Acquiring the 40 famous paintings for 40 Most Mentioned was the hard part. Slicing and splicing was simple.
Creation of 40 Most Mentioned – Son of Man, digital image
Creation of 40 Most Mentioned – Mona Lisa, digital image
Creation of 40 Most Mentioned – Mona Lisa is based on Visitors of Louvre in front of Mona Lisa by Edal Anton Lefterov, available at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mona-lisa_in_the_Louvre.jpg, and is likewise licensed under the Creative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Disclaimer: No physical paintings were harmed in the production of 40 Most Mentioned. The Mona Lisa was intact when I visited the Louvre in July 2013. If any of the paintings have been stolen or damaged, it wasn’t me.
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)
Theo is the short form of THEODORE, THEOBALD, and other names that begin with Theo.
Theodore comes from the Greek name Θεοδωρος (Theodoros), which meant “gift of god” from Greek θεος (theos) “god” and δωρον (doron)“gift”.
Theobald is derived from the Germanic elements theud “people” and bald “bold”.
Heartist is a made up word. The suffix -ist has several meanings:
a person with a particular creative or academic role; eg. guitarist, one who plays guitar
one who proscribes to a particular theological doctrine or religious denomination; eg. deist
one who owns or manages something; eg. industrialist
one who has a certain political tendency; eg. environmentalist
a person who holds bigoted, partial views. eg. heightist
Hopefully only the first three meanings apply to Theo.
The prefix heart also has many meanings. In Theo’s case heart is courage, kindness and love, the center, the core, the essence, and the source or seat of emotions.
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, digital photograph.
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.
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.
Select the objects and move them to a new layer.
Select the natural highlights and shadows of the background and render clouds/plasma and apply canvas and weave filters.
Add a filters for coffee stain and torn border
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Thiswork, 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.
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.
