Each work of art in the Grand Prize round received the highest number of votes throughout the bi-weekly contests, but this time there’s only one artist who will walk away with the Grand Prize package.  My drawing “Antonia” is one of the finalists.

Voting is now open  HERE   My work is #13.

The artist whose work receives the highest number of votes by June 16, 2013 at 11:59 pm EST will be awarded the Grand Prize package. Not only will the winner receive art books, instructional art videos, art supplies and equipment, but will also have their work seen in three major art magazines (Fine Art Connoisseur, Plein Air and Southwest Art) as well as a full feature article in Artists on Art online magazine.

Click on any of the thumbnail images (those fifteen in the middle) to get a closer look at each work of art. The enlarged image will display all of the information needed for voting, including an assigned entry number for each piece. Once you’ve decided on a favorite, scroll down to the voting box at the bottom of the page and cast your vote. Only one vote per computer or mobile device is allowed.

ARC International Salon Competition 2012/2013 winners have been announced. In this year’s competition a jury had to select the best works among 2000 submissions from more than 850 international artists. I have sent a portrait drawing done in sanguine/white chalk and am honored to be selected as a finalist for this prestigious award.

Zdravko Dučmelić (1923-1989) was one of those outstanding, yet lesser known artists. He was born in Vinkovci, Croatia and have studied painting in Zagreb, Rome and Madrid (Real Academia de San Fernando), and in 1949 emigrated to Argentina. From 1963 to 1966 he was director of Escuela Superior de Artes de la Universidad Nacional de Cuyo.

Dučmelić masterfully illustrated a famous book “Laberintos” (Labyrinths), written by Jorge Luis Borges (Ed. De Arte Gaglianone, Buenos Aires, 1983), with his surreal, quasi-metaphysical works.
He also made various portraites of Borges (with whom he befriended) that were exhibited in 1987. In 1980 Dučmelić has been invited by Argentinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to realize expositions of his works in several museums in Japan: in Tokio, Kyoto, Aomori and Kamatura. Besides in Japan, Dučmelić had exhibitions in Panama, Peru (Lima), Chile (Santiago), Mexico, Cuba (Habana), Canada (Ottawa) and China (Bejing). In 1983 he had exhibitions in his homeland, in Zagreb and Rijeka.

Unfortunately, high quality images of his works are very difficult to find, so here are several examples ranging from poor to medium quality. The second drawing is one of the portraits of Jorge Luis Borges from the 1987 exhibition.

I am honored to have one of my works included in You Be The Judge art contest. It has been posted on this link for viewers to vote on.

Click on any of the thumbnail images (those fifteen in the middle) to get a closer look at each work of art. The enlarged image will display all of the information needed for voting, including an assigned entry number for each piece.Once you’ve decided on a favorite, scroll down to the voting box at the bottom of the page and cast your vote. Only one vote per computer or mobile device is allowed.

The deadline for voting is March 3, 2013.

Edit (March 13th): 
I have just been notified that this drawing has received one of the three 
highest vote counts and, as a result, will now advance to the 
Grand Prize round at the end of the contest. 
Thank you all who voted for me!
 

Croatian islet Galešnjak (also called Island of Love and Lover’s Island) is located in the Pašman channel of the Adriatic sea, between the island of Pašman and the town of Turanj (near Zadar) on mainland Croatia. It is one of the worlds few naturally occurring heart-shaped objects. Galešnjak came to prominence after its unusual shape was highlighted on Google Earth.

The island has a surface area of 0.132 km2, with its beach measuring 1.55 km in length. It features two peaks, the highest of which is 36 m high above sea level. Galešnjak is privately owned and contains only wild plants and trees. Even the owner of the uninhabited island didn’t realize how perfectly heart-shaped the island was until he was swamped with requests from couples to stay there.

The island’s unusual shape was first recorded in the early 19th century by Napoleon’s cartographer Charles-François Beautemps-Beaupré, who included it in his 1806 atlas of the Dalmatian coast (kept today at the National and University Library in Zagreb).

It seems many lovers from around the world consider it the ideal spot for a romantic Valentine’s Day break.

Croatian photographer Nenad Šaljić has won an award at the 2012 National Geographic Photo Contest. He is the winner for “Places” category with this photo, The Matterhorn at Full Moon.

It was chosen out of 22,000 photographs from all over the world by judges at the world’s most famous geographic magazine. Šaljić’s love for the mountain landscapes was spurred in 2006 when he accepted an invitation to a trekking expedition in the region of Mount Everest. Over the course of three years, he’s taken thousands of Matterhorn shots, even though only 31 of those are displayed in his portfolio. This is one of the photos taken in October 2102 between 3 and 5am during a strong wind and minus 15 degrees temperatures last year.

Here are two more from the same series:

Alphonse Mucha (1860–1939) was a very influential but seldom mentioned figure in the history of art. He is more than anyone else responsible for the Art Nouveau style that developed around the turn of the century. He applied his considerable talents to a wide variety of pursuits, ranging from painting and sculpture to poster, magazine, and calendar illustration, as well as product and architectural design. It is probably because he did things other than gallery paintings that many of the leading artistic institutions have ignored his work for most of 20th century.

The Slav Epic (in Czech : Slovanská epopej) was Mucha’s magnum opus. It is a cycle of 20 large canvases (measuring 18 by 24 feet) painted between 1910 and 1928 and depicting scenes from the history of the various Slav nations.

He managed this feat in part due to the generosity of Count Jerome Colloredo-Mansfeld who offered the use of a wing of Castle Zbirov where Mucha could have the space and light necessary to carry out his vision. The work on this project took place between 1912 and 1928. The sequence is divided equally between Czech and broader Slavic themes, and is also arranged thematically along allegorical, religious, military and cultural lines. As well as the time spent composing the paintings, Mucha devoted considerable energy to research involving travel throughout the Balkans and Russia; this scholastic approach resulted  in considerable moral and didactic content.

Here is the b/w photo of Mucha in front of The Slav Epic, taken in Clemtium, Prague in 1919. Below that is one of the paintings from that cycle titled “Defense of Sziget against the Turks by Nikola Zrinski: The Shield of Christendom.” (click for enlargement)

 

Defense of Sziget deals with an important episode from Croatian history.

In January 1566 turkish Sultan Suleiman “the Magnificent” went to war for the last time. His advance was eventually halted at the city of Sziget by a citizens’ army let by Croatian nobleman, Nikola Zrinski. The Battle of Sziget was fought from 5 August to 8 September 1566. Count Zrinski found himself besieged by a hostile army of 150,000 soldiers with powerful artillery while he had assembled a force of only 2300. There were heavy losses on both sides. Both commanders died during the battle – Zrinski in the final charge and Suleiman in his tent. More than 20,000 Turks had fallen during the attacks and almost all of Zrinski’s 2,300 man garrison was killed, with most of the final 600 men killed on the last day. Although the battle was an Ottoman victory, it stopped their push to Vienna that year. It was not threatened again until the Battle of Vienna in 1683.

The importance of the battle of Sziget was considered so great that Cardinal Richelieu has described it as “the battle that saved civilization.”

Mucha captures the moment when Zrinski’s widow, realising the inevitability of defeat, threw a touch into a gunpowder store, destroying the city but inflicting damage on the Turkish army which halted their progress. Mucha divides the scene between the sharply focused sacrifice of the women on the right and the blurred images of destruction to the left. The device used to split the picture, a mushroom-shaped prop, is uncannily prophetic of later wars.  (Unfortunately, good color images of the paintings from The Slav Epic are very hard to find on the web. I scanned this one from excellent 356-page monograph on Mucha, published by Prestel.)

 

Croatian master painter Vlaho Bukovac (1855-1922) is well-known artist in Central Europe.  He was one of the founders of a modern, Western tradition of painting in that region in the late 19th century. Trained in Paris at a time when Impressionism was catching the public imagination, he painted grand literary and religious scenes, nudes and portraits. Overcoming his initial poverty, he was soon successful, and gained a high reputation in Paris. Bukovac learnt English when living in America in his early teens, and he first visited England aged 16, when he docked in Liverpool on board a merchant ship. From the mid-1880s to the First World War, he regularly came to England, where many of his most popular pictures were imported by the London dealers, Vicars Bros.

They bought his Salon exhibit The White Slave in 1884 and showed it in London, describing it as ‘the picture which created so great a sensation in Paris last season’. They charged a shilling admission to see the painting in the red velvet splendour of their basement room in the gallery just off Piccadilly, and many were happy to pay.
Vicars subsequently sold The White Slave to the collector, philanthropist and industrial magnate Samson Fox of Harrogate (a forbear of the Fox acting family). He was to acquire many more works by Bukovac, and together with his friend and fellow industrialist Richard LeDoux of Liverpool, became one of Bukovac’s most significant patrons. The painter came often to England from Paris to stay with the two families, and was accepted into their social circle. Through them further commissions followed and in the closing years of the century he enjoyed considerable public success. Bukovac’s portraits of them reveal him at his best, as a sensitive and technically accomplished artist.

Richard LeDoux was the Liverpool director of the firm Suter, Hartmann & Co., which made composition for ships’ keels. Fox and LeDoux families seem to have enjoyed a friendly rivalry competing for Bukovac’s pictures. A photograph of the music-room at ‘Marlfield’, LeDoux’s villa in West Derby, taken in 1903 shows Bukovac’s ‘The Bathers’, painted in Zagreb in 1899.

Bukovac enjoyed a close friendship with LeDoux’s wife Laura, of whom he painted at least four separate portraits. The most important of them is this full-length portrait (200x110cm) in the Walker Art Gallery’s collection, which was exhibited in the Walker in 1892 and at the Paris Salon the following year.

Vlaho Bukovac was the subject of an exhibition, Searching for Blaise, Vlaho Bukovac and his Northern Patrons, which took place at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, the Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate  and Bonhams, London, in 2005 and 2006. In 2009/10 Gemeentemuseum in Den Haag, Holland staged a major retrospective exhibition “Vlaho Bukovac- A Cosmopolitan Croatian”.

I am in the process of preparation for a portrait painting at the moment. Here’s a study of a sitter. It was done with sanguine and white pencils on tinted paper (obviously .

I recently wrote about the exhibition “Orient & Occident – Austrian Artists travelling East” at The Belvedere Museum in Vienna. One of the paintings of Emil Jakob Schindler, whose work illustrated my post, will be offered at Dorotheum auction of 19th Century Paintings on October 16th. It is View of Ragusa (Dubrovnik), painted in 1887 during Schindler’s second journey to the Dalmatian coast.

The people shown in the foreground are the artist’s wife, the Hamburg singer Anna Bergen, and their daughter Alma, who later married Gustav Mahler and Franz Werfel. The figures on the right in the middle of the work are the painter Carl Moll, shown dressed as a gardener, and Schindler’s second daughter, Grete, who later married the painter Wilhelm Legler. Schindler had rented a house in Dubrovnik which is clearly visible at the edge of the cliffs. During severe Sirocco winds the waves would break over the cliff, creating a magical spectacle.

Schindler is doubtless the most outstanding practitioner of Austrian mood painting. “He is regarded as a spiritus rector, a leadership figure and shining light” (Gerbert Frodl, Stimmungsimpressionismus, Vienna 1999, p. 30.) This work may be regarded as one of the most, if not the most important of Emil Jakob Schindler’s paintings. (click for enlargement)