The Eye of the Artist – Art Notes
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Featured painting of the week: “I will plant companionship thick as trees …”
This week’s featured painting is a piece I created back in 2010 for a special exhibition celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Calamus edition of Walt Whitman’s celebrated Leaves of Grass. The title of the piece, “I will plant companionship thick as trees” is a quote from one of Whitman’s Calamus poems, which are remarkable…
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Ferdinand Hodler and the paysage planétaire
As I promised in Tuesday’s post, I have found the reference to ‘paysage planétaire,’ and this makes for the perfect opportunity to give you a more extended introduction to the artwork of Ferdinand Hodler, if you aren’t familiar with him. I first discovered Hodler through an excellent exhibit of his late work at the Neue…
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Studio Notes – the landscape evolves
As a sort of journalistic experiment, I’m going to follow the development of my recently started Paysage planétaire painting through several blog posts. This should be interesting, and maybe disastrous, since I don’t know how the painting is going to turn out. For me, creating is perhaps like giving birth to something — that something has a…
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Featured painting of the week – “Magnolia”
I’m featuring a different painting each week. To start this series off, I present to you Magnolia, an oil painting I created in May 2014. This painting was inspired by photos I took of some lovely Magnolia trees in a city park in Manhattan. The color palette is very simple: white, black, green, pink and…
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Studio Notes – New landscape started
I spent some time in the studio this afternoon, stretching canvas and beginning a new painting in my “paysages planétaires” series. A big inspiration for this series is the work of Swiss symbolist and proto-expressionist (my designation) Ferdinand Hodler. (Occasionally I reblog Hodler images on my tumblr.) I believe I came across the term “paysage…
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2014: A year in review
2014 has been a good year, although I pretty much felt like I was shot out of a cannon right from the beginning. Even before I’ve started to put up the window dressing and what-not in this shiny new blog space, I want to give you an overview of the very exciting year that just…
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Hello world! (and welcome to the Eye of the Artist)
Welcome to my new blog, “Eye of the Artist | John Azelvandre Art Notes“. This blog succeeds and essentially replaces my old blogger blog “Hominy Grits,” which had served me so well for over 11 years. There were certain limitations with that blog and the best solution for me is a new start for a…