Me gusta pintar!

This week the book covers diversions and pastimes, and one of the verbs we have is pintar: to paint! I would like to introduce you to five 20th century painters: 2 from Spain, 2 from Mexico, and one from Colombia. Their styles are very different - and some of the paintings may actually look familiar to you.

Pablo Picasso was a very well known Spanish painter, and some of his works are in NYC at the MOMA. Many of his paintings are Cubist - a style where objects are not shown whole, but are broken up and reassembled to allow the viewer to see them from more than one perspective at a time.

The painting here is titled Guernica, after a city that was bombed during the Spanish Civil War. The small city (5000-7000) people was destroyed in 1937, in what many believe was a senseless act of violence. If you look at the image here, you will notice people screaming and animals also suffering. Cubism is a very appropriate style to denote the horrors of war.
You can search his images on the web, but here is a link to a small selection: http://www.artinthepicture.com/artists/Pablo_Picasso/.


Another painter from Spain who is well known is Salvador Dali, who was a surrealist. Surrealist works offer an element of surprise and unexpected images set together. Surrealism.org defines it as "Surrealism style uses visual imagery from the subconscious mind to create art without the intention of logical comprehensibility. "



This painting titled "The Persistence of Memory" is in the MOMA in NYC. If you are ever in St Petersburg, FL, stop by the Salvador Dali museum. Here is a link to a page with galleries of thumbnails of his work along with his bio - he was a very eccentric character!

Let's jump over the Atlantic now and take a look at Frida Kahlo, who has become pretty popular in the US. A few years ago, Salma Hayek produced and starred in a film, titled simply "Frida", and based on the painter's life. Many of her paintings are self-portraits. She also focuses quite a bit on her body and on medical aspects, perhaps because of an almost-fatal accident when she ws a teen. Here are her "Two Fridas".



On a somewhat irrelevant (and irreverent) side note, if you ever saw the movie Dodgeball, the one female dodgeball player was probably based on Frida, with the exaggerated features and the unibrow! Here is a link to her paintings: http://www.fridakahlofans.com/mainmenu.html.

Another Mexican painter was Diego Rivera, who was Frida's husband. He was a muralist, and as a painter, much more innovative when it came to style than his wife. Murals - or large paintings directly on the wall or the ceiling of a building - had been used in antiquity and during the renaissance, but the type of paint was unknown. In early 20th century Mexico, Rivera (and others) experimented until they found a type of paint that would hold up. Some of his enormous murals are very detailed, and show a preoccupation with social justice. Here is "Man at the Crossroads".
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Rivera also painted smaller pictures, and sometimes you can catch one in the city. If you are interested in seeing a mural painted by one of the best know Mexican muralists, the New School for Social Research has some by Jose Clemente Orozco. A link to more info on Rivera is here:http://www.diegorivera.com/index.php.

The last painter here is the only one who is still alive of these 5. His work should look familiar, as you have seen one of his paintings in the text: Fernando Botero, from Colombia. His trademark is painting very fat people, and he is known for using a deceptively simple style to insert social criticism. This painting is titled "The Dancer". Here is a link to a youtube video with some of his work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI1rjytiZsM.

You can find info online for all of these painters. The Wikipedia site on Botero is not very good, but the others seemed better with a quick glance.

All five painters have very different styles, and they are very recognizable. My question to you is which is your favorite, and why? Tell me why you like the specific painter the best - and why you don't like the others as much.