batcave rules: Art is Cool

Larry Bob Phillips

Hello students.

Caravaggio

I am posting this today because I have been thinking a lot about art and how cool it is, and how cool it was to learn about when I was in high school. In New Mexico I had a small art gallery called the Normal Gallery and would host art shows every month. Every month a new artist would put art in my gallery and we would throw a big party. It was a lot of fun because the art was very good, and because I lived in the gallery.
So as I am thinking about art I want to share some of my favorite artists and pieces of art with you. Today I will focus on painting, and maybe tomorrow or the next day I will post some different kinds of art.
Caravaggio is one of my favorite painters of all time. He painted between 1593 and 1610, but his style is super modern. He was famous for a style called chiaroscuro, which mean light-dark in Italian. The name refers to the very intense lighting used in his paintings. This style of lighting has become very common in modern movies.
Hieronymus Bosch is another amazing painter, and actually comes from before Caravaggio. Bosch was active between 1450-1516. His style is also very ahead of its time. It is famous for its surrealism, and illustrative quality at a time when most painters painted what they saw. He is also very famous for his strange landscapes.
Another Classic painter is Guisseppi Archimboldo. A man famous for his very strange portraits.
The last hundred or so years have also been really interesting for painting. There were the Surrealist, Joan Miro, Man Ray, and Salvador Dali. There was pop art, which produced a few great painters such as David Hockney.

David Hockney

Then there is graffiti which is a really cool, and new approach to painting. It is painting and architecture, art and community interaction. It is sometimes dirty and violent, and other times it is safe and heart warming.