Favorite Classical Artists

Introduction

I would consider myself as someone who loves art. Not traditional art, though. Sorry for sounding like a degenerate hipster, but most of the visual art pieces I enjoy are not exactly ones you'd find in a museum. A lot of my favorite pieces are from individual comic panels, manga covers, 3D Blender renderings and animations, digital art I found on Reddit, art my friends made, screenshots from movies, and more like this. That being said, over the years I've come to really appreciate a few "traditional" artists. Feel free to take a moment and check out the (not comprehensive) list of artists, and some sample works, below!


Francisco De Goya (1746 - 1828)

Francisco De Goya (1746 - 1828)

Sample Work: This Is How Useful Men Usually End Up (1814)

Goya has such a cool story arc as a human being. To me, his life is a story of aging and becoming jaded. I love how his early works were so traditional and honestly boring, but as he moved later in life they just turned darker and more authentic. Later in his life, he made the 14 "Black Paintings", dark works that represented his fear of insanity and evolving bleak outlook on life. I actually named my dog, Saturn, after my favorite of these works, Saturn Devouring His Son. I remember seeing these in person in Spain; they're all in a dark and eerily-lighted room, the aesthetic is perfect! Anyway, the work I chose here is one of his sketches. I would hope I don't age with the same fear he did, but I respect his bleak and transparent horror of life seen in this sketch, where he laments his growing older.


Hieronymus Bosch (~1450 - 1516)

Hieronymus Bosch (~1450 - 1516)

Sample Work: The Garden of Earthly Delights (1510)

There's a subreddit I frequent for art called r/wimmelbilder. It describes wimmelbilder as "a genre of pictures filled to the brim with people, animals, vehicles, monsters and all kinds of stuff". Think "Where's Waldo". I love art with a lot of stuff going on, and many of Bosch's famous works are just that. His most famous works are triptych altarpieces, which are panel paintings of three sections that can be folded together. His works have tons of crazy detail, which I love, but the icing on the cake is they're often filled with bizarre and grim mini-scenes. The piece I've highlighted here is his most famous. It depics "The Garden of Eden", "The Garden of Earthly Delights", and "Hell", essentially heaven, earth, and Hell. It's known for it's severly odd imagery, especially in the "Hell" section (see the birdman devouring a human with birds flying out of their ass). Spend some time looking at the Wikipedia article for a more in-depth look at its brilliance!


Zdzisław Beksiński (1929 - 2005)

Zdzisław Beksiński (1929 - 2005)

Sample Work: Untitled (1974)

Beksiński is my favorite artist. Showing you one image does not do this guy justice; check out a compilation of his works here. His portfolio of works tells the story of a tragic, gorgeously macabre, detailed, and emotional depiction of the world. His paintings are a masterfully-crafted depiction of a terrifyingly surreal, post-apocolyptic hellscape. Perhaps antithetical to his work, he was known as actually quite an optimistic, funny, and charasmatic man. However, his death was just as tragic as the paintings themselves. He was stabbed to death in his Warsaw apartment for refusing to loan his son's friend the equivalent of about $100. His work is admired posthumously and has inspired many surreal modern artists and filmmakers, most notably Guillermo Del Toro.


Salvador Dalí (1904 - 1989)

Salvador Dalí (1904 - 1989)

Sample Work: The Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening (1944)

By this point, you can probably tell that my favorite classical art genre is surrealism. Something about the eerie, dreamlike art is just very intriguing and fascinating, and maybe even a bit cozy(?), to me. And who would I be to leave off one of the kings of the genre, Salvador Dalí. A lot of my favorite art pieces are rooted in science-fiction; I love art that looks futuristic or timeless, makes me confused, or has me coming up with a story for the scene. Dalí is not a science-fiction artist, but his works make me feel the same way. The piece I chose to highlight here is a great example of that. There are layers to it, each one more alluring and complex as the last.



Created: 07/06/2024
Last Updated: 07/06/2024