Art and Super Bowl

Well the Super Bowl is over and so now there's no more football. Yay! Can concentrate on art and art related activities not that I wasn't before in between RANTING at the referees and feeling that it just wasn't fair.

I've been reading a diary by Eugene Delacroix who was a painter in France in the 1800's.

It's really interesting, I recommend it. Here's an example of one of his paintings, a self portrait:
http://artroots.com/art2/delacroix3.jpg

He starts out writing it when he's in his twenties and then drops it for a long time before picking it up again in his 50's.

It's funny, but all the entries during his twenties are about women, all the women he's in love with and all the women "he makes love to", which I think had a different meaning back then than it does now.


In his fifties, he's settled down quite a bit, he obviously more serious, the ol' loss of the youthful enthusiasm. He says at one point that the real geniuses are those who can manage to keep their youthful observations alive even as they grow older, which sounds about right to me.

He fills the diary with day to day things, like what the weather is and talks about people who annoy him. He travels a little bit and writes about that too. He goes to the theater and he goes to concerts and he goes to parties where they talk about large topics.

He has many complaints about modern artists and thinks the world is going to hell in a handbasket which I guess everybody of every generation starts to think about sooner or later.

It's fascinating for me to read and I always have to stop and think that during his time there were no cars or trains or planes or any of the modern inventions yet his ruminations and discussions sound very close in subject matter to things that I've thought about and wondered about.

It just goes to show you that the main focus of any life during any age is about the same, that you can be a caveman or a man in 2006 and still be worried about or wondering about the same kinds of things.

The setting around you has changed of course, but not much else.

Delacroix is also very particular about how he paints, he has recipes for success that he applies to all his paintings. He'll describe eggs-actly how he's going to accomplish something, eggs-actly the paint he's going to use.

This is light years different than the way I paint, where if I had to describe it to someone would come out somepin like "well, I guess I just paint until I think it's right and that color there (pointing at canvas) could never be repeated in a million years by me because I have NO IDEA how I got there."

Delacroix LOVES Rubens to the point that I'm going to have to get a book about him and really check him out. Here's a link:
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/rubens/christ.jpg


He is constantly going to Louvre or other museums around Paris and looking at paintings (really looking at them) to get ideas and to discover how somebody else did something. There also seems to be an endless supply of prints of paintings that he can look at, they must've been more prevalent in that era as a way to show the masses the paintings of other lands.

Delacroix loves Gericault, who died while Delacroix was a young man, and his "Raft of the Medusa" (http://wilsonhellie.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/gericault_medusa.jpg) is universally (at least in Paris) considered to be a masterpiece.

What I like especially about the diary is that Delacroix will see something around him or see another painting and get an idea and he'll say something like "Be careful with the hands" or "Be aware of the foreground color", these little notes to himself that sound kind of like the notes I'll make to myself sometimes.

There's kind of a way that a person talks to himself I think that's direct, to the point, no beating around the bush, you just say it to yourself and you understand it. It's fun to see somebody else a hundred and fifty years ago doing the same thing.

I think people of Delacroix's era, if they had money enough, had a lot of time to spend thinking about things and they also had a lot of time to spend talking to others about the things they thought of. That's great, but all in all, when push comes to shove I think that the big things that count are the same across the board through every era and it really is true that there isn't anything new under the sun.

And I think that's a good thing.