Oh, musical artists? None, really. Artists as in a guy with a paintbrush whose name isn't Felipe and whose canvas isn't a recently vacated rental? (Just a jab at an old friend, so don't get offended!) Alberto Vargas and Adolph Hitler. Yeah, yeah! I know. Mention Hitler and everybody freaks out. But his more nefarious aspect aside (and I know it's really really hard to look past it), I happen to like his paintings. I wish I could lay my hands on affordable prints of them. It'd be neat to see how many people appreciate the work, maybe even think it's the most beautiful, delicate scenery they've ever seen, then let them see who the artist is and see if they change their minds.
I'm going to take the term "artists" and apply it to a whole range of folks: Writing - Terry Goodkind, James Clemens, Rita L. Lampkin (she writes language books), Janet Evanovich Music - A Perfect Circle, Coheed and Cambria, Rush, Iron Maiden, Atmosphere, Tupac, Nobuo Uematsu Art - my friend Steve and my girlfriend are my favorites (one doing sketches/painting, the other doing photography)
Musicalness- Ludwig van Beethoven, Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart (Gottlieb is the german translation of 'amadeus'). Drawing- meself, of course, and Jaques-Louis David (er, whatever his french-ass name was).
Yeah, that's what I'm talkin about. Although I've never really cared much for Pink Floyd. Pardon the blasphemy. - N
spidergoat-Do you have any links to his portfolio? I've only seen a scant few. Which ones have you seen?
Okay, wait. Here's the challenge. Can you separate the mass murderer from the artist? http://www.snyderstreasures.net/pages/hartworks.htm#a15 Can any of you draw an honest opinion on these paintings without having it tainted by what you know about the man's later years? What I find even sadder than the fact that I believe that most of you can't, is that the only reason these paintings are fetching high prices is because of those later years.
Actually, as odd as it may seem, I rather enjoy a lot of Hitler's works simply because they are beautiful and the composition is wonderful. No doubt these fetch high prices because of what he did, but these also remind me of the same paintings my girlfriend and I have decided to purchase from antique stores. Whoever told Hitler that he would never make it as a painter should be shot... then again, they're long dead now anyway so... hah. http://www.snyderstreasures.net/images/artworks/StoneArch.jpg This is my favorite.
Oh yeah, the Stone Arch is breath-taking. I read on one site that he was rejected from art school because he couldn't render the human figure. Did you see the red-pencil piece called "Germania"? If that's "incapable" of rendering the human figure, what the heck do they consider "capable"? I'd always heard that he was thrown out because they were looking for cubism, abstracts, dadaism (I think it was around at the time), and didn't want to bother with people who weren't artsy-fartsy avant-garde snobs. There's no excuse for the Holocaust, but I wonder how different things would be if he had just stayed plugging away at the art world? Would the Reich have found another speaker so charismatic? Would the Nazi movement have dissolved as a bunch of failed radicals?
That's the fun part about history, the 'What Ifs.' And I think you may be right, since it was the early 1900s and people were more concerned with abstract art (isn't this when the abstract movement took off?) than anything that seemed real. Mostly, I'd gather, because "real" art was being taken over by the movement of photography and photographers at the time were taking pictures and using various techinques to make the pictures seem like paintings. Very interesting little bit of trivia.
*laughs* True. But I don't like Hitler the person, so I think I can detach myself enough to enjoy the images that he painted.
I'm relieved that I'm not alone in that! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! I guess as an artist myself I know too well how different artists can be from their "other selves", so I tend to ignore the politics of an artist (can't stand Johnny Depp's politics, but I enjoy his films) and just focus on the art. I even have to admit that I like some of Barbara Streisand's music and acting, but I really wouldn't miss her if she dropped off the face of the planet. Speaking of artists, we had some fun a few years back with some paintings that we found. They came from two different places, but had been painted by the same guy, probably for a motel or something. One showed two tigers just sort of sitting there and chilling out, the other was a huge sailing ship. The colors were white and orange for highlights and background, and black for the subject. (Like drawn in black and colored in with white and orange where needed.) All we know of the artist is his signature, V Ryan. One had been thrown out, the other had been abandoned in an apartment. We thought it was a neat coincidence to find these two pieces by the same guy in two separate cities on the same day, so we kept them. Then we started looking for others by going through thrift stores. We were saying things like "That almost looks like his hand..." and other such art afficionado type phrases, then we started dropping his name. Instead of pronouncing it RYE-an, though, we were calling him ree-AHN just to make it sound French. We concocted this story about the guy and his troubled, tragic life and all kinds of BS, which as the story grew, we started dressing up like art dealers to go to the thirft stores. We actually got a few people in different stores to start flipping through the paintings trying to nonchalantly look at the artists' names! Ah, what fun to mess with people's minds! We still have the Ryans (so far the only two known to be in existence). We call the ship "Riding the Storm" and tell people how it reflects Ryan's difficult childhood. The one with the tigers is "Feline Repose In the Wild". According to the legend of V Ryan it was his last painting, done from life. It was found in a wildlife preserve in India along with a smashed easel, one of Ryan's shoes, and no trace of the artist. It's believed that he walked away from the human world to become one with nature. (More likely he became one with the tigers' digestive tracts, but we let people drawn their own conclusions.) Somewhere is probably a hack painter with a huge alimony payment, a mountain of bills, and ungrateful kids he only sees every other weekend trying desperately to churn out that next painting for Motel 6, unaware that (for awhile, at least) he was a mysterious legend among amateur art collectors in Silicon Valley.
