Acre

View of Acre (Acco) port.

Jerusalem

A view of the Western Wall (Ha kotel Ha Ma’ravi) and El Aktza Mosque.

Paint what you know

There’s a saying to start off young authors: “Write about what you know”. Well I’ve decided to change it to suit me (as always) to “Paint what you know”.

Sounds simple and obvious but you’d be surprised how many times I’ll sit there trying to draw and end up with a paper full of useless squiggles because I didn’t use any references at all, or any models. When you use memories and places you know and like, life is a lot easier and painting is that much more fun.

That doesn’t mean you have to paint everything in the scene or that you can’t ADD or TAKE OUT things, after all it’s your painting. Further more being creative and trying different techniques  is important to find what suits you and what really makes painting or drawing fun for you.

As I’m from Israel I’ve decided to use Israeli inspiration and over the last few days finished 2 paintings (which is why I didn’t  write on here for a while) that will follow in the next posts.

More thoughts about art

So to continue my thoughts from yesterday, the next inspirational art movement I like, and according to research a lot of people my age (in their 20s) like it as well,  is impressionism. 

Maybe its because it’s not as important if the details aren’t exactly like they are in real life, maybe it’s the play of light and shadow or the wonderful colours (which set impressionism apart from anything that existed before), to me impressionist paintings just seems like pure fun.

When I look at painting like the one that gave impressionism its name:”impression, sunrise” by Monet, I can almost feel the pleasure the artist felt at painting it. I may be completely wrong, he could have been miserable but at the end of the day art is about what the viewer experiences, not the creator so my pleasure is good enough for me!

Something you may like

This is a Balakov’s Flickr album, found it through another blog. it’s very good.

All Star Wars or Lego fans will like it 😉

Some thoughts about art

I happened to watch a program about Tate museum of modern art and it’s exhibits and it made me think about how much my taste in art has changed.

Where I used to really like art work that was “photographic” (and still do, after all you have to appreciate the amount of skill to paint/draw like this – Yes its a drawing!) I’ve started to move away from it, or expand my horizons if you like.

Now that we have cameras to “preserve memories” for us, making things more interesting and creative seems to me a lot more fun. That’s why I like the art of Salvador Dali, for example, which can be very beautifully painted but highly imaginative – apparently its all about the “Dreamworld”, Freudian psycho analytical etc’. This is the painting that inspired my naked lady painting.

Try looking at some of his art, its quite interesting when you actually think about what’s in the pictures.

Can’t say I’m aiming at painting like him though!

Not finished on this subject, but I’ll continue in future posts.

Together

Another big painting that I did in my teens, from a photo I’ve seen somewhere. Its one of my favourites, I never really named it but my mom sent it to me and the file name was “Beyachad” which means together in hebrew.