Art Blog For June 2008
30 June 2008
My new website, GodsKingdomArt.com, is finally complete and I invite you all to visit the website containing my original Cristian oil paintings.
23 June 2008
South African artist Koos van der Lende's intensely personal engagements with the environment underpin his status as a leading South African landscape photographer. Born in Pretoria, South Africa (1955), he emigrated to the Netherlands with his Dutch parents in 1971. After completing his studies at the School of Photography in The Hague, he visited the country of his birth in 1977. The experience prompted him to return on a more permanent basis, and in 1983 he immigrated back to South Africa. He spent the next two decades working as a commercial photographer, in 2002 decisively abandoning the confines of a studio environment for the outdoors, where he spends most of his year photographing series of limited edition work.
Van der Lende's portfolio is testimony of his formidable artistic talent and unrelenting dedication to the art of photography. Working from Pretoria, he mostly shoots in panoramic format using the time-honoured film and darkroom processing techniques. The large vistas his camera records are technically complex, Van der Lende spending days, sometimes even weeks researching the ambience of each potential composition. Typically, his pictures blend natural and artificial lighting sources, with minimal intervention afterwards during the printing and reproduction of his spectacular prints. The photographer imbues the picturesque quality of his landscapes with an added layer of spiritual intensity, although Van der Lende is by no means proscriptive in enforcing this view. Modesty is central to both his character and his work, which in itself records an awestruck moment of humility and wonder.
More information on this South African artist
16 June 2008
South African artist Jan Willem van Bergen born 1964 in Pretoria, Gauteng
Jan Van Bergen is facinated by the excessiveness and voluptiousness of the natural landscape, or God’s garden- as he preferes to call the vistas of unspoilt nature in this part of the world. It is his intention to capture the exuberance of life as it gushes forth in the flora of the southern african landscape. Jan Van Bergen does not paint human interventions –not because they are not natural, but because they detract from the landscapes Godliness. In a sense man is defined by his emergence from the immanent continuim of the universe. Space and time define the discontinuous world of man. Contrary to this God is found by man in the continuous… immanent world of the startling and unexplained. There is no better symbol of this than the untainted natural beauty of the african landscape.
Jan Van Bergen has been influenced by Hokusai and Hiroshige. This can be seen in his economic use of line. He has also been very heavily influenced by van Gogh -who was also influenced by Japanese 19th century artists. The movement captured by the brushstroke is very important to Jan Van Bergen. He works wet and believes in maximum effect through minumum effort. Is the painting a single movement that cannot be overworked? Definitly. It is a movement that signifies spirit. It is only in this sense that a work consoles. Life is hard. To offset this hardness the painting provides consolation.
More information on this South African artist
9 June 2008
Another oil painting in my latest series of Christian themed paintings.
Click here for more information on this oil painting
2 June 2008
This is my latest oil painting titled "A New Covenant". This is the first painting of a series of Cristian oil paintings I am doing for a new web site that I will be launching this year.
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