Alice Neel was an Amer­i­can painter whose long career spanned from the Great Depres­sion to post World War II and into the 1960’s. Her paint­ings are noted for their expres­sion­is­tic use of line and color, and por­traits both psy­cho­log­i­cal and emo­tional, cap­tur­ing what was impact­ing her and the world at the time. Neel grew up in ...

For this week’s Time Travel Tues­day, I’m going to focus on a type of work. An illu­mi­nated man­u­script refers to the text that is sup­ple­mented by the addi­tion of dec­o­ra­tion, such as dec­o­rated ini­tials, bor­ders (mar­gin­a­lia) and minia­ture illus­tra­tions. They are more com­monly known to illus­trate reli­gious texts, and were pro­duced between 400 to 600AD. ...

I’m not an extremely details-oriented per­son. I would con­sider myself more of a “big pic­ture” thinker, so I really appre­ci­ate artists that have a style which looks so beau­ti­fully painstak­ing. Aubrey Beard­s­ley is a prime exam­ple of this; his work is pour­ing with pat­terns and swim­ming with detail. Beard­s­ley was alive in Eng­land dur­ing the ...

It wasn’t until the last few years that I started really look­ing and appre­ci­at­ing work that was out­side of the west­ern hemi­sphere. I’m often sorry I didn’t start ear­lier. There are so many nuances and sen­si­bil­i­ties that come from places not our own, and we have a lot to learn and take in. For this ...

If you aren’t privy yet, then you must know that today’s entries are a theme — they all revolve around the art of children’s book and illus­tra­tions. For Time Travel Tues­day, I’ve included the work of a children’s book artist that I really love: Mary Blair. When I was in col­lege, Mary Blair was the ...

Adolph Got­tlieb was an American-born painter and sculp­tor. His paint­ings were a mix­ture of abstract expres­sion­ism and sur­re­al­ism, move­ments that influ­enced his work greatly. Orig­i­nally born in 1903, Got­tlieb stud­ied art at Art Stu­dents Leauge of New York, even­tu­ally head­ing to Europe to study in France and Ger­many. After study­ing there, he returned to New ...

Saul Stein­berg was a Romanian-born Amer­i­can illus­tra­tor best known for his illus­tra­tions that appeared in The New Yorker for nearly six decades. Stein­berg stud­ied archi­tec­ture in Milan, even­tu­ally leav­ing the Fas­cist gov­ern­ment in the 1940’s and immi­grat­ing to the United States after a year in the Domini­can Repub­lic. Dur­ing this time, he sub­mit­ted draw­ings to ...

Balthasar Klos­sowski de Rola, or bet­ter known sim­ply as Balthus, is a French painter whom worked in the mid-20th cen­tury. While he painted land­scapes, still life, and por­traits, he is best known for his con­tro­ver­sial depic­tion of ado­les­cent girls and women. Balthus grew up to par­ents who were con­sid­ered intel­lec­tu­als — his father was an art ...

Paul Rand’s influ­ence still sur­rounds our cul­ture today, although you might not know it’s him. Rand cre­ated cor­po­rate iden­ti­ties for big name com­pa­nies such as ABC, UPS, and Enron. His logo for Yale was used up until last year, and he was a pro­lific designer. Rand got his start by tak­ing night classes at the ...

I’d like to start rolling out some fea­tures on Brown Paper Bag now that the site is rapidly approach­ing its two month birth­day. I’ve always enjoyed look­ing at both con­tem­po­rary and older works of art. After all, you have to under­stand where the rules came from to effec­tively break them! It’s also help­ful in pre­dict­ing ...