When planning your next painting, its always good to look at works from past masters and art styles in order to draw some inspiration from. That is the case for me at the present moment, these past couple weeks i have been looking at Christian artwork from the medieval period and select pieces from the baroque period in order to create my next piece in the religious based painting series I am currently working on.
I am in the final stages of the first painting, titled “Gethsemane” and have begun to plan the next painting in the series which will be about the crucifixion of Jesus. Luckily for me there is no shortage of artwork on this topic, because 90% of the art covered in art history courses has to do with Jesus; Jesus as a baby, Jesus and his mom, Jesus and his buddies, Jesus doing miracles, Jesus doing miracles with his buddies and so on and so forth for like a couple thousand years. BUT it’s some of the most beautiful artwork ever created nonetheless! However with this piece I have planned in my head, I would rather like to focus, not so much of Jesus Christ dying on the cross, but more so what that sacrifice meant to all man kind in t he long run. his suffering was the saving of everyone so the story goes and even though I am not a devote catholic or really an observer of any organized religion, I find that to be the most noble thing a person can do, laying down ones life for the greater good.
There are a few pieces in particular from the Medieval Period that I’ve taken the most inspiration from:
These are two pieces of different periods but portraying the same event. I really like the slightly abstracted form and well balanced compositions (by the books, rule of threes. simple is always the best). Obviously that first picture is… a lot…just a little too much blood perhaps. However the intensity of all that red is something I would like to show in my eventual piece as well. Red is always the best color is paint with if you’re trying to get a point across! And as for the second image, Byzantine iconography has probably been my favorite art style for the past couple years. I love portraiture but am not interested in painting realistic depictions of people, i would rather see abstracted versions of people and Byzantine iconography is great with that with its slightly abstracted style of depiction.