Affordable Art Fair

I'm going to go on Friday to the Affordable Art Fair, in Battersea Park. There's going to be 120 galleries, with the work of their corresponding artists there, there's going to be little cafes with foodz and there's going to be talks and workshops and whatever else.

It's something I would have really liked to participate in, but I found out about it like two days before it started XD I wrote to them anyway, 'cuz it doesn't hurt to ask, right? I've not gotten a reply as of yet, but I'm going to take some drawings anyway, in case I get lucky.

I'm pretty excited to see what's to be found and really inject myself with everything I'll find. There's going to be galleries from all of the United Kingdom, to my understanding. And there will be tents with the work of up to three artists in each, and the total under each tent, cannot exceed three thousand pounds.

I feel like London is pretty soaked up in art and culture, what with it's great architecture and sculptures and galleries and museums at everyone's disposition; but you can never get art to enough people, the more people you get it to, the better. You can never make it accessible enough.
Artists supposedly kind of reflect their own times and have some sort of duty with the society they live in, we're supposed to see it with our own eyes and reflect that out into our pieces. But I think of art in general, as something that is supposed to make one's soul feel good, no analysis, no horizontal lines are peaceful, red is for passion or violence, no questions, no why this or why that, "Oh, he must have meant this". I think when one buys a piece or likes a piece, it should be because when you looked at it, it fascinated you and you couldn't stop looking at it and were enthralled by the piece. It made you either feel very good inside or it just made you feel something and the piece caught you.

Nothing against analysing pieces and the old masters or contemporary artists, I just feel that sometimes, just *liking* the piece is overshadowed by wondering too much about what the artist could have meant.

And fairs like this, I think, have the capability of bringing back that simplicity to art. More approachable and not so much something reserved for collectors or something: Anyone can like art, anyone should be able to purchase art!

I'm going to have a pretty good time.

And I really like this picture from the London AAF page:


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Tate Modern

I went to Tate Modern yesterday, because I figured, I could see the old masters online and it's better for me to soak up in my contemporaries and see what's up with some real art these days. And I amused myself at how excited I was to see a HUGE Monet painting, two Jackson Pollocks, two Dalis, a Lee Krasner.
These are definitely not the old masters, but they're dead and I have huge amounts of respect for them and they seriously made in the art world whilst alive. Pollock and Dali, specially.
And I enjoyed these paintings much more than the other more contemporary work.

Dali's paintings were pretty amazing, I don't remember their names right now
I saw this one:

And another one with a phone, that I don't remember the name of.
They were both incredible to look at, I had to make sure that I could see brush strokes and some kind of texture on the painting, because it was SO SMOOTH!! And the pieces were not big at all, I don't think either of them were bigger than 18 x 24 inches; which is super comforting for me, because I really tend to go for the smaller formats for both drawings and paintings. And him and I have that in common, the small format and the amount of detail. Man, his amount of detail, sure is remarkable!!
Something cool about him and his painting is how he was a surrealist, but he painted in a very realistic way and his human figure and figurative things came out very realistic, indeed.

I don't remember what Pollock paintings I saw. I do remember one of them, that according to the explanation, he felt he was reaching a plateau or something in his work, so he was experimenting just painting with black paint. The other one was this really long painting.
I saw part of the "Pollock" movie with Ed Harris, and he does a really good job at it and it's nice to watch.

Of Monet's, I saw this one:

It really is a GYNORMOUS! painting. I don't remember the dimensions lol x_x
He did very many water lilly paintings, it turns out he was living somewhere where he had this pond as his view, so he'd do a lot of his light and atmosphere studies with that.

I feel pretty honoured to have seen those paintings live.
I mean, I HAVE seen paintings of the old masters in front of me before, but I guess I hadn't gotten *that* much into art myself and the famous museums get so full sometimes, it really killed my appreciation.
For example, when I went to the VanGogh museum, I would have loved to have it all to myself, so that I could get real close and then far from the paintings to look at whatever I want; because VanGogh used so much paint, it actually gave his paintings texture, but texture made of full oil paint. But there would always be a ridiculous amount of people in front of each painting.

That's all for now, I'd really like it if you'd have a looksie in my page in Facebook and liked it, I often upload pictures of what I'm doing and what I've done, you'd keep well updated with my work. Here's the link: Gabriela Handal Arte
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Blue Lady

Today is some kind of mixture of my work with somebody else's work, it's like a surf and turf and more so the turf, because most of the pieces that I picked of the artist that I want to talk about have to do with bathing and the sea.

First we have "Blue Lady", she's finally been finished and I really like how she turned out, her facial expression is great, it really reminds me of some kind of medieval portrait.
I'm pretty proud of her hair and it's the reason for the title, 'cuz it's all like Baroque or Victorian, just not as complicated. Her mouth looks pretty delicious and super plump and reminds me a little bit of Angelina Jolie. One of the other things I really like is her eyes and the facial expression, there's some kind of indifference and untouchableness.




The other artist I want to talk about is Bouguereau. Here's a cool website with a bunch of his work: Bouguereau
Click on the pictures to be able to see them at a nice size.
"The Abduction of Psyche" is the first piece I saw of him, I think. It's been printed on cards, his themes can be very romantic <3
I thought/think this piece is beautiful in every sense: The bodies of both characters, the fabrics, the landscape, their facial and bodily expressions, the story upon which the painting is based. It's hard to notice, but one of the things I really like, is that Psyche has butterfly wings, because that's how she's represented in Greek mythology.
I like her facial expression and bodily expression, especially, because she's completely surrendering to Cupid's arms.
There's a floatiness to them, but the weight of their human bodies also seems so real. The places where their skins touch and they're all just so palpable in general. The fabrics around them are amazing, I always admire the work of fabrics in old paintings, how REAL they make them is enviable.


I discovered the guy's name after a while that I actually paid attention to the back of the card ('cuz I'd only bought it, because I loved the illustration so much) and many years later, after having used Wikipedia and the internet in general for everything, I looked for more of his work and I'm in love.
Also, you can't tell me that's not a crazy name.
But, anyway, yeah. There's plenty to look at in the website I linked you to, but I picked out some of my favorites to show you here.
His favorite subject was the woman and, like I said, his themes tend to be really romantic. He makes skin look so creamy and LIKE skin! And his human figure is just flawless and at the same time, everything else he paints is faithful to reality.
Bouguereau was looked down upon by his contemporaries, I don't know how they couldn't appreciate the talent that he had and how maybe that's just exactly what he wanted to paint.





So that's all for today, thank you so much for reading and DO FOLLOW if it's your first time here and also like my Facebook page and suggest it to all your friends using the suggest to friends link under the profile picture: Gabriela Handal Arte