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Velázquez's Allegories of Deception

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Diego Velázquez, Joseph's Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob, 1630 oil on canvas, Monastery of San, Lorenzo, El Escorial,  Spain, 87 3/4 x 98 3/8 in.  wikipedia image Cheating card players and fortune tellers by Caravaggio and Georges de la Tour are among the best-known paintings of deception .   Two extraordinary Velázquez paintings completed in 1630, The Forge of Vulcan and Joseph's Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob , above, are also allegories of deception from the Baroque period of art.  Although a Biblical painting and a mythological painting would not seem connected, the canvasses match in height, format and the number of figures, six each.  The painting of Jacob and sons has been cut at either end, while the other image has added canvas to the left.  Both paintings have large window openings onto landscapes on their left sides.  There are only male figures, many of them scantily dressed to show the artist's extraordinary ability at depicting muscles of...
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Layering Paint

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Georgia Nassikas's triptych , Stone Wall, is in the very old technique of encaustic. . McLean Project for the Arts is currently exhibiting three contemporary artists whose techniques involve layering. I was initially attracted there to look at Georgia Nassikas' paintings made in an encaustic technique. In this medium, paint pigment mixes with beeswax to create a very thick and rugged texture, as seen in Stone Wall, above. Paint must be kept hot during application and it sets quickly. The technique was introduced in Egypt during the Roman Empire, in portraits of the deceased encased in mummies. Nassikas uses the wax from the hives of bees she keeps, as it is necessary to cover the large areas of the multi-layered canvases she paints. Many diverse, uneven shades of color show through the wax in both abstract and landscape paintings. Carolyn Case has small intimate paintings of oil which also feature layering of a different kind. Her exhibition is called Accidently, On Purpose, ...
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Monet's Paintings of Snow

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Claude Monet, The Road to Giverny in Winter , sold last year, but hadn't been seen in public since 1930 When Monet's The Road to Giverny in Winter came up at auction about a year ago, it was the first time this idyllic painting had been on the art market since 1924.  The painting leaves me with a magical impression, in the way Monet painted a pink sunset with warm highlights poking through the winter chill.  Leave it Monet to see the beautiful warmth in the coldness of winter. So I wanted to explore his other paintings of snow and see how he developed the theme. At one point in the late 1870s, Monet's colleague Manet tried to paint a scene of snow, but gave up, exclaiming that no one could do it like Monet. When looking at reproductions online, we get a great variety of versions of the colors in the various photos of the same painting.  No reproduction can substitute for seeing the actual painting.  Monet did about 140 paintings of snow, but they represent just a...
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