Ancient Egyptian Art, Part 1- Painting

This will be the first post in a series on ancient Egyptian art. Today, I’ll focus on paintings.

Not just anyone could paint the pictures that appeared inside ancient Egyptian tombs and monuments. Those paintings were extremely important and had to be done perfectly because they were meant to help the dead in the afterlife.

Painters usually worked as teams with one master craftsman overseeing the work of several apprentices. First, a grid was drawn on a piece of papyrus. Then the image was drawn on top of the grid. In ancient Egyptian art, each figure had to be a specific size. For example, a grown man was always 19 squares from the bottom of his feet to the top of his head.

Egyptian art was standardized. Not only were certain figures always the same number of squares tall and wide, but the there was a formula for the way to draw figures. When you look at Egyptian paintings (and carvings) you’ll notice that the face is always sideways, the upper body always faces forward, and the legs and feet face sideways. This is not a natural position. You’ll also notice that the one eye that shows is always painted on the side of the face. The Egyptians wanted to show only the most important parts of the body and they wanted to show those parts in the most attractive way. They painted the eye on the side of the face so it could be shown looking straight out. Feet don’t look like feet from straight on so the Egyptians painted them from the side.

When the drawing was perfect, a thin layer of plaster was spread over the area to be painted. It was sanded and smooth until it was shiny. Some of the apprentices would then use cords dipped in red paint to create a grid on the wall. The image was then painted onto the wall in red paint by the apprentices. They had to be careful to paint the figure exactly the way it looked on the papyrus. The master craftsman corrected the pictures in black before the apprentices filled in the figure with colored paints.

Egyptians used only eight colors, all mixed from natural materials likes rocks and plants. The colors have stayed bright in some place because the sun doesn’t reach the inside of tombs to bleach away the paints.

Sometimes paintings were done on papyrus scrolls instead of on walls. The figures still followed the same formulas.

Check back tomorrow for the next post in this series on Egyptian art!

EDITED TO ADD: Ancient Egyptian Art, Part 2- Carvings, Ancient Egyptian Art, Part 3- Sculpture, Ancient Egyptian Art, Part 4- Amarna Art, Ancient Egyptian Art, Part 5- Fayum Portraits

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Aubrey Beardsley

Yesterday you read about illustrator and stained-glass artist, Harry Clarke. Today’s post is about the illustrator Clarke was most often compared to, Aubrey Beardsley.

A note to parents: This post is completely kid-friendly but be aware that other articles you’ll find about Beardsley probably will not be.

Aubrey Beardsley was born in England in 1872. His artistic talent was obvious even when he was a young boy. He was mostly self-taught, though he did study art at the Westminster School of Art.

In 1892, Beardsley illustrated his first book, Morte D’arthur by Thomas Malory. This included 300 illustrations and decorations such as the ones shown below.

The next year an article was published about Beardsley in the journal, The Studio. The article included some of his illustrations and because of this he was hired to illustrate Oscar Wilde’s Salome. Beardsley became friends with Wilde and the two were linked in people’s minds from then on.

Beardsley became the art editor of a periodical, The Yellow Book. It was very successful but did not share the values and beliefs of society in 1890s England. When Oscar Wilde was arrested and sent to jail, Beardsley was fired from The Yellow Book and it was forever changed.
Beardsley briefly worked for another, smaller publication before illustrating more books including Theophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin and Aristophanes’ Lysistrata.

In 1898, at only 25 years old, Beardsley died of tuberculosis. He had always been sick and weak and his body had finally had enough.

As I mentioned earlier, many compare Harry Clarke to Beardsley but I think they are very different. Clarke’s illustrations are creepy. Beardsley’s are certainly strange, but I wouldn’t call them creepy. I think the pictures have different feelings. What do you think?

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Harry Clarke

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! To celebrate, I thought I’d post on an Irish artist, Harry Clarke. Sorry, no potatoes or four-leaf clovers here.

Clarke was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1889. His father was a craftsman who worked in design and stained glass, and his brother would also become an artist. Clarke’s passion was in stained glass but he also worked as an illustrator. I’ll be honest, it was the illustrations that first caught my attention, though his stained glass is extraordinary.

Clarke began his art studies in his father’s studio but was influenced by many artists and styles. He was influenced by Rosetti and Edmund J. Sullivan, and his illustrations were often compared to Aubrey Beardsley, who I'll post about later in the week. Clarke traveled in Europe during the height of the art nouveau moment and was inspired by the style. Also on these travels, Clarke visited many of the great cathedrals with their varied stained glass windows.

Clarke designed and created more than 130 stained-glass windows in his life. What strikes me about his windows is that the scenes have depth. The thick black lines of most stained glass windows makes it very difficult to create foreground and background. I think Clarke uses black differently than most stained glass artists, though. There’s a lot of black but it isn’t overwhelming. Click for examples of Clarke's stained-glass and check out the images below. What do you think?

As I mentioned earlier, Clarke also illustrated books. His first illustrations were for Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The illustrations were destroyed in an uprising and were never published but that didn’t stop Clarke from accepting another assignment. He next illustrated Hans Christen Andersen’s Fairy Tales, followed by Edgar Allen Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, Charles Perrault’s Fairy Tales of Perrault, Goethe’s Faust, and Selected Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne. I know that kids may not have heard of many of these books but they are all well known, even today.

Click here to see his fairy tale illustrations. When you get to the page, click on the thumbnail images because there are several pictures from each story.

Clarke died in 1931 when he was only 41 years old.

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Andre Derain

Andre Derain was such a star during most of his life but I would guess that many of you hadn’t heard of him before yesterday’s post on fauvism. After today, all that will be changed!

Andre Derain was born in 1880 just outside of Paris to a pastry chef. He was a terrible student but he was great at drawing and, when he was fifteen, began painting lessons. It was because of these lessons that Derain met Henri Matisse who would also become a fauvist.

In 1900, Derain and his new friend, Maurice de Vlaminck, rented an old restaurant to use as a studio. During this time Derain studied the works of the masters that hung in the Louvre and he visited new exhibits to keep up to date on the happenings in the art world. He was called into military service at the end of 1900 but before he left he introduced Vlaminck and Matisse, thus paving the way for fauvism.

When he returned from the service in 1904, Derain’s career began to pick up. A wealthy art collector bought all the paintings in his studio in 1905, then Derain showed at the Salon des Independants where he sold four paintings. Later that year he showed at the Salon d’Automne where the fauvist movement got its name. (Shown below is Collioure.)

In 1906, the art collector who had bought out Derain’s studio wanted more paintings. Derain went to London to create these paintings which became some his most popular and most famous. Below is London Bridge, one of thirty paintings Dearain completed in London.
Late in 1906, Derain met Picasso. This friendship would last for many years and Picasso would influence Derain to experiment with cubism (like in the painting shown below, Cubist Grove, which is cubist more in color than in overall style) as the fauvists began to move on to other styles.
Derain illustrated two books around this time, one by Guillaume Apollinaire and a book of poetry by Max Jacob.

Around 1911, Derain’s work began to show the influence of the old masters he had studied at the Louvre. In 1914 he was again called into military service. When he finished his duty in 1919 he continued to develop in this more classical style. Below is Portrait of a Young Girl in Black, an early example of Derain's later style.
Derain became even more popular and he was thought highly of throughout the art world and beyond. In the year leading up to World War II, however, Derain’s downfall began. Hitler’s foreign minister wanted Derain to paint a family portrait. Derain did not paint the portrait but he did go to Germany on an official visit. This was not a popular thing to have done and after the war Derain could never regain his position in the art world. Several negative books were published about him during his lifetime which made him unsure about his work. He couldn’t create the way he used to.

He lived his final year with an eye infection and was then killed by a car in 1954.

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Current NaNoEdMo Hour Count: 13.5/50hours
Yeah. I'm not doing so well with this but those 13.5 hours have made a huge difference.

Fauvism

No post yesterday because I was sick… again. I’m still feeling run down but it’s nothing like how I felt last night.

Anyway, on to fauvism (sounds like: foe-viz-um).

Fauvists used exaggerated colors when painting subjects. In fact, color was the most important aspect of a fauvist painting, with the subject taking a backseat. For example, when painting a portrait of a woman with very dark hair, a fauvist might choose to use blue in the hair to show just how dark it was. He might use yellow for the skin instead of a carefully mixed bronze. Shadows might be drawn in greens and purples instead of grey.
Shown above is Andre Derain’s The Turning Road, L’Estaque. I love this painting for the way Derain has taken the colors of the changing fall leaves and used those colors throughout the painting, in the trees, the earth, and the people.

Fauvism began in 1905, though artists were moving toward this color-based style of painting before this time. Fauvism in some ways grew out of the impressionism movement that van Gogh was a part of. Vincent van Gogh had a great influence on the fauvists. His use of color affected Henri Matisse (whose Woman with a Hat is shown below) and it affected Maurice de Vlaminck.
Most people didn’t like this new movement. It was called fauvism by an art critic. Fauvism means “the wild beast” and it was not meant as a compliment. Some wealthy art buyers did purchase paintings, though, which allowed the artists to continue working.

By 1908 the movement had run its course and many of the artists involved moved on to other styles. Georges Braque, for instance, moved on to cubism. You can see this in the two paintings shown below, Spared from the Storm (1906) and Houses at L’Estaque (1908). Look at the change in style that happened in just two years!
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Current NaNoEdMo Hour Count: 13.5/50hours