Lifted from the Journaleers
Mar. 1st, 2006 05:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skyringA favorite painting.
It so often depends what I'm looking at. There are so many artists I love, and seeing a new work often makes me gasp with pleasure.
But this one is special:
Madge by Hugh Ramsay. There was something about Madge that stopped me dead in my tracks the first time I saw her. Something about her face, some expression. To say she had an interesting face would be an understatement; her face knocked me off my feet from across the room.
Later I learnt more about Ramsay and the story of this and a few other paintings. An artist of enormous talent, he left, like so many other Australians, for England. His portraits have an air of John Singer Sargent, but there is something special. Not quite so much the perfect formality, but a touch of irreverence or something wholly lacking in JSS.
Ramsay learnt a lot and made a splash and knocked around with many noted artists, but eventually he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent home to Australia. He only lasted a short time, but in those few months he painted many of his best paintings. His subjects were his sisters, of whom Madge was one, and what is written in their faces is concern for their dying brother, along with a determination to pose for him, because painting gave him such pleasure.
Lyonel Feininger's Gelmeroda IX is another I love. So very different to Ramsay, but the energy and the intellect shines through in every brush stroke, every not-quite Golden rectangle.
It so often depends what I'm looking at. There are so many artists I love, and seeing a new work often makes me gasp with pleasure.
But this one is special:
Madge by Hugh Ramsay. There was something about Madge that stopped me dead in my tracks the first time I saw her. Something about her face, some expression. To say she had an interesting face would be an understatement; her face knocked me off my feet from across the room.
Later I learnt more about Ramsay and the story of this and a few other paintings. An artist of enormous talent, he left, like so many other Australians, for England. His portraits have an air of John Singer Sargent, but there is something special. Not quite so much the perfect formality, but a touch of irreverence or something wholly lacking in JSS.
Ramsay learnt a lot and made a splash and knocked around with many noted artists, but eventually he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent home to Australia. He only lasted a short time, but in those few months he painted many of his best paintings. His subjects were his sisters, of whom Madge was one, and what is written in their faces is concern for their dying brother, along with a determination to pose for him, because painting gave him such pleasure.
Lyonel Feininger's Gelmeroda IX is another I love. So very different to Ramsay, but the energy and the intellect shines through in every brush stroke, every not-quite Golden rectangle.
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no subject
Date: 2006-02-28 10:28 pm (UTC)It takes a few seconds to realize what it is, because the air around the building takes center stage. The perspective, too, the small people in the large space, really makes a statement. Is the colors that luminous in the real thing?
no subject
Date: 2006-02-28 10:58 pm (UTC)Last year in Washington, I got to see several Feiningers in the NGA on the Mall, or rather in the annex.
I went with Kerri that first day, on a day of wonder and delight for us both as we tramped through the snow and admired the grand buildings and the grander paintings, and I just had to go back a couple of days later to see the paintings again.
There was more than I could possibly see or appreciate in that one huge building, but I remember Biglin Brothers Racing with some fondness, and of course John Frederick Peto's stunning "Take your Choice"
no subject
Date: 2006-03-01 01:13 am (UTC)