [...]
by David Clayton on June 28, 2010
John Singer Sargent (1856 – 1925) may well be the last great artist in the academic tradition. He was an American, born in Florence in Italy and who spent much of his life in Europe. He was prolific, painting hundreds of oil paintings and thousands of watercolours and sketches. Painting alongside the Impressionists (and sometimes [...]
by David Clayton on June 17, 2010
I can only marvel at the work of French artist Corot (1796-1875). He follows that baroque format of variation in focus rendering much of out blurred and out of focus. In this respect some might liken him to the Impressionists who followed him. But to my eye he differs in that he retains the sense [...]
by David Clayton on June 9, 2010
For the next few weeks I am going to feature individual artists from the 19th century. I pointed out in earlier articles two difficulties with baroque landscape. First was the inclination in the 17th century baroque to represent those areas where the colour is muted in sepia. This meant that they very often gave the [...]
by David Clayton on June 2, 2010
It might seem contradictory that the landscapes of the Romantic movement (with which William Turner’s work is usually associated) are so beautiful. The Romantics of the 18th and 19th century were responsible in many ways for destroying the traditional forms that preceded them and opened the way to ugliness of modern art. Their emphasis on [...]
