Ernst Ludwig Von Aster

Ernst Ludwig Von Aster, Autumn Landscape With Crescent Moon

1922

This evocative early 20th-century oil painting by Scottish artist Robert Russell MacNee RGI (1880-1952) depicts a farm with a track, horses, and figures. MacNee was an accomplished p...

This evocative mid-19th-century oil painting by Robert T Stuart (XIX) depicts a picturesque river landscape illuminated by a setting sun. A silhouetted wood stands before a majestic...

This charming mid-19th-century oil painting by Dutch artist Johannes Philippus Galjaard (1812-1867) depicts several figures on a rural track with a town and distant hills beyond. Hai...

This late 19th-century oil painting by English artist Edward Robert Smythe (1810-1899) depicts a picturesque bay with buildings, fishing boats, figures and horses. Smythe was a maste...

Frameless. Josep Marfa Guarro (1928-2014) Josep Marfa Guarro was a Catalan painter specialized in landscape painting. Among Josep Marfa Guarro's work are numerous watercolors and ...

David Shingler's (NC based) "Moab Plateaus" is an oil painting that depicts the vast desert dotted with grasses leading to the towering plateaus of Moab...

Todd Carpenter's (US based) "Shores of Next Year" is an oil painting that depicts a black and white landscape of vast plains with a small river winding into the distance and swirling...

Todd Carpenter's (US based) "Darkness Rises" is an oil painting that depicts a city in the distance glimmering in the darkness with a few sparse and leafless trees vaguely blocking its view Bio/artist statement: Todd Carpenter is a Los Angeles based artist who uses black and white paint to explore the perception of space and beauty. Carpenter's formal education is in science - he holds a MS in Neuroscience from UCSD and a BS in Psychobiology from UCLA - and he brings this background into service when making art. His paintings explore the mechanisms of perception and aesthetics, examining among other things how the depiction of light can impart realism and convey emotion. Like his paintings bridging art and science, Carpenter's career has similarly straddled the two fields, and he has taught subjects ranging from neuroscience and environmental science to photography and painting. Artist Statement As a painter, I am particularly interested in how the depiction of light contributes to our experience of paintings. Painting, as with any visual art, is obviously dependent on light. But painting can also have a more specific connection in that the accurate depiction of light is crucial for achieving realism. Realism in paintings largely arises from the portrayal of depth - perceiving a painting as being realistic is equivalent to seeing its subject as existing in more than just the two dimensions of the picture plane - and one of the mechanisms by which humans perceive depth is through lighting cues. Light creates features such as shading, shadow, and contrast that tell us about the three-dimensional arrangement of our surroundings, and artists often use these features to impart realism to paintings. Light also factors in to the emotional impact of paintings. The differential illumination of our surroundings can evoke different moods, as evidenced by the influence sunsets, candlelight, and darkness can have on us. Such effectssuggest that our perception of light could be tied to primitive instincts, with light signaling factors such as shelter, nightfall, and warmth, which were once crucial for survival. The depiction of light in...