Romantic Images With Quotes Biography
Source (google.com.pk)The strange mystery surrounding the death of Christopher Marlowe and the unknown facts surrounding the life of Shakespeare has intrigued many. It has lead to serious debate surrounding the identity problem of whether Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare were in fact one and the same person... Marlowe moved in high circles within the court of Queen Elizabeth I. The chief minister and political advisor to the Queen was Sir Francis Walsingham, whose role necessitated a network of spies and it was believed that Marlow was in his employ in this capacity. Marlowe is understood to have been murdered in an inn in Deptford, London, on May 30th 1593. Marlowe and his friend Ingram Frizer were drinking together and when they were about to leave began to argue over the payment of the bill.
Marlowe grabbed Ingram Frizer's dagger from its sheath, there was a struggle and Ingram Frizer retrieved the dagger and struck a blow in Marlowe's eye. The blow was a lethal one and Christopher Marlowe was buried two days later in an unmarked grave. The mystery is that a week earlier a warrant had been issued for the poet's arrest. Christopher Marlowe's killer, Frizer, pleaded self-defense and received a pardon from the Queen...
Marlowe lived between 1564 -1593. William Shakepeare lived between 1564 - 1616 and details of his life have only been scrutinised recently long after Marlow's reported death which has lead to the identity problem between Shakespeare and Marlowe. Coincidently, William Shakepeare is believed to have had a problem with one of his eyes. Take a look at the image below, which gives perhaps some credence to the Marlowe / Shakespeare identity problem, there is indeed a likeness...
It takes a very long time to get to know Andrew Wyeth as a man and even longer to know him as an artist. He's a cover-up kind of guy in life and in art. But the key to understanding both human being and creator is to know that he is a staunch independent.
He's been independent all his life - from the time he was taken out of school and tutored (sometimes being treated like Little Lord Fauntleroy) and from the moment his famous illustrator-father took him into the studio and started his formal artistic education. His fierce independence has continued right up to the present day.
He has almost always gone against the grain, except for the early watercolors in Maine, which he tends to dismiss as being part of his ' blue sky' period. As a realist in an epoch of art history devoted to the abstract and the visually obtuse, Wyeth has been swimming upstream all his career. It has not been easy, although it may look it. Wyeth has struggled with his art. There is nothing facile about it.
From the start Wyeth was free and undisciplined. He either resented opinion or ignored it. Early on he stopped showing anyone his works in the first stages for fear that a discouraging phrase might cause him to abandon the project. He learned how to fight and finish a picture, for himself, beyond anything. In art, as well as in life, the artist can become ornery. And he can be maddeningly secretive - so much so that, at times, he becomes the sole worshiper in his own cult.
Wyeth, in essence, has always painted for himself. He harbors private, sometimes bizarre reasons for initiating a work, reasons that occasionally surface in an interview, such as those comments that accompany the paintings chosen for this retrospective.
It would have been impossible for anyone to have imagined that the impulse to produce the brilliant Garret Room showing the sleeping old black man Tom Clark, would have been the four-year-old Wyeth feeling both anticipation and trepidation in the middle of the night at the Christmas stocking on his bed with the skinny doll stuck in its neck. And its hard to imagine that when he began to conceive of the complete Night Sleeper - that mesmerizing image of his sleeping dog and the views of his farm through mysterious night windows - he was recalling the old overnight train that whisked him to Maine as a child. In other pictures we all can guess the symbolism: the dry leaf that reaches out like a hand or dried corn that stands out there alone, solitary and isolated like a personal friend or alter ego of the artist. Like Caspar David Friedrich, he is an original who only on occasion chooses to share with the world the underlying emotional and spiritual impulses that goaded him into creation.
For Wyeth the free, dreamlike, often romantic associations are a vital part of his creative process and lie at the heart of the independent spirit that has supported him for five decades. The romantic nature of his realism is what has sustained him throughout his career and will guarantee that in the years to come his works will be remembered, perhaps not always with fondness, but no doubt indelibly.
That does not make Wyeth a romantic He couldn't be further from one and despite the fact that he brings his emotions to bear in creating a work of art, it's accurate to describe him as dispassionate even cruelly detached from his subject.
He moves things that he sees around in his pictures, he swoops up into the air to have a "helicopter look" or burrows down on the ground to investigate from an ants point of view something that has struck his gaze, but he never romanticizes or sweetens a subject. He relishes letters lie has received praising him for having painted the "beautiful picture of that gorgeous young girl Christina" crawling in her front yard in Christina's World, As he says, somewhat triumphantly, "Of course, she's an old cripple, for Pet'es sake!
Unlike most artists of the second half of the twentieth century, Wyeth hasn't never been confused about the direction his work should take, nor has he experienced dramatic transformations of style. That is not to say that he has not changed. Early in his career he was a proud protagonist of technique and a keen observer of and philosopher about the materials of painting. Today he argues convincingly that he doesn't "give a damn" about technique and sometimes tries to lay waste to it.
This is all the more surprising since, in the past, he has been virtually poetic about the various media he uses.
About drawing:
No comments:
Post a Comment