Category Archives: Artist of the Day

Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 18th Century artist, Giovanni Domenico Ferretti [Italian, 1692-1747] Link: http://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Ferretti_Giovanni_Domenico

Giovanni Domenico Ferretti (Giandomenico), also called Giandomenico d’Imola (1692–1768) was an Italian Rococo style painter from Florence. According to the contemporary Giovanni Camillo Sagrestani, Ferretti was a pupil of the Bolognese painter Giuseppe Maria Crespi. Others say he worked with painter Giovanni Gioseffo dal Sole.

Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 20th Century artist of the Futurist movement, Carlo Carrà [Italian, 1891-1966] Link: http://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Carra_Carlo

Carrà was born in Piedmont and followed in his father’s footsteps as a decorator and muralist, moving to Milan in 1895, where he later met Boccioni at the Brera Academy. Carrà experimented with Divisionism, but like Boccioni was dissatisfied with current trends in painting. Together with Boccioni and Russolo he drafted the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters and the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting (both 1910), issuing his own manifesto The Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells in 1913. He also developed a lifelong friendship with Soffici, traveling with him to Paris in 1914, where he was inspired to experiment with Cubism and primitivism. He continued to back the Futurist campaign, however, supporting Italy’s participation in the First World War. During the war years he developed a strong interest in Italy’s artistic past, particularly the work of Giotto and Paolo Uccello. With de Chirico he formed the short-lived Scuola metafisica in 1917, creating works depicting enigmatic interiors and city squares. These prepared the way for the consciously naïve figurative style he evolved after his break with de Chirico, and throughout the 1920s he adopted a naturalistic approach that remained unchanged until his death.

Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 20th Century artist of the Symbolist movement, Akseli Valdemar Gallen-Kallela [Finnish, 1865-1931] Link: http://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Gallen-Kallela_Akseli_Valdemar

Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865–1931), was a Finnish painter, graphic artist, designer, and architect, his country’s most famous artist and a major figure in the Art Nouveau and Symbolist movements. He was born in Pori and studied in Helsinki and then in Paris (1884–9, notably at the Académie Julian). In 1894 he settled at Ruovesi in central Finland, where he designed his own home and studio (1894–5) in a romantic vernacular style, together with its furnishings. He traveled widely, however, and was well-known outside his own country, particularly in Germany (he had a joint exhibition with Munch in Berlin in 1895 and exhibited with Die Brücke in Dresden in 1910). In 1911–13 he built a new home and studio for himself at Tarvaspää near Helsinki (now a museum dedicated to him). Gallen-Kallela was deeply patriotic (he volunteered to fight in the War of Independence against Russia in 1918, even though he was in his 50s) and he was inspired mainly by the landscape and folklore of his country, above all by the Finnish national epic Kalevala (‘Land of Heroes’).

Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 20th Century artist, Constantin Brâncuși [Romanian, 1876-1957] Link: http://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Brancusi_Constantin

Constantin Brâncuși; surname sometimes spelled Brâncuș; February 19, 1876 – March 16, 1957) was a Romanian-born sculptor who made his career in France. As a child he displayed an aptitude for carving wooden farm tools. Formal studies took him first to Bucharest, then to Munich, then to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His abstract style emphasizes clean geometrical lines that balance forms inherent in his materials with the symbolic allusions of representational art. Famous Brâncuși works include the Sleeping Muse (1908), The Kiss (1908), Prometheus (1911), Mademoiselle Pogany (1913), The Newborn (1915), Bird in Space(1919) and The Column of the Infinite (Coloana infinitului), popularly known as The Endless Column (1938). Considered the pioneer of modernism, Brâncuși is called the patriarch of modern sculpture.