Portrait of a Piedmontese Cow

Scholarship Winner!

The second place awards of $4,000, go to two students this year, Amelia Landes Taylor, for the Adrian Gottlieb Studio & Atelier,....

Jacob Collins, Director of the Grand Central Academy finds Amelia Landes Taylor "extraodinarily focused and intense...with great energy and ambition, realizing her natural talent."

It had been a goal of mine since I was 16 to place in that competition and I feel that I did very well. I am very excited about working on the west coast.

For photos and mor information the link is :

http://www.artrenewal.org/articles/2009/Scholarship/results1.asp

Tribute to Anna Sewell

This is a still life I recently finished.  I have always been a lover of horses and of the book Black Beauty.  When I learned that the author Anna Sewell had sold the all time best selling manuscript for $25 and received no royalties, I was shocked.  I was more amazed to learn what she said when asked how she felt about being swindled out of her rights.  She said she was just glad that her message of animal abuse awareness was spread so far.  This painting is a tribute to her and the influence her book and the equine animal in general has had on my life. Enjoy.   

Just About the End of the Year Art

Here is what I have been working on the past few months.  Very exciting to finish my first real painting.  Let me know what you all think!

New Website

http://web.mac.com/ameliataylor21

Is my new website.  Please check up on this to see any new art.  My blog will now be for more personal use.  Thanks!

ps, I'm getting married hence the added Taylor to the name

Figure Drawing

My Latest Figure Drawing, with chalk and pencil on toned paper

Latest Studies.... a little blurry

Here are a couple of portraits and a painting in progress.  I really need to get a new camera. these pictures are completely awful.  But you can kinda get the idea.  

Latest Drawings

Feel like a few tragic thoughts?

Sometimes, I like to feel well, ... how do I put this, Tragic.  I know it's weird. But sometimes I like the feeling of deep feeling--deep tragic feeling.  As long as it's not real :)  Does anyone else feel like that? So what better way to feel that way then through poems?

I found this poem in a book of love poems, and is one of the most beautifully tragic things I have ever read.  Emily Bronte is  one of my favorite writers of all time, so that helps.  

If you ever have lost a loved one in anyway I feel this poem helps to do those feelings justice. 

The last two stanzas are horribly heart wrenching but have so much truth to them.  I just love this poem so much. 

A little background first on Emily Bronte, I added a painting of her and a drawing of her home :

She was born England in 1818 and died at the age of 29 from the flu.  She had two sisters who were also fabulously successful writers, Charlotte and Anne.  Their mother died when Emily was 3 and their two elder sisters died before they were yet adults.  The three sisters wrote together from childhood.  They published themselves together (at their own expense)  under pen names.  Currer, Ellis, and Acton.  They published a collection of poems. How cool is that! 

They all wrote their intensly influential novels around the same period (I'm sure they are like my mom and sister and other writers of our clan who bounce ideas off each other's heads all the time ) Emily wrote Wuthering Heights (a tragic gothic romance which happens to be one of my very favorites) and Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre.  

Emily died only a year after her only novel was published an her sister Anne died within a year after her, leaving Charlotte as the remaining sister, with no mother.  

Their lives have been painted as very isolating and tragic, which it sounds like it was.  

But maybe they were just like me,  happy with who I'm with and who I am, but like to feel and express tragic feelings sometimes. 

Or maybe they were all horribly depressive old spinsters. 

Remembrance

 

COLD in the earth--and the deep snow piled above thee, 

         Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave! 
Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee, 
         Sever'd at last by Time's all-severing wave? 

Now, when alone, do my thoughts no longer hover 
         Over the mountains, on that northern shore, 
Resting their wings where heath and fern-leaves cover 
         Thy noble heart for ever, ever more? 

Cold in the earth--and fifteen wild Decembers 
         From those brown hills have melted into spring: 
Faithful, indeed, is the spirit that remembers 
         After such years of change and suffering! 

Sweet Love of youth, forgive, if I forget thee, 
         While the world's tide is bearing me along; 
Other desires and other hopes beset me, 
         Hopes which obscure, but cannot do thee wrong! 

No later light has lighten'd up my heaven, 
         No second morn has ever shone for me; 
All my life's bliss from thy dear life was given, 
         All my life's bliss is in the grave with thee. 

But when the days of golden dreams had perish'd, 
         And even Despair was powerless to destroy; 
Then did I learn how existence could be cherish'd, 
         Strengthen'd and fed without the aid of joy. 

Then did I check the tears of useless passion-- 
         Wean'd my young soul from yearning after thine; 
Sternly denied its burning wish to hasten 
         Down to that tomb already more than mine. 

And, even yet, I dare not let it languish, 
         Dare not indulge in memory's rapturous pain; 
Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish, 
         How could I seek the empty world again? 

My Favorite Painting

"Abbey in the Oak Forest"
By Caspar David Friedrich of Germany

This is and has been one of my top five favorite paintings of all time. It is not classical, and it is not a painting that most would consider their favorite, but to me, the power and feeling, and sense of morality and hope this painting gives, along with its sheer beauty, is all that a painting should be.
Info on the painting from Wikipedia:
A key innovation of Friedrich's was his use of the landscape genre to evoke religious themes. . Friedrich sought not just to explore the blissful enjoyment of a beautiful view, as in the classic conception, but rather to examine an instant of sublimity, a reunion with the spiritual self through the contemplation of nature. Friedrich said, "The artist should paint not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him. If, however, he sees nothing within him, then he should also refrain from painting that which he sees before him. Otherwise, his pictures will be like those folding screens behind which one expects to find only the sick or the dead." Expansive skies, storms, mist, forests, ruins, and crosses bearing witness to the presence of God are frequent elements in Friedrich's landscapes. Death is referenced more directly in paintings like The Abbey in the Oakwood, in which monks carry a coffin past an open grave, toward a cross, through the portal of a church in ruins. The bare oak trees are a recurring element of Friedrich's paintings, symbolizing the "pagan aspect" of death. Countering the sense of despair are Friedrich's symbols for redemption: the cross and the clearing sky promise eternal life, and the slender moon suggests hope and the growing closeness of Christ. In The Abbey in the Oakwood, the movement of the monks away from the open grave and toward the cross and the horizon imparts Friedrich's message that the final destination of man's life lies beyond the grave.
Obsessed with themes of death, Friedrich developed images that, through their silence, sadness, and symbolism, provide meditations on mortality.

I agree with most of this article about the painting, except the last sentence that says he was obsessed with death and the sadness and symbolism is what provides meditation on our mortality. I look at this painting and see so much hope! I love this painting because depending on the viewer it can be taken as a hopeful painting of the resurrection and eternal life, or a painting showing how religion can not save you.
For example, is the sun setting or rising? I feel it is rising. This could symbolize the risen lord, or that death is merely the beginning of a new life, a new day.
I love how vast the landscape and trees are, and how small the people are. To me it shows the plan of eternal life and how much greater the whole picture is then just us.
I also love how it's a ruined church. This could mean so much! To some it could show the corruption of religion, and how God is really in "the landscape".
To me it shows how Christianity is so much more then just church, or the letter of the law. Yes, they are passing through "the ruined church" to the next life, and it could be necessary, but in the grand scheme of things, Christ is in the rising sun, not in the crumbling, skewed crosses.

To me this painting reminds me of eternal life, and the ressurection, not death. And how much God loves us and how grand and perfect His plan is.