The Junk Drawer

My Top Ten Favorite Prints by fleur_de_lis

Affordable art...affordable good art, is usually beyond our grasp. One way to have the 'real' thing is to find a print by an artist that you love. Even these can be beyond your budget, but every once in a while...(Fleur, wistfully thinking). Here is a sampling of some of my very favortite prints starting with The Great Wave which is at the top of my list, but the rest are in no particular order. The Great Wave at Kanagawa--Hokusai woodcut Drawing Hands--M. C. Escher lithograph Banknotes--Eugene Delacroix lithograph (Hey, who wouldn't want to have their face on the national currency!) Melancholia--Albrecht Durer engraving John Wayne--Andy Warhol silkscreen Bald Eagle--John James Audubon lithograph Moulin Rouge--Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec lithograph Self Portrait--Kathe Kollwitz lithograph 'A Spill Out' on the Snow--Currier and Ives lithograph An Eagle Flying Over the Hundred-Thousand Plain--Hiroshige woodcut Aren't they wonderful? Do you have any favorites?

Sliced and Diced by fleur_de_lis

See if you can recognize these masterpieces of western painting from the hands of Ju Duoqi! The Raft of the Lotus Roots The Kiss of the Radishes Cabbage Monroe Napoleon on Potatoes Mona Tofu The Scream of the Sweet Potatoes Van Gogh Made of Leek "In the summer of '06, I bought several kilograms of peas, and sat there quietly for 2 days peeling them, before stringing them on a wire and turning them into a skirt, a top, a headdress and a magic wand. I used a remote control to take a photo of myself in them, and named it Pea Beauty Pageant. That was my first work of vegetable art." Ju Duoqi was born in 1973 in Chongqing, China. She was part of the One Child Policy generation and was at one time a website and computer game designer. Today she is a housewife in Beijing and fills some of her idle hours in the kitchen creating veggie art. She photographs her work and prints editions for sale--usually $1500 to $2000 apiece. Since 2006 she has been able to produce approximately 2...

Gimme a Can Opener by fleur_de_lis

BAM! There you go--right in your face--100 cans of Beef Noodle soup courtesy of Andy Warhol (1928-1987). Some consider Andy to be the most famous American artist of all time. He certainly created his share of controversy and made us look at our world in an entirely new way! "If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings, and me. There's nothing behind them." "I like boring things. I like things to be the same over and over." And the quote everyone is familiar with: "In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes." As you might expect, Andy was a very strange young man. As a boy, he became fascinated with movies and celebrities and would retreat into a fantasy world to escape his real life. Andy was an extremely shy boy and man but was still able to have a successful career as a commercial artist before he became an influential member of the Pop Art movement. Pop Art (short for Popular Art) took bits...

A pitchfork, a teacup, and some red hats... by fleur_de_lis

I'm sure you are all familiar with the following picture-- American Gothic by Grant Wood (1891-1942). Wood was one of a group of midwestern artists called Regionalists. He stated, "This painting is not about farms, not about a married couple, and not a satire." Hmmm...I will leave it to you to puzzle this one out! The painting by Wood I actually want to take a deeper look at is one you might not be so familiar with called Daughters of Revolution. It is a satire based on the Daughters of the American Revolution, a group that traces it's ancestry back to the Revolutionary War. Wood said: "These people are trying to set up an aristocracy of birth in a country that has always been a Republic!" Actually, Wood became angry with them when the group condemned him for working with German craftsmen to create a WWl memorial window. The DAR didn't want a window made by America's enemies because it would dishonor the memories of the people it was meant to honor....

New Swan Stone by fleur_de_lis

New Swan Stone is the English translation for Neuschwanstein, probably the most famous castle in the world. Perched atop a peak in the Bavarian Alps, Neuschwanstein is mysterious, haunting, and fantastically beautiful. Ironically, this structure, built to be a private refuge, 'sacred and out of reach', was only occupied for 11 nights by King Ludwig ll of Bavaria. The Swan King, the Mad King of Bavaria, the Dream King, and Mad Ludwig were all nicknames for King Ludwig ll. He was a strange man that came into his kingship at the age of 19. For many reasons, his reign as king did not go well from the start and he withdrew into his beloved mountains where he built several castles and related structures as well as Neuschwanstein. Instead of an architect, Ludwig commissioned a stage designer, Christian Jank, to come up with the plan for the castle. Ludwig was fascinated by the music of Wagner with whom he enjoyed a long though rocky friendship, and Neuschwanstein was built largely as...

The Pearl of the West by fleur_de_lis

Mont St. Michel-- the Pearl of the West, mysterious, ethereal, heavenly battleground, spiritual inspiration, mighty fortress. All of these phrases describe the first of several posts I will be doing on Architectural Wonders . Mont St. Michel is a beautiful, mystical abbey built at the top of a rocky islet one mile off the French coast in the English Channel. It is separated from the mainland by a mile of sand and quicksand at low tide, or a mile of water at high tide. In the past, the journey across the sands was treacherous, and frequently pilgrims lost their lives in the quicksand or the rapidly rising tides before they could complete their journey. It is said that the tides race in at the speed of galloping horses! Today there is a causeway that connects the mainland to Mont St. Michel, and guides if you insist on making the journey on foot. Legend has it that the archangel Michael appeared to the bishop of Avranches in 708 A. D. For 3 nights in a row, the bishop had the same strange...

Top Ten Architectural Wonders by fleur_de_lis

Wow! This was really a hard list for me to narrow down. Beautiful structures, like beautiful art, have their own stories, time periods, and cultures that make them unique. These are my favorites...I look at them with admiration for the drive and purpose of their creators. My favorite is the Taj Mahal, but the rest are in no particular order: Taj Mahal--Agra, India Chrysler Building--New York City, New York Sydney Opera House--Sydney, Australia Fallingwater--Bear Run, Pennsylvania Notre Dame Cathedral--Paris, France Machu Picchu--Andes Mountains, Peru Pyramids--Giza, Egypt St. Basil's Cathedral--Moscow, Russia The Colosseum--Rome, Italy Angkor Wat--Angkor, Cambodia That's it! I didn't even get to include the Eiffel Tower, the Parthenon, the Transamerica Building, Neuschwanstein, Hagia Sophia, La Sagrada Familia...and the list goes on! Do you have a favorite structure? Does architecture awe and inspire you? I may do a post or two in the future on some of these, my favorites,...

Tribute by fleur_de_lis

On January 16, 2009, at the age of 91, one of America's premier artists died--Andrew Wyeth. As a tribute to him, I would like to showcase his most well-known painting Christina's World. Christina's World is a painting of a woman Andrew knew. He was visiting the Olson house (located in Cushing, Maine) and happened to see Christina out one of the windows, crawling across a field. She suffered from a muscular deterioration that paralyzed the lower part of her body. Wyeth was well-known for his sparse, dry, and dusty architectural landscapes. I always find it hard to believe that much of his painting was on location in Maine, and not here in my midwest neck of the woods. Look at the composition--how he balances the large figure in pink with the buildings silhouetted against the horizon, and how the lines of her body and the faint tracks of the road focus your attention on the weathered house. The title of the painting and a little background information are all you really need...

3 1/2 Million Marks by fleur_de_lis

Yes, that is 3 1/2 million marks, the number of small dots and slashes Georges Seurat used to complete his master work Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte , one of my top ten favorite paintings. Degas called him "The Notary". Gauguin referred to his technique as "petit point". The poet Apollinaire called him the "microbiologist of painting". Seurat himself said "...see poetry in what I have done. No, I apply my method and that is all there is to it". Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat (1859-1891) is an example of a style of art called Pointillism. Pointillism was Seurat's answer to the small, distinct brush strokes of Impressionism taken one step further. Georges developed a precise optical formula using small dots and marks of color placed next to each other that would mix together and form different colors from a distance. Grass, for example might be made with yellow and blue marks which the eye...

My Favorite Artist...cont. by fleur_de_lis

Hold on to your hats, I have a load of beautiful paintings to show you! A few weeks back, I did a quick post on my favorite artist, Claude Monet (1840-1926). His painting Impression: Sunrise gave the Impressionist movement it's name and took painting in an entirely different direction. Monet and the Impressionists were not so much concerned with the subject they painted or the realism they captured. Their main concern was to capture the influence of light on a subject, to capture atmospheric effects. Monet did this with magnificent colors, strong, distinct brushstrokes and a loosely structured style. The Impressionists also began a trend of painting outdoors instead of in the studio as was the accepted practice of the time. The paintings that most intrigue me were the serial paintings Monet did beginning in 1890. These were paintings of the same subjects made under different light conditions, in different seasons, or at different times of day. Here are a few examples of those: Haystack...

Exquisite Illuminations by fleur_de_lis

For my Christmas post this year, I have decided to show you a few examples of illuminated manuscripts. Illuminated manuscripts are huge works of art made in Medieval times. They are bound by leather, written on vellum (a soft animal skin), encrusted with precious jewels, and usually of the Bible, although one of the most beautiful illuminated manuscripts is a book of hours for the Duc de Berry known as les Tres Riches Heures . The word illumination is derived from the Latin word for "adorn", and refers to the frequent practice of applying gold and silver leaf to some of the letters and pictures. Many of these precious works were done by monks who would spend their entire lifetimes in their endeavors. Because few people in medieval times could read, these works were also meant to tell the stories of the Bible visually. Above is a beautiful example of an application of gold leaf. The following are some examples of an entire manuscript: The rest of the examples are pages from an...

Avida Dollars by fleur_de_lis

"The one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous." "The only difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad." Flamboyant, greedy, money hungry, egotistical, and definitely outrageous, this artist began exhibiting his bizarre behaviors as a child. He was born 9 months and 10 days after the death of his older brother and was given his brother's name--a fact which many believe contributed to his desire to stand out and his perverse behaviors to draw attention to himself. He relished causing his parents grief by pretending to throw himself down the stairs or choke, and as an adult his 'grand' entrances to events, his appearance, and his antics were the stuff of the tabloids. If you haven't figured it out yet, this artist is Salvador Dali and Avida Dollars is a 'catty' anagram of his name given to him by a fellow painter, Andre Breton. Salvador was known amongst his fellows as the man who would do anything for a buck...

Old Master by fleur_de_lis

He wanted to be so famous and so successful that he would be recognized by his first name only. He achieved his fame and success early on in his career but fell into obscurity at the end of it. He amassed and spent several fortunes, eventually falling into debt and being forced to sell his house and all of his possessions. This giant of the art world, this old master, is Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669), and still today, he is a name that all the world recognizes. Rembrandt is most known for the strong use of light and dark in his paintings to emphasize important elements, his willingness to flout convention and break the rules of the day, and his ability to capture an action and vitality in his figures that was lacking in paintings done by other masters of the time. By far my favorite work of Rembrandt's, and also one of my top ten favorite paintings is The Night Watch . What a tangled web of facts, myths, stories, and lies have been woven around this one! The Night Watch is actually...

My Top Ten Favorite Sculptures by fleur_de_lis

Here is a wide assortment of sculptures from different time periods that just happen to be my very favorite ones. Some of them I have come to love for their uniqueness and the stories behind them, some of them appeal to my sense of beauty, and some of them I chose because I admire the sculptor's tremendous talent. Again, enjoy, or scratch your head and wonder 'Why in the heck did she pick that one?' The Pieta--Michelangelo Buonarroti Beauty, spirituality, talent--it fills your heart. This is my all time favorite sculpture, but the rest are in no particular order. Surrounded Islands--Christo and Jeanne-Claude Crazy, but so cool! Carhenge--Jim Reinders This one is located in my home state of Nebraska. Iris Leaves and Rowan Berries--Andy Goldsworthy It seems so simple, doesn't it? Countryside--Stan Herd Another favorite! I would love to see one from the air. Chinese Pottery Army Words can't describe these and the tremendous amount of manpower, effort, and time it took...

My Top Ten Favorite Paintings by fleur_de_lis

It was brutal, but I chopped, axed, hewed, whittled, and cut down my list of favorite paintings to 10. You have seen a few of them on my blog, and you will see some additions to those that may be topics for future posts. Enjoy, or scratch your head and say 'Why in the heck did she pick that one?' and please let me know if you have a favorite artist or painting that is not in my top 10! I would like to do a top 10 reader's choice post eventually! Here they are, in no particular order (except for Starry Night which is my favorite). Starry Night--Vincent Van Gogh Rouen Cathedral--Claude Monet Nightwatch--Rembrandt van Rijn Guernica--Pablo Picasso The Persistence of Memory--Salvador Dali Raft of the Medusa--Theodore Gericault Whose Meat--Charley Russell Green Stripe, Madame Matisse--Henri Matisse Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte--Georges Seurat The Sistine Chapel--Michelangelo Buonarroti There you have it. After thinking it over, I can't say I have a single...