Time after time, I have been wondering what I should be doing in this blog. First off, I have shortened the description of this blog to include only “oil paintings” and “Chinese culture“.

Ideas so broad and free from any restriction. More often than not, this blog has been about oil paintings and Chinese culture. The former idea is a challenge for me, since I’m not a painting artist.

How ordinary people appreciate painting art from their unlearned minds?

Oil paintings is my interest I hope to learn more from other great painting artists. I love fine arts, visual art and oil paintings. I will not be able to showcase my art work by blogging. Practically, not so able to gain a good chance of hands-on with oil on canvas.

Despite that limitation, I cannot rule out the possibility of learning digital paintings. It could be a new trend. I might want to try that to explore my creativity too. 

Presently, I’m learning to appreciate all sort of art form for its aesthetics and conceptual purpose. I’m doing my own study and research. Studying about art history from Renaissance art to Impressionism movement. As well as, modern art, like Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism.

Vincent van Gogh was the great Dutch post-impressionist painter. There are more to learn from his paintings. Claude Monet has great painting technique of alla prima, also refer as wet-on-wet painting.

Good example of Claude Monet famous artwork will be the series of water lilies paintings. Believe it or not, approximately 250 oil paintings by French Impressionist in his life span.

Naming a few famous artist of all time, Leonardo da Vinci, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Gustav Klimt, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, Georgia O’Keeffe and Paul Jackson Pollock. There are more to catch up!

Visiting an art gallery is more relaxing, as compared to listening to music repertoire in a concert hall. Soothing music is not that distracting to our ears, some audience may just fall asleep in the midst of listening. Some prefer to have it noisier and more energetic, such as trance or rock concert.

I play my musical instruments, and that is how sound is produced through this medium. Likewise, an artist uses his painting brushes to produce an artwork on a large canvas filled with vivid oil color. Medieval art, renaissance, baroque, impressionism and expressionism are art movements defined by the Western art; there are analogous with different genres in music.

‘Likings’ is the rudiment for every artist’s hope to achieve in an art exhibit with invited friends and guests. It is a simple gesture and compliments, beside trying hard to understand and breaking the ‘da Vinci’ code from the hanging art frame. Abstract art does not necessary have to translate into words.

Even famous quote from the great painter, Claude Monet, once said:

“People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it’s simply necessary to love.”

Here are a few reasons why visiting an art gallery is more relaxing, as compared to listening to music:

1. Viewers share and discuss about the oil painting art that is hanging on the wall, without the constraint to sit silently listening music in a concert hall.
2. Before an audience is able to listen to audio music, one need to take a step further to press the ‘play’ button. Visual art is mainly for the eye only.
3. Its healthier to keep our body moving and walking around in the art gallery. Listening is merely an exercise of your ears, while siting restlessly in a cushion chair.
4. There isn’t a need to pay a high entrance fee to view a masterpiece in an art museum; most displaying less than 3 meters from your naked eye. Conversly, one need a bionic eye to see the musician playing in a stage, with at least 15 meters away from the chair you are sitting.
5. Scan your paintings or take a snapshot with your iPhone, and upload it to Facebook. It is much faster and less tedious than recording music.
6. Your Mom will love your paintings, even she is busying cooking for your dinner. A glimpse of your mini Picasso’s art is what she have to do. Same support goes to your good friends who is an artist.

Today’s post will be short.

In about less than 2 weeks, one of the best oil paintings by Claude Monet will finalize the auctioned price at Christie’s. The paintings entitled, “Nymphéas” or Water Lilies, painted in 1906.

This set is just one out of the 250 oil paintings in his life time. Every artwork on the water lilies is rendered with rich colors, expressing his most accomplished skill in alla prima technique, aka “direct painting” or “wet on wet”.

Less of describing the paintings, but to learn more about art auction at Christie’s.

Estimated price is ($43,350,000 – $57,800,000). This magnificent artwork will be offered in the Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale in London on 23 June. What will be the price realized?

Nympheas, Water Lilies, Claude Monet, 1906, Oil Paintings, Auction

10 most beautiful quotes from Claude Monet (14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926), founder of French impressionist.

1. “People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it’s simply necessary to love.”
2. “I would advise young artists . . . to paint as they can, as long as they can, without being afraid of painting badly . . . . If their painting doesn’t improve by itself, it means that nothing can be done – and I wouldn’t do anything!”
3. “It took me time to understand my water lilies. I had planted them for the pleasure of it; I grew them without ever thinking of painting them.”
4. “We’re having marvelous weather and I wish I could send you a little of the sunshine. I am slaving away on six paintings a day. I’m giving myself a hard time over it as I haven’t yet managed to capture the color of this landscape, there are moments when I’m appalled at the colors I’m having to use, I’m afraid what I’m doing is just dreadful and yet I really am understating it; the light is simply terrifying.”
5. “No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.”
6. “For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life – the light and the air which vary continually. For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value.”
7. “I am completely absorbed by my work. These landscapes of water and reflections have become an obsession. They are beyond the strength of an old man, and yet I am determined to set down what I feel. I have destroyed some…I have begun others over again…and I hope that something will come of so much effort.”
8. “I know that to paint the sea really well, you need to look at it every hour of every day in the same place so that you can understand its way in that particular spot; and that is why I am working on the same motifs over and over again, four or six times even.”
9. “I am following Nature without being able to grasp her… I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.”
10. “It’s on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.”

The first Impressionist Exhibition held in Paris in April 1874, that probably marks the starting point for modern painting.

Camille Pissarro (1830 – 1903), Claude Monet (1840 – 1926), Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841 – 1919), and Edgar Degas (1834 – 1917), organized the exhibit of independent artsits.

In a critic’s sarcastic reaction to Monet’s painting Impression, Sunrise, 1873.

The term “Impressionism” was born as a commentary on the artist’s loose paint application and ambiguous subject matter.

The Impressionists introduced the public to contemporary subjects drawn from a direct engagement with the urban world of boulevards, cafe, theathers, cabarets, racetracks, and train stations.

The revolution of French Impressionism unfolded in Paris in a series of eight exhibitions held between 1874 and 1886.

The works exhibited during these years represented original investigations into the science of light and color, a commitment to outdoor painting. New source of inspiration for both the formal language and subject matter of painting, challenges to technical conventions of painting, and the idea of finish.

In turn, the Impressionists opened the door for a generation of artists who extended the boundaries of painting even further.

In this regards, some of the artists briefly associated with Impressionism such as Paul Gauguin (1848 – 1903), Vincent van Gogh (1853 – 1890), Georges Seurat and Cezanne, later emerged as powerful voices for an even more dramatic shift in thinking about the nature of goals of art.

Thereafter, the term “Post-Impressionism” was first coined in 1910 by the English critic Roger Fry.

Impressionism conjures up a series of unifying aesthetic concepts, whereas Post-Impressionism refers less to a single style, and more to a generational gap.

Water lilies painted by Claude Monet made in 1905, is one of a group of water-lily subjects. The beauty of his work tends to be more attractive, as compared to traditional landscape painting. Both kind of paintings have common theme of “nature” and having of their work outdoor.

Traditional landscape compositions usually consist of perspective and the horizon from afar; the dramatic clouds above, and the land with people, housing, mountains, etc. The artwork is easily understood and to appreciate, as within one’s eye-level who tend to see distant objects in a panoramic aspects.

In Monet’s water lilies, he has a different approach to landscaping. In 1895 he began to paint waterscapes, a practice he continued until his death. After the completion of the Japanese Bridge series (1899 – 1901) he enlarged the pond, using it for both the series of water lilies made between 1903 and 1908, and for his later ‘decorations’, on which he devoted the closing years of his life.

His work on water lilies has abandoned any reference to the banks of the pond, concentrating instead on the water and plants. The surfaces of the painting and of the pool merge into one. The top of the composition bulges with lilies, while the water reads as both an illusion of depth and a reflection of nearby trees and distant sky.

The effect is to invert the composition, and in doing so Monet has overturned the tradition expectation of landscape painting, namely the inclusion of the horizon line and perspective. When forty-eight of these works were shown at Durand-Ruel in 1999, guests enjoyed a favorable critical reception, with analogies being drawn between the paintings and music and poetry.

There are two ways of approaching your painting. The first is known as ‘alla prima’ or direct painting, when the canvas is completed in one session. The second technique is slower because each layer must be dry before the next coat is applied. This means a drying time of several days or more. Famous impressionist artist, Claude Monet, was essentially an ‘alla prima’ painter, but if the composition was not satisfactory he would bring the canvas back to the studio and continue working.

Familiarize yourself with the palette by mixing the colors together. Begin by making up as many greens as you can from the two blues and two yellows. Then dull down each mixed green by adding small amounts of the two reds, and watch the results carefully.

There are a number of important factors to observe when using oils, which are outlined below alongside some handy hints.

1. When squeezed from the tube, oil colors are too thick for the first layer of painting (the ‘lay-in’), so it is necessary to this them with turpentine. It is a good idea to buy a double dipper to attach to your palette.

2. The rule of painting in oil is ‘fat over lean’. The first layers of your pictures should be thinned with a little turpentine, this w ill allow the color to dry more quickly.

3. As you build up your layers the paint film can be thicker, and the medium can be added to help manipulate the colors.

4. Thin colors dry quicker that ‘fat’ colors, which contain more oil. It is important that the paint films gradually thicken towards the upper layer.

5. whether you choose the ‘alla prima’ method or wait for each layer to dry, it is important not to cover a tacky surface with new paint – the surface must either be completely fresh or completely dry. Painting over a tacky surface will result in cracking.

What is a double dipper for oil painting accessories? It is two small containers jointed together, that is able to clip on to the edge of color palette. One is to contain pure turpentine to dilute the first layers whilst the other has an equal quality of linseed oil and turpentine, linseed oil by itself makes the paint too greasy; too much turpentine creates a matt effect.