Landscape painting auctioned in Beijing for record $12.3 mln in china

BEIJING, June 28 (Xinhua) - A record auction price of 84 million yuan (about 12.3 million U.S. dollars) was achieved for a unique Chinese painting in Beijing.

The landscape painting by Zhu Da, also known as Bada Shanren (1626-1705), sells to a private buyer at the Council Auction held on Friday.

The previous record was put in 2007 when The Red Cliff Handscroll by the Ming Dynasty painter Qiu Ying (1494-1552) was sold for 79.52 million yuan.

A famous freehand brushwork painter and calligrapher, Zhu Da was born into the majestic family of the dynasty. He retires to the mountains when the dynasty fell in 1644.

His early paintings included albums of flowers and rocks, accompanied by poems and signed under a range of obscure names. Later he used to paint birds and fish to signal distress, painting lotuses with broken stems, and ink landscapes.

M.F.Husain painting sells for Rs 3.1 cr at Christie's

London (PTI): A 1960 painting by M F Husain fetched a whopping Rs 3.1 crore at Christie's South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art sale here which saw 76 lots of famous artists going under the hammer for Rs 18.98 crore.

Pakistani artist Rashid Rana's "Red Carpet" has got the second highest price of Rs 1.3 crore at the auction which took place on June 10, the organisers said. Ram Kumar's "Untitled (Benares)" paint sold for Rs 1.04 crore.

The "Ragamala Series", oil work on canvas, features visual interpretation of Indian musical modes. The series capture Husain's continuous fascination with 'rasa' or aesthetic rapture.
The inter-disciplinary nature of music, dance, sculpture, painting and film provided enormous inspiration to M.F.Husain at that time (1950s and 60s) and his "Ragamala Series" embodies the masterful usage of his most recognisable pictorial elements.

Husain's other works "The Preacher at Mecca" fetched 250, 121pounds (Rs 9.5 million) and "Untitled (Horses)" Rs 5.7 million.

Franz Marc painting fetched 6.2 million dollars

London - The oil paintings Springende Pferde by German expressionist artist Franz Marc fetched 6.2 million dollars At Christie's auction house Tuesday. The price exceeded the lowest estimation of 4.9 million dollars and grazed just under the maximum estimate of 6.5 million dollars.

Marc is one of the main important painters of the 20th century and was a co-founder of Munich's 'Blaue Reiter' artist circle that included Wassily Kandinsky and August Macke. His painting of the three leap horses was made in 1910. He was draft into the German army after the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and was killed in 1916 during the Battle of Verdun.

Also sold at the auction was Claude Monet's Au Parc Monceau from 1878, for 10.4 million dollars - well beyond the maximum hope of 7.4 million dollars.

Man's duck paintings won second place in competition

Dan Speidel, 25, of Elyria Township, he likes to paint and hunt. By combine his two avocations, he has won second place in the Ohio Wetlands Habitat Stamp Design Competition sponsored by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.

Speidel's 16-inch-by-21-inch acrylic paintings of two bufflehead ducks in flight over Lake Erie show the Lorain Lighthouse in the background. Tim Daniel, public information officer for ODNR, said the judges praised the particulars of Lake Erie, the positions of the birds and the way they were portrayed in Speidel's painting. The first-place honor in the competition is the use of the winning artwork on the $15 waterfowl hunting stamp issued just before hunting season begins in September, Daniel said. Speidel's entry was one of 24 paintings entered by artists from 12 states, Daniel said. First place wins by Jeffrey Hoff, a North Dakota resident whose painting shows two ruddy ducks in the water.

This is the third time Speidel has enter the Ohio Wetlands habitat Stamp Design Competition, and the second place award is the highest he has earned.

Three Paintings peak the Million Dollar Mark at Heffel's $11.3 Million Spring Auction

Heffel Fine Art Auction House set a new record sale cost tonight when a rare Emily Carr painting sold for $2,164,500 in the second session of Heffel’s Live Spring Auction. Wind in the Treetops, 36-1/2 x 21-1/4 inch oil on canvas, circa 1936-1939, is from the majority sought-after period in Carr’s career – the mature period of the 1930s. Heffel Fine Art Auction House has already sold two Carr paintings for more than $1-million and is the only auction house to reach that price point for her works. This ranks as the fourth main priced painting in Canadian history.

Tonight’s sale result of $11.3-million was well past the $6 - $9-million presale calculate for Heffel’s two sessions. The Canadian Post-War & Contemporary Art, which commenced at 4 p.m. PST, had sales totaling $4.7-million. The second session of Fine Canadian Art began at 7 p.m. PST and had a sales entire of $6.6-million. Both sessions were held before a crowd of 300 people at Vancouver’s new Convention Centre overlooking Coal Harbor.

Mecca painting won young artist $40,000

A 26-year-old Victorian artist has been taken out a $40,000 national prize for his artwork depicting thousands of bowing Muslims at the annual Mecca pilgrimage.

Jackson Slattery's work, titled Our Plastic Everything Is Broken, beat more than 200 entries won the Metro Art Gallery Award. The award is the expensive prize for Australian painters under 35.

Slattery says he was enthused by a magazine image of pilgrims facing Mecca in prayer. A $10,000 people's selection prize was awarded to 30-year-old Victoria Reichelt from Brisbane for her self portrait - A Stack of Books Crowded in a Bookshelf.

Former Victorian premier Jeff Kennett, who made the announcement today, welcomed the judge’s decisions.

Slattery also won the people's selection prize in 2008.

White Paintings 2007-09 at Sara Nightingale Gallery, Shelter Island NY June 20-July 9, 2009 - Eric Dever

Announce a exhibition of 23 new paintings by Eric Dever, in Sara Nightingale's new gallery space reopened in May 2009.

Painting itself is the subject of Eric Dever's current project, spanning two years and 94 paintings. In his investigation of titanium and zinc white oil paint on canvas, burlap, and linen, the exclusive use of white has more to do with a focus on paint properties and supports and is less about color. This is a progression from Dever's earlier color based work before exhibited by Sara Nightingale Gallery in 2005.

Each piece is constructing with one or two brushes or knives. Supports are exposed as the negative space between multiple strokes or through the paint itself. Dever was introduced to Robert Ryman's monochrome painting as an NYU graduate student of Marcia Hafif; both were powerful artists of the Radical Painting Group formed in the late 70's.

Whether applied in stacked or alternating strokes, concentric circles, or randomly placed marks with second tries and adjustments, qualities related with current 'Provisional Painting' (Raphael Rubenstein AiA May'09), these paintings are part of a continuum. They are active and nonchalant.

China's top political advisor visits demonstrate of Chinese painting master's works

China's top political consultant Jia Qinglin visited a show of paintings by Li Keran (1907-1989), one of the best-known Chinese artists.

Jia, chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and also a part of the Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee Political Bureau, was accompanied by Politburo affiliate and Beijing's Party chief Liu Qi and CPPCC National Committee's secretary-general Qian Yunlu.

All the works on display at the exhibition, in the Beijing Fine Art Academy, are aid from Li's family members including his widow Zou Peizhu.

The exhibits contain 108 Chinese paintings and 13 water and color paintings by the artist. And these are only part of the family's contributions to the Municipal Government of Beijing.

Li, a native of Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, east China, began studying the traditional Chinese paintings at 13. He is also known as a great master in painting mountains and water.

The magic of kishangarh painting and its inspiration

Kishangarh art is simply concerned with the realities of life; above all, with passionate love service, conceived as the symbol of all combination. Rajput art creates a magic world where all men are heroic, passionate and shy, all women are beautiful, beast both wild and tame are friends of man and trees and flowers are conscious of the footsteps of the bridegroom as he passes by. This magic world is not unreal or fanciful, but a world of imagination and eternity, observable to all who do not refuse to see with the transfiguring eyes of love.

By the middle of thirteenth century Islam was firmly recognized in India and during this time forward Sufism influenced Hinduism greatly. The Sufi position of union with God through devotional love was seen a mirror reflection and complementary to the devotion of Krishna in Vaishnavite division of Hinduism. Vedantic idea of Oneness found its admiration in the Supreme Oneness of Allah and Islam's teachings.

According to Chaitanya, God or Krishna who is the symbol of God on earth is the lover and the soul of man is his bride represented by Radha, For describing the stages of Radha's love for Krishna, the similarity of human love was adapted. Such paintings were, at first sight, easy to understand. Although they alternated between two methods of expression - the first a style of savage distortion, the second a style of the softest grace--each manner enlivened the ordinary subject.

Best way to express our paintings

Basically, Painting is a expression applied to the deliberate application of paint to a surface, whether for decoration and protection of that surface, or in order to create an image upon that surface. Paint can be used to express color, emotions and a distortion of realism, and so that is what it tends to be used for. The best way to do this is to focus on rising one area of painting at a time. For example, when dealing with color, experiment purely with squares of color, to note the crash that one color has upon another. If experimenting with tone restricts your palette to just white, black, and the shades of grey that can be mixed with them. In doing this you will slowly build an understanding of the elements that make up painting. This is a good way to have fun with nature, learn a paint and express your creativity.

Yale Sued over Van Gogh Painting held by Soviets

A successor of the onetime owner of a famed Van Gogh painting has sued Yale University in an effort to reclaim the artwork from the Ivy League school.

In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in New Haven, Conn., Pierre Konowaloff alleged that the university should have known the painting - "The Night Café" - has been confiscated from his great-grandfather, a Russian industrialist and aristocrat, Ivan Morozov, during the Communist takeover of Russia in the early 1900s.

The 1888 painting was consequently sold by the Soviet government to a European gallery. Stephen Carlton Clark, a Yale alumnus, bought the paintings from a gallery in New York in the early 1930s and bequeathed it to Yale in 1961.

Traditional chinese painting in twentieth century

The first decades of the twentieth century marked the end of the insular, tradition-bound Qing empire (1644–1911) and the strong entry of China into the modern age. Zhang, who became a most important connoisseur and collector, based his diverse painting styles on the firsthand study of early masterpieces, while Fu, an academic, learned about earlier works from reproductions and copies.

Fu Baoshi (1904–1965) and Zhang Daqian (1899–1983), both of whom studied in Japan and traveled abroad late in their lives, some powerful artists created hybrid styles that reflected a cosmopolitan attitude toward art and a willingness to modify inherited traditional through the incorporation of foreign idioms and techniques. Zhang, who became a important connoisseur and collector, based his diverse painting styles on the firsthand study of early masterpieces, while Fu, an academic, learned about earlier works from reproductions and copies.

With the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949, cultural activities came under the power of the state. Seeking to reform traditional paintings to make it "serve the people," the Communist government mandated that artists follow a "revolutionary realism" that would celebrate the heroism of the regular people or convey the majesty of the motherland.

Informations about painter Mr.M.F.Hussain

Mr. Maqbool Fida Husain has depicted lots of Hindu Gods and deities nude in his paintings. That at the same time his paintings related to Muslim and other religions does not depict any nudity in respect of the respective persons, Gods and goddesses. A comparison of his paintings on Hindu mythology and religion and other religion leads to the inevitable conclusion that the Hindu nude paintings become visible to be with the sole objective to hurt Hindu religious sentiment and insult the Hindu religion and provoke communal tensions in this country. Thus he is doing his business by drawing pornographically paintings of Hindu Gods and Godesses.

M F Husain has been chosen for Kerala government's prestigious Raja Ravi Varma Award. Announcing this year's award, education and culture minister M A Baby said the award comprising Rs.1.25 lakh in cash prize, a citiation and a sign would be presented to M F Husain on his birthday on September 17.

M F Husain paintings

Beautifull art paintings of women