BEAUTY: Painting--Christopher Orr

English artist Christopher Orr creates absolutely stunning images combining the sense of Dutch Old Masters, some Turner, and a dose of dream logic where memories and illusions of people and places get superimposed and collaged onto each other. The results are quietly beautiful, a little disturbing, and even a bit romantic. A group of people waist deep in a river hold hands, dozens of inexplicably unattended campfires burn in a landscape, an art salon melts into a meadow, a man pets a calf whose head is visible while the body disappears, a tiny figure obliviously passes an abduction or a rescue...

Top to bottom: A Gathering of Shadows; A Gathering, You Cannot Hear Us; All Of Your Nothings; An Unvisited Vastness; An Unsettled Encounter; Anthems In Eden; Departing Summer; Half Hidden From The Eye; Little We See In Nature That Is Ours; Nature yet remembers; Stumbling Across A Numinous Landscape; Those Shadowy Recollections; Where The Long Shadows Fall; Your Silent Face

https://www.christopherorr.co.uk/

Etnia References Classic Art

I love when photographers recreate famous paintings (I think it started for me with Steve Martin's 1981 film "Pennies From Heaven" which recreated Edward Hopper paintings, and that same year Malcolm McLaren's recreation of Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe for his New Romantic group Bow Wow Wow, previously here in a post about Dame Vivienne Westwood) and Spanish eyewear company Etnia has recreated some marvelous classic art works for their newest collection titled Anartist.

They started with some marvelous copies of works by Klilmt. Here is their image followed by the original The Kiss by Klimt.

Klimt painted Judith and Holofernes, a piece showing Judith from the Biblical story holding the head of Holofernes. Etnia created two image based on this Klimt narrative. Note the amazing chokers, both seemingly made from waste parts of old computers...and that Holofernes' head is here a motorcycle helmet.

Klimt painted an epic wall mural--coming in at 7 feet high and a whopping 112 feet wide, covering several walls--for the 14th Vienna Secessionist exhibition in 1902 which I previously wrote about here. It was part of an assemblage referred to as a "Gesamtkunstwerk" or a "total art work" meant to unite the arts (painting, sculpture, and music). For this exhibition, the artists celebrated the idea of the misunderstood, lone hero of Beethoven. Max Klinger created a massive sculpture of Beethoven while Klimt created his wall mural based on Beethoven's 9th Symphony. Here is a detail from a section of the mural individually titled The Hostiles.

Moving further back in time to 1830, this delightful copy is of Liberty Leading The People by French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix.

The Spanish Baroque artist Diego Velázquez painted The Triumph of Bacchus in 1628-1629...

...while 150 years prior, Sandro Botticelli painted Portrait of a Man with a Medal of Cosimo the Elder. I love how the modern photograph has the young man holding a sliced eggplant which actually does resemble the surface of the original medal!

A mash-up of two paintings--Raphael's Portrait of Young Woman with Unicorn from 1506 and Leonardo da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine from 1489--inspired this look-alike.

And speaking of da Vinci, his Salvator Mundi is here portrayed by a woman. But actually there is some controversy about whether this is an actual da Vinci...

https://www.etniabarcelona.com/