Leon Richman ~ Figurative sculptor

Beginning in medium to large-scale marble figures, his passion to explore the beauty of the human form in all dimensions soon led him to a more pliable medium, allowing more freedom in the creative process. The result has been an inspired body of work, each piece possessing its own unique spirit and personality.
Leon Richman is a California artist with a formal education from the renowned Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and years of practical experience in the field of commercial art, but his soul and passion have always been deeply rooted in the finer arts. He has almost as many years experience in drawing and painting as he’s been living and breathing. Now he has directed his creative ambitions towards the art of sculpture.
Chosen to study under the tutelage of the internationally acclaimed sculptor Richard MacDonald, Leon Richman has since become even more skillful at the physical interpretation of the human spirit, not settling for a simple duplication of a posing body, but instilling his sculptures with the same passion he feels in their creation.

Eva Gonzalès | Les grandes dames of Impressionism

Eva Gonzalès (1849-1883) was a French Impressionist painter.

She was one of the four most notable female Impressionists in the nineteenth century, along with Mary Cassatt (1844-1926), Berthe Morisot (1841-95) and Marie Bracquemond (1840-1916).

Gonzalès began her professional training and took lessons in drawing in 1865, from the society portraitist Charles Chaplin, who was also Mary Cassatt's teacher.

Martin Johnson Heade and the Hudson River School

Art historians have come to disagree with the common view that Martin Johnson Heade (-1819-1904) is a Hudson River School painter, a view given wide currency by Heade's inclusion in a landmark exhibition of Hudson River School landscapes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1987.

The leading Heade scholar and author of Heade's catalogue raisonne, Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., wrote some years after the 1987 Hudson River School exhibition that "...other scholars-myself included-have increasingly come to doubt that Heade is most usefully seen as standing within that school".

Albert Carrier-Belleuse | Chryselephantine sculpture

Carrier-Belleuse is the name used by this sculptor -born Carrier de Belleuse- on his mature pieces, after initially signing works "A. Carrier". His career began firmly in the applied arts, with his apprenticeship at thirteen to a Parisian ciseleur today known as Bauchery (or Beauchery), and he did subsequent work for Jacques-Henri Fauconnier and Fannière Frères. His formal education took place at the Petite Ecole - chosen after an unhappy stint at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1840 under the direction of David d'Angers, his official master.

While at the Petite Ecole in the 1840s, Carrier-Belleuse began his lifelong practice of providing commercial houses with models for edition, as statuettes or as ornament for functional pieces. Around 1850, the sculptor moved to England as a designer for Minton China Works, at Stoke-upon-Trent, as well as for Wedgewood, Coalbrookdale Ironworks, and Graham Jackson furniture makers.

Even after returning to Paris in 1855, he continued to send models to British firms throughout his life.

He began to garner acclaim as a fine-arts sculptor after ten years of showing in the Salon, beginning with two portrait medallions in 1850 and a flurry of busts and groups with mythological or historical subjects between 1857-1861, the latter of which earned him a third-class medal.

Catherine Calcagni | Ed intanto fuori piove..

Assorta nella penombra

delle pagine gialle della mia vita

mi siedo con l'abbandono

con le mani raccolgo il vuoto

e mi conforta la pena

non guardo fuori...

sento solo....confesso

il rigurgito fuso delle mie angosce

eppur..... c'era il sole

Jeremy Mann

The fountain of the Four Rivers / La Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi, 1651

Quattro enormi allegorie sedute in pose contrastanti agli angoli delle rocce in marmo bianco che rappresentano i maggiori fiumi di ciascuno dei quattro continenti noti, secondo le cognizioni geografiche del XVII secolo:

Il Danubio per l'Europa, scolpito da Antonio Raggi;

Il Gange per l'Asia di Claude Poussin;

Il Rio della Plata per l'America di Francesco Baratta;

Il Nilo per l'Africa di Antonio Fancelli.

Will Barnet | Abstract painter

American painter and printmaker Will Barnet (1911-2012) has lived through every major artistic school in modern American art.

He can remember watching John Singer Sergent paint murals on the ceiling of the Boston Public Library in the 1920s, and being the printmaker in New York for Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco.

He remembers the explosion of Abstract Expressionism that would come to define the so-called New York School of artists.

Alda Merini / Michelangelo | Bambino..

Bambino,

se trovi l'aquilone della tua fantasia

legalo con l'intelligenza del cuore.

Vedrai sorgere giardini incantati

e tua madre diventerà una pianta

che ti coprirà con le sue foglie.

Michelangelo Buonarroti | La Madonna di Bruges 1503-1505