Visual Heaven

Visual Heaven is a place for art lovers to connect and look back at art that gets forgotten all the time because of how the art industry only shows significant art work by certain artist.   We at Visual Heaven think that it is important that we appreciate art history from other artist that never get mentioned because of the big name artist clogging the spotlight.  It's not about who it is made by but what the artwork means underneath the colors.  

• Torii gate at Ise Shrine, Mie prefecture.
• Ise Jingu 672, Dedicated to Amaterasu
• Period:Edo period (1615–1868)
• Date:17th century
• Medium:Two-panel folding screen; ink, color, and gold on paper
• Dimensions:60 x 64 1/4 in. (152.4 x 163.2 cm)

This bird's-eye view of a Shinto shrine and its environs offers a lively scene of seventeenth-century Kyoto, a genre that developed from late sixteenth-century paintings of famous sites around the capital. Entering and leaving through the red torii gate that dominates the scene are gaily clad citizens of various classes. In the street market nearby, vendors enjoy a bustling trade selling fish, rice cakes, and tobacco. Such activities, which remain to this day among the pleasures associated with shrine visits, were particularly noteworthy at the Yasaka Shrine, famous for its market and its buildings that assimilated Buddhist temple architecture. The shrine was also recognized for its prominence during the Gion Matsuri, Kyoto's most important festival.



ARTIST Kawanabe Kyosai, Japanese, 1831-1889
MEDIUM Color woodblock print on paper

• Place Made: Japan
• Standing Tiger
•       DATES 1878
• PERIOD Meiji Period
• DIMENSIONS 9 x 11 5/16 in. (22.9 x 28.7 cm) (show scale)

Utagawa: Masters of the Japanese Print, 1770–1900In this print, most likely designed to celebrate the arrival of the Year of the Tiger in 1878, Kyōsai depicts an artist’s studio with all the accoutrements of an accomplished painter, including ink, brushes, and rolls of paper. Kyōsai was celebrated for his depictions of animals, and in this print he showcases his skill with the depiction of a majestic tiger on a painted screen, an image within an image. He has cleverly rendered his signature as if it appears on the surface of the screen.

Edward Hopper

1. Credit  Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund 
2.  Oil on Canvas
3.  Object Number 577.1943                                  Gas 1940

This work resulted from a composite representation of several gasoline stations seen by the artist. The light in this painting—both natural and artificial—gives the scene of a gas station and its lone attendant at dusk an underlying sense of drama. But rather than simply depicting a straightforward narrative, Hopper's aim was "the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature"—in this case, the loneliness of an American country road. Fellow artist Charles Burchfield believed these paintings would remain memorable beyond their time, because in his "honest presentation of the American scene . . . Hopper does not insist upon what the beholder shall feel."



Edward Hopper

• Painting - Nighthawk   1992    
• Oil on canvas 

Edward Hopper said that Nighthawks was inspired by “a restaurant on New York’s Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet,” but the image—with its carefully constructed composition and lack of narrative—has a timeless, universal quality that transcends its particular locale. One of the best-known images of twentieth-century art, the painting depicts an all-night diner in which three customers, all lost in their own thoughts, have congregated. Hopper’s understanding of the expressive possibilities of light playing on simplified shapes gives the painting its beauty. Fluorescent lights had just come into use in the early 1940s, and the all-night diner emits an eerie glow, like a beacon on the dark street corner. Hopper eliminated any reference to an entrance, and the viewer, drawn to the light, is shut out from the scene by a seamless wedge of glass. The four anonymous and uncommunicative night owls seem as separate and remote from the viewer as they are from one another. (The red-haired woman was actually modeled by the artist’s wife, Jo.) Hopper denied that he purposefully infused this or any other of his paintings with symbols of human isolation and urban emptiness, but he acknowledged that in Nighthawks “unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.”