Bøger af Narim Bender

Leonardo, like Christopher Columbus, possessed an greedy curiosity and desire for discovery of unknown worlds. Only observation, says many times Leonardo, is the key to knowledge and understanding. His drawings are unlike from those of his generation and those drawn before and after him. Among them are fast sketches, portraits, rapid notes for compositions, complicated cartoons, drapery studies, and projects for machines, plants, animals, sketched from nature and anatomical studies. The grotesque caricatures are combinations and variations of human faces, creating a series of types. His anatomical sketches make obvious not only the place of muscles or the bone construction; they as well illustrate the embryo in mother's womb and a exposed skull, - symbols of the creation and ending of human life.

William Blake was English artist, draftsman, engraver, philosopher, and poet, one of the most remarkable figures of the Romantic period. In art as in life Blake was an individualist who made a principle of nonconformity. He had a prejudice against painting in oils on canvas and experimented with a variety of techniques in color printing, illustration, and tempera. His work as an artist is almost impossible to separate from the complex philosophy expressed also through his poetry. He believed that the visible world of the senses is an unreal envelope behind which the spiritual reality is concealed. He refused the easy path of abstraction and misty suggestion, remaining content with nothing less than the maximum of clarity and precision. His output was enormous; there are important collections in the British Museum, the Tate Gallery, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and several American museums.

Vincent van Gogh drew thousands of images to better his style. He believed that drawing was "the root of everything" and completed over 1,000 drawings from 1877 to 1890. His drawings were mainly done in pencil, black chalk, red chalk, blue chalk, reed pen and charcoal on a variety of paper types these included Ingres paper, laid paper, wove paper. At the outset of his career, he felt it necessary to master black and white before attempting to work in color. Thus, drawings formed an inextricable part of his development as a painter. There were periods when he wished to do nothing but draw. Although his paintings are much more popular than his drawings, Van Gogh is considered a master of drawing. Similar to his drawings, Van Gogh often did watercolors as studies before doing an oil painting or as practice. As he continued to refine his technique, he used more and brighter colors in his watercolors. He produced nearly 150 watercolor paintings during his life.

Andrea Mantegna made important contributions to the compositional techniques of Renaissance painting. Like other artists of the time, Mantegna experimented with perspective by lowering the horizon in order to create a sense of greater monumentality. His stony, metallic landscapes and somewhat rocky figures give evidence of a fundamentally sculptural approach to painting. His human forms were distinguished for their solidity, expressiveness, and anatomical correctness. Mantegna developed a passionate interest in classical antiquity. The influence of both ancient Roman sculpture and the contemporary sculptor Donatello are clearly evident in Mantegna's rendering of the human figure. One of the key artistic figures of the second half of the 15th century, Mantegna was the dominant influence on north Italian painting for 50 years.

With his signature graphic style, embrace of figural distortion, and bold defiance of conventional norms of beauty, Egon Schiele was one of the leading figures of Austrian Expressionism. He was an Austrian painter, a protégé of Gustav Klimt and important figurative painter of the early 20th century. The twisted body shapes and the expressive line that characterize his paintings and drawings mark the artist as one an earliest exponent of Expressionism. In Schiele's early years, he was strongly influenced by Klimt and Kokoschka but soon evolved into his own characteristic style. He focused on portraits of others as well as himself. In his later years, while he still worked often with nudes, they were done in a more realist fashion. Schiele made many drawings, some of which were extremely erotic. During his short but highly prolific career which ended with his premature death, Schiele created more than three thousand works on paper and approximately 300 paintings.

Alfred Sisley was French impressionist landscape painter, founding member of the Impressionist movement. He received an excellent education, even studying English and business in London before returning to Paris in 1862. Sisley took the opportunity to study the works of John Constable and William Turner. However he wasn't attracted to the business and dedicated to painting. Following 1871, Sisley lived at Moret-sur-Loing and painted splendid small-town landscapes that reveal a wistful, lyrical sensibility. Influenced by his friends Renoir and Monet in his selection of colors, Sisley was less daring than Monet in his use of the "rainbow palette" and closer to the Barbizon School tradition. Among the Impressionists Sisley has been overshadowed by Monet, although his work most resembles that of Camille Pissarro. He concentrated on landscape more consistently than any other Impressionist painter. Sisley produced some 900 oil paintings and about 100 pastels and many other drawings.