ArtMatters Gallery
The Gallery will bring your residents and their visitors an in-house museum experience with an exhibition of 10 -16 fine art reproductions. The revolving exhibition, displayed in a common area, would be replaced every month with a new subject. The art would be themed, and display a self-guided informational panel next to each of the reproductions, including information about the artist and the painting. It could be accessed easily by your residents, their family, friends, your staff, or anyone visiting your facility. The changing gallery would assure regular and anticipated interest.
Art Keeps Us Human
Art teaches. Art communicates. Art has humor, adventure and passion. Art matters! People are the only living creatures who make art. It is a uniquely human activity, and the sole reason we have an advanced civilization. We use visual images to communicate with one another as a species. Art transcends language, different cultures, time and distance. It keeps us connected to one another. It keeps us human.
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Join us for a mini-history of western civilization through art, from the caves to the shuttle, to see and understand how art and civilization depend upon each other. Be sure to bring your sense of humor and your sense of Human.
Italian Renaissance
Renaissance, Italian for “rebirth” was a cultural movement in Europe, during the 14th to the 17th centuries. It was considered the bridge between the “Dark” Ages and modern history. The Renaissance's intellectual basis was humanism, derived from the rediscovery of classical Greek philosophy, which taught that "Man is the measure of all things." This new thinking became manifest in art, architecture, music, religion, politics, science, literature and other aspects of intellectual inquiry.
Portraits - Life's Great Stories
A portrait is much more than just a record of what someone looks like.
A portrait can document the history of a whole family, or a single individual’s journey. It can relate the flavor of an era of time, a whole culture, or even a single event. Portraits tell stories and sometimes serve as commentaries of social values or politics.
“It is not important to look good. It is only important that you think you look good.” – Andy Warhol
Classic Nude
Visual images are a form of communication that is unique to Humans Beings, and through the centuries, art has continued to entertain, teach, stimulate and inspire us. Identification with one another is paramount to our communication with art. The Human figure has been pivotal in that identification and what we all have in common is our anatomy. Clothes are important to date eras, recognize wealth, label class, and tell certain stories. But the nude figure transcends fashion, time and societal bias to offer personal recognition on a more universal level, physically, emotionally and spiritually.
Northern Renaissance in Holland & Flanders
The Northern Renaissance produced some of the greatest artists and the boldest innovations in art, not the least of which was the invention of oil painting itself. The wealthy culture encouraged trade with countries around the world, and the benevolent politics encouraged the exchange of ideas. It was an era of enlightenment celebrating commerce, education, religious free thought, writing, invention, innovation and art. It was a golden age.
Rembrandt: The Dutch Golden Age
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was known for the high drama of his paintings and his great financial failures. His career was the fastest rise to the top of any other Dutch artist. By the time he was 28, he had a long line of clients waiting to have their portraits painted, a thriving atelier with paying students, a grand house on the canal, and a beautiful wife who he was very much in love with. His career suffered an equally swift fall from grace. Mid career, he lost everything: his clients, his students, his reputation, his wife and his home. Despite his brilliant international reputation as one of the greatest painters in Europe, he died at age 63, one year after the death of his only child, ignored, bankrupt, and alone.
Rembrandt & Vermeer: Dutch Masters
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn and Johannes Vermeer were two of the greatest painters the world has known. They were opposite in artistic style, but similarly suffered life struggles and financial failures. Rembrandt was in love with drama; stories, action, sound and fury. His paintings were about marching soldiers, storms, biblical adventures and dramatic portraits. One cannot help but get swept up in his silences of Vermeer’s paintings. They evoke a special brand of “quiet”, sumptuous images of calm, peaceful, and focused energy.
Landscapes of the Imagination
Our imaginations can bring us to fantastic places. It is not enough for artists just to be able to reproduce nature; they may sometimes be called upon to interpret, reinvent, and expand on the natural world. They can bring us to places of legend and story, places both absurd and incredible. They offer us vistas seen only in our imaginings, and indeed show us places many people cannot even imagine.
Landscapes: A World Tour
Images can transport our imaginations to many places. The hand and eye of the artist can bring us all around the world without actually having to leave the room. By looking at landscapes, we are able to experience foreign cultures, alien climates, natural wonders, difficult terrains, dramatic weather conditions, romantic and exotic locals and even places that offer us exciting possibilities or tranquility and peace. Landscapes offer us a way to escape the “here and now”, and make the “over there” real. Art can make the world a smaller place.
Landscapes: An American Tour
Images can transport our imaginations to many places. The hand and eye of the artist can bring us all around the world without actually having to leave the room. By looking at landscapes, we are able to travel around our own country to experience different climates, natural wonders, difficult terrains, dramatic weather conditions, and places that offer us tranquility and peace. Art can make the world a smaller place.
Landscapes: Seascapes
Paintings of the sea encourage very personal responses, meaning different things, at different times, to different people. It can be a place of peaceful meditation and constant renewal, yet also violent and dangerous. It may offer the possibility of travel, play, adventure, commercial rewards, and a place to reflect and renew the spirit. The sea is a metaphor for all of nature, bountiful, enduring, powerful, and mysterious.
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“The heart of man is very much like the sea, it has its storms, it has its tides, and in its depths it has its pearls too.” ― Vincent van Gogh
Gustav Klimt: Mood Landscapes
Gustav Klimt was an Austrian painter who was a prominent member of the Viennese Art Nouveau movement and a leader of the Vienna Secession, which broke with the traditional academic art of his era. Klimt spent many summers painting at Lake Altersee. These summer landscapes account for one quarter of all his paintings. The artist chose simple motifs: gardens, meadows with fruit trees, farmhouses surrounded by lush vegetation, and details of the lake and its shoreline.
Gustav Klimt: La Belle Epoch
Gustav Klimt was an Austrian painter who was a prominent member of the Viennese Art Nouveau movement and a leader of the Vienna Secession, which broke with the traditional academic art of his era. His primary subject was the female figure, the controversial treatment of which is known for a highly decorative and erotic nature in an era of conservative formality.
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Still Life: Edibles in Art
The Still Life offers us a long tradition of celebrating beautiful objects. Just by looking, we can stimulate all our other senses. We can hear, touch, smell and taste delicious items. Looking at rich food and drink serves up tempting and enjoyable aromas and flavors, which may remind us of pleasurable memories and dreams, satisfying different desires, both real and fantastic.
Still Life: Bouquet
The Still Life offers us a long tradition of celebrating beautiful objects, textures, aromas, tastes, and creative composition. One of the most cherished subjects is uplifting, colorful, fragrant and joyful. It is simply the bouquet of flowers.
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"Painting is done to decorate walls. So it should be as rich as possible. It should be something likeable, joyous, and pretty—yes, pretty.” ― Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Odilon Redon: Dreaming in Flowers
Redon was a French painter who broke free from all artistic movements with black and white imagery conjured in his dreams. His dark visions were connected to the writings of Poe, Baudelaire and Mallarmé. Then, after 20 years, Redon surprisingly began to paint colorful, radiant images of flowers. He brings spirituality to one of his favorite subjects in this mature era of his career. They represent the positive aspects of growth and “coming to flower”.
Interiors: Public Spaces
People are social beings. The interior public space is a place, out of the weather, that is accessible to all kinds of people. It is used for social interactions of all kinds; entertaining, romantic, as well as just the daily business of living. They offer us a place to get away to, a place to belong, and a place to find connection, fun, music, and laughter. The interior painting allows us to frequent restaurants, taverns, churches, theatres, schools, trains & buses, commercial markets and stores. They are places we can go to interact, learn, play, and pray.
Interiors: Intimate Spaces
Images bring us places. They bring us to many places we would not normally have access to. They give us access to special, private moments in special, private settings. Artists love to share the intimate moments of lives that we can all relate to and appreciate. From the bedroom to the bath, we are all vulnerable in our private moments in our intimate spaces.
Interiors: Living Spaces
We live inside our homes. It is our sanctuary, a safe place to share with our family and enjoy the daily business of living. The interior space is private, secure, and sacred. Yet with art, we are invited to voyeuristically glimpse the sacred spaces of the lives of our neighbors. How well do we fair?
Art of Storytelling
Visual Images are a form of Communication that is unique to Humans Beings. We are the only living creatures who make art. Art teaches. Art communicates. Art has humor, adventure and passion. Art matters! Art tells stories. From gossip to great literature, stories made visual communicate on many levels, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. Through the centuries, art continues to entertain, teach, stimulate and inspire.
Animals
Humans are the only animals that communicate with art. But we humans love animals, and we love art about animals. Whether they be wild or domesticated, our partners in sport, or household family members, we have a special relationship with the animal kingdom and depend upon them for the quality of our own existence. We are sometimes more connected to animals than with other people.
10 Second Images: Universal Visual Communication
Human Beings are the only animals on the planet that make art. We have depended on images to communicate with one another since we were drawing animals on cave walls. It is our base-line communication. You do not have to speak the same language, live in the same part of the world, have the same culture or religion, or even live in the same millennia, to look at any image and touch another Human Being. There are many images that communicate a universal message almost instantly. As you confront each image in this Gallery, ask yourself what is the first feeling you experience.
Impressionism
The Impressionists were a group of artists, who exhibited together in France from 1874-1890. Although each of them was very different, they were united in their rebellion from the conservative Grand Salon, the all-powerful elite jury who choose only very academic paintings, restricting and repressing any new expressions. This group of courageous painters broke with convention, and changed the way we looked at art. They included: Manet, Degas, Cassatt, Morisot, Renoir, Monet and Pissarro.
Post Impressionism
The Post Impressionist painters were the first artists to be influenced by the new and radical style of Impressionism. They included Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Paul Seurat, Henri Rousseau, Toulouse Lautrec, and Paul Cezanne. These artists took a small step away from the tenets of the original Impressionists, who advocated direct observation of nature. By the beginning of the 20th century, each of these younger artists, each initiated, inspired, and influenced the creation of whole new movements of art.
Auguste Renoir
One of the most popular of the Impressionist painters, Renoir was the romantic of the group. His paintings celebrate life and love.
His reliably happy images, filled with music, dancing, & dappled sunlight, did not mirror his own life. He was socially intimidated and later severely handicapped with arthritis.
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“Why shouldn’t art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world. I wish to lend joyousness to a wall!” ― Pierre Auguste Renoir
Claude Monet: Life is a Garden
Monet takes the motif a blooming garden and successfully creates a sense of the familiar and comfortable, in an atmosphere of the brilliant colors of changing nature. Arguably the most important painter of gardens in the history of art, Monet’s garden was one of his biggest sources of inspiration.
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​“I must have flowers, always, and always. I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.” ― Claude Monet
Claude Monet: En Plein Aire
The French phrase means "in the open air". At the end of the 19th century, painting "en plein aire" was almost unheard of. Breaking with an art world dominated by traditionally approved painting methods, materials and subject matter, Monet and the Impressionists escaped from their studios to paint outside in nature. There, they were able to experience first hand, the wind, the sun, and the mist, while trying to capture the heightened expression of nature. A new category of landscape became possible, painting en plein aire.
Claude Monet: Water Garden at Giverny
Monet's long career as a painter was spent in the pursuit of understanding the effects of light on the color of objects, and the effects of the juxtaposition of color with each other. Monet is most famous for his series of paintings depicting water lilies at his pond at Giverny (1910-20) recording how their appearance changed as the light shifted. His mural-sized paintings feature the water garden emerging from almost-abstract compositions of broad strokes of bright color and intricately built-up textures.
Henri Matisse
Matisse’s world is a place celebrating color, music, dance, enjoyment, and peace. His world is one filled with flowers & fruit, beautiful women, and views out of windows where the sun is always shining and it is always summer.
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​“What I dream of is an art in balance . . . a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.” ― Henri Matisse
Pablo Picasso: Leonardo Da Vinci of the 20th Century
Picasso was not like a single artist, but many different artists, reinventing his expression as he evolved. As a prodigy at 13, he mastered realism and old world techniques. Throughout his career, he changed his style, sometimes completely, and sometimes overnight, each time inventing new imagery and motivating dozens of artists to explore new directions. Then he would get bored, and invent something else. He is at the heart of many movements of the 20th century from realistic to the abstract. Swear by him or at him, he was the most influential painter of the 20th century and the most influential painter since Leonardo Da Vinci.
Abstract Art
Abstract art does not attempt to represent an accurate image of reality but instead uses a visual language of shapes, colors, forms and gestural marks to achieve an emotional or intellectual effect.The term abstract can be applied to any art that is a departure from reality in imagery, whether slight, partial, or complete. Even art that achieves a high degree of reality can be said to be abstract, since a perfect representation is likely to be extremely elusive, created as a 2-dimensional illusion with necessary visual distortions.
Vincent Van Gogh: Landscapes
Van Gogh began to paint when he was 27 years old. He never took a formal lesson. He met the Impressionists in Paris and with their influence, and trial and error; he impacted the world with his passion. His career only lasted, in total, about 10 years, dying at 37 years old.
Norman Rockwell: War on the Home Front
Norman Rockwell was a 20th-century American painter and illustrator; most famous for his cover illustrations of everyday life scenarios he created for The Saturday Evening Post magazine. During WWII, his images fought the war at home to keep moral high. He raised almost $1.4 million for the war effort, and in 1977 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Norman Rockwell: Saturday Evening Post
Norman Rockwell, The Saturday Evening Post’s most famous illustrator, is considered by many to be one of America’s greatest artists. He was a master visual storyteller, and his works captured the triumphs and foibles of the common man. In 1943, a fire in his studio destroyed many original canvases and over the years many other works were lost. Many reproductions were, by necessity, produced from existing covers. You may notice that they may be ripped, yellowed, folded or even defaced with a mailing label.
Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia O’Keeffe is one of the most significant and intriguing artists of the 20th century. She was famous for her large-scale flower paintings, as well as her images of the towering skyscrapers of New York City and the landscape of New Mexico. In a career spanning more than 60 years, she produced more than a thousand artworks. She was a pioneer of abstraction, inspired by close observation of her surroundings. Her images were products of her insight and imagination rather than imitative representations of the visual world.
Ansel Adams
Ansel Adams was an American photographer best known for his iconic images of the American West, including Yosemite National Park.
His photographs were used as evidence, presented at Congressional hearings at the time, debating whether to fund more than the one National Park, Yellowstone. The beauty of his images moved government officials to pass legislation protecting our lands for future generations of Americans to enjoy.
M.C. Escher
Maurits Cornelius Escher was a Dutch graphic artist. He is known for his often mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints. His work explores unexplored perspectives and features impossible constructions. He experiments with reflections, transformations, tessellations, negative vs. positive spaces, impossible worlds and illusions of the infinite.
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“In high school, I was a particularly poor student in math. Imagine, now mathematicians treat me as their long lost brother. Most of the time I don’t even know what they are talking about.” ― MC Escher
Paul Gauguin
A brilliant intellectual, Gauguin was a scoundrel, a self-described savage, and his innovative work inspired great devotion. “I don’t want to paint what I see. I want to paint what I imagine.” He was a champion for human rights, and a shameless opportunist. His life was an adventure, traveling back and forth across the globe and journeying through many levels of civilization.
Marc Chagall
Known as the “Poet”, Chagall was one of the most versatile artists of the 20th Century.
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Like a poem his paintings use images as metaphor. He merged the traditional images of his native Russian, Jewish culture with the modern styles of Cubism, and Fauvism.
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His paintings portray folk tales and fables, ideals of freedom, religious symbols, flowers, music, dreams of love, nightmares of war, passionate emotions and soul refreshing humor.
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He never finished a canvas until something in it “surprised” himself.
As a revolving attraction, the Gallery offers a built-in, stimulating, activity for residents and their guests. The program may also benefit your marketing department, potentially making them a
willing co-sponsor.
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Gallery subjects can revolve once a month or once every 2, 3 or 4 months.
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For specific pricing information, call
(508)660-8689