VICTORIA REICHELT - PAINTINGS

I stumbled upon this painter. If you love books you'll love these paintings! I'd really like one for my wall.

HENRI ROUSSEAU

This painting hung on my bedroom wall as a when I was a kid. My parents said they finally had to take it down because it scared me.



They had this one hanging in the kitchen. This one didn't scare me. I liked looking at it and I think some of his art (the paintings without the tigers and lions perhaps) would work great as children's art. Although, I will say that it wasn't the lion that scared me in the painting... it was the person lurking in the shadows. I had an issue with people lurking in shadows, but I digress.

Now I love all of Rousseau's art and found this nice, short documentary about him.

PAINTING ON LOCATION - CINDY TOWER

I go to the Strand on occasion (though I try to avoid it as of late until I make more room on the bookshelves and pay my medical bills!) and riffle through the art catalogs. This is how I stumbled upon Cindy Tower's work:


This is cindy...

And here she is at work...

And here she is with her hired body guard. It's a long story. I urge you to check out her film where you get to watch her work on location, which happens to usually be dangerous! She hides her paintings and chains them up sometimes, along with ladders and other things she may need. Homeless people live where she paints but there are other people there who come to collect valuable copper and they have come with guns, etc. Cindy doesn't seem to mind any of this. She paints away and is perfectly at home in her environment. It's a very interesting thing to watch. Go here to view it.

AN ARTIST'S LIMITATIONS - DOING WHATEVER IT TAKES

I did a post earlier about a group of people who made a Chuck Close image out of paper pulp. This time the post is actually about Chuck Close. No, he isn't a children's book author or illustrator but I was certainly enamored of him at an early age. My dad painted on weekends and would do a lot of portraits. He also had a lot of art books on hand that I liked to pour through. I went through various stages in my art development. I was obsessed with different artists at different times. For a while it was Christ Van Allsburg. I swore I'd publish children's books and be just like him and win the Caldecott. Later on, in high school, I abandoned that theory and just wanted to paint photorealism. So I looked at a lot of Chuck Close paintings. In the late 80s, Chuck Close changed his style. This was a forced change. A spinal artery collapse caused him to be paralyzed. His new method of painting was strap the paint brushes to his wrists with tape Below is his self portrait using his new "style" and method.



He paints abstract colored circles inside a grid. Up close it looks like nothing but far away a realistic image emerges. Below is a trailer for a documentary about him--

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And this video is his wheelchair. It's not an ordinary chair!



I'm inspired by this story because I have my own limitations. I've been sick on and off for a few years now and it definitely gets in the way of being creative. But I'm always inspired by seeing the length other artists will go to, to continue creating! THEY WON'T BE STOPPED! I think when you are born with that "thing" inside you--that thing... that voice that tells you to keep making things... you will just find a way.