Art Shop

Buying anything from eBay can be a bit tricky if you are doing so for the first time. However, understanding the mechanics of how the system works and following the tips below, will help you in extracting maximum value out of each purchase:

1. You should always keep an eye on the seller’s feedback and check how many negative, neutral and positive feedbacks he or she has. If it’s a high value item, then you would want to be very cautious of sellers who have too many neutral and negative feedbacks.

2. Next, you would want to ask yourself whether the deal is too good to be true. Try to evaluate what’s being offered from an impartial and non-emotional perspective. Do some research and try to determine whether or not the item is being offered at a ridiculously low price – if yes, then it’s probably wise to fight the temptation and not proceed with the purchase. Another clue would be to see whether the buyer is adamant on being paid in cash or check – fraudsters would never want to get paid via PayPal. By the same token, there are also a plethora of sellers who will try to palm you off with low quality stuff while charging you for designer goods.

3. Now for the tricky part – checking for falsely inflated pricing. Many fraudulent sellers would also engage in shill bidding – meaning that they would have a few other dummy IDs which would bid highly for the item in question. This would throw the genuine buyers off track and lure them into bidding at a higher price. Often the fraudulent seller would then sell the item to one of his own false IDs and then later come back to the genuine buyers and offer them a second chance provided all payments are wired directly to the seller – this also cleverly removes eBay from the picture. Keeping this in mind, as a buyer you should always cross check the price of the item on various other online and brick and mortar stores before making the purchase. And secondly, never ever choose to wire money to the seller for high priced items – PayPal is the best and safest option.

4. It’s probably also wise to thoroughly read the descriptions of the items that you wish to bid on. Ask yourself if it meets all your requirements and if you are not sure (or if the description is not clear enough) then write to the seller and ask. Also you would want to ask the seller whether or not the picture of the item is the actual picture of “the” item or is it a stock photo or a photo of something that is supposed to be identical to the real thing. Rule of thumb: when in doubt, ask.

5. Also always be sure to check and double check the postage costs that are being charged by the seller. Do a sanity check and try to determine whether or not the postage costs are too high. Keep in mind that this postage cost will be added up to your bid amount – so be mindful of that when bidding.

By: Gregg Rio

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There are a number of religious artists that have crafted immaculate pieces, but Rembrandt is one of the greatest. Throughout his career, he often turned to the bible for inspiration to complete his work. He produced a number of different pieces of religious art ranging from paintings to drawings to etchings, and each depicted a scene from the Old Testament.

In his work, he attempted to bring to life the characters and figures in both the Old and New Testament. But in particular he seemed to focus on the faces and events that were related to the life of Jesus Christ. He looked to his work and the bible to surpass the rough times of his life.

It was in the late 1650’s that Rembrandt began to craft religious art. The death of two of his children and other personal problems led to him beginning to craft religious figures and events. He hoped that this would lift his spirits and his family’s as well. Some of his most famous work includes depictions of Christ and the Virgin, the Apostles, the Evangelists, Monks, and Saints. His most famous piece, though, was his self-portrait as the Apostle Paul in 1657.

Rembrandt was known for painting the faces of all religious figures to reflect the burden of spiritual and emotional conflicts. The faces of the Apostles and Saints that he painted are shown peering out from the darkness of poorly-lit rooms. Through his technique of painting, he was able to bring to life the emotions and feelings of all of the religious characters in the paintings.

It was clear through his paintings that his ability to create such profound depth of expression in each character came from an understanding. He had clearly studied in-depth every person in the bible and connected with how they were feeling. Rembrandt was able to bring to life the characters, and show their psychological well-being as well.

There is a plethora of religious artists that have created brilliant work. But Rembrandt took his creations to the next level by bringing them to life and putting meaning in every little detail that was done. He, unlike anyone else before, was able to see into the human’s soul and put it on a canvas for people to amuse over. And because of this, his religious art has been considered to be his best work and amongst the best religious art to ever have been created.

By: Danny Wright

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This is the list of 100 of the Best Art Works of the World Museums Society. This list of the best 100 famous and important artworks was chosen from a huge selection of the great works of the last five centuries. There is a real cross-section of art work listed here from many countries.

Contemporary Art Gallery Magazine asked the World Museums Society to create a list of famous artworks from the great world art museums based on their importance and influence on contemporary art. The best 100 selections of these important works of art was compiled by voting members of the WMS.

1) Bosch – The Garden of Delights (1504) – Prado, Madrid

2) Michelangelo: Il Giudizio Universale/ Universal Judgement (1541) – Cappella Sistina, Roma

3) Dali: Persistence of Memory (1931) – Museum of Modern Art, New York

4) Klimt: The Virgin (1913) – National Gallery, Prague

5) Botticelli: Allegoria della Primavera (1478) – Uffizi, Firenze

6) Monet: Nimphee (1926) – Orangerie, Paris

7) Leonardo: Il Cenacolo/ The Last Supper (1497) – S.Maria delle Grazie, Milano

Rubens: Fall of the Damned/ Der Hollensturz der Verdammten

9) Van Gogh: Starry Night (1889) – Museum of Modern Art, New York

10) Raffaello: Sposalizio della Vergine (1504) – Piancoteca di Brera, Milano

11) Dali: Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (1936) – Museum of Art, Philadelphia

12) Bruegel: Triumph of Death (1562) – Prado, Madrid

13) Greco: Toledo (1599) – Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

14) Seurat: La Parade du Cirque (1888) – Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

15) Rembrandt: Militia Company (1642) – Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

16) Van Eyck: Madonna in the Church (1425) – Gemaldegalerie, Berlin

17) Leonardo: Gioconda/ Mona Lisa (1505) – Louvre, Paris

18) Rousseau: Sleeping Gypsy (1897) – Museum of Modern Art, New York

19) Greco: La Crucifixion (1594) – Prado, Madrid

20) Altdorfer: The Battle of Alexander the Great (1529) – Alte Pinakothek, Munchen

21) Klee: Ad Marginen (1930) – Kunstmuseum, Basel

22) Rembrandt: Belshazzar’s Feast (1635) – National Gallery, London

23) Rubens: St Agustine, National Gallery, Prague

24) Renoir: Bal du Moulin de la Galette (1876) – Musee National d’Orsay, Paris

25) Goya: Aquelarre/ Il Grande Caprone (1821) – Prado, Madrid

26) Chagall: I and the Village (1911) – Museum of Modern Art, New York

27) Magritte: Specchio Falso (1928) – Museum of Modern Art, New York

28) Millet: Harvesters Resting (1853)

29) Veronese: Nozze di Cana (1563) – Louvre, Paris

30) Velasquez: Las Hilanderas (166?) – Prado, Madrid

31) Caravaggio: Davide/ Galea (1607) – Kunsthistorische Muzeum, Wien

32) Rubens: Feast of Venus/ Vennsfest (1637) – Kunsthistorische Muzeum, Wien

33) Vermeer: The Astronomer (1668) – Louvre, Paris

34) Schiele: Death and the Maiden (1915) – Belvedere, Wien

35) Cezanne: Le Mont Saint Victoire (1906) – Museum of Art, Philadelphia

36) Klee: Landschaft mit dem Gelben Kirchturm (1920) – Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst, Munchen

37) Leonardo: Vergine delle Rocce I (1486) – Louvre, Paris

38) Rousseau: Virgin Forest at Sunset (1907) – Kunstmuseum, Basel

39) Tintoretto: Miracolo dello Schiavo (1548) – Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venezia

40) Ernst: Antipope (1942) – Guggenheim, New York

41) Botticelli: Miracolo di San Zenobio (1500) – National Gallery, London

42) Picasso: Three Musicians (1921) – Museum of Modern Art, New York

43) Miro`: Hunter, Museum of Modern Art, New York

44) Matisse: Dance (1909) – Museum of Modern Art, New York

45) Braque: Violin and Palette (1910) – Guggenheim, New York

46) Klee: Fischzauber (1925) – Museum of Art, Philadelphia

47) Duchamp: Nude Descending a Staircase #3 (1916) – Museum of Art, Philadelphia

48) Van Gogh: Sunflowers (1888) – Museum of Art, Philadelphia

49) Kokoshka: Der Irrende Ritter (1915) – Guggenheim, New York

50) Murillo: Nascita di S. Giovanni Battista, Norton Simon, Pasadena

51) Renoir: Bal a Bougival (1883) – Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

52) Manet: Esecuzione dell’Imperatore Massimiliano (1867) – Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

53) Manet: Olympia (1863) – Musee National d’Orsay, Paris

54) Monet: Water Lilies I (1905) – Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

55) Leger: Acrobat at the Circus, Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Basel

56) Hodler: Der Tag (1899) – Kunstmuseum, Bern

57) Munch: The Scream (1893) – Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo

58) Altdorfer: Rest on the Flight to Egypt (1510) – Gemaldegalerie, Berlin

59) De Hooch: The Mother (1660) – Gemaldegalerie, Berlin

60) Steen: St Nicholas Eve (1660) – Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

61) Rembrandt: Man in Oriental Costume (1635) – Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

62) Rembrandt: The Betrayal of Peter (1660) – Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

63) Rembrandt: Philemon and Baucis (1658) – Washington, National Gallery

64) Rembrandt: Landscape with Bridge (1636) – Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

65) Vermeer: Kitchen Maidservant (1660) – Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

66) Marc: Stables (1914) – Guggenheim, New York

67) Hals: I reggenti dell’Ospizio dei Poveri (1664) – Hals Museum, Harleem

68) Carpaccio: S. Giorgio in Lotta con il Drago (1507)

69) Bellini: Pala di San Giobbe (1487) – Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venezia

70) Pisanello: Partenza di San Giorgio (1438) – Sant’Anastasia, Verona

71) Boccioni: La Citta` che Sale (1910) – Museum of Modern Art, New York

72) Chagall: Dedie a Ma Fiance (1911) – Kunstmuseum, Bern

73) Chagall: Le Soldat Boit (1912) – Guggenheim, New York

74) Kandinskij: Einige Kreise (1926) – Guggenheim, New York

75) Rousseau: Jouers de Football (1908) – Guggenheim, New York

76) Leger: Le Grand Dejeuner/ Three Women (1921) – Museum of Modern Art, New York

77) Delaunay: St Severin (1909) – Guggenheim, New York

78) Ernst: La Grande Foret (1927) – Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Basel

79) Picasso: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) – Museum of Modern Art, New York

80) Picasso: Night Fishing at Antibes (1939) – Museum of Modern Art, New York

81) Van Dyck: Crowning of Thorns – Prado, Madrid

82) Tiziano: Venere, Amore e Organista – Prado, Madrid

83) Leonardo: Annunciazione (148?) – Uffizi, Firenze

84) Perugino: La Consegna delle Chiavi (1482) – Cappella Sistina, Roma

85) Giorgione: Tre Filosofi (1508) – Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien

86) Grunewald: St Erasmus und St Maurice (1523) – Alte Pinakothek, Munchen

87) Gauguin: Where Have We Come From (1897) – Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

88) Gauguin: Mahana No Atua/ Day of the God (1894) – Art Institute, Chicago
an dMuseum of Art, New York
89) Greco: Bautismo de Cristo (1596) – Prado, Madrid

90) Van Eyck: The Fountain of Grace (1429) – Prado, Madrid

91) Picasso: Guernica (1937) – Museum of Modern Art, New York

92) Leonardo: Epifania, Uffizi, Firenze

93) Ghirlandaio: Vecchio e Nipote, Louvre, Paris

94) Van Gogh: Selfportrait (1887) – Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

95) Carpaccio: Disputa del Sinedrio (1514) – Brera, Milano

96) Pissarro: Verger a Pontoise (1872) – Musee National d’Orsay, Paris

97) Toulouse-Lautrec: Moulin Rouge (1892) – Art Institute, Chicago

98) Delacroix: La Mort de Sardanapal (1827) – Louvre, Paris

99) Degas: Dance Class (1874) – Louvre, Paris

100) Gericault: The Raft of the Medusa (1819) – Louvre, Paris

This list of 100 of the Favorite Art Works of the World Museums Society has a cross-section of art work from several centuries and many countries. If you are intersted in contemporary art please see the links below. The WMS voted these to be the best of important and influential art works from the world museums.

By: Tia Marks

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What actually is art? Give me ten people and I’ll give you ten different definitions of the word. What it means to you is as unique to you as your fingerprints. But who’s to say what qualifies as art, or fine art? What distinguishes the art of Jean Michel Basquiat from Rembrandt van Rijn? Besides the time differences, each artist’s art have been met with different types of criticism. Was one art, and the other just crummy art? Who’s to say?

What we can say though is there is an unmistakable mainstream art circuit with art dealers and galleries, critics and fine artists with or without their MFA’s. Sometimes this crowd can be quite pretentious and judges art in its own way, usually following the natural cycles of fads and trends. What’s hip today may be tomorrow’s old news. That’s just how it is.

But true art and artistry can be found everywhere. Wherever there is creativity there is art. You don’t need to hang around in posh upper class galleries and drink expensive wine to be a real artist.

Jean Dubuffet and Art Brut

“Art Brut” in French literally means “rough” or “raw” art. This was translated to “Outsider Art” in English. It was started by the painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet to describe art that is outside of the official art culture. He knew the value of art which normally doesn’t hang on gallery walls but nonetheless should be recognized and not necessarily written off as lesser art.

Dubuffet mainly focused on the art of the mentally ill in insane asylums. One particularly noteworthy example was Adolf Wolfli. As a mental patient diagnosed with psychosis, he was an extremely prolific artist creating epic novels of 45 volumes with over 25,000 pages and 1600 illustrations. With minimal resources he would slowly create work after work with only one pencil and two sheets of paper a week at his disposal. This meant drawing on tiny bits of paper, using small stubs of pencils, and anything he could find or beg off of people to get his work done.

Wolfli’s work was often characterized as “schizophrenic art” with obsessive symmetry, ornamental patterns, reduced depth. Every piece of the paper is covered, leaving no white or empty space. Another similar work is by the psychiatric patient Friederich Schroder, who drew the “Swan Doll’s Dance of Death.” With a perfect mirror symmetry down the middle, the drawing shows a monster with a grotesque smile wearing a crown and holding his arms curving downward with birds’ heads for hands, combining animal with man.

Naive and Primitive Artists

Dubuffet was working with the mentally ill artists, while “Outsider Art” outside of France was known to be a much more general term. It included not just the psychotic art, but also naive, self-taught, and primitive art as well. On the American scene in the early to mid twentieth century we had Grandma Moses, the renowned folk artist painting such countryside favorites as “This Old Checkered House in Winter” which was the subject of many paintings, one of which was appraised on “Antiques Roadshow” in 2004 for $60,000. Several of her paintings have appeared on Hallmark holiday cards.

Earlier we have Horace Pippin, born in my local area in West Chester in 1888, who painted “Giving Thanks” and “Domino Players.” Even earlier in France, there was Henri Rousseau, with his dream-like representations of jungles and jungle animals.

All of these artists could have been considered Naive painters because they were self-taught and their paintings possessed a child-like quality to them. This doesn’t mean all Naive painters had no formal education, but as it relates to Outsider Art it generally does. In modern times there is no stigma attached to this genre of art.

Children’s Art

I talked about how children learn art in my article Learning Art. The way we learn as we grow up and experiment with art starts out with an expression close to ancient societies’ art. For example, in ancient Egyptian wall paintings you will find people in a row side by side with no overlap. Children would express the same type of thing when they draw people in a crowd next to each other in a row instead of showing any signs of overlap. The way they see it, if someone’s arm looks as if it disappears into the back of another person, this makes no visual sense. You wouldn’t really see a person’s arm actually going inside someone else, so why would one draw it that way.

The same is true for people in buildings. When a child draws a person inside a building, they wouldn’t show a face looking out from a window, because this would mean there is simply a floating head in a window sill. If anything their art was more true to reality, than to aesthetics and perspective.

One funny recent story which raises the question of the authority of art dealers is a woman selling her son’s scribble paintings as priceless works of modern art. She didn’t tell the dealers her son was 6 or 7 years old and the paintings were more or less doodles. Nonetheless the dealers saw the “genius” of them and bought them top dollar.

If anything is to be learned from children and from child-like naive paintings is that art can be appreciated for art’s sake. It doesn’t have to be perfect and it certainly does not need the approval of avant garde art experts. Art can be found in the small crafts of Christmas Kitsche statues, the scribbles of prisoners and psychiatric patients and even the finger paintings of gorillas. Art should be appreciated for what it is, and what’s its attempting to be.

Whether it’s good art, bad art, crummy art, children’s art, “Outsider Art” is still art.

By: Daniel Kretschmer

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Martial Arts refers to a systematic style of personal combat. There are many different variations of the arts. Here is an introduction to the subject.

Any discussion of martial art facts should begin with the meaning of the word itself. The term martial arts comes from the Roman god of war Mars. The phrase arc Martialis actually translates as the “arts of Mars.” Although there is no doubt that martial arts was developed in the beginning as a part of warfare, even from the earliest times it had other purposes. Today, marital arts are used for a wide variety of purposes. Some of them are very spiritual in nature and some are non-spiritual. They include self discipline, mediation, self confidence, and sport.

Although martial arts are thought by many to be almost exclusively of Asian origin, the development of formal systems of self defense actually took place world wide. The Europeans developed several unique styles of fighting including savate, the French kick boxing discipline developed by sailors and street fighters. American Indians and Hawaiian islanders both had their own forms of martial arts.

Although certain people brought knowledge of the Asian forms of martial arts to the West from the very beginning of the contact between Asia and the West, martial arts were basically unknown in the United States until after the 1950’s. An example of this lack of knowledge was given in the popular James Bond movie “GoldFinger”, where Bond who was supposed to be an expert in unarmed combat himself displays at distressing lack of knowledge about the nature of karate and judo.

Some non-Asian forms of unique martial arts include khridoli which is a very ancient Georgian form that used mostly bare hands and Glima, which is an ancient Scandinavian martial art that is thought to date back to the Vikings and is still the National sport of Iceland. Today, many forms of martial arts have become sports. Judo and Tae Kwon Do are both events in the Summer Olympics. Archery, boxing, javelin throw, wrestling and fencing are other Olympic sports that have martial arts roots.

Today, the increased media attention has brought the ancient martial arts to a new level of popularity. Martial arts movies and televised competitions have also helped increased the interest and exposure of martial arts. Although many of the ancient forms of personal combat that were developed over the centuries have been lost, martial arts has experienced a revival through sport and competition.

By: Aazdak Alisimo

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