I don’t know who votes these things up, but I am glad they do. Can we have a new x_HN, with all the things with potential to open your mind in unspecified ways?
There's also a guy who has been curating a newsletter of all the best posts of the week. Been doing it for years now (it's on newsletter 817 this week!).
Love these, a transition period between Art Nouveau and surrealism. I keep getting a deeper appreciation for Beksinski, I dropped a bunch of art into a screensaver/virtual frame and am always enthralled when they come up regardless of how many times I've seen them.
Speaking of Slavic paintings, I've had the chance to see Alphonse Mucha's Slav Epic [0] (which, for complicated reasons, is being displayed in some random village somewhere in Czechia) and it was maybe the most impressive art display I've ever had the pleasure of seeing.
The sheer scale (the paintings are like 8 x 6m each!) and detail is unlike anything I've seen before, it really has to be experienced in person. I'd highly recommend making the trip to Moravský Krumlov if you're ever in that part of the world!
You might know Mucha from his Art Nouveau posters, but this Epic was what he considered his magnum opus and spent eighteen years of his life on.
Mucha, IMHO, is a very underrated artist. Were he born in Italy, his level of fame would be somewhere else entirely.
An interesting detail about the epic cycle - it was funded by an American millionaire who got randomly interested in Slavic history even though having no Slavic roots himself.
It's interesting how much of the shading is done. It's like pointillism, but much cruder. When combined with the very saturated acrylics creates this effect that what you're looking at is made of flesh, almost. Swanteid, Sacrifices, and several of the pieces depicting the dragon of Wawel Hill especially draw out this effect.
If you enjoy this, you might also like he work of Stanisław Szukalski, a historically problematic but talented/eccentric painter and sculptor who pursued neo-pagan slavic (slav-adjacent?) themes.
Think better of mankind: the conflicts that seem insurmountable today will be overcome. Sweden and Denmark hold the record for most wars, the land that is now Italy was a failed state for many decades at a time, the Japanese spent the better part of the Muromachi period fighting each other grimly.
I don’t know who votes these things up, but I am glad they do. Can we have a new x_HN, with all the things with potential to open your mind in unspecified ways?
There's also a guy who has been curating a newsletter of all the best posts of the week. Been doing it for years now (it's on newsletter 817 this week!).
You can subscribe here: https://hackernewsletter.com
You'll find three nice links on weekdays here https://aldaily.com/
There is something redolent of Ralph Bakshi's work in many of these images.
Love these, a transition period between Art Nouveau and surrealism. I keep getting a deeper appreciation for Beksinski, I dropped a bunch of art into a screensaver/virtual frame and am always enthralled when they come up regardless of how many times I've seen them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zdzis%C5%82aw_Beksi%C5%84ski
Speaking of Slavic paintings, I've had the chance to see Alphonse Mucha's Slav Epic [0] (which, for complicated reasons, is being displayed in some random village somewhere in Czechia) and it was maybe the most impressive art display I've ever had the pleasure of seeing.
The sheer scale (the paintings are like 8 x 6m each!) and detail is unlike anything I've seen before, it really has to be experienced in person. I'd highly recommend making the trip to Moravský Krumlov if you're ever in that part of the world!
You might know Mucha from his Art Nouveau posters, but this Epic was what he considered his magnum opus and spent eighteen years of his life on.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slav_Epic
ha, so that's where they went. Saw them this year in Prague in Mucha's museum (1:1 replicas though...)
I think more people should see this part of his work (that is, perhaps even more than the classic Sarah Bernhardt posters, which are also wonderful).
Mucha, IMHO, is a very underrated artist. Were he born in Italy, his level of fame would be somewhere else entirely.
An interesting detail about the epic cycle - it was funded by an American millionaire who got randomly interested in Slavic history even though having no Slavic roots himself.
It's interesting how much of the shading is done. It's like pointillism, but much cruder. When combined with the very saturated acrylics creates this effect that what you're looking at is made of flesh, almost. Swanteid, Sacrifices, and several of the pieces depicting the dragon of Wawel Hill especially draw out this effect.
If you enjoy this, you might also like he work of Stanisław Szukalski, a historically problematic but talented/eccentric painter and sculptor who pursued neo-pagan slavic (slav-adjacent?) themes.
https://www.szukalski.com/
Zermatism. TIL! Now I want to know if I’m descended from an Easter Islander or a yeti.
He always painted the same scene in different ways. That's absence of talent.
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Think better of mankind: the conflicts that seem insurmountable today will be overcome. Sweden and Denmark hold the record for most wars, the land that is now Italy was a failed state for many decades at a time, the Japanese spent the better part of the Muromachi period fighting each other grimly.
Why specifically do you have these doubts?