nourishing obscurity

Here’s an interesting quiz on the technique of oil painting itself.  The one below is about famous oil painters:

1. What was Hopper’s famous painting of the diner called [not the one above]?

2. Who was the artist who began the tradition of St. Bernards with barrels around their necks, for example in Alpine Mastiffs [1820].  He was famous for dog paintings.

3.  Who was he?  His paintings are admired for their transparent colours by adding the paint onto the canvas in loosely granular layers, for their careful composition and brilliant use of light.  Historians speculate that he possibly used a camera obscura to achieve a perfect perspective (David Hockney has been a major exponent of this theory).  He painted mostly in-house scenes, and even his two known landscapes are framed with a window.

4. His bold experimentation with colouring led directly to the Synthetist style of modern art while his expression of the inherent meaning of the subjects in his paintings, under the influence of the cloisonnist style, paved the way to Primitivism and the return to the pastoral. He was also an influential exponent of wood engraving and woodcuts as art forms.

5. His classical influences included Raphael, Bronzino, Francisco de Zurbaran, Vermeer, and Velázquez. The technique he called the Paranoiac-critical method of accessing the subconscious for greater artistic creativity. An Italian friar, Gabriele Maria Berardi, claimed to have performed an exorcism on him while he was in France in 1947.

Answers

Night-Hawks, Edwin Landseer, Johannes Vermeer, Paul Gauguin, Avida Dollars

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