Ivor Hele

Ivor Hele is an Australian War illustrator and artist.
Ivor Hele was born on June 13, 1912 in Adelaide, Australia. At the age of 15, after having shown considerable talent in art classes, Ivor Hele left Australia to travel to Paris via Italy and resume his artistic training among European ateliers. In Europe he studied casts, anatomy, the figure in life classes, learning to draw and paint form and light. He returned several years later, suitcase crammed with art books and drawings, having considerably improved his art practice. Upon returning to Adelaide, he set up a studio and began creating artworks for exhibitions and art prizes. He was successful at a young age, winning several art shows and establishing himself. After several exhibitions he chose not to exhibit commercially again, deciding to sell his work solely to commissioners and collectors.


Hele enlisted in the armed forces in June 1940 and left for North Africa in Nov, in 1941 he was appointed official war artist. Hele spent a year at the frontlines in the North African campaign from 1941-42 and 5 months in the Korean War and his grimly realistic paintings are among the most impressive of any done during those conflicts.
What can be said of the emotional impact witnessing, and recording a brutal war had on the artist? The conditions at war were tremendous, the temperate conditions of the desert and jungle and the struggle against an enemy. The mountainous brutal deaths of soldiers are seen in his paintings, among scenes of men around mortar and portraits of commanders. He spent the next year with troops from the 6th Australian Division AIF in North Africa and returned to his studio in South Australia in 1942 to complete a series of paintings of their actions then to New Guinea.
“The war artist has had to contend not only with enemy action but also with adverse natural conditions. In the Middle East he had to endure extremes of heat and cold, and sandstorms. In New Guinea he has encountered completely different conditions - tropical storms, mud and swamps and rain forests. The vast open spaces of the North African desert have been replaced by tracks through dense jungle and kunai grass. In the Middle East the artist did at least enjoy the advantage of transport. In New Guinea he has been forced to accompany the troops usually on foot, carrying not only the same equipment, clothing, arms and operational rations as the fighting troops but also his sketching outfit in addition. Like the fighting troops he has to ward off malaria, scrub-typhus, tinea, tropical sores, and dermatitis; to sleep out not for one night but for many in rain and mud and to live for days at a time in wet clothes. Fresh food is often scarce. These conditions, I suggest, must be allowed for when the work of the artists is judged. The Army, which knows the conditions with which they have to contend, has a profound admiration for what they had done and are doing.”
' From Exhibition of New Guinea Pictures by Ivor Hele'


After enduring emotional ordeals during the war, and dealing with a divorce and re marriage, plus being a public figure because of his Archibald success, Ivor Hele became a recluse. Upon returning to Australia from his war expeditions, he worked as a portrait painter, painting notable politicians and dignitaries, who traveled to his beach cottage to sit for him. He also produced a substantial amount of private work of his wife, who modeled for him daily.

Ivor Hele is an artist of form, interested in the curves of the body and the tones of multilayered war scenes, figures receding in depth in dusty deserts. Ivor Hele created a significant body of work, he was prolific overseas and prolific upon returning. He worked quickly with sketching materials, creating drawings with pen and ink, charcoal, pencil and conte.

Ivor Hele’s art is a triumph of the human spirit over appalling conditions, an artist who showed bravery and produced art in appalling conditions. It is a testament to the power of the artist, that a painting can reproduce the horrors and emotions of a war, and create challenging work against adversity. Ivor Hele artworks remain to document a war better that no written record could ever accomplish a visual reminder of bravery and loss.

Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville is a contemporary British figure painter born in 1970.

Jenny Saville paints figurative paintings of large, fleshy, obese women with a tremendous physicality about them. Saville is not a painter of conventional beauty, although her painting approach is beautiful, lush tones and thick fleshy forms, she chooses a confrontational subject choice (rather than simply observational) for her paintings. Saville is most often compared to contemporary British painter Lucian Freud and Peter Paul Rubens (work seen in previous posts) in her portrayal of flesh as art.
Huge figures, painted large in scale confront our notions of beauty in an age saturated by notions of skinniness and runway models, femininity and idealized images of the female figure.

Saville traveled to NY in the mid 1990’s spending hours in the workplace of Dr. Barry Martin Weintraub, a plastic surgeon based in the city. There she took photographs of patients receiving cosmetic surgeries and liposuctions, gaining an understanding of the anatomy of the human body and the manipulations possible by surgery. This physical understanding led to a psychological awareness of the factors behind the alterations present in patients, and the market for medical beautification.
Saville is interested in gender in art. Her artworks are exclusively of women, transsexuals and transgender people often in confronting, violent positions. There is also a certain
tenderness present in some works, a hidden look of vulnerability as seen in an image like

Saville fulfills what it means to be a figure painter in the twenty first century. With a certain amount of abstraction and realism, her works are both modern and traditional. She pushes paint around in passages of intensity and areas of quiet, moving the eye around the flesh. She often adds several figures in one picture, twisting, stretching in different
angles.


Saville describes her painting approach in her work passage… “I was looking for a kind of contemporary architecture of the body. I wanted to paint a visual passage through gender – a sort of gender landscape. To scale from the penis, across a stomach to the breasts, and finally the head. I tried to make the lips and eyes be very seductive and use directional mark-making to move your eye around the flesh.”
Saville describes the scale of her paintings
“I like that sense of awe. I'm small, so to make something huge just fills me up. I love that ability to make something, to make marks across the surface and have the physicality of it take over my body. I like art that's not really intellectual, something that has to do with sensation.”

Passage 2004 336 x 290 cm
, Saville writes that she “was interested in the malls, where you saw lots of big women. Big white flesh in shorts and T-shirts. It was good to see because they had the physicality that I was interested in.”
Born in 1970, she came of age in the 1980s: "Everyone was obsessed with the body - it was all about dieting, gym, the body beautiful. Pornography, Aids were the big debates." She was influenced by feminism. "As a child I'd look through art books and there were no women artists. Of course, you start to ask why not." And: "Could I make a painting of a nude in my own voice? It's such a male-laden art, so historically weighted. The way women were depicted didn't feel like mine, too cute. I wasn't interested in admired or idealised beauty."

As one writer points out “Her exaggerated nudes point up, with an agonizing frankness, the disparity between the way women are perceived and the way that they feel about their bodies”. Saville uses the scale of her canvases to achieve the scope of her ideas. Her ginormous figures tumble across the canvas and into the viewer's physical space, hyper large and hyper real with an intense physicality.
“I have moved from the anatomy of the body to the anatomy of paint," she says. "That is how I see it. Spaces within the body of the paint are what interest me now."

Her images offer a queasy experience of fragmented bodies, uncomfortable and uneasy, her paint becoming flesh and her images sparking doubts about our own bodies.

What relevance does jenny Saville’s work have to the 21st century? Her painting technique is rooted in strong traditional tonal realism with servings of abstraction in areas of the figure. Her subject matter doesn’t shy away from confrontation, from shocking the viewer by its inherent size and scale, flesh painted with gusto. Saville’s rightful fame is rooted not just in her talent with a brush, but the relevance of the body in our current culture. A culture that obsesses with the body image and beauty, Saville work is a reflection on the neurotic nagging voice of doubt and unease within our bodies and minds.

Peter Paul Rubens

Sir Peter Paul Rubens born June 28, 1577 –May 30, 1640) was a prolific seventeenth-century Flemish Baroque painter, who combined Flemish technique with classical based renaissance themes. Rubens established a studio, where artists would collaborate on artworks. Most notable of his students is Anthony Van Dyke and Frans Snyders. Rubens would draft drawings of elaborate genre and religious scenes, and his students would paint large portions of it. Work can be categorized into those painted by Rubens himself, those which he painted in part (mainly hands and faces), and those he only supervised.
self portrait
Rubens should be considered an illustrator and a fine artist. He worked mostly for clients, such as the nobility and church. Rubens used the production of prints and book title-pages, to extend his fame throughout Europe during this part of his career. Rubens established copyright for his prints. Most significantly in Holland, where his work was widely copied through print. In addition he established copyrights for his work in England, France and Spain.The fall of the damned

Rubens gigantic paintings include dozens of figures contorted in dynamic rhythmic poses.
Rubens was a baroque painter, inspired by the Italian greats such as Michelangelo, Titian and Caravaggio.

Helene Fourment in her wedding Dress
Dressed in a gigantic dress, Helene looks gazingly at the viewer. She sits on the edge of her chair, round faced and soft skinned, at ease. Rubens painted full figured women, fleshy and large. His Women often having seemingly small heads. Critics point out that his women look startlingly similar. This is especially evident in the Rape of the daughters of Leucippus.
From Rubens perspective, painting women allowed him to portray his own feminine ideal:


Rubens men are also astonishingly large to unnatural proportions. His paintings of gods serve as models for idealistically exaggerated beings.
The drunken silenus
Silenus staggers drunk, a hunk of a man, heavy set, overweight but muscular. His back leg strides against the ground, his figure caught in motion. Rubens had a brilliant knack for rhythmic composition. The heads of the figures leave an arc down to the figures composed on the ground.

What makes Rubens paintings so spectacular? Besides the staggeringly incredible painterly technique, Rubens paintings are spectacular because they are intense, vigorous, living compositions that are filled by incredible beings. They portray immaculate dramas, intensely populated and dynamic, the characters in his paintings are not stiff or dull in any sense. They are engaged, in motion, expressing themselves in a way that seems believable but larger than life.

Alex Kanevsky

I have been a long time admirer of Alex Kanevsky’s work because of his gutsy painting approach and figurative subject matter.
Kanevsky describes his technique and final painting as a process of finding the right notes on each layer. He writes “So I work fast, trying to hit the right note every time. That is nearly impossible, so I constantly fail. But I keep coming back to a painting. It accumulates layers, each one - more or lass a complete painting. Complete but failed. The layers are sort of like Swiss cheese - they have holes through which in right places you can see the previous layers. Eventually there are enough of "good holes" and also, because of all the repeated attempts, I manage to do a good top layer. And then I have a painting that has enough intensity in every passage to satisfy me. Then it is done.”

You can see from his progression photos on his website the technique he describes. Each layer is a finished painting in its own right, though through the artist’s eye it is not entirely satisfying. Here are progress images from his work titled “ Blue Bathroom”

All the steps can be seen here http://www.somepaintings.net/2009/ACprogress/index.htm

Each layer has its own life force, its strengths and flaws, its own decisions and thoughts.
He writes “They are in some ways diaries of their own creation.”

I am still unsure what makes Alex Kanevsky's paintings so visually appealing and delightful on the eye. I think it is the combination of a unique approach and the authority that captures his subjects in a raw subjective manner.
The bride is a supreme example of Alex Kanevsky’s painting skill.


A woman kneels on a bed wearing a wedding dress with a haunting expression, her eyes lost in the shadow of her face.
Alex Kanevsky’s figures appear somehow trapped against their backgrounds, blended in amongst the shadows, sometimes disappearing among the colour.



Alex Kanevsky’s website
Interviews :
http://rtspot.wordpress.com/2009/01/08/alex-kanevsky/
http://www.vivianite.net/alex-kanevsky-3.aspx

A common compliment given to artists is that their paintings look like photographs. Many artists, myself included, find this offensive in some way. Should a painting exist if its function is simply to reproduce in the most realistic way the effects of a camera lens?

Realism and realist art has long suffered from criticisms that it is outdated and inefficient in comparison to photos. Traditionalist realist art has suffered under the tight grip of modern art for the past century, and while this has broadened art in unforeseeable directions, the traditions and practices of the past have almost been lost.

What separates a photo from a realistic painting?


Jacon Collins : Candace Profile 2004

Realism can be separated into many movements and styles
Below is a list of some fields of realism which will be discussed in my study
• Realism (arts), the depiction of subjects as they appear in everyday life
• Realism (visual arts), a style of painting that depicts what the eye can see
• Classical Realism, an artistic movement in late 20th Century that valued beauty and artistic skill
• Hyperrealism (painting), a genre of painting that resembles high resolution photography
• Photorealism, a genre of painting that resembles photography
• Social realism, an artistic movement which depicts working class activities



In his criticism of abstraction Fred Ross writes “ As ARC Founder Brian Yoder has put it elsewhere, art fictionalizes reality. The artist takes elements of reality and rearranges them in such a way that he makes perceivable an idea, a concept, an impression of the world. In other words, it is the artist, a human being, who is doing the selecting - not nature and not chance.”

The nature of reality and its representation is a broad topic with many conflicting answers. During the following months I wish to discuss some of these facets of realism using figure painting as the vehicle with which to analyze.

first post

Hello and Welcome to my blog.
This blog is part of a folio that will be created as part of a year 12 subject I am undertaking called Extension Studies. The title of my study is "I aim to explore the connection between illustration and fine art."
I am developing an in-depth understanding of how the human body is represented by both artists and illustrators: the focus of the study is the crossover of how skills and understandings are used by both for different purposes. I will be looking at the similarities and differences of how artists and illustrators work and how they compliment each other.Jon Foster

My aims for this study are:

• To gain a greater understanding of illustration and fine art
• Create a variety of artworks that demonstrate my creativity and technical skills in handling a variety of media.
• Learn more about illustrators and fine artists
• write about illustration and fine art

The areas of study I am undertaking are

• Technical study of anatomy, art materials and technique.
• Themes and ideas as expressed through the depiction of the human form- for example, emotions, likeness, narrative.
• methods of representation- for example: cubism, realism, abstraction and surrealism

Anders Zorn

please give me feedback.