Degas Green Dancer

Hello my favorite small humans!

 

It was very nice to see you last week, even if it was for a sad reason.  You both looked so pretty and your uncle and I were totally impressed with your coolness – you can totally hang with the grownups!  You ladies are pretty fabulous.

 

This week I’m sending a Degas picture.  Edgar Degas is probably the worlds’ most famous painter of ballerinas.  The green dancer is my favorite because of the color, and how he makes the edges of the tutu look like lace.  So pretty!  I love the blue/green on the ladies in front and the orange/red on the ones in the background – most people wouldn’t put colors from opposite sides of the color wheel as the main shades in a painting, but it really works here!  He was also a sculptor, and did some beautiful ballerinas in bronze, too (second pic)…but I like his paintings better; some of them were very realistic and some were impressionistic. 

 

He was painting at the time when photography was a brand new thing (the late 1800s), so that influenced his work quite a bit.

 

I really like in the third pic how there’s one girl in the background with her head on the wall.  I know just how she feels sometimes. The last picture is a self-portrait.  I kind of think he looks a little bit like your dad, if your dad walked around in an old-timey suit making a very sad face.  So I like Degas for looking like my brother.

 

I know you’re busy, so that’s all I’ll say for now.  Know that I love you and that I think you’re awesome.

XOXOXOXO

Auntie Paula

 

 

 

   

Bob Ross

Hello beautiful ladies!

 

So I’m going to see you this weekend – sad reason, but glad to get to see 2 of my most favorite small people in the world!  Happy Thursday!

 

Your Auntie Paula is having a super crazy week at work – we have internal auditors in, who are people that come to help make sure you’re doing everything right – it’s actually something I used to do years and years and years ago – which is kind of fun, because a lot of times they’re able to help think of new ways of doing things that are better, but it’s also a LOT of work to get ready for, because they ask lots of detailed questions.

 

So I’m going to have to be quick again this week.  I’ve chosen Bob Ross for this weeks’ painter.  Now, he’s not a fancy painter like some of the other folks…but I love Bob because he was on TV when I was a kid, and he taught people how to paint.   Bob was actually from Orlando, Florida!!   He painted really, really fast, which I’ve always loved – because you get to see beautiful things happening right in front of your eyes – and he also donated most of the original paintings he did after he got famous to PBS, which is pretty cool.  I have a few of his instructional tapes…it’s harder than it seems to do what he does, but it’s awfully fun to try!

 

Another thing that’s cool about Bob is he liked to rescue squirrels – he painted them a lot too – but sometimes he’d just have a live squirrel with him on his show, because he was helping it get better after something bad happened to it. 

 

The thing I liked best about Bob Ross…and a lot of other people did too…was that everything he painted was “happy”.  He’d be painting a landscape and he’d add a tree in, and he’d say “We’re just going to put a happy little tree right here.”  And “This is a happy little stream, and we’re going to put a bunch of happy little trees right along the edge of it”…it was always happy in Bob’s painted world, and that is a beautiful thing.

 

Know that I love you ladies so much, and I think that you’re awesome, and I’ll see you on Saturday.

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula

 

Carl Spitzweg's "Butterfly Hunter"

Hello my lovely ladies – I hope this finds you well today!

 

It's been a tough week, but I chose a piece of art for today that has butterflies in it, because your Great-grandmother (Mom-Mom) loved butterflies, and she was an artist.  She tried all different kinds of art – I have a wax painting that she did a long time ago, and I know she liked to work in pastels a lot, and watercolors…and when your dad and I were little, she would send us these funny, funny letters where she would draw little pictures to go with all the words; everybody had a face (like an avatar on the Wii) in the letters – mine had brown pigtails, your dad had big blue eyes and short brown hair…and the one for Gram-E had curly brown hair, and Gramp-Es had a big moustache, Mom-Mom drew herself with red hair and Pop-Pop with just a little hair and a thin moustache…so she would write down the persons' name, but then draw a funny face above it…and she would tell us stories about their travels on ships (and draw boats) or the things they saw (and draw little buildings), and there was always some mention of the weather and she would draw sun-shines or rain clouds and rainbows.  They were wonderful letters.  So today we do butterfly art for Mom-Mom.

 

Carl Spitzweg lived in the late 1800s and was from Germany.  He was both a painter and poet, but I think he's mostly known for his paintings.  I tried to  look up one of his poems, but couldn't find one…I kept getting pictures of one of his paintings about a poet instead of the poems themselves.

 

Carl trained to be a pharmacist but got sick, and while he was getting better started to paint things – so he was self-taught as an artist.  He travelled to Prague, Venice, Paris, London and Belgium to study art (lots of the old artists seemed to be able to just travel the world and look at art and paint in new places – kind of a cool way to live!

One interesting thing about his work was that in the 1930s, a "copyist" painter named Toni reproduced 54 of his famous paintings – Toni was a good guy who just painted reproductions; he wasn't trying to do anything shady…but other people took Toni's name off the reproductions and sold them as original works of art.  They got caught and went to jail for 10 years!

So, here is Carl Spitzweg's "Butterfly Hunter".  I like that the butterflies are gigantic and the man has a little tiny net to catch them in.  I like that his glasses are reflecting the sun, and it makes him look like he has bug eyes.  And I like that it makes me think of Mom-Mom today, and how when I was a little girl when we visited her house she had a glass box full of porcelain butterflies that were SO beautiful and we would admire them together.  She was something of a butterfly herself – all bright colors and sparkling in the sunlight.  We're going to miss her.

 

Know that I love you and think that you're awesome.

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula

 

 

 

 

Signac's Portrait de Félix Fénéon

Good morning, my two favorite princesses!

 

I hope all is well in Florida this week.  Today I am in a most-awful-very-bad mood.  It happens sometimes.  So, in an attempt to convince myself to not spend the entire day in a most-awful-very-bad mood, I have chosen a spectacularly happy piece of art to introduce you to this time.

 

This is a pointalist piece by a man named Paul Signac.  He was one of the first people to paint in this style, although there were sort of a lot of people trying it all at once, so I don’t think we can say he invented it or anything like that.  Signac was born in 1863, so was painting at the same time as Van Gogh and Monet…a lot of significant art seemed to be happening around that time!  Pointalism is different from impressionism, which uses really short brush strokes that run into each other on the canvas (no hard edges) to make the picture; pointalists use teeny-tiny dots of colors that when you back away from them make a picture….but in the end it has a kind of impressionistic look – probably because it was all happening at the same time by artists who were sort of friends! 

 

If you look at the first painting, the style is something that people think the Beatles invented in the 1960s…which amuses me.  This was painted about a hundred years before the Beatles ever existed, and was probably influenced by things that came from hundreds of years before that.

 

One cool think about Paul Signac is that a “new” painting of his was found in 2010.  In 1894 he stayed overnight in a hotel in Holland, and gave them a painting to pay for his room.  They hung it on the wall and mostly forgot about it for over a hundred years before somebody realized it was a painting from a pretty famous guy!  He was also the very first person to ever buy a painting from Matisse, so in addition to making his own art, he helped to encourage other artists to continue to paint, which makes him an excellent dude.

 

Anyway, I love his bright colors and happy shapes and patterns, and I think pointalism is really interesting, because it’s super hard to do really well – it takes a ton of planning and patience to make a beautiful painting made entirely of teeny tiny dots! 

 

So now I am happier, having looked at and talked about these pretty things.  Thank you for brightening my day from far away!

Know that I love you and that I think you’re awesome.

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula

 

 

Edward Hughes - Midsummer Eve

Hello there Shannon & Eva!

How’s life?  How’s your summer?  Uncle Patrick and I have returned from our fabulous vacation looking for bigfoot, and while we didn’t find bigfoot, we saw many, many beautiful things.

So now we’re back in NJ and ready to enjoy the rest of our summer, and July 2 was the mid-point of the year – which is how I chose today’s piece of art, Midsummer Eve from Edward Hughes.

Edward lived from 1851-1914.  It’s said he helped to paint “The Lady of Shallott” (remember her?), but I’m not totally sure that’s true, so don’t trust me on that one.   I love this painting, because it’s another great dress, the lady has a wreath of flowers in her hair (always love that) and you can tell that there are little people (fairies, maybe?) holding magical things to make the ring of light around her, but she’s not afraid – she looks like something awesome is about to happen…it’s supposed to be based on a Shakespeare play (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, about a magical midsummer’s evening.  Traditionally, Midsummer’s Eve was a night for dancing around fires; a magical spell-casting, love-finding kind of night.)

So I wish you a happy day-after midsummer’s eve, and hope all your wishes come true today!

Know that I love you and think that you’re awesome.

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula