On the first day of summer school we chose the works of art we wanted to base our animations on. The Courtauld Gallery Curators helped us find out more about the paintings then we did research using books from the library, the internet and best of all, we visited the works on paper collection and were allowed to copy drawings done by really famous artists.
These are the paintings we chose:
'Landscape by Moonlight' by Peter Paul Rubens, 1635-40
Landscape by Moonlight
by Peter Paul Rubens
Asean Williams and Carl Wright
We particularly liked this painting because of the beautiful way Rubens has painted the landscape at night; it is so mysterious because of the way he has used the contrast of light and dark to show the shining moonlight. We noticed how the light filters in from the left, leaving the woods on the right in darkness. The woods appear more focussed and detailed in comparison with the soft light on the landscape. The painting shows the isolation of the moon and the mystery of the woods at night.
View the animation
'Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery' by Giovanni Battista Benvenuti Ortolano, 16th Century
Christ and the Woman taken in adultery
by Giovanni Battista Benvenuti (Known as L’Ortolano)
Kelsey O'Connor and Gurpreet Rattan
Benvenuti is an under researched artist, who was born and worked in Ferrara, northern Italy. His alternative name Ortolano was derived from his father, who was a gardener. His painting depicting a scene from the bible, inspired our animation due to its lively range of contrasting colours. Benvenuti’s way of portraying a biblical story in renaissance architectural setting also stood out to us upon viewing the painting, provoking us to question the contrast between the modern architecture and the time of the subject; i.e its relation to history.
View the animation
'Young Woman Powdering Herself' by Georges Seurat, 1888-90
The Young Woman Powdering Herself
by Georges Seurat
Ruben Pires and Roxi Ventel
Seurat uses a luminous mix of colours to portray the image of his mistress Madeline Knobloch, and is one of the very few images to reveal anything of his personal life. The painting uses the pointillist style, which Seurat invented with his fellow neo-impressionists. Seurat expressed through one of his letters that he found luminous hues to be gay, where as the dark dull hues he saw as sad. The pointillist technique is a precise method of painting in which the hues are not mixed on the canvas but rather by the eyes. Seurat developed this technique having read the recent colour theory of Scientific Aesthetics by the academic Charles Henry of how hues worked best together on the canvas. We used this inspiration to animate the techniques of pointillism.
View the animation
'Bridge at Courbevoire' by Geroges Seurat, 1886-7
Bridge at Courbevoire
by Georges Seurat
Megan White and Aygul Yilmaz
We got our inspiration for our animation, using Seurat’s invention of Pointillism. We decided to use the Rostrum camera so that we could apply actual paint to the image instead of digitalising it.
View the animation
Moses and the Brazen Serpent by Peter Paul Rubens, 1609-1610
Moses and the Brazen Serpent
by Peter Paul Rubens
Kelvin Dimeji and Shaun Lindo
We chose Moses and the Brazen Serpent by Rubens because it’s really powerful painting and tells a whole story from the Bible in one image. The painting is strong and violent; we like the way it’s divided in half with the writhing bodies and darkness on one side and Moses holding up the Brazen Serpent on the other which has more colour and a lighter sky.
We found out in our research that brazen is a word for bronze and that Moses was told by God that if he made the bronze snake the people would be saved from the storms and the plague of serpents. We wanted to make an animated story of the painting and decided to make it a bit fun to help school kids relate to it better. We had a technical problem with the sound when we moved the animation from PC to MAC so, sorry but you’ll have to make up your own words when you listen to it!
View the animation
'Dejeuner sur l'herbe' by Edouard Manet
Dejeuner sur l'herbe
by Edouard Manet
Claudia Garnder-Pickett and Shazad Khalid
The Painting in possession of The Courtauld Gallery is a less refined version of the original and said to have been painted for a friend. The original Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe was painted in 1863 and was submitted alongside three other paintings to the Paris Salon, which were rejected from the exhibition. Manet later exhibited his work himself with the title Le Bain at the Salon Des Refusés.
Through intensive research we managed to find many possible influences for Manet’s work and narrowed it down to a select few to incorporate in to our animated piece. One of the paintings we believe Manet was influenced by is called ‘The Judgement of Paris’ by Marcantonio Raimondi, after a drawing by Raffaello Sanzio. After having studied this piece it’s easy to see what influence Manet took from it in the positioning of his subjects.
Another piece to have influenced Manet is called ‘The Tempest’ by Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco. ‘The Tempest’ is a Renaissance painting, which like Manet’s piece, features a nude woman and a fully dressed man.
But unlike most other paintings with this content, Manet was criticised for it. Whilst the woman’s body was seen as ugly and the image was regarded as indecent, the Renaissance examples were justified because their allegorical or religious subject matter distanced this nudity from daily life. The figures in Manet’s painting, however, are contemporary.
Last but not least we believe Manet also took inspiriration from ‘The Creation of Adam’ by Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni by using a similar pose as Adam in the Michelangelo painting. After researching this theory we found that the subjects in Manet’s painting are actually people who share strong bonds with him. He had both his future wife Suzanne Leenhoff and his favourite model Victorine Meurent pose for the naked lady using his wife’s body and the face of Victorine. The two men in the painting are in fact his brother Eugene Manet and his future bother in law Ferdinand Leenhoff.
It is possible that Manet wanted to celebrate his brother by giving him the pose of Michelangelo’s Adam. Alternatively, we wonder what claim Manet might be making about his own creativity.
View the animation
'Young Woman Powdering Herself' by Georges Seurat, 1888-90
Female nude
by Amedeo Modigliani
Laurence Leonard and Duane Uba
From our research we realised that Modigliani’s nude art had a unique sense of tone, a unique brush technique, and individual faces.
Also we considered the controversy of how Modigliani’s nudes were received when they were painted, in 1917. His only exhibition at the Berthe Weill galley caused a sensation because of the amount of flesh on display.
We took notice of his own inspirations, sculptures from the Africans, Egyptians and Oceanic peoples. We also looked at the X ray of his female nude on the art and architecture website and realised that his brush strokes were very rigid, as if he kept jabbing the paper with paint.
'Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear' by Vincent van Gogh, 1889
Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear
by Vincent van Gogh
Masum Ahmed
I chose this painting because there seems to be a mystery about why Van Gogh chopped off his ear and then painted a portrait of himself and I wanted to know if he was proud of it or sorry that he had done it. When I started my research I found an article by an art historian in Germany who thinks that he didn’t cut his own ear off but that his best friend Paul Gauguin accidentally cut it off with a sword during an argument. Paul Gauguin was an artist too so I wanted to show them together before the fight in my animation.
View the animation