On This Day

I am interested only in the unknown and I work for my own astonishment.—– Roberto Matta Roberto Matta was a well-known and significant Chilean painter who is best remembered for his mystical and fantastical works which are widely recognised as some of the most important representations of Surrealist art. Despite being an architect by profession, […]

\”Intellectually it [sculpture] requires a far greater effort of concentration to visualize a work in the round. I find it difficult to work on more than two busts in the same period. Also in carving there is absolute finality about every movement. It is impossible to rub out and begin again. This fight with the

NOVEMBER 9, ON THIS DAY Stanford White was a master of architecture, interior design, and ornament, fearlessly juxtaposing materials and objects from myriad cultures and times. Drawing on precedents from antiquity and the Renaissance, from Asia, the Middle East, and Europe as well as Colonial America, White created complex surfaces inside and out. White was an

NOVEMBER 8, ON THIS DAY Paintings must be understood through the eyes, and that\’s not the word either. No writing, no talking, no singing, no dancing will explain them. They are the final, the nth whoopee of sight. Charles Demuth Charles Henry Buckius Demuth was an American painter who specialized in watercolors and turned to

NOVEMBER 7, ON THIS DAY Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán is well known for his still-life paintings and religious works featuring nuns, monks, and martyrs. Due to his skillful use of chiaroscuro, Zurbarán earned the nickname \”Spanish Caravaggio.\” He is occasionally compared to the somewhat older Italian painter Caravaggio because of his talent for rendering

NOVEMBER 5, ON THIS DAY Pietro Longhi was a famous Venetian painter known for his miniature genre pieces that exemplified the \”private and the bourgeois\” trend. Popular for their attractiveness and apparent innocence, yet with a hint of light humour, his paintings exhibit the interest in social observation that was distinctive of the Enlightenment. They

November 4, ON THIS DAY People say I paint every leaf on the tree. I don\’t…I paint what I think is there. I mean I try to make it look as though it belonged there, but very often when people look at my landscapes and look at the painting I am doing, ‘Oh, you changed

OCTOBER 27, ON THIS DAY One could go on forever as to whether the paint should be thick or thin, whether to paint the woman or the square, hard-edge or soft, but after a while such questions become a bore. They are merely problems in aesthetics, having only to do with the outer man. But

OCTOBER 26, ON THIS DAY \’Observing life through all my various travels, I have been particularly struck by the fact that even in our time people kill one another under all possible pretexts, and by every possible means. Wholesale murder is still called war, while killing individuals is called execution. Everywhere the same worship of