40 Most Mentioned

10 February 201512 February 2020 by Theo

Featuring slices of the following works:

Mona Lisa (Leonardo da Vinci, 1517)
The Scream (Edvard Munch, 1893)
The Starry Night (Vincent van Gogh, 1889)
The Last Supper (Leonardo da Vinci, 1498)
Girl with a Pearl Earring (Johannes Vermeer, 1665)
The Creation of Adam (Michelangelo, 1512)
The Persistence of Memory (Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1931)
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (Georges Seurat, 1886)
The Great Wave off Kanagawa (Hokusai, 1832)
Guernica (Pablo Picasso, 1937)
Starry Night Over the Rhone (Vincent van Gogh, 1888)
The Night Watch (Rembrandt, 1642)
The School of Athens (Raphael, 1509)
The Son of Man (René Magritte, 1964)
The Kiss (Gustav Klimt, 1908)
American Gothic (Grant Wood, 1930)
The Birth of Venus (1486)
Cafe Terrace at Night (Vincent van Gogh, 1888)
Nighthawks (Edward Hopper, 1942)
Bal du moulin de la Galette (Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1876)
Christina’s World (Andrew Wyeth)
Lady with an Ermine (Leonardo da Vinci, 1490)
The Garden of Earthly Delights (Hieronymus Bosch, 1504)
Irises (Vincent van Gogh, 1889)
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (Gustav Klimt, 1907)
Las Meninas (Diego Velázquez, 1656)
Vitruvian Man (Leonardo da Vinci, 1490)
Whistler’s Mother (James Abbott McNeill Whistler, 1871)
The Potato Eaters (Vincent van Gogh, 1885)
The Last Judgment (Michelangelo, 1541)
Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Édouard Manet, 1863)
Ginevra de’ Benci (Leonardo da Vinci, 1478)
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Caspar David Friedrich, 1818)
The Torment of Saint Anthony (Michelangelo, 1488)
Liberty Leading the People (Eugène Delacroix, 1830)
Fortitude (1470)
The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (El Greco, 1588)
The Art of Painting (Johannes Vermeer, 1666)
Impression, Sunrise (Claude Monet, 1872)
Head of a Woman (Leonardo da Vinci, 1508)

Waiting for creation

3 February 201512 February 2020 by Theo

I occasionally try to imagine what it would have been like before everything. Prior to creation, there was no time, no space, no matter. No light. No dark. No past. But all of the future. It is hard to get my head around it. Even harder to express in a work of art.

What was it like waiting for the first sunrise?

I have black wooden desk where I spend most of my time.

It provides a lot of reflection.

It is waiting for creation.

Desk reflections - waiting for creation — *Desk reflections – waiting for creation*, digital photograph.

Horror vacui

31 January 201512 February 2020 by Theo

Horror vacui (physics) : Nature abhors a vacuum.

Horror vacui (art) : The fear of empty space.

Horror vacui, digital image. — *Horror vacui*, digital image.

Like a sculptor who sees the statue in a block of stone or the potter who sees the pot in the lump of clay, artists see the potential. Their fear of empty space and abhorrence of a vacuum compels them to create and turn their imagination into reality. Motivation to overcome procrastination.

A social media presence is essential and Theo has recently joined a few social networks. Most of them allow for customization of the profile. Often the color scheme, background images and sometimes fonts are changeable to suit the personality of user.

Because Theo has not created a volume of work yet, we needed to produce something quickly for the cover photo on the Facebook page. By default, Facebook has this image for cover photos:

It is rather dull and grey. It cries out “replace me with anything colorful!”.

Producing Horror vacui to answer this cry was rather quick and simple:

Create an image 851 by 315 pixels in GIMP (OpenSource photo editing software).
Capture an image of pencils and a paintbrush with my Macbook FaceTime HD camera and Photo Booth.
Original image for Horror vacui
Import the photo into GIMP and use various tools and effects to produce the art.
1. Select the objects and move them to a new layer.
2. Select the natural highlights and shadows of the background and render clouds/plasma and apply canvas and weave filters.
3. Add a filters for coffee stain and torn border
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This work, Horror vacui, represents what the artist sees when they look at a blank canvas. The image hidden deep within the fabric is trying to break through the canvas and become visible.

Horror vacui is representative of theme of potential in Theo’s Prospective collection – art which is prophetic or predictive in nature and hints at what could be. Due to the urgency and speed of its creation, this work is not necessarily representative of the quality of the rest of the collection.

I should buy this book someday

30 January 20157 December 2020 by Theo

How to Procrastinate (Self-Hurt): Knock Knock: 9781601060433: Amazon.com: Books [affiliate link]

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Eternal Sunrise

29 January 201512 February 2020 by Theo

ETERNAL SUNRISE (Trailer) by Guzmán de Yarza Blache from Guzman de Yarza on Vimeo.

Madrid, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago de Chile, Miami, Mexico DF, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Sydney, Singapore, Tokyo, Beijing, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, London & Madrid. 16 airports in 25 days. Two artists turn the world around without ever leaving an airport.

http://www.promofest.org/en/films/eternal-sunrise

The sun is always rising

27 January 201510 December 2015 by Theo

At any given moment, somewhere in the world, the sun is rising.

Technically, the sun is stationary and the world is turning.

The polar regions experience the sunrise a few times per year, astronauts on the international space station every few hours.

If you were to travel at the same speed as the earth rotates you could see an eternal sunrise.

I have not yet seen a sunrise this year and so my Impression of Sunrise is still blank.

Wrestling until sunrise

16 January 201510 December 2015 by Theo

Then the man said, “Let me go, for the dawn is breaking!”
But Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”
Genesis 32:26 (NLT)

Lord, help me as I wrestle with you and give me the tenacity to persevere until you bless me.

I am certain that the best art comes from the struggle. That which appears easy sometimes has decades of life and fight before it comes to birth.

Sometimes the struggle is not with the art, but with getting the rest of life out of the way so the art can flow.

Sunrise

14 January 201523 January 2022 by Theo

One of Monet’s first impressionist paintings was Impresssion, Sunrise.

*Impression, soleil levant.*
Claude Monet, 1872.
Oil on canvas. 48 cm × 63 cm.
Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris

As a tribute to Monet’s work, and as an exploration of Impressionist painting techniques, I will paint a work titled Impression of Sunrise. I do not expect this work to be the first I will complete, however, Sunrise is an appropriate title for this first blog entry.

I have seen many sunrises in my lifetime, but I usually do not rise before the sun climbs in the sky. Most of my experiences have been from overnighters and my most memorable sunrise views are:

7:30 am, Saturday 9 June 1990, Waikato University Campus steps, Hamilton New Zealand. I had travelled on an overnight bus from Palmerston North to Hamilton. Apart from a short break at Waiouru to build a small snowman, I had read No Compromise [affiliate link], the biography of Keith Green from cover to cover through the night. I later gave the book to a friend. The sun came up over the Kaimai Ranges. The sky was overcast.

5:53 am, Tuesday 1 January 1991, Turakina Māori Girls’ College, Marton, New Zealand. My family was attending the annual camp of families involved in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. Seven young adults piled into my mini with me and we took a spin around the empty town after seeing in the New Year. The sunrise was not memorable. We squeezed 27 people into the mini (including seven kids in the boot) later in the day.

6:26 am, Tuesday 6 April 1999, Whispering Sands Beachfront Motel, Gisborne, New Zealand. After taking the long way around the East Cape from Whakatane, we spent a night in Gisborne. I was ill and woke early to see the first light. It was not particularly spectacular, with the day beginning with cloud. The Millenium sunrise in the same location was also apparently disappointing.

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