I didn’t always like looking at art, but I think all it took was a change of perspective. Hopefully this’ll at least make you think about stuff. Maybe listen to some atmospheric music like this, or this, or this, or whatever.
To start off, I saw this one in the Museum of Fine Art in Montreal.
This painting is by Henri-Joseph Harpignies, a name that’s sort of hard to spell and say in English, and was painted in 1865. They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, but that’s really not that much for a painting like this. You may think that’s just a few trees with a mountain in the background, but just look at it for a while, and imagine that he would have had to stand there and take it all in, instead of just going snap. Source
This is a self portrait of Van Gogh from 1889. As far as I know, it’s not his most famous, but it’s certainly one of my favorites.
And this one has sheep. And a lot of his paintings have sheep, he’s pretty high up on my list. That’ll do painter.
I’m sure you’ve seen this one before, it’s a standard of romanticism by Caspar David Friedrich. Look at him, he’s pretty intense.
And then there was Klimt.
He was a pretty intense painter, if I do say so myself, although I know I’m not the only one saying this. Oh, the people Austria’s produced…
And Klimt was a sort of mentor to Schiele.
This painting depicts a cardinal and nun engaging in something that could be referred to as unexpected.
Speaking of unexpected, how’d this get here?
That’s a 15th century book illustration of Dietrich and Siegfried. I read a saga in Old Norwegian about them in my last semester in college. It’s not a very accurate image, but neither was the saga, which had plenty of “chivalry” in it. You know what I mean by chivalry. *eye roll*
After some digging, I found the origin of the image. It’s worth a look, it’s got some pretty post-modernist illustrations, in terms of realism.
I could go on forever, but I’ve sort of ran out of ideas. I suggest looking at the Google Art Project, which is a great source of pictures of art/museum tours with streetview.
P.S. I was looking around on the google art project, and I found this apparently timeless object.
[kyle-genitive-blog] 