International Artist Day is a great day to celebrate art and artists. Treat yourself to an exhibition, visit a gallery or museum in your town or city. There are a great many wonderful exhibitions to see: Starting with Oenone Hammersley’s paintings on display at Walton Fine Arts, on Walton Street in London.
Oenone Hammersley, a visionary artist with a heritage of creativity, has undertaken a captivating odyssey of transformation. Her latest compilation, fittingly named Art for the Earth-Fire and Water, serves as evidence of a significant shift in artistic direction. This shift not only captivated audiences in the United States but also sparked enthusiasm among art lovers globally.
Oenone’s recent series, Art for the Earth-Fire and Water, delves into the elemental forces that shape our existence. The paintings, exhibited on cut-out wooden panels and canvas at Walton Fine Arts, explore the duality of fire and water—forces that simultaneously create and consume. The Fire paintings exude a fierce energy, while the Water pieces, inspired by Oceans of Plastic awareness day on November 22nd, call attention to environmental issues with a blend of fantasy and reality.
Oenone’s innovative technique is as captivating as the themes she explores. Utilizing a method that combines hand painting with multiple paint pouring, her creations come to life with a vibrancy that transcends traditional boundaries. The incorporation of collage adds layers of texture and complexity, making each piece a narrative in itself. The result is a collection of unique and powerful works that have earned Oenone several international awards, with her recent focus on water exemplifying a heightened level of abstraction, delivering a poignant message about the urgent need to preserve the natural world. A percentage from sales will benefit Ocean Conservancy.
Oenone Hammersley doesn’t just welcome evolution; she turns it into a captivating visual journey. Art for the Earth-Fire and Water goes beyond being a mere collection; it stands as a testament to the profound impact art can have, stirring emotions, sparking contemplation, and instigating transformative change. Hammersley’s adept navigation of unexplored artistic realms serves as an inspiring example, affirming that an artist can successfully shift directions, imprinting an enduring mark on the ever-evolving canvas of contemporary art.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is showing a superb exhibition of Manet and Degas paintings on display until 7th January 2024.
This exhibition examines one of the most significant artistic dialogues in modern art history: the close and sometimes tumultuous relationship between Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas. Born only two years apart, Manet (1832–1883) and Degas (1834–1917) were friends, rivals, and, at times, antagonists who worked to define modern painting in France. By examining their careers in parallel and presenting their work side by side, this exhibition investigates how their artistic objectives and approaches both overlapped and diverged.
Through more than 160 paintings and works on paper, Manet/Degas takes a fresh look at the interactions of these two artists in the context of the family relationships, friendships, and intellectual circles that influenced their artistic and professional choices, deepening our understanding of a key moment in nineteenth-century French painting.
Also showing at the Met: Vertigo of Color: Matisse, Derain, and the Origins of Fauvism on until 21st January 2024.
Over an intense nine weeks in the summer of 1905 in the modest fishing village of Collioure on the French Mediterranean, Henri Matisse and Andre Derain embarked on a partnership that led to a wholly new, radical artistic language later known as Fauvism. Their daring, energetic experiments with color, form, structure, and perspective changed the course of French painting; it marked an introduction to early modernism and introduced Matisse’s first important body of work in his long career. This exhibition, which is co-organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, emphasizes as never before the legacy of that summer and examines the paintings, drawings, and watercolors of Matisse and Derain through sixty-five works on loan from national and international museums, including Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou; National Galleries of Scotland; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; as well as private collections.
With this new direction in painting, Matisse and Derain manipulated color in radical ways—nature took on hues responding to the artists’ sensations rather than reality. At the Salon d’Automne in 1905, when Matisse and Derain unveiled their controversial canvases, a prominent French journalist labeled them “les Fauves,” or wild beasts.
At the National Gallery in London is an exhibition of Frans Hals on until 21st January.2024.
Four hundred years since they were painted, Frans Hals’s portraits still breathe with life. There’s the hint of a smile, a hand resting nonchalantly on a hip, and just occasionally, a burst of laughter.
Meet the striking characters Hals brought to life in this exhibition of some 50 of his best works. It’s the first major Hals retrospective in more than thirty years.
Hals enthralled 17th-century Dutch audiences. His style was pioneering for the time, showing relaxed, lively sitters, often smiling, and even laughing. This gifted artist’s deft brushwork was unparalleled. He changed the face of portraiture forever.
See these intimate portraits, lively groups scenes and marriage portraits reunited after centuries apart. Amongst them is the first-ever loan of his most famous picture, ‘The Laughing Cavalier’ (1624), from the Wallace Collection, and paintings that have never left the Netherlands.
Exhibition organised by the National Gallery, the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and the Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin with the special collaboration of the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem.
Enjoy your day on 8th December celebrating art and artists wherever you live.
skype – quitegr8