When I was a young boy, I was something of an outcast because growing up in Europe meant growing up different. When you don't sound or behave like the others you kind of stand out and as society tends to dictate, the nail that sticks out furthest is hammered hardest. I think it was important that that'd happened, though. It really did wonders to broaden my perspective. All the same, though, I didn't have much that I could engage in. Edward William Marsh was my only friend, and he was a grade above me, so we were kind of separated by time in school, and by grade in the Youth Center we both attended after school because our parents worked late.
I didn't really have any friends aside from Edward, so I kind of spent most of my free time reading. There were, distinctly, three books I loved most:
Anansi the Spider, the
Eyewitness Guide series, and anything by Shel Silverstein.
The
Eyewitness Guide series is one I've not seen since my stay in Europe, but it's essentially a collection of information and photos all organized into their respective topics. They had them for everything, too: Money, Mummies, Fossils, Gems, Deep Sea Life, and finally Painters.
I was particularly fond of Vincent van Gogh's
Eyewitness Guide. I kind of related to him, and even though he's no longer my favorite artist, I owe him mention at least for instilling in me a sort of kinship and getting me interested at such a young age. However, I will say that as I grew Art became a distant subject for me until I discovered...
GUSTAV KLIMT
Gustav Klimt quickly became a favorite of mine, and for my birthday, I remember getting a framed print of his work, The Expectation. I confess I have a soft-spot for his piece, Portrait of Mäda Primavesi, too.
Mäda Primavesi's beautiful, but it's also downright gaudy. It's one of those pieces I'd love to have a print of, but I know better because I'd have nowhere to put it. Klimt seems like he'd have been a fun guy to know, too. Just as I have seen photos of him sternfaced at matinees, I've seen ones of him with he's sleeves rolled up on the beach, with his dog.
Klimt was my lone favorite for a long time, and I'd discovered my second through a bit of a fluke.
My little sister used to own a copy of Animal Crossing: Wild World, and we used to play it together before I'd gotten older and she'd gotten legitimately challenged in classes. If you've never played it, it features this sneaky fox who offers to sell you paintings for exorbitant sums of cash, and they all have a chance to be utterly fake and useless. The paintings are all renditions of factual acclaimed paintings and my favorite was the "
Opulent Painting," which is actually a pixellated rendition of Alphonse Mucha's
The Zodiac.
Which brings us to favorite number two.
ALPHONSE MUCHA
Alphonse Mucha did a lot of these really beautiful, fanciful pictures of people almost befitting of old school whiskey-labels. I have a particular fondness for this painting in particular titled Fate. There's something about those intelligent eyes, that Aleister Crowley nose-bridge, and those positioned hands befitting of a Buddhist statuette. I just can't help but love it. Mucha's a bit less, how shall we say, "Mosaic", than Klimt, but that's simply Klimt's hallmark style. Mucha's got a thing all his own going, though, and his works are just as distinct without any blatant hallmarks beyond Mucha's fondness for square, almost post-card or lable-like mountings on which he set his paintings.
But, goodness. I just love them both.
I guess that's sort of all I really wanted to do. I'd planned on sneaking in a piece about Matisse and his blindness, and how when he could no longer paint, he simple made things out of ripped paper. It's hard to discern what they are until you read the titles. I've kind of decided to just leave this post about my favorites, but if you'd like to see the charming curiosity that is Henri Matisse's career extending well-into his blindness and crippling arthritis, I encourage you to look up Matisse's The Snail.
It was shown to me at an exhibit in England by a woman who encouraged our small touring class to guess what it was without knowing its name. We all burst into laughter when, name revealed, we were able to see quite clearly what Matisse had made.
