Monthly Archives: April 2013

Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 20th Century artist of the Contemporary Realist movement, William Bailey [American, 1930-] Link: http://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Bailey_William

William Bailey was born in 1930 in Council Bluffs, Iowa, William Bailey is certainly American, but he has spent summers in his studio in the Italian countryside for more than forty years. The colors and feeling of Italy are important influences on his art. In American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, Robert Hughes writes that Bailey’s “calm arrays of pots, jugs, eggs, and bowls make up an ideal form-world, Platonic in its removal from ‘the itch of desire.’ Nothing spills out, thrusts forward, or wants to be touched or possessed — the traditional solicitations of still-life painting, most materialistic of arts. They are as removed from touch (and as grandly articulate in their scale) as the facade of a fine quattrocento building, seen from the other side of the piazza … an extreme opposite to the American taste for works of art which bear the signs of their struggle, unedited, in their final form.”

Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 15th Century artist, Fra Angelico [Italian, 1387-1455] Link: http://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Fra_Angelico

Fra Angelico (Fra Giovanni da Fiesole) (Guido di Pietro) (c. 1400-55). Florentine painter, a Dominican friar. Although in popular tradition he has been seen as ‘not an artist properly so-called but an inspired saint’ (Ruskin), Angelico was in fact a highly professional artist, who was in touch with the most advanced developments in contemporary Florentine art and in later life travelled extensively for prestigious commissions. He probably began his career as a manuscript illuminator, and his early paintings are strongly influenced by International Gothic. But even in the most lavishly decorative of them all — the Annunciation in the Diocesan Museum in Cortona — Masaccio’s incluence is evident in the insistent perspective of the architecture. For most of his career Angelico was based in S. Domenico in Fiesole (he became Prior there in 1450), but his most famous works were painted at S. Marco in Florence (now an Angelico museum), a Sylvestrine monastry which was taken over by his Order in 1436. He and his assistants painted about fifty frescos in the friary (c.1438-45) that are at once the expression of and a guide to the spiritual life of the community. Many of the frescos are in the friars’ cells and were intended as aids to devotion; with their immaculate coloring, their economy in drawing and composition, and their freedom from the accidents of time and place, they attain a sense of blissful serenity.