My 3 Favorite Artists

Leonardo da Vinci was born on April 15^th, 1452. His father was a wealthy legal notary and his mother was a peasant. Leonardo lived with his mother for a few years then lived with his father who had married 4 times before having a legitimate child. Leonardo supposedly began his career as an artist when a local peasant made a shield and had Leonardo paint it. Leonardo painted such a scary looking monster on the shield that his father sold it to a Florentine art dealer and bought another shield for the peasant. The shield that Leonardo had painted was speculated to be sold to the Duke of Milan.

 Leonardo then worked in a workshop that helped produce many other famous artists of the time. Leonardo later traveled throughout Italy doing different types of work including painting, sculpture, and architecture. He also served as a military engineer and made maps for the army. Leonardo, in the later years of his life, created a walking lion that could also open up its chest to show a cluster of lilies. He died on May 2^nd, 1519 at the age of 67. Leonardo never married and only had two close friends that were women.

Leonardo was a painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer. He was the definition of a renaissance man. He had a very inventive imagination and this lead to his successes in many fields. He is believed by some to be the best painter of all time and to be the most talented person to ever live. He invented many things that could not even be made during his time, such as a helicopter, a tank, parachute, and flying contraption. His paintings were very lifelike because of his study of the human body.

The Annunciation, The Baptism of Christ, Portrait of a Musician, and The Mona Lisa are some of Leonardo’s paintings. He also made a lot of advancements in biology and math, and he also invented many things. His paintings captured the elements of art and the principles of art but since many of his paintings were portraits there was not a lot of movement. Leonardo utilized form and shape by making the humans in his artworks look as real as possible. He did this by studying cadavers.

I find Leonardo da Vinci interesting because he is a renaissance man. He wasn’t just an artist; he was about everything you possibly could be. His artwork was also the best of his time and the renaissance is my favorite time period for art. My artwork is like his in that I try to make mine look exactly as it does in real life. I also do not want to just be an artist when I grow up; I also want to do many other things that involve art. I have not done many paintings so I cannot really compare my paintings to his.

 

Pablo Picasso was born on October 25^th, 1881. His baptism name is Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Crispiniano de la Santísima Trinidad. Pablo’s father was a painter and worked as an art teacher at many different places. Their family moved all over Spain. Pablo did not like formal education and left school at the age of 16.

Pablo moved to France where he lived with a friend and had to burn many of his works to keep warm. Pablo and his anarchist friend created a magazine titled Young Art, in which Pablo published art depicting the terrible condition of the poor. Pablo became famous while he was young and married a ballerina that he was designing a ballet for her troupe. They had a son name Paulo who became a motorcycle racer at a young age. Pablo and his wife did not get along and separated later in life. They did not get divorced because Pablo did not want his wife to get half his wealth.

Once his wife died he openly dated a woman, whom he had been having an affair with, and fathered a child with her. She wanted to get married to him so badly that four years after his death, she committed suicide. Pablo stayed in France during the Second World War but did not exhibit any artwork because his style was not in line with the Nazi’s. Pablo painted in private at home and used bronze casting smuggled to him by the French Resistance. During this time he started writing poetry as another outlet for his emotions.

At the age of 63 Pablo began to have an affair with a woman who bore two more of his children. Pablo had many mistresses at a time, most of them much younger than he. The girl that had his two of his children was 40 years younger than he. He had another lover later in life, at the age of 70, who was only 19 years old. He began to realize his old age and love for young women, and started painting ugly old dwarfs with lovely young women. Pablo died on April 8^th, 1973 at the age of 91.     

Pablo Picasso was a main founder of the Cubist movement. Cubist paintings have angular shapes and a very imaginative aspect to them. They are what the artist sees with emotion put in it, not just a reprint of image. I find Pablo Picasso interesting because Cubist painting is so different than what I do. I could never really do what he does as art because my art has to look very realistic. His art has a lot of pattern, rhythm, contrast, variety, unity, and many different shapes.

       

            Claude Monet was born on November 4^th, 1840. Monet visited several countries and painted in each city. He painted at the Louvre. He also joined the army but got out because he went to an art school to finish his studying. Finishing up his studies he met other painters who shared his new approach to art. Together they started the impressionism movement.

            Impressionism was not appreciated at the time of its beginning because it did not resemble real life and did not follow the traditional paintings of royalty, religious, and portraits. Impressionism had more to do with landscapes and artwork of nature with emotion and the artist’s vision put in them. Impressionism is done by small and thin brush strokes. Impressionism also has an emphasis on light and how it changes, ordinary objects or people, movement, and unusually visual angles.

            Monet painted seascapes in England, trains, landscapes, scenes of people, relatives, a few portraits, and many paintings of his home at Giverny. He had a beautiful garden at Giverny that he painted many times. The garden had a stream going through it and a bridge over the stream, which he also painted. Monet also painted the rooms in his house vibrant colors, like blue, green, and yellow. Monet liked painting controlled nature, like the lilies in his garden, and he also painted up and down the Seine River.

            Monet had cataracts later in life, which made if paintings seem rather reddish. Once he had the cataracts removed he was said to have been able to see some ultraviolet wavelengths and that is why some of the paintings after the surgery had a bluish tint to them. Monet had two children of his own and his wife had 6 others. Monet died of lung cancer on December 5^th, 1926 at the age of 86. Monet wanted his funeral to be very simple, in like with his impressionistic views.

            I find Monet interesting because he also does a form of artwork that is much different than mine. Mine would more go in line with the traditional way of art. His paintings have a lot of pattern, rhythm, movement, contrast, harmony, color, and texture. Color was a main theme in his artwork because impressionism focused on light and the shades of things that it affected. I first learned a lot about Monet in the first quarter of French 4 Honors when we did a project on him, and became very interested in his way of art. I find art that is much different from mine very interesting, especially art that is heavily influenced by the artist’s emotion and perception.

The great Gatsby Review

The Great Gatsby, it is not just a title of a book. It sets a tone for the rest of the story, a tone of wonder and mystery. Magicians use great in their names so that they impose mystery, wonder, and awe in their audience. By putting “great” in their names, they make themselves higher up than everyone else. It is like being knighted by the Queen, except that great implies much more wonder than just sir. That is why Jay Gatsby is called the Great Gatsby; there is so much wonder and mystery about him.

  When first hearing the name of this book, a thought came to my mind. That thought was, “Who is this ‘Great Gatsby?’” I began to think immediately that this man was a very rich man, but not only a rich man, but also a mysterious man. I expected this Gatsby fellow to be an older man who was very unpredictable in his actions. I had this feeling that no one would know what this Gatsby did for a living, and that he might partake in illegal activities. I was partly right.

Jay Gatsby was a mysterious man. He comes to us in this story out of surprise. Nick was talking to a man that turned out to be Gatsby, but Gatsby never mentioned his name until Nick said how he still has yet to see this Gatsby. Jay Gatsby floats around his parties, partaking in a few conversations but mostly sticking to himself, which caused wonder about him because some people would not even know it, was him that they were talking to. He would walk around the party, a stranger to everyone yet the topic of many conversations. 

Gatsby was the sort of man that inspired wonder. He was a very young handsome man, who had come into a very large amount of money, and had been a major in the army. No one knew how Gatsby had come to get this money and so many rumors were made. These rumors added to Gatsby’s greatness. They added mystery and intrigue in his character, and they inspired wonder in those who heard them. People would hear the rumors about him and come to his parties to find out for themselves about this Gatsby man, to see what he was really about. Gatsby never denied or confirmed the rumors and so he only fed the fire that created and spread them.

Gatsby wanted this. He wanted to be a man of mystery and wonder in peoples’ eyes. He had created a new name for himself and a new life, and with this new life he could become anyone and anything, and so he left this up to the masses. He let them write his life story; he let them decide what he did for a living, and all the aspects of his life. The human imagination ran wild creating a story about this man, for humans cannot stand knowing nothing about someone, especially someone who is very prominent in the world.

The masses created stories about Gatsby; stories that inspired awe, respect, wonder, jealousy, mystery, and intrigue. No one knew if these stories were real or not, which caused Gatsby to be as much of a mystery as how a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat. This book is about a man whose life was surrounded by mystery, a man who had fueled this mystery so that he might find and impress a woman he had fallen in love with may years ago. She did not know much about him now, and so he was as much a mystery to her as he was to anyone of his guests. He was surrounded so much by rumors and mystery that when he died, almost no one came to his funeral.

 No one really knew much about him and he was such a mysterious man that no one really became close with him. There were only a few close friends that he had and even the truth about him was foggy to them. As far as the party goers went, Gatsby could have been a figure in their imagination, a man made up to satisfy their starving minds. As for his close friends, this mystery about Gatsby made it so their friendships could never become very deep. The Great Gatsby, a title for a man people knew nothing about, a man who could be anyone or do anything because his life story was built and alive in the minds of the masses. That is why this book is appropriately named The Great Gatsby.