Pre-Raphaelite

I am having a bit of a Pre-Raphaelite lurve at the moment. I bought a book of poetry and Dante Gabrielle Rossetti's poems featured in this book. He intrigued me. I love Christina Rossetti's poems and on realising that Dante was her brother and he was an artist got me sidelined into Pre-Raphaelite art.


There was a slo a really goodprogramme about this period of Art History on BCC4 that really grabbed my interest. I liek the airy-fairy, mystic naturalist concepts of the art.


The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's early doctrines were expressed in four declarations:
1) To have genuine ideas to express;
2) To study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them;
3) To sympathise with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parodying and learned by rote;
4) And, most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues.


I dabbled yesterday painting. By no means am I ever, I repeat EVER, going to be an artist or any great shakes at trying to reproduce an image I see, but I find it theraputic. My first problem was though that I didn't know what to paint. I had no "genuine ideas to express" (number 1). I can see why this idea is a foundation to their Brotherhood. A lot of paintings sometimes have no apparent idea behind them except that the artist could do it. (Argubly that is an idea- proving/showing they can... but still...)

At the top of this blog is Dante Rossetti's Venus Verticordia (1867). He liked the idea of the femme fatale and quite frankly I do too... this is one of his best (in my opinion). Alluring yet dangerous! ROARRRR! lolz

I prefer it in the chalk than the full bodied, all out painting.

More on Pre-Raphs coming up :)