Painting of the month

George Stubbs 1724 – 1806
Stubbs was classified in his lifetime as a sporting painter, and as such was excluded from full membership of the Royal Academy. He is best remembered for his paintings of horses and his conversation pieces. Having studied anatomy, Stubbs's pictures of horses are among the most accurate ever painted, but his work is lyrical and transcends naturalism.

Stubbs was born in Liverpool, the son of a leather worker, and he spent his early career in the north, painting portraits and developing his interest in anatomy. In the later 1740s he lived in York and supplied the illustrations for a treatise on midwifery. Following a brief visit to Rome in 1754 he settled in Lincolnshire, where he researched his major publication, 'The Anatomy of the Horse'. In about 1758 he moved to London, which remained his base.

Early clients for his sporting and racing paintings included many of the noblemen who founded the Jockey Club. Like Gainsborough, he later painted scenes of peasant life, as well as studies of wild and exotic animals. He also became known as a printmaker and for his paintings in enamel on Wedgwood earthenware plaques.

Whistlejacket was foaled in 1749. His most famous victory was in a race over four miles for 2000 guineas at York in August 1759. Stubbs's huge picture was painted in about 1762 for the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, Whistlejacket's owner and a great patron of Stubbs.

Stubbs's picture is a portrait of an animal on the scale usually reserved for kings. This colossal, almost three-metre-high painting depicts a horse as a solitary and splendid individual, with no people in the picture, no landscape, just a surrounding void that focuses our attention on the rearing racehorse - his shiny flanks, flying mane, brown eye looking back at us.

This painting fascinated contemporaries who hypothesised that it was really an unfinished equestrian portrait of George III. A landscape painter was supposed to have filled in the background and a portrait artist was going to do the king, but then political differences between the Marquess of Rockingham and the monarch meant that the picture was left unfinished. There's no proof of this story. The way Stubbs has painted the shadows under Whistlejacket's back feet suggests on the contrary that this painting looks the way he wanted it to. It is a romantic study in solitude and liberty, freeing Whistlejacket from the bridles and whips that surrounded him in life to gallop in unlimited abstract space.

Stubbs is interested in the inner being of Whistlejacket, his character, his self, and that is what he captures here: the incredible tension, energy and sensitivity in the way the horse rears, the electricity in the taut muscles, the look of something that might be terror in his face.

Banksy puts the mp in chimps…or…Barney puts the rat in library

This artwork of Barney’s was directly inspired by the Banksy painting of the month of September 2009 which was hung in BWHS Library for inspirational reasons and to coincide with a major exhibition of the artists work.

World-renowned graffiti artist Banksy held a public exhibition of his work in Bristol's City Museum & Art Gallery. Banksy, a quasi-anonymous street (graffiti) artist famous for witty, visual, public comments around the world on life, collaborated in with the gallery to thread his artworks throughout the museum. This was kept secret from the public until the very day it opened in a blaze of publicity. Queues to see the exhibition were up to 6 hours long.

Banksy started as a freehand graffiti artist 1992–1994 as one of Bristol's DryBreadZ Crew (DBZ). He was inspired by local artists and his work was part of the larger Bristol underground scene.

Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery recently closed the door on their most popular exhibition, possibly since opening.

Barney, currently in year 13 of BWHS, is taking Art and studied Banksy for his Graphic Communication module. He was enthused by reading ‘Wall and Piece’ a new book of Banksy’s work to date, and seeing the ‘painting of the month’, both of which were purchased for our library to coincide with the major exhibition in Bristol.

Barney’s work for this module was also chosen for the front cover of this year’s sixth form diary.

Vincent Van Gogh - Almond Blossom

Vincent Van Gogh (30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist artist. Some of his paintings are now among the world's best known, most popular and expensive works of art.

The central figure in Van Gogh's life was his brother Theo, who continually and selflessly provided financial support. Their lifelong friendship is documented in numerous letters they exchanged

On January 31, 1890, Theo wrote to Vincent of the birth of his son, whom he had named Vincent Willem. Van Gogh, who was extremely close to his younger brother, immediately set about making him a painting of his favourite subject: blossoming branches against a blue sky.

The gift was meant to hang over the couple’s bed. As a symbol of this new life, Vincent chose an almond tree, which blooms early in southern regions, announcing the coming spring as early as February.
Composition Already in Arles, Van Gogh had been fascinated by the orchards, filled with apricot, peach and plum trees and in full bloom at the time of his arrival in March 1888.

The composition of Almond Blossom is, however, both unusual and unique in Vincent’s oeuvre. The branches seem to float against the blue sky, and it is unclear if they are still part of the tree or set in a vase, as in one of his earlier works.

With an unusual regularity, the entire pictorial surface has been filled with branches, which are further accented by the use of dark contours. Both this sharp outlining and the placement of the tree were certainly inspired by Japanese prints, which Van Gogh had seen for the first time in Paris. This influence can also be seen in a number of other paintings.

‘Ben’ by Sir Kyffin Williams KBE RA

Twelve prints, selected from the original works donated to Oriel Ynys Môn, Anglesey, by Sir Kyffin Williams himself have been produced by Curwen Press, Cambridge and are on sale at Oriel Ynys Môn. Each print has a limited edition run of 350, and has been individually signed by the artist . A further six unsigned prints are available which Sir Kyffin Williams was unable to sign before his death in 2006.

One of these prints, ‘Ben’, now hangs proudly in our T.H.Jones Library, chosen and purchased by librarian Mrs Esther Sargeant with money raised by the pupils in our school for this purpose.

It was considered appropriate not only to have a work by a renowned Welsh painter hanging in the school, but this print in particular as all would recognise, if not own, a sheepdog such as Ben.
Sir John "Kyffin" Williams

KBE, RA (9 May 1918 – 1 September 2006) was a Welsh landscape painter who lived at Pwllfanogl, Llanfairpwll on the Island of Anglesey. It is of note that his most recent passport, on show in the Oriel Ynys Môn gallery at Llangefni; 2004-2014, shows his name as Sir John Williams. Kyffin was his grandmother's maiden name.

At once a pillar of the establishment and a thorn in its side, Sir Kyffin Williams is regarded as one of the defining artists of the twentieth century, famous for rugged landscapes of his beloved North Wales.
Williams was born in Llangefni, Anglesey into an old landed Anglesey family, and was educated at Shrewsbury School, where he contracted the disease polioencephalitis which later led to epilepsy,

After failing a British Army medical examination in 1941 (due to epilepsy), doctors advised him to become an artist, and so began the career of one of Wales' most prolific artists. A doctor advised him, "As you are, in fact, abnormal, I think it would be a good idea if you took up art".

In 1968 he won a scholarship (Winston Churchill Fellowship) to study and paint Welsh descendants in Patagonia.

According to BBC North West Wales, Williams was one of the most popular living artists in Wales. His works typically drew inspiration from the Welsh landscape and farmlands. His works appear in many galleries all over Britain and is on permanent exhibition in a new dedicated gallery in Oriel Ynys Môn, Anglesey. He was President of the Royal Cambrian Academy and was appointed a member of the Royal Academy in 1974.
In 1995, Williams received the Glyndŵr Award for an Outstanding Contribution to the Arts in Wales during the Machynlleth Festival. He was awarded the OBE for his services to the arts in 1982 and a KBE in 1999.

He died on 1 September 2006, aged 88, at a nursing home in Anglesey after a long battle with cancer.
The Welsh singer and Manic Street Preachers frontman James Dean Bradfield released a track called "Which Way to Kyffin" on his 2006 album The Great Western, which is dedicated to Williams.

The new £1.5m Oriel Kyffin Williams gallery shown here, was opened during the summer of 2008. The Kyffin Williams Drawing Prize was established, was awarded to artist Louisa Theunissen from Wrexham for the first time in 2009.

Artist: Sandro Botticelli (circa 1445 - 1510)
Location: National Gallery of Scotland
Date: circa 1485
Materials: tempera on canvas
Dimensions: 122 x 80.5cm
Amount Paid: £550,000 (Total: £10,250,000; tax remission)
Vendor: The Wemyss Heirlooms Trust

Chosen because of the relevance at Christmas time, the simple beauty of the image, the clear tempura colours and the fact that it is a very beautiful and romantic piece of Renaissance art.
Description:
This painting was rescued for the nation in little over a month, with the help of the largest grant The Art Fund has ever provided; this is among the greatest Renaissance paintings acquired for any museum in the UK since the Second World War. The picture depicts the Virgin adoring her son, who lies in swaddling clothes on the ground - a prefiguration of the dead Christ wrapped in the burial shroud. Behind Mary an outcrop of rock acts both as a simple shelter and a reference to the tomb. To the left of her, a magnificent display of thornless pink roses alludes to the Virgin's purity as the 'rose without thorns'.

BOTTICELLI, Sandro
about 1445 - 1510
Italian, Florentine
Botticelli was a late 15th-century Florentine painter, popular for his graceful Madonnas, altarpieces, and life-size mythological paintings, such as 'Venus and Mars'. He pioneered new types of portraiture in Italy, influenced by Netherlandish art.

Botticelli probably trained with the goldsmith Maso Finiguerra, and subsequently with Fra Filippo Lippi. Botticelli in turn taught Filippino Lippi. He worked for the Medici and their circle, painting some of his most ambitious secular works, such as 'Primavera' (Uffizi, Florence). In 1481-2 Botticelli went to Rome to paint wall frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. It is the only time he worked out of Florence.
Although he was one of the most individual painters of the Italian Renaissance, Sandro Botticelli remained little known for centuries after his death. Then his work was rediscovered late in the 19th century by a group of artists in England known as the Pre-Raphaelites.

It was in the fall of 1924 that Alfred Stieglitz divorced his wife and asked Georgia O'Keeffe to marry him even though they had been together for at least six years by this time. They visited his family's home at Lake George every year.

In a career that spanned much of the 20th century, Georgia O’Keeffe combined both the figurative and the abstract in her paintings of flowers, bones and shells. Her works present their subjects in exquisite detail, as abstract images with symbolic connotations. O’Keeffe has always denied they had any feminist subtext.

Born in rural Wisconsin, O’Keefe took an interest in art at an early age and left home in 1905 to study in Chicago and New York. In 1915 she produced a series of abstract charcoal drawings that launched her career. They were shown at a gallery in New York run by the photographer \Alfred Stieglitz, who continued to show her work regularly and whom she married in 1924. Her works began to command high prices and she became one of the US’s most successful living artists. (Art – the Definitive Visual Guide)

Year7 are currently studying Georgia O’Keeffe as part of their set curriculum.

Born April 24, 1931 in Norwood, London

Bridget Riley is one of the outstanding figures of post-war British art, and is our best-known abstract painter. Since the mid-1960s she has been celebrated for her distinctive, optically vibrant paintings which actively engage the viewer’s sensations and perceptions, producing visual experiences that are complex and challenging, subtle and arresting. Circa 1960 she began to develop her signature Op Art style consisting of black and white geometric patterns that explore the dynamism of sight and produce a disorienting effect on the eye. She began to use colour in the late 1960s.

She was educated at Cheltenham Ladies' College. She studied art first at Goldsmiths College (1949-1952), and later at the Royal College of Art (1952-1955).

Riley works meticulously, carefully mixing her colours to achieve the exact hue and intensity she desires. She explores colour interaction first in small gouache colour studies, then moving to full-size paper-ad-gouache designs (as in the photo at right). The large-scale canvases are then marked up and painted entirely by hand — first in acrylics, then in oil.

Riley’s vibrant optical pattern paintings, which she painted in the 1960s, were hugely popular and become a hallmark of the period.

Chosen because of the title and because ‘Kashan’ by Bridget Riley in similar style, is currently on display in the National Museum and Gallery, Cardiff.

Banksy puts the mp in chimps

Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery has just closed the door on their most popular exhibition, possibly since opening.

World-renowned graffiti artist Banksy held a public exhibition of his work at Bristol's City Museum & Art Gallery. Banksy started as a freehand graffiti artist 1992–1994 as one of Bristol's DryBreadZ Crew (DBZ). He was inspired by local artists and his work was part of the larger Bristol underground scene.

Banksy, a quasi-anonymous street (graffiti) artist famous for witty, visual, public comments around the world on life, collaborated with the gallery to thread his artworks throughout the museum.

This was kept secret from the public until the very day it opened in a blaze of publicity. Since opening, the queues to see the exhibition have been up to 6 hours long. There are many Banksy artworks to see on Google images.

Winifred Nicholson (1893–1981) was an English painter, a colourist who developed a personalized impressionistic style that concentrated on domestic subjects and landscapes. In her work, the two motifs are often combined in a view out of a window, featuring flowers in a vase or a jug.

Honeysuckle and Sweetpeas c. 1945 – 1946
oil on board In the last forty years of her life, the garden of Winifred Nicholson's home at Bank's Head, Cumbria, provided a rich and profuse source of images for her paintings. She loved the pure prismatic colours of flowers but more than this, she found in them something magical and mysterious - a secret life. Her bold, almost naïve style was an intentional simplification. Winifred Nicholson had made a study of the science of colour and knew the physical properties of colour and light. She wrote; What I have tried to do is to call down colour so that a picture can be a lamp in one's home, not merely a window.

Presented to Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums in 1950 by the Contemporary Art Society.

Overall: Height: 45.5 cm, Width: 74.1 cm