Leonardo da Vinci: self-portrait

This piece is a self-portrait made by painter, sculpture, architect, scientific and investigator, Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo is a legendary artist and there has been no other artist, no other name created more discussions and debates. This piece was created in 1512 while he was sixty years old. seven years later Leonardo da Vinchi died at the age of sixty-seven The portrait was made from red chalk on paper.

Vincent van Gogh self-portrait

Vincent van Gogh has a legendary story. In December 1889 van Gogh threatened Paul Gauguin with a razor. Then he cut off the lower part of his own left ear which he then he wrapped it in a newspaper and gave it to the one he loved which was a prostitute named Rachel in the local brothel, asking her to "keep this object carefully".













The reason that van Gogh interests most people is that he is crazy from the lead poisoning.

playful portraits in charcoal

Doing a portrait in charcoal there is something called photocopy mode which is narrowing you eyes and picturing the picture as if it were black and white.Using this technique allows the artist to see the contrast between light and dark, black and white. While working on a charcoal portrait the artist also needs to be making notes, the way the artist makes notes is visualizing in his or her head the shades and contrasts to be able to differentiated the shades of dark to light and the hardness to press down the charcoal. Thirdly there is pushing as a technique that you must use for a charcoal painting that is pushing. Pushing is the amount of pressure that you put on the charcoal against the portrait to allow certain spots to be either a light gray or dark black. It's used when you modell and moddelling is creating shades with your eraser.

Christo and Jeanne Claude

Christo and Jeanne Claude were two married artists. Jeanne Claude died at the age of 74 suffering from a brain aneurysm after a fall. They worked together to mummify the Pont Neuf, to envelop a string of Miami islands in flamingo-pink nylon, to bind the German Reich-stag building in aluminium fabric and to erect 7,503 billowing, saffron "gates" in Central Park, New York.Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon was born in Casablanca, Morocco, where her father, a French general, was stationed at the time. She was born on exactly the same day as her husband and collaborator.

Three of the most famous of their work was the wrapped tree, Completed over the course of several days in November 1998, Wrapped Trees is an exceptional outdoor work that involved the meticulous covering of nearly 180 trees in Basel, Switzerland. The Umbrellas, Consisting of 3,100 yellow and blue umbrellas placed in both California and Japan between 1984 and 1991, The Umbrellas was one of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s most ambitious projects yet. The project cost $26 million and required the efforts of thousands of workers and several helicopters to have all of the umbrellas placed in just the right spot. Valley curtain, Designed in 1970 by the dynamic duo, Valley Curtain comprised a gigantic 1,310 foot orange curtain that hung across a valley in Rifle, Colorado. Costing an estimated $400,000 and using a series of iron bars and concrete anchors for support, the first curtain was raised in October 1971 before being torn to pieces by strong winds and even heavier rocks.

Gothic Cathedral

The Gothic Cathedral was created by the Goths which were a barbaric tribe who had held power in various regions in Europe. These buildings were built between the fifth and eighth century. The Gothic grew out of the Romanesque architectural style, when both prosperity and peace allowed for several centuries of cultural development and great building schemes. From roughly 1000 to 1400, several significant cathedrals and churches were built, particularly in Britain and France, offering architects and masons a chance to work out ever more complex problems and daring designs.



The most fundamental element of the Gothic style of architecture is the pointed arch.The pointed arch relieved some of the thrust, and therefore, the stress on other structural elements. It then became possible to reduce the size of the columns or piers that supported the arch. So, rather than having massive, drum-like columns as in the Romanesque churches, the new columns could be more slender.

Space and Form

As an element of art, space refers to distances or areas around, between or within components of a piece. Space can be positive or negative, open or closed, shallow or deep and can have a 3 dimensional or two dimensional aspect to it. Sometimes space isn't actually within a piece, but the illusion of it is.  

In the picture above space isn't in the picture but the illusion of it is, and it feels as though you are going through a tunnel 

In the paintings by Max Beckmann, the relative sizes of the various elements give understanding to the space that is suggested.

Space in art can have many aspects to it that will affect the way you feel if you were to see a certain piece. Some of these feelings you may feel are sad, lonely, intiment, distant, free, lost, ect. 

This peice shows size variation. Because the diminishing size of distant objects is a basic characteristic of human vision, any systematic variation in size will increase the illusion of space. This effect is demonstrated most clearly when the distance is great.

value

People always seem to think that the main component of art is color but really it is not. The main component of art is value, it allows you to be able to tell when you  look at a shape or object if that object is rough you smooth, shiny or clean, dull or sharp. Colour on the other hand does not allow you to see things like this. If we didn't have value everything would look plain and flat. Value is the relative degree of lightness or darkness of a particular color.


Value isn't only a component in art, it is a component in the 
real world as well if we didn't have it there would be no texture to what we look at.