Art History Guide

Ivan Le Lorraine Albright (February 20, 1897 – November 18, 1983) was a magic realist painter and artist, most renowned for his self-portraits, character studies, and still lifes.
Ivan Albright and his identical twin Malvin were born near Chicago in North Harvey, Illinois, to Adam Emory Albright and Clara Wilson Albright. Their father was a landscape painter, and came from a family of master gunsmiths, whose original name was “Albrecht”. The brothers were inseparable during childhood, and throughout much of their young adulthood. Both enrolled in The Art Institute of Chicago, a coin-flip deciding that Ivan would study painting and Malvin sculpture. Ivan particularly admired the work of El Greco and Rembrandt, but was quick to develop a style all his own.
Albright attended Northwestern University, but dropped out and took up studies in architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. During World War I he did medical drawings for a hospital in Nantes, France, morbid work that probably influenced his later style. After working in architecture and advertising briefly he was pushed away by commercialism and took seriously to painting. After living in Philadelphia through most of 1925 and 1926, he returned to Illinois, where he began to achieve some substantial success, having his first show in 1930.
Among Albright’s typically dark, mysterious works are some of the most meticulously executed paintings ever made, often requiring years to complete. Lace curtains or splintered wood would be recreated using brushes of a single hair. The amount of effort that went into his paintings made him quite possessive of them. Even during the Great Depression he charged 30 to 60 times what comparable artists were charging, with the result that sales were infrequent. In order to survive he relied on the support of his father, and took odd carpentering jobs. An early painting of his, The Lineman won an award and made the cover of Electric Light and Power, a trade magazine. However his stooped and forlorn portrayal caused controversy among the readership, who did not consider such an image representative. The editors later distanced themselves from Albright’s work.
Albright focused on a few themes through most of his works, particularly death, life, the material and the spirit, and the effects of time. He painted very complex works, and their titles matched their complexity. He would not name a painting until it was complete, at which time he would come up with several possibilities, more poetic than descriptive, before deciding on one. Such an example is Poor Room - There is No Time, No End, No Today, No Yesterday, No Tomorrow, Only the Forever, and Forever and Forever Without End (The Window), the last two words actually describing the painting (it was as such the painting is generally referred). Another painting, And Man Created God in His Own Image, was called God Created Man in His Own Image when it toured the South. One of his most famous paintings, which took him some ten years to complete, was titled That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do (The Door), which won top prize at three major exhibitions in New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia in 1941. The prize at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York earned him a $3,500 purchase award and a place in the permanent collection, but, not willing to part with the work for less than $125,000, Albright took the First medal instead, allowing him to keep the painting.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Ivan Albright (1943)

In 1943 he was commissioned to create the title painting for Albert Lewinz’s film adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. His realistic, but exaggerated, depictions of decay and corruption made him very well suited to undertake such a project. His brother was chosen to do the original uncorrupted painting of Gray, but another artist’s was used in the film. Ivan’s was a great success, and made him somewhat of an instant celebrity.
Albright was a prolific artist throughout his life, working as a printer and engraver as well as a painter. He made his own paints and charcoal, and carved his own elaborate frames. He was a stickler for detail, creating elaborate setups for paintings before starting work. He was obsessive about lighting to the point that he painted his studio black, and wore black clothing to cut out potential glare.
Later in life he lived in Woodstock, Vermont. Despite much time spent travelling the world, he never stopped working. Albright made over twenty self-portraits in his last three years, even on his deathbed, drawing the final ones after a stroke. He died in 1983.

References to dreams in art are as old as literature itself: the story of Gilgamesh, the Bible, and the Iliad all describe dreams of major characters such as Callum and the meanings thereof. However, dreams as art, without a “real” frame story, appear to be a later development—though there is no way to know whether many premodern works were dream-based.
In European literature, the Romantic movement emphasized the value of emotion and irrational inspiration. “Visions”, whether from dreams or intoxication, served as raw material and were taken to represent the artist’s highest creative potential.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Symbolism and Expressionism introduced dream imagery into visual art. Expressionism was also a literary movement, and included the later work of the playwright August Strindberg, who coined the term “dream play” for a style of narrative that did not distinguish between fantasy and reality.
At the same time, discussion of dreams reached a new level of public awareness in the Western world due to the work of Sigmund Freud, who introduced the notion of the subconscious mind as a field of scientific inquiry. Freud greatly influenced the 20th-century Surrealists, who combined the visionary impulses of Romantics and Expressionists with a focus on the unconscious as a creative tool, and an assumption that apparently irrational content could contain significant meaning, perhaps more so than rational content.
The invention of film and animation brought new possibilities for vivid depiction of nonrealistic events, but films consisting entirely of dream imagery have remained an avant-garde rarity. Comic books and comic strips have explored dreams somewhat more often, starting with Winsor McCay’s popular newspaper strips; the trend toward confessional works in alternative comics of the 1980s saw a proliferation of artists drawing their own dreams.
Dream material continues to be used by a wide range of contemporary artists for various purposes. This practice is considered by some to be of psychological value for the artist—independent of the artistic value of the results—as part of the discipline of “dream work”.

About William Blake–>

Today, I’m featuring an amateur fantasy artist and good friend, Samantha J. Aura. Sammy, is an aspiring fantasy artist oozing with talent. I find her skill and talent for creating people, characters and landscape awesome in one so young.

Interview with Samantha J. Aura

For readers to get to know Sammy I have setup some interview questions that she answered. I want to thank Samantha for allowing me to feature her on my blog. Thank you, Sammy!

Also, she has a gallery of her works at Deviant Art, Sammy J. Aura. If you are a writer of scifi/fantasy in need of fantasy and cover art for your work. I recommend that you check out Sammy’s work.

Salvador Dali was an eccentric best known for his engaging, but incrediablity unothodoxed and surrealist work. His flair for the dramatic and nonconformist attitude drew a wide range of people to purchase his work. His most famous work The Persistence of Memory (1931) introduced the surrealistic imagery of soft melting clocks/watches in a strange landscape.

Wikipedia has an indepth information and bio of the unconventional man — Salvador Dali (Wikipedia)

No. Fantasy Art has been with the human race for thousands of years. Mankind has always been made of dreamers. If we didn’t have dreamers then we wouldn’t have the luxuries and technologies that we now enjoy.

The discovery of prehistoric cave paintings depicted mythical creatures, gods and imaginary fantasy beasts. Is it a possibility that what was depicted on the stone walls, existed or was it just imagination? Only the prehistoric man knows.

(Picture featured — Pech Merle Prehistory Center)

In my research if there were anyone to be considered the father of fantasy art it would have to be Hieronymous Bosch (c. 1450 - 1516). A lavish Early Netherlandish painter of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. His works depicted sin, human degradation and immorality. What you would see in his paintings was unreal landscapes, burning buildings, wicked human figures, demons and exotic, phantasmagorical objects. Bosch’s painting techniques were rendered with a delicate precision of that time period.

I find Bosch’s paintings for that time, advanced, vibrant and disturbing. The 15th century ushered in the modern era, a confluence of changing languages, ideology, and technology. The 15th century was the precursor to the Reformation of the 16th century. This was a time when many changes occured as the medieval period was coming to an end.

I believe that Bosch witnessed a great many things throughout his life that caused his distorted view of the world. Also, the astringent and harsh machinations of churches, religions and governments played a part in this view. Bosch’s overall sense of art would later be cultivated and further refined several hundred years later by artists such as Salvador Dali and H. R. Giger.

Bosch’s most famous work is the disconcerted Garden of Earthly Delights.

A large triptych, it’s original function remains a mystery.

Hello! I’m Sherrie Hibbs (S. P. Hibbs) and have recently joined 451 Press. Thank you for allowing me to be apart of your team. This week I will be doing posts on fantasy art, artists and featuring an amateur artist. Now, to the feature blog.

Fantasy art is a genre of art that depicts magical or other supernatural themes, ideas, creatures, or settings. While there is some overlap with science fiction, horror, and other speculative fiction art, there are unique elements not generally found in other forms of speculative fiction art. Depictions of ancient myths and legends, as well as depictions of modern day fantasy in the form of divine interventions and other magical or supernatural forces, are very common elements, and help distinguish fantasy art from other forms. Dragons, wizards, fairies, and other fantastical and mythical creatures are common features in fantasy art.
Fantasy art is strongly linked to fantasy fiction. Indeed, fantasy art pieces are often intended to represent specific characters or scenes from works of fantasy literature. Such works created by amateur artists is fanart.

There is a large subculture based around the creation of amateur fantasy art. This is largely centered around websites such as Elfwood. Such sites are noticeably less male-dominated than some other pursuits related to the fantasy genre.
Fantasy art should not be confused with the fantastic art genre, which can contain fantastical elements that are not always considered “fantasy” per se.

Fantasy Art and High Culture

Despite the technical skill of many of its practitioners, and despite (or arguably because of) its popularity, Fantasy art is not considered part of the ‘canon’, or ‘fine art’, in the sense that it is not hung in galleries, subsidized by governments, studied in art schools etc.

A few works that are ‘canonical’, particularly surrealism or Pre-Raphaelite works, have many characteristics in common with fantasy art. For example The Castle in the Pyrenees by Rene Magritte, and The Lady of Shalott by John William Waterhouse, would almost certainly be accepted as fantasy art if an artist who presented them as such had created them recently. As with much fantasy art, the latter illustrates a scene from another work. Other modern fantasy artists use the Art Nouveau Movement and other high culture art movements with the contention that fantasy or faerie art should be critically evaluated and noticed by academic institutions. Finucane defines his art stylistics as “Neo-Medieval”, rather than using the escapist terminology of “fantasy art” to define his work. Historical standards of what is high art or what is not high art was a common problem for now famous artists like the Glasgow School, who were also unfairly defined as inferior artists in their time.

Nonetheless these works are accorded the status of fine art, and not considered to be connected to fantasy art. The situation could arguably be compared to the way in which certain critically-esteemed works may be treated as if they had no connection to non-’literary’ genres, for example Nineteen Eighty-four and science fiction.

Click HERE to check out the complete entry from Wikipedia with some examples of fantasy art.