Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was arguably the greatest graphic artist of his time; he is best remembered for his bold, colourful posters of Parisian entertainers. His childhood years were spent at his family chateau in the southwest of France where he broke both of his legs and therefore stunted his growth. This left him ill proportioned and dwarfish. This unfortunate event probably helped his artistic ability as he spent most of his time on his own. Lautrec was at his peak as a painter and poster artist in the early 1890's at the time of the post impressionists. During his life Lautrec felt most comfortable in the nightclubs, dance halls and brothels of Paris. The narrow life he led is clearly shown in the art that he produced. Lautrec was best renowned for his paintings of the Moulin Rouge and other Parisian entertainers. Lautrec was not the first artist to make the Parisian entertainers serious subjects to paint, Edouard Manet and Edgar Degaswere among the first to paint the Paris nightlife and others soon followed their lead like Lautrec. Although Lautrec's many paintings looked spontaneous and carefree he as never "slapdash" as in he was never messy or careless. He was in fact a dedicated craftsman who knew a lot about the technical matters of his work, especially printmaking. Even after a rough night he would be up to supervise the printing of

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  • Level: GCSE
  • Subject: Art
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Passions and obsessions evaluation. The first artist I looked at was Leonid Afremov, I found him while searching the Internet for inspiring artist and I came across a piece of art called Beautiful Cellist.

Passions and obsessions evaluation Who were the reference artist and how did the influence your idea? The first artist I looked at was Leonid Afremov, I found him while searching the Internet for inspiring artist and I came across a piece of art called Beautiful Cellist. When I first saw it I loved it because of its bright I colors and because I used to play cello and I really like the instrument. I also liked the fact he used oil paint because of its thick texture, also the bright colours reminded me of pop music so I tried to make my own study of Leonid Afremov using oil paint however it took forever to dry so it didn't come out to well. After looking at Afremov I decided to base my project on music so I started looking at ears and exploring how I could use them in my final piece, also using the shape of the ear and turning it into a guitar/cello. Then my mum told me to look at an artist called Andy Warhol who focuses on pop art. I liked Andy Warhol because of his bright colours and it looked unique to other artist I was looking at. It also was modern and I like the effect of the repeated images yet different colours had. I decided to study Andy Warhol and bring him into my idea of 'ears'. So I had done a few ears using bright colours and repeating them in different ways. I liked this idea a lot so used Andy Warhol in my final piece. What material did you experiment

  • Word count: 1044
  • Level: GCSE
  • Subject: Art
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Moor in Othello

Iago turns Othello from a 'noble moor' into a raging, jealous husband. How does he achieve this? Iago brings about this change in Othello by building up trust, provoking him with imagery and lowering his self-esteem. Iago is a compulsive liar and is extremely convincing in speech. He uses his tone of voice and facial expressions to appear believable and carefully chooses his words to be able to manipulate each and every character in their own different ways depending on each personality. He is a master orator and uses this to his advantage to sail through the situation. Firstly, to be able to talk to, let alone convince, Othello about Desdemona having an affair takes a lot of friendship and trust. For this to happen, Iago has planned out every step; the more trust, the more rage. He gradually becomes more and more dominant over Othello by building up trust. Every so often, Iago, ironically, states the obvious, through Othello's eyes. "Honest my lord?" This small sentence is seen as an attribute of Iago's duplicitous personality. He tries questioning himself as not being honest but he knows that it will lead into a deep argument with Othello saying that he is honest and that he is trusted with all his heart. This reassures Iago and stimulates him to keep on going with the plan. Another example of Iago preserving his own innocence is

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  • Level: GCSE
  • Subject: Art
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Cubism project evaluation The parts of the project that I enjoyed the most were drawing the wine bottle with the shading.

4-2-07 Cubism project evaluation The parts of the project that I enjoyed the most were drawing the wine bottle with the shading. I liked drawing the shoe at the first lesson because I found it easier to draw with cubism texture. The shading and perspective describe the shape and position of which the object is in. it looks 3D and coming out of the page. The way I carried out my observational drawings was that I look at the key features. Then I detailed it more and more until it looked good like the object. I also used positive and negative shape which is drawing the shades on a white piece of paper and drawing the light areas on a black piece of paper. This helped to know where to do the shades when drawing the final piece. The ideas and techniques present in the cubist work that we looked at were: overlapping; drawing objects on to of each other, interlocking shape, and fragmented. The cubist painter who inspired me to paint like the cubists was Braque. In my opinion he is a very good painter and knows how to use colours well. I used some of those techniques in the development of my own work by showing perspective. I drew it very carefully that it would look realistic. I drew the objects in collage which made the painting look abstract and interesting. I overlapped the objects to make them look like the painting was done in the cubist period. The way I planned my final

  • Word count: 466
  • Level: GCSE
  • Subject: Art
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Why is Chartres cathedral of such outstanding importance in the study of Gothic art and architecture?

Why is Chartres cathedral of such outstanding importance in the study of Gothic art and architecture? Gothic architecture in Europe was a style largely associated with cathedrals and churches, which flourished in Europe during the high and late medieval period. Beginning in 12th Century France, initially known as the 'French style' before later being recognised as the 'Gothic style', the architectural structure was typically characterised by vast space and lots of light to create a feeling of awe. The rib vault, flying buttress and pointed arch were used as solutions to the problem of building a very tall structure whilst preserving as much natural light as possible. The High Gothic period "can be recognised as one of unresolved experimentation, a brief transition between two much longer and more productive eras".1 The High Gothic years (1250-1300) heralded by Chartres cathedral were dominated by France, especially with the later development of the Rayonnant style. Bony (1969) goes as far to say "the whole history of French Gothic in the 13th Century could almost be reduced to the development and metamorphosis of the Chartres type"2. Having no gallery, the elevation was in three tiers yet despite the weight of the great vault, the cathedral was to be luminous like no other church had been before, to make this possible the master-builder of Chartres abandoned the quadripartite

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  • Level: GCSE
  • Subject: Art
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Active reading notes

The handmaid's tale by Margret Atwood Section 8 (294-339) Themes for this Section * Power- Many people of Gilead manipulate power to get what they want. Many characters in the novel find a way to control others with what they have, Offred uses sexuality as her power, even though she has fear of controlling this tool, she try's to imagine what men ( angels) think of her appearance when she sways her body, Offred uses her sexuality with the Commander to get out information. Offred has power but she is afraid of using it, she knows that her power is to an extend because if she gets caught, the commander will never protect her from the wrath of Serena Joy. On the other hand the Commander uses his power to meet handmaids behind Serena Joy's back; he also has power when he takes Offred to Jezebel. Offred learns that to maintain power over their bodies and decisions some handmaids commit suicide and Offred too has thoughts of killing herself. * Sexuality- Gilead's society is revolved around controlling sex and human nature, Gilead has strict rules that enable everyone to be isolated and forced to follow Gilead's regime. In Gilead males and females are executed if they are gay, pornography and sexual clothing are destroyed and they attempt to normalize weird sexual relations that they believe are in the bible. * Women rights/ Feminism- Gilead provide protection for women by

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  • Level: GCSE
  • Subject: Art
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Girl With A Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier

Girl With A Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier Tracy Chevalier is unusual in having taken a specific painting and created a construction round it. How does she build a convincing impression of the characters and their circumstances in this unusual household on Papists Corner in Delft between 1664-1676? Tracy Chevalier is unusual at having taken a painting, a Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer and assembled her story around it. Tracy Chevalier's construction is about a young girl, Griet. Who has to become a maid, due to her family's circumstances, to the painter Johannes Vermeer. Part of her job is to clean the painter's studio without moving anything, as she has been doing for her blind father. But she finds herself falling in love with Vermeer while being courted by the butcher's son, Pieter. Her hard life as a maid then comes to an end when she is painted, by her master for an art tradesman, van Ruijven. In an interview in 2001 Chevalier said, 'I have always loved this painting, I was attracted to the ambiguity of expression.' She uses this ambiguity to create a convincing but unusual novel based on an unusual painting. The attraction of this ambiguity to the novelist is that she has a lot of freedom within which to write her story and to make it attractive to the 21st century reader. Tracy Chevalier uses the other Vermeer paintings and the limited biographical

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  • Level: GCSE
  • Subject: Art
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Frank Auerbach

Frank Auerbach is an artist whose work is almost completely diminished when it's reproduced in books or magazines (or websites for that matter). The images are as far removed from Auerbach's actual work as a photograph of someone is from the real person. It's all to do with the complexity of the surfaces that Aurbach builds up on each canvas, and short of having 3-D glasses this is all lost in the flatness of a page. Auerbach paints small to medium sized paintings of rather ordinary subjects, portraits of people, views of his studio and landscapes of Camden Town and Primrose Hill, the areas near his home. Each painting is the result of a painstaking process, with Auerbach painting and re-painting the canvas again and again. The paint on the canvas not only contains the image of the subject matter but also a trace of the time Auerbach has spent painting. Each painting slowly becomes a statement of Auerbach's tenacity, to his commitment to keep going back over old ground until he is satisfied. In early works his technique was to work on top of what was already there, resulting in the paint being literally inches thick. Head of IOW from 1955, constructed over 2 years and 300 sittings, resembles nothing so much as a skull attached to a canvas, the light somehow held in the surface as if it were an object rather than a surface resembling an object. Some of his early landscapes

  • Word count: 410
  • Level: GCSE
  • Subject: Art
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How innovative were Brunelleschi, Donatello and Masaccio in pioneering a distinctive new art style in Florence during the first half of the fifteenth century?

How innovative were Brunelleschi, Donatello and Masaccio in pioneering a distinctive new art style in Florence during the first half of the fifteenth century? Seonaid MacLeod VI CRB Art in Renaissance Florence certainly marked a departure from the previous style that was seen during the Middle Ages, so named by Renaissance artists because they saw this period as a 'dark age' between the classical style they so admired and the rebirth of art that the Renaissance encouraged. New ideas based on the classical artistic thinking inspired a group of Florentine artists who were desperate to break away from the international Gothic style and revive classical technique, either for personal motives, as Gombrich believes, or because of the desires of their patrons. The gothic that this group was so opposed to was actually quite a beautiful form, inspired by the artists' observation of delicacy and beauty. The previously illusive quality of religious works was replaced by historical accuracy and for the first time research was required in order to paint a faithful reconstruction. Blinded by their desire to destroy all things Gothic, which they saw as the barbaric artistic style, named Gothic because the Goths led to the downfall of the Roman Empire, this group of artists were unable to recognise many aspects of the international Gothic style as the starting points of their own work.

  • Word count: 1378
  • Level: GCSE
  • Subject: Art
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Egyptian Exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Angela Lau January 31, 2006 Advanced Painting Prof. Emily Mason Egyptian Exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art It's been awhile since I went to the Met, but I noticed that they had added more artwork in the Egyptian Exhibit. There must've been over 150 artworks featured at the exhibition, but among the highlights of the exhibition were some ritual bowls and chalices of blue and green, a finely carved wood statuette, and a Roman mummy portrait. The exhibition also included several examples of sculpture in wood. One of these, that I found of interest was a statuette of a man preserved from the waist up, is considered a Middle Kingdom masterpiece. Another work on display that caught my eye the most was a small human doll of bound flax with blue beaded hair, which probably served as a symbol of regeneration. This enigmatic Middle Kingdom figure is one of two dolls excavated from the tomb, the other one being larger with no beads. As far as I know, from the very beginning of Egyptian history, writing and art were inseparable. Most Egyptian works of art are actually larger forms of the figures in hieroglyphics. For example, the figure of a seated man, which appears frequently in sculpture and painting, is also the hieroglyphic ideogram for "man." As much care was taken in drawing the hieroglyphs as in creating the images in art. In the ancient Egyptian language the

  • Word count: 783
  • Level: GCSE
  • Subject: Art
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