Monday, April 4, 2016

Inspired by Reading: Swan Thieves

I forgot to post this! I posted on the Inspired by Reading Facebook site, but completely forgot to blog about it!

I had already listened to this book on cd twice. Plus read her first novel The Historian. I loved them. Very long, but keeps your interest. Since it had been a while since I read it, I thought I would do some projects on the IDEAS that she used to tell the story.

Étretat, Normandy Coast, France was called "the beach of artists and writers" in the late nineteenth century. Gustave Courbet, Eugene Boudin, and Claude Monet to name a few.

In the winter of 1868-1869 Monet's attention was drawn to Etretat in the Caux region of Normandy. He then returned there every year between 1883 and 1886. Like many painters, particularly Gustave Courbet, Monet was captivated by the picturesque qualities of the place, and took inspiration from it for more than fifty of his paintings.
The configuration of "these high cliffs pierced by these strange arches called the Gates" (Maupassant, Adieu, 1884) gives an unusual character to the landscape. The largest of the three openings in the cliffs, the Manneporte, "an enormous vault through which a liner could pass" (Maupassant, Guillemot Rock, 1882), appears in only two of Monet's paintings. This work can be dated 1885, by analogy with another painting of equal size, signed and dated 1885: The Manneport, Etretat in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

I fell in love with this one of the series...

Here are a few more...

Here's my necklace to represent Monet's cliffs at sunset...

The hand blown glass beads are from Ooooh Beads out of France. I LOVE that she makes glass tassel caps to match large hole beads. There's some huge Allegory Gallery handmade polymer clay beads on there as well.
The Myth of Leda and the Swan in a story and subject of art from Greek mythology in which the god Zeus, in the form of a swan, seduces or rapes Leda. According to later Greek mythology, Leda bore Helen and Polydeuces, children of Zeus, while at the same time bearing Castor and Clytemnestra, children of her husband Tyndareus, the King of Sparta. According to many versions of the story, Zeus took the form of a swan and raped or seduced Leda on the same night she slept with her husband King Tyndareus. In some versions, she laid two eggs from which the children hatched.
Although there is a more famous painting by Michelangelo depicting this, there was another famous Renaissance painting of the subject. Correggio's elaborate composition of c. 1530 (Berlin); this was damaged whilst in the collection of Philippe II, the Regent of France. His son Louis, though a great lover of painting, was very pious and "had periodic crises of conscience about his way of life, in one of which he attacked the figure of Leda with a knife." The damage has been repaired, though full restoration to the original condition was not possible. The original remains but a headless Leda has been restored by Schlesingen.
Here is my necklace to represent Leda and the Swan and Zeus...

The Leda with the Swan is a DeviantArt piece I found while researching...

 

1 comment:

  1. I already commented on Facebook, but just wanted to say again how much I enjoyed your pieces and inspiration. Thanks for sharing the paintings of the cliffs at Etretat!

    ReplyDelete

Art Elements: September 2019 Challenge

September Art Elements Challenge Wow, it’s been a year since I last used the blog. I always liked using my blog instead of Facebook, I act...