500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art

http://www.angelfire.com/ak2/intelligencerreport/portraits_women.html ^

[navysealdad]

Phillip Scott Johnson uses 90 portraits of women from famous painters to seamlessly show their changing features as time elapsed. The morphing effect is bizarre and impressive at the same time. It's impressive not just for its stretch of time, but style, medium and interpretation as well.

[PLMerite]

That is a remarkable painting.

[Califreak]

Meryl Streep without makeup.

[ETL]

Yes, IMO, it’s up there with Rembrandt. Did you click on the link and see some of his other portraits?

[onedoug]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzz8-QKwQjM

Listen to Dan Loklair’s “Rubrics #4” at 9:35. I heard this in church one morning and was very taken by its sense of pathos. It brings tears, and I’m not quite sure why. The composer was born in 1949.

There are many examples of great art around by contemporary artists. One just has to look a bit more carefully.

[Swordmaker]

I found it interesting how many of the portraits were covered with yellowed varnish, i.e. not well cared for, in high end art museums. They are in dire need of good cleaning and restoration after years of neglect.

[Swordmaker]

Yes...interesting how no teeth were shown until some time in the 20th century. The “impressionist” and “modern” genre are pure untalented crap. Haven’t change my opinion of that for fifty years.

Would you want to show rotting or crooked teeth? Stone ground grain always had some of the stone left in the flour which eroded the grinding surfaces of the teeth away, exposing the pulp, allowing bacteria to get into the soft inner core.

Even Washington had most of his teeth pulled at an early age and the Ivory and wooden dentures made for him were very uncomfortable substitutes used mainly for eating.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Thanks...I forgot about the problems of stone-grinding wearing down teeth. I figured it had to be due to bad teeth and was probably due to decay (and lack of orthodontia), but didn’t consider the root cause.

The things we simply take for granted today! Anesthesia, high-speed pneumatic dentist drills, advanced materials, x-rays.

[Swordmaker]

I had to google that. It looks like a mashup of Art Nouveau and Art Deco, both of which I like in their own manner, but not, it seems, as a blend.

My girlfriend, Kathy, collects original Erte's (Romain de Tirtoff)--considered the one of the principal originators of the Art Deco movement--his the serigraphs, bronze sculptures, and even some of his jewelry. She has quite a few of them. Our house is filled with them. Although they are not realism, in that they are impressionistic Art Deco, they are very beautiful. This is one that she has both a serigraph and the bronze sculpture:

"Heat" by Erte (left, Serigraph, right, in Bronze

We were in Seattle at the Science Fiction Museum a couple of months ago while they were displaying the costumes of the original six Star Wars movies. Kathy discovered that many of the costumes were based on the costumes Erte designed for the Folies Bergere in the 1920s. Kathy is one of those rare people that can probably be counted on the fingers of two hands who have never seen Star Wars, but with that discovery, she was in seventh heaven!

[sparklite2]

Gorgeous.