Art And Literature » Biographies

Biography of Henri Matisse

admin — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 15:37:07 +0000

Henri Matisse was born on 31 December 1869, in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, Nord, France. He was an artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid, brilliant and original draughtsmanship. He was a master draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but excelled primarily as a painter.

Matisse is considered, with Picasso, as the greatest artist of the 20th century. He was initially labelled as a Fauve (wild beast), by the 1920s, however, he was increasingly hailed as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. His mastery of the expressive language of colour and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century, won him recognition as a leading figure in modern art.

The first painting of Matisse acquired by a public collection was Still Life with Geraniums (1910), exhibited in the Pinakothek der Moderne. Today, a Matisse painting can fetch as much as US $17 million. In 2002, a Matisse sculpture, Reclining Nude I (Dawn), sold for US $9.2 million, a record for a sculpture by the artist.

Matisse died of a heart attack at the age of 84 in 1954. He is interred in the cemetery of the Monastère Notre Dame de Cimiez, near Nice. He was a great painter and paintings are a great asset for art.

<< The Gallery >>

<< The Slide Show of Henri Matisse Art >>

Biography of Margaret Atwood

admin — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 12:36:13 +0000

Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born on November 18, 1939 in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. She is an author, poet, critic, essayist, feminist and social campaigner.

Atwood is the second of three children of Margaret Dorothy, a former dietitian and nutritionist, and Carl Edmund Atwood, an entomologist. She was a lover of literature from her very early life, since she learnt reading.

Atwood began writing at age six and to write professionally when she was 16. In 1961, She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English (honours) and minors in philosophy and French at Victoria University in the University of Toronto. She won the E.J. Pratt Medal for her privately printed book of poems, “Double Persephone” in late 1961. After that she began graduate studies at Harvard’s Radcliffe College with a Woodrow Wilson fellowship. She has taught at the University of British Columbia (1965), Sir George Williams University in Montreal (1967-68), the University of Alberta (1969-79), York University in Toronto (1971-72), and New York University, where she was Berg Professor of English.In 1968, Atwood married Jim Polk, whom she divorced in 1973. She formed a relationship with fellow novelist Graeme Gibson soon after and moved to Alliston, Ontario, north of Toronto. In 1976 their daughter, Eleanor Jess Atwood Gibson, was born. Atwood returned to Toronto in 1980. She divides her time between Toronto and Pelee Island, Ontario.

Atwood is among the most-honoured authors of fiction in recent history; she is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Prince of Asturias award for Literature, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, winning once, and has been a finalist for the Governor General’s Award seven times, winning twice. While she may be best known for her work as a novelist, she is also an award winning poet, having published 15 books of poetry to date. Many of her poems have been inspired by myths, and fairy tales, which were an interest of hers from an early age. Atwood has also published short stories in Tamarack Review, Alphabet, Harper’s, CBC Anthology, Ms., Saturday Night, Playboy, and many other magazines.

Atwood celebrated her 70th birthday at a gala dinner at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, marking the final stop of her international tour to promote The Year of the Flood. She stated that she had chosen to attend the event because the city has been home to one of Canada’s most ambitious environmental reclamation programs: “When people ask if there’s hope (for the environment), I say, if Sudbury can do it, so can you. Having been a symbol of desolation, it’s become a symbol of hope.”

<< Selected Poems of Atwood >>

Biography of Sri Chinmoy

admin — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 06:56:30 +0000

Sri Chinmoy Ghose was born in 1931 in East Bengal, India— today’s Bangladesh. He was the youngest of seven children. He lost his father to illness in 1943, and his mother a few months later. Orphaned, in 1944 the 12-year-old Ghose joined his brothers and sisters at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, French India, where elder brothers Hriday and Chitta had already established a presence. There he spent the next twenty years in spiritual practice, including meditation, study in Bengali and English literature, and work in the ashram’s cottage industries. There he absorbed the teachings and tutelage of India’s great wisdom and fostered his deep aspiration to be of service to humanity. In 1964 he voyaged to New York, where he has lived since that time.

Sri Chinmoy began writing poetry at an early age, his early efforts being in his native Bengali tongue. However, Sri Chinmoy learnt English metre and rhyme and most of his poems have since been written in English. His first English poem was written in 1945 and was entitled “The Golden Flute”.
In his poetry, Sri Chinmoy is attempting to express the inexpressible, to articulate what is beyond the scope of words. Sri Chinmoy is above all a poet of the inner landscape, and he never forgets that the poem is ‘a finger pointing at the moon’, an invitation to the silence beyond the words.

“The Absolute” is a good example of this. This poem encapsulates a profound spiritual experience; He does not have to argue his case, he just expresses a spiritual consciousness. This inner confidence is reminiscent of the great mystic poets such as Kabir, Mirabai and Rumi. With this kind of poetry we feel it is coming from an inner source of spontaneity and creativity.

Recently Sri Chinmoy’s poetry has focused on short mantric sutra’s or aphorisms. They display a haiku-like compactness, a tremendous density and compression of language. Many of Sri Chinmoy’s short poems are also instructional, their apparent simplicity revealing more and more profound depth on each re-reading.

During the 1970s, while in America, Sri Chinmoy attracted followers such as musicians Carlos Santana, John McLaughlin, Narada Michael Walden, Roberta Flack and Boris Grebenshikov. Sri Chinmoy also had the Olympic athlete Carl Lewis as a student. Frederick Lenz (Atmananda) became a follower around 1972, but he left and became a guru on his own around 1981. In 1976, Chinmoy released a meditative album on Folkways Records entitled Music for Meditation.

In 1977, he founded the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team, which holds running, swimming, and cycling events worldwide, from fun runs to ultramarathons. Its precursor was the 1976 Liberty Torch Run, a relay in which 33 runners marked America’s bicentennial by covering 8,800 miles in 7 weeks, mapped out over 50 states. This concept was expanded in 1987 to become the international Peace Run (later renamed World Harmony Run), generally held every two years.

Sri Chinmoy died from a heart attack while at his home in Jamaica, Queens, New York on October 11, 2007. His works, teachings and efforts are great asset. According to an estimate, Sri Chinmoy wrote 1,500 books, 115,000 poems and 20,000 songs, created 200,000 paintings and gave almost 800 peace concerts. His short songs were written in Bengali and English.

<<<< The Selected Poems of Sri Chinmoy >>>>

Biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley

admin — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 06:23:05 +0000

“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you-
Ye are many — they are few.” (P. B. Shelley)

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born on 4 August 1792 in Horsham, Sussex, England. He was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded among the finest lyric poets in the English language. He is most famous for such classic anthology verse works as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, and The Masque of Anarchy, which are among the most popular and critically acclaimed poems in the English language. His major works, however, are long visionary poems which included Prometheus Unbound, Alastor, Adonaïs, The Revolt of Islam, and the unfinished The Triumph of Life. The Cenci (1819) and Prometheus Unbound (1820) were dramatic plays in five and four acts respectively. He also wrote the Gothic novels Zastrozzi (1810) and St. Irvyne (1811) and the short works The Assassins (1814) and The Coliseum (1817).

Percy Shelley was the eldest of the seven children of Elizabeth Pilfold and Timothy Shelley, a country squire who would become baronet in 1815 on the death of his father. Young Percy attended Sion House Academy before entering University College, Oxford, in 1804. He, due to his atheistic views, was expelled from school. After being expelled from school, he eloped with sixteen-year old Harriet Westbrook to Scotland. They married on 28 August 1811 and would have two children, daughter Ianthe born and son Charles. The marriage,later, was broken.

Shelley was impressed by William Wordsworth and famous for his association with John Keats and Lord Byron. It was the result of his affiliation with Wordsworth that Shelley prodiced the poem “Queen Mab” and “printed” this first major poem in 1813, at age of 21. But the poem was pirated by printer, after he printed it’s 250 coppies. It was a revolutionary poem, therefore, was considered illegal and Shelley could not claim for copyright against the pirator. Between 1821 and the 1830s over a dozen pirated editions of Queen Mab were produced and distributed among and by the laboring classes fueling, and becoming a bible for, Chartism.

The novelist Mary Shelley (Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin; 1797-1851) became the second wife Percy Shaelley. She was the daughter of an atheist journalist William Godwin. Their marriage was also the result of an elopement of Mary to Switzerland in 1814. The Shelley’s were spending much time with Lord George Gordon Byron who also led a controversial life of romantic entanglements and political activity.

In 1815 the Shelley’s moved back to England and settled near London. The year was full of good and bad news for him. His grand father left a handsome money for him, his wife Harriet drowned herself and Mary’s half sister Fanny committed suicide.

During his last years, Shelley wrote numerous articles on vegetarianism. He was working on his tragedy in five acts The Cenci and many other works including “Men of England” and his elegy for John Keats “Adonais” (1821). Mary too was busy writing while they lived in various cities including Pisa and Rome. Shelley died on 8 July 1822, at the age of twenty-nine while he was on sailing trips on his schooner ‘Don Juan’ when in a storm it sank. His body washed ashore and he was cremated on the beach near Viareggio. His ashes are buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, Italy.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major contributors to English Romantic poetry. He is an asset for the English literature. His unconventional life and uncompromising idealism, combined with his strong disapproving voice, made him an authoritative and much-denigrated figure during his life and afterward. He became an idol of the next two or three or even four generations of poets, including the important Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poets Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as Lord Byron, Henry David Thoreau, William Butler Yeats, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and poets in other languages such as Jan Kasprowicz, Jibanananda Das and Subramanya Bharathy.

<= The Selected Poems of Percy Shelley =>

Biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

admin — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 17:15:22 +0000

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on 21 October 1772 in the rural town of Ottery St Mary, Devon, England. He was a poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher. He with his friend William Wordsworth, founded the Romantic Movement in England. He was also, one of the Lake Poets.

About his childhood, Coleridge suggests that he “took no pleasure in boyish sports” but instead read “incessantly” and played by himself. After John Coleridge died in 1781, the then 8-year-old Samuel was sent to Christ’s Hospital, a charity school founded in the 16th century in Greyfriars, London, where he remained throughout his childhood, studying and writing poetry. At that school Coleridge became friends with Charles Lamb, a schoolmate, and studied the works of Virgil and William Lisle Bowles. From 1791 until 1794, Coleridge attended Jesus College, Cambridge. In 1792, he won the Browne Gold Medal for an ode that he wrote on the slave trade. In December 1793, he left the college and enlisted in the Royal Dragoons using the false name “Silas Tomkyn Comberbache”, perhaps because of debt or because the girl that he loved, Mary Evans, had rejected him. Afterwards, he was rumored to have had a bout with severe depression. His brothers arranged for his discharge a few months later under the reason of “insanity” and he was readmitted to Jesus College, though he would never receive a degree from Cambridge.

Coleridge is best known for his poems “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan”. Among his major prose works is “Biographia Literaria”. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, is highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture. He added new words and terminologies to the English poetry. He was a major influence, via Emerson, on American transcendentalism.

Throughout his adult life, Coleridge suffered from crippling bouts of anxiety and depression (neuralgia) and chose to treat these episodes with opium, becoming an addict in the process.

As important as Coleridge was to poetry as a poet, he was equally important to poetry as a critic. Coleridge’s philosophy of poetry, which he developed over many years, has been deeply influential in the field of literary criticism. This influence can be seen in such critics as A.O. Lovejoy and I.A. Richards.

<= The Selected Poems of Coleridge =>

Biography of William Wordsworth

admin — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:02:05 +0000

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850) was the arch representative of the Romanticism in English Literature. He along with his contemporary Samuel Taylor Coleridge, launched the age of Romantic poetry.

Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth, Cumberland. His boyhood was full of adventure among the hills, and he says of himself that he showed “a stiff, moody, and violent temper.” He lost his mother when he was 8, and his father, John Wordsworth ( a legal representative of James Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale) in 1783 when he was 13. The latter, prematurely cut off, left little for the support of his family of four sons and a daughter, Dorothy (afterwards the worthy companion of her illustrious brother).After the death of their mother, in 1778, John Wordsworth sent William to Hawkshead Grammar School and Dorothy to live with relatives in Yorkshire; she and William would not meet again for another nine years. He further in 1787 went to St. John’s Coll., Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. in 1791.

Wordsworth’s father, although could not live long, did teach him poetry, including that of Milton, Shakespeare and Spenser, in addition to allowing his son to rely on his own father’s library. After the death of his father, Wordsworth’s uncles were desirous that he should enter the Church, but to this he was unconquerably averse; and indeed his marked indisposition to adopt any regular employment led to their taking not natural offence. The beginning of his friendship with Coleridge in 1795 tended to confirm him in his resolution to devote himself to poetry; and a legacy of £900 from a friend put it in his power to do so by making him for a time independent of other employment.

Wrdsworth, in November, 1791, married a French woman, Annette Vallon, while he was on a visit to France and had a girl from her but due to uncertain circumstances, he had to leave them and returned to England. With the Peace of Amiens again allowing travel to France, in 1802 Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, visited Annette and Caroline in France and arrived at a mutually agreeable settlement regarding Wordsworth’s obligations.

The year 1793 saw Wordsworth’s first published poetry with the collections An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. That year, he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Somerset. The two poets quickly developed a close friendship. In 1797, he settled with his sister at Racedown, Dorsetshire, and shortly afterwards removed to Alfoxden, in the Quantock Hills, to be near Coleridge, who was then living at Nether Stowey in the same neighbourhood. One result of the intimacy thus established was the planning of a joint work, “Lyrical Ballads”, to which Coleridge contributed “The Ancient Mariner”, and Wordsworth, among other pieces, “Tintern Abbey”. The first edition of the work appeared in 1798. With the profits of this he went, accompanied by his sister and Coleridge, to Germany, where he lived chiefly at Goslar, and where he began the “Prelude”, a poem descriptive of the development of his own mind. After over a year’s absence Wordsworth returned and settled with Dorothy at Grasmere. Two years later Wordsworth’s circumstances enabled him to marry his cousin(In 1802), Mary Hutchinson, to whom he had been long attached. The following year, Mary gave birth to the first of five children, three of whom predeceased William and Mary.

In 1807 his best publication of “Poems in Two Volumes”, which contains much of his best work, including the “Ode to Duty,” “Intimations of Immortality,” “Yarrow Unvisited,” and the “Solitary Reaper”, added the treasure of English Literature. In 1813 he migrated to Rydal Mount, his home for the rest of his life; and in the same year he received, through the influence of Lord Lonsdale, the appointment of Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland, with a salary of £400.

Wordsworth’s magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semiautobiographical poem of his early years which the poet revised and expanded a number of times. The work was posthumously titled and published, prior to which it was generally known as the poem “to Coleridge”. Wordsworth was England’s Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850 (buried in the churchyard of Grasmere). He is regarded by the great majority of the lovers of poetry as, notwithstanding certain limitations and flaws, a truly great and original poet.

<= The Selected Poems of Wordsworth =>

Biography of Lord Byron

admin — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:10:41 +0000

George Gordon Byron was born on 22 January 1788. His names changed through out his life. he was born to Captain John Byron, and Catherine Gordon. He was also known as Lord George Gordon Noel Byron and commonly as Lord Byron. Lord Byron was an English poet and a leading figure in Romanticism.

Byron spent his early childhood years in poor surroundings in Aberdeen, where he was educated until he was ten. After he inherited the title and property of his great-uncle in 1798, he went on to Dulwich, Harrow, and Cambridge, where he piled up debts and aroused alarm with bisexual love affairs. Staying at Newstead in 1802, he probably first met his half-sister, Augusta Leigh with whom he was later suspected of having an incestuous relationship.

In 1807 Byron’s first collection of poetry, Hours Of Idleness appeared. It received bad reviews. However his real poetic success came in 1812 when Byron published the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1812. Amongst Byron’s best-known works are the brief poems She Walks in Beauty, When We Two Parted, and So, we’ll go no more a roving, in addition to the narrative poems Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan. He is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and remains widely read and influential, both in the English-speaking world and beyond.

Byron’s notability rests not only on his writings but also on his life, which featured aristocratic excesses, huge debts, numerous love affairs, and self-imposed exile. He was famously described by Lady Caroline Lamb as “mad, bad and dangerous to know”. Byron served as a regional leader of Italy’s revolutionary organization, the Carbonari, in its struggle against Austria. He later travelled to fight against the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero. He died on 19 April 1824, from a fever contracted while in Messolonghi in Greece.

Lord Byron is attributed as one of the most important figures of the Romantic Movement (1785–1830; a period when English literature was full of virtuous heroes and themes of love and triumph). Because of his works, active life, and physical beauty he came to be considered the perfect image of the romantic poet-hero; the concept of the ‘Byronic hero’.

<= The Selected Poems of Lord Byron =>

When We Two Parted

We’ll Go No Mpre A-Roving

There Be None of Beauty’s Daughters

She Walks in Beauty

Prometheus

On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year

The Eve of Waterloo

The Destruction of Sennacherib

Darkness

And Thou Art Dead, As Young and Fair

Biography of Geri Halliwell

admin — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 11:37:24 +0000

Geraldine Estelle “Geri” Halliwell was born on 6 August 1972 in Watford, Hertfordshire England U.K. She is an English recording artist, author and philanthropist.

Halliwell was born to Laurence Francis Halliwell, who was of English,Irish/Italian descent, and his wife Ana Mar?a (née Hidalgo), who was of Spanish descent from Huesca, Spain. She grew up on on a council estate in North Watford, Hertfordshire. Before starting her music career, Halliwell had worked as a nightclub dancer in Majorca, a model and presenter on the Turkish version of Let’s Make a Deal and as a glamour model. She got fame with her nude photos of Halliwell which were re-published in a number of top-shelf magazines in the UK, as well as in Playboy and Penthouse.

On 30 May 1998 Halliwell left the Spice Girls due to depression and differences between the group. After coming to international prominence as a member of the girl group, the Spice Girls, Halliwell launched her solo career and released her debut album Schizophonic in 1999. Since then she has released two more studio albums — Scream If You Wanna Go Faster(2001) and Passion(2005) — and four number one singles at the UK Singles Chart, “Mi Chico Latino”, “Lift Me Up”, “Bag It Up” and “It’s Raining Men”.

Halliwell’s first child, a daughter named Bluebell Madonna, was born on 14 May 2006. Halliwell did not identify the father. She told reporters that the first name was inspired by the “precious flower,” and that the middle name was in honor of the singer Madonna.

On 28 June 2007, Halliwell announced she was joining her former group-mates for “Return of the Spice Girls”, a concert tour that would see all five original members of the Spice Girls re-uniting on stage. In 2008 Halliwell published a book series named Ugenia Lavender.

In 1999, after having left the Spice Girls, Halliwell became a representative for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). As a goodwill ambassador, Halliwell toured the Philippines on a fact-finding trip. She visited with staff and clients of family planning clinics, women’s groups in slum areas, and college students. She also kept related with country politics and supported Tony Blair’s Labour Party in the United Kingdom general election, 2001.

Halliwell in Spice Group was famous with the name Sexy Spice. She is a talented beauty with all her performing charms for the amusement of her fans.

Biography of Claude Monet

admin — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:03:03 +0000

Claude Monet was born on 14 November 1840 in Paris. Claude Monet is also known as Oscar Claude Monet or Claude Oscar Monet. In 1845, his family moved to Le Havre in Normandy. His father wanted him to go into the family grocery business, but Monet wanted to become an artist. His mother was a singer. His early learning is from Jacques-François Ochard and Eugène Boudin. When his mother died, at the age of sixteen, he left school and went to live with his widowed childless aunt, Marie-Jeanne Lecadre.

His early years were spent in Le Havre, where he first excelled as a caricaturist. Later he was converted to landscape painting by his early mentor Boudin, from whom he derived his firm predilection for painting out of doors. He studied in Paris at the Atelier Suisse in 1859. There he made a friendship with Pissarro. He also joined for two years’ military service in Algiers, he returned to Le Havre because he had contracted typhoid fever. On his return he met Jongkind, to whom he said he owed `the definitive education of my eye’. He then entered the studio of Gleyre in Paris , in 1862. There he met Renoir, Sisley, and Bazille, Together they shared new approaches to art, painting the effects of light en plein air with broken color and rapid brushstrokes, in what later came to be known as Impressionism. Monet’s Camille or The Woman in the Green Dress (La femme à la robe verte), painted in 1866, brought him recognition and was one of many works featuring his future wife, Camille Doncieux; she was the model for the figures in The Woman in the Garden of the following year, as well as for On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt, 1868, pictured here. Shortly thereafter, Cammille became pregnant and gave birth to their first child, Jean.

The Franco-Prussian War broke in 1870-71 and he traveled to England with Pissarro where he studied the work of Constable and Turner and painted the Thames and London parks. He also met the dealer Durand-Ruel, who was to become one of the great champions of the Impressionists.

Monet married Camille Doncieux in 1870. She had been the model of his paintings. He had two sons from her. After the birth of the second son weakened her already fading health. On 5 September 1879, Camille Monet died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-two; Monet painted her on her death bed.

Before the death of his wife during the period from 1871 to 1878 Monet lived at Argenteuil, a village on the Seine near Paris, and here were painted some of the most joyous and famous works of the Impressionist movement, not only by Monet, but by his visitors Manet, Renoir and Sisley. In 1878 he moved to Vétheuil and in 1883 he settled at Giverny, also on the Seine, but about 40 miles from Paris. After having experienced extreme poverty, Monet began to prosper. By 1890 he was successful enough to buy the house at Giverny he had previously rented and in 1892 he married his mistress, with whom he had begun an affair in 1876, three years before the death of his first wife.

Beginning in the 1880s and 1890s through the end of his life in 1926, Monet worked on “series” paintings, in which a subject was depicted in varying light and weather conditions.–Haystacks or Grainstacks (1890-91) and Rouen Cathedral (1891-95) are the best known. He travelled widely, visiting London and Venice several times (and also Norway as a guest of Queen Christiana), but increasingly his attention was focused on the celebrated water-garden he created at Giverny, which served as the theme for the series of paintings on Water-lilies that began in 1899 and grew to dominate his work completely.

During World War I, in which his younger son Michel served and his friend and admirer Clemenceau led the French nation, Monet painted a series of Weeping Willow trees as homage to the French fallen soldiers. In 1923, he underwent two operations to remove his cataracts: the paintings done while the cataracts affected his vision have a general reddish tone, which is characteristic of the vision of cataract victims. It may also be that after surgery he was able to see certain ultraviolet wavelengths of light that are normally excluded by the lens of the eye, this may have had an effect on the colors he perceived. After his operations, he even repainted some of these paintings, with bluer water lilies than before the operation.

Monet died of lung cancer on 5 December 1926 at the age of 86 and is buried in the Giverny church cemetery. He was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement’s philosophy of expressing one’s perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise.

<== The Gallery ==>

<= The Slide Show of Monet Works =>

Biography of Frida Kahlo

admin — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 04:40:19 +0000

Quote: “I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.” (Kahlo)

Frida Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907 in Coyoacán near Maxico city. Kahlo being a Mexican painter, painted using vibrant colors in a style that was influenced by indigenous cultures of Mexico and European influences including Realism, Symbolism, and Surrealism. Most of her works are self-portraits that symbolically articulate her own pain.

Kahlo was born in a small town house known as La Casa Azul (The Blue House). Her parents were Lutheran Germans. Her father, Guillermo Kahlo sailed to Mexico in 1891 at the age of nineteen. Frida’s mother, Matilde Calderón y Gonzalez, was a devout Catholic of primarily indigenous, as well as Spanish descent. Kahlo contracted polio at age six, which left her right leg thinner than the left, which Kahlo disguised by wearing long, colorful skirts. It has been conjectured that she also suffered from spina bifida, a congenital disease that could have affected both spinal and leg development. Kahlo joined a clique at the school and fell in love with the leader, Alejandro Gomez Arias. During this period, Kahlo also witnessed violent armed struggles in the streets of Mexico City as the Mexican Revolution continued. On September 17, 1925, Kahlo met a serious accident causing several injuries.

After the accident, Kahlo turned her attention away from the study of medicine to begin a full-time painting career. It was due to her temporary immobilization and isolation. It were her depriviations which appeared in the stark portrayals of pain. Of her 143 paintings, 55 are self-portraits which often incorporate symbolic portrayals of physical and psychological wounds.

As a young artist, Kahlo approached the Mexican painter, Diego Rivera, whose work she admired, asking him for advice about pursuing art as a career. This advice later resulted in likeness, love and ultimately, marriage. But their marriage was often tumultuous due to numerous extramarital affairs of the both artists. Farida was bisexual. She had affairs both with men and women, including Josephine Baker. Their marriage broke but they remarried in in 1940, yet their metrimonial life remained the same. Frida Kahlo died on July 13, 1954 due to pulmonary embolism.
A few days before her death she wrote in her diary: “I hope the exit is joyful – and I hope never to return – Frida”

Kahlo’s Casa Azul (Blue House) in Coyoacán, Mexico City, where she lived and worked, was donated by Diego Rivera upon his death in 1957 and is now a museum housing artifacts of her life. Her work conveys a melancholy and contemplative nature and is largly admired throughout the whole world. Though late after her death yet her art forced the art lovers to admire her works truely, deeply and cosiderably.

<== The Gallery ==>

<= The Slide Show of Kahlo Paintings =>