Al Rounds - autumn in Salt Lake City

 

Al Rounds Studio

4 days ago ·

“This painting started out as a commission piece and all my client asked me to do was a historical piece of early Salt Lake City and for it to be somewhere from the North East side with a view of the Salt Lake Temple. As we got further along into the painting discussion he also asked if there could be some, what he said, “Tall, skinny trees,” that they used to have. Those trees were lombardy poplars, which I absolutely love and was excited about that. He also asked if I could do it in the fall. Everything else came after that.”

“What I normally do when I very first start a painting for a client is do a couple of sketches as I’m gathering my ideas. I do a really rough one on my idea and then a more tightened up sketch for my client to look at that will look pretty close to what the painting will end up being. As I started doing this I started doing historical research by going through historical books and photographs trying to find some ideas. Ron Fox helped me with some early photographs of Salt Lake City, which had these types of lombardy poplar trees in it.”

“As I got progressing in the painting I got this idea of seeing a house up on the hill with an irrigation ditch coming, so I sketched that into my drawing. I decided to do it from the North East side, so you can see Main Street and the East side of Salt Lake Temple. The towers are taller on the East side than the other side. Every time I do a painting of the Salt Lake Temple it’s like starting over because it is a very difficult building to draw and paint.”

“I went up on the hill where Heber C. Kimball had his compound. One of Heber C. Kimball’s home can be seen in the bottom left part of the painting, the brown building. I went up on the hill where the Kimball Apartments are and got all of my perspectives from that area. I ended up doing it in the fall with the lombardy poplars and all the stone walls that they had. The stone walls show how great the soil was. They were always picking the rocks out of the soil and built the fences with those rocks. That kept the animals in and kept other people’s animals out. It also helped keep the dust out of their compound in the summertime.”

Image: Salt Lake City 1893

Joan of Arc

 

James Lucas

@JamesLucasIT

You have to zoom in on her face because these may be the most beautiful eyes ever put on canvas, and once you understand what she is looking at, they become almost unbearable... The painting is Joan of Arc, made by the French artist Jules Bastien-Lepage in 1879, and it hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It is enormous, more than eight feet tall, and it shows Joan not as a warrior in armor, but as what she actually was before any of it: a peasant girl of thirteen, standing in her parents' garden in the French countryside. The Met describes her eyes as wide open and clear blue, her cheeks feverishly flushed, her gaze turned upward and away, and they are right, this is the face of someone who is no longer fully in the garden... She has just heard the voices and behind her, among the trees, Saints Michael, Margaret, and Catherine have appeared, and they are telling this teenage girl the impossible thing she was born to do: leave home, take up a sword, and drive an army of invaders out of France. Her eyes are fixed on something the rest of us cannot see, but her bare feet are digging into the earth, and one hand grips a branch beside her. She is being called toward something vast and terrifying, and every muscle in her is trying to stay rooted to the ground she knows. The artist caught the precise moment a girl is torn between the life she has and the fate she cannot refuse. And everyone knows how the story ends: she would follow those voices, she would lead armies, crown a king, and be captured, and at nineteen she would be burned alive as a heretic, still insisting the voices were real. Everything that was coming for her is already there, waiting, behind those wide blue eyes in this peaceful garden...

Joseph Pickett

@Pastpassport

Her figure is his cousin's, Marie-Adèle Robert, who modeled for him more than once. Critics at the 1880 Salon praised her face but disliked the saints floating behind her. He finished it in 1879, eight years after Germany annexed part of Lorraine, Joan's home province. France was still raw from the defeat, and Joan had become the symbol of getting it back. So a Lorraine girl stood in a Lorraine garden, playing the girl who saved France.

Preston Tsao

@PrestonTsao

·

1h

Decades ago this painting was very prominently displayed in one of the main hallways at the Met. Then it was banished to the basement for being to realistic and sentimental. Not it’s back to where it belongs. ( I wasn’t sure my 50 year memory was correct, so checked with Grok. It was.

St. Lo art museum

 St. Lo in Normandy has a fascinating history and an excellent museum.

This is a small version of a statue that the Germans melted down when they took over the city during World War II.

Starry night

 

https://x.com/JamesLucasIT/status/2097263966921605204?s=20

James Lucas

@JamesLucasIT

Reading the comments on this post told me everything I need to know about art. So many of you wrote to say you felt the exact same thing I did standing in front of the Starry Night. That strange pull, the sense that the painting is somehow alive... It turns out the feeling is completely universal. I am not someone who gets emotional easily. But every so often a piece of art really gets to me. And that is exactly what happened the first time i walked up to Van Gogh's magnum opus. I know how that sounds, it is one of the most famous paintings on earth, almost a cliché to be moved by it. But maybe it is that famous for a reason... It genuinely looks like it is moving while you stand there, shifting in a way I cannot explain and have never seen in any of the thousands of paintings I have looked at in my life. The same day I took the photo below, I also filmed this short video. It still comes nowhere near the real thing, but you can at least catch a little more of it here, the thick ridges of paint, the way the stars and swirls lift right off the canvas. This technique is called "impasto", from the Italian for mixture. It means paint laid on so thickly that every brushstroke and ridge stays visible on the surface. Van Gogh piled it on with a loaded brush, building the stars up thick so they would blaze as bright as possible against the dark. But no video and no explanation of technique can really convey what it feels like to stand in front of it. And the fact that so many of you felt the very same thing says something true about what art is really for. Tolstoy said it best: "The receiver of a true artistic impression is so united to the artist that he feels as if the work were his own and not someone else’s, as if what it expresses were just what he had long been wishing to express. A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist. In this uniting of it with others lies the great attractive force of art."

James Lucas

@JamesLucasIT

I took this photo four years ago, standing right in front of it at the MoMA in New York, and nothing had prepared me for the real thing. Seeing The Starry Night in person is still one of the most magical things art has ever done to me... What a screen can never show you is the paint itself: Van Gogh squeezed it straight from the tube onto the canvas, building the sky in thick, raised ridges you can practically feel, so the stars and swirls stand up off the surface and catch the light as you walk by. It's not just a picture of the night sky, it's a physical storm of paint, and standing before it, everything seems to move. He made it in 1889, from the barred window of the asylum at Saint-Rémy, during one of the darkest moments of his life. He wrote to his brother Theo that the night was "more alive and more richly colored than the day," and once you have seen it with your own eyes, you understand exactly what he meant...