500 Years of Women in Art
[2nd Jun, 2007|23:16]
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Hometown News
[8th Jan, 2007|09:55]
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 E. J. Hughes died on Friday at the Cowichan District Hospital in Duncan at the age of 93. Hughes was born in North Van and grew up in Nanaimo. He'd lived in Duncan for the past 29 years. The gallery representing him is on the main street in Duncan, Station Street (which is all of three blocks long). My old work had one of his paintings in the boardroom. E. J. Hughes holds the distinction of one of his paintings receiving the highest price ever at auction for a living Canadian artist, over one million dollars taxes and fees in. Of course he sold the painting for $300 many years before and never saw a cent of that. I've been a fan of Hughes' work for decades and it has been an influence on my own. If you don't recognizes the name, you may recognizes the style: 
"View of Maple Bay"
(Incidentally. this is where I used to row in high school. The building with the reddish-brown second floor immediately behind the red railing of the government wharf is the Maple Bay Rowing Club. I know this strip of shore so well that I recognizes individual rocks and have a good idea of when it was painted from the height of the trees) |
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Nightclub Renaissance
[7th Jan, 2007|23:16]
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Remember this post about how this picture reminded me of the lighting in Academic painting? A few dozen filters, layers, and assorted other Photoshop tricks later, et voilà. And here is a detail crop so you can appreciate the full effect: |
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Three Centuries of Art
[21st Aug, 2006|21:05]
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 If you've been reading here for a while, you might remember me accidentally running into an ancestor at the Art Institute of Chicago a couple of years ago. I had an idea today that inspired me to have a look around for more images of his work (I found a three good high-resolution images on-line, two from the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and one from a private auction site). Then I started looking for work by his cousin Jacob and found a couple of fun things:  |
While this image isn't large enough for my purposes, it struck my fancy from a Canadian perspective and a literary perspective. Jacob Huysmans moved from Belgium to England and became a fashionable painter in the court of King Charles II. This portrait is of His Highness, James, Duke of York, while he was the second governor of the Hudson's Bay Company from 1683 to 1685. In 1685 he ascended to the throne of England, Scotland and Ireland as King James II of England and King James VII of Scotland.
On the literary side, one of my favourite books is "Captain Blood" by Rafael Sabatini. This would be the James that Peter Blood was accused of treason against. BTW, if you have never seen the film adaptation with Errol Flynn (it was his first movie), find it and see it. It's the pirate movie that started all pirate movies ;-) |
The winning find of the night, however, is the image below. A portrait of Bridget, Lady Kilmorey, painted sometime around 1664 (give or take a year). The image is a wonderful tie-in with what I've had in mind behind the Red Chair series, anchoring what I'm working on not only in general historical context I had in mind all along, but pulling it right back into the family. I'm very pleased with this. |
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