Natalia Goncharova - Russian painter

I came across this very stylish slide show whilst writing a piece on the Russian modernist painter and stage designer, Natalia Goncharova. Further details on her work here.

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Howard Hodgkin - book review

I've been a long time fan of Howard Hodgkin's work. He has a great sense of form, uses luscious colours, and produces semi-abstracted compositions which are like rich food for the visual sense. So much so in fact, that I've created a mini-gallery of his paintings HERE.The problem in interpreting work of this kind is that there's a tension between the degree of abstraction of the image and its ostensible subject, stated in its title. I've been reading Andrew Graham-Dixon's book on the subject to give me some help with this problem. Unfortunately, his is an approach to art criticism which is well informed (in biographical terms) which pays attention to the details of what appears on the canvas, and yet which seems to stop short of interpretation... Read more >>

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Howard Hodgkin - art works

Anyone who has seen the almost but not quite completely abstract paintings by Howard Hodgkin will know what a beatiful sense of colour he brings to his work. You might have problems working out just which brushstrokes represent the figures in a painting such as 'Walking in the Park with Andrew' - but his evocation of ambience and emotions with a palette of hot colours and rich textures is unmistakable.

In a fit of enthusiasm I put together a web gallery of his work snatched from the Net which probably breaks every copyright agreement known to man. But my justification is that it has no purpose other than to celebrate the artist and his work. That's my defence your honour. See the pictures HERE - and if you are interested in some HTML 'paintings' see HERE. These works were inspired by the competition which used to run for creating web sites which were visually interesting but weighed in at less than 5K - which is pretty small. There were some amazing effects created, but the original site at <www.the5k.org> seems to have disappeared. If anyone knows of a mirror site somewhere ...