Pain-ters

Ironic and funny portrait photography and short movies by Dellacroix & Dellfina dealing with famous painters. Part of the project “Self Portraits of Others“.

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This album is dealing with art inspired and based on the life of artists that made their pain into an art form.

Frida Kalho

Kahlo suffered lifelong health problems, many of which stemmed from a traffic accident in her teenage years. Her daily life was never painless and she also furred from her lifelong love relation with artist Diego Rivera. She said about him “ I had to accidents in my life, the first when in a bus crash, the other when I met Diego “ These issues are reflected in her works, more than half of which are self-portraits of one sort or another. Kahlo suggested, "I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best." She also stated, "I was born a bitch. I was born a pain-ter."

Vincent van Gogh

Vincent viewed his life as horribly wasted, personally failed and impossible. On July 27, 1890 Van Gogh attempted suicide by shooting himself in the chest. He survived, but died two days later from the wound.

Theo, who had collected the majority of Vincent's work from Paris, died only six months later. His widow took the collection to Holland and dedicated herself to getting the now deceased Vincent the recognition he deserved. She published his work and Vincent became famous nearly instantly. His reputation has been growing since.

The story of Vincent van Gogh's tragic life, filled with mental evils and artistic triumphs , lingers almost becoming that of legend. His work is still astounding millions around the world daily, and though he sold only one painting in his life, his influence on the outcome of art has been amazing and overwhelming. His paintings have reached new records when sold for hundreds of millions of dollars, and his persona has sparked number one hit songs. Vincent van Gogh has altered mankind forever... and he believed his life was a terrible failure!

Joseph Beuys

In 1941, Beuys volunteered for the Luftwaffe. He began his military training as an aircraft radio operator. In 1942, Beuys was stationed in the Crimea and was a member of various combat bomber units. From 1943 on he was deployed as rear-gunner in the Ju 87 "Stuka" dive-bomber. Drawings and sketches from that time have been preserved and already show his characteristic style. On 16 March 1944, Beuys’s plane was shot down on the Crimean Front. Beuys’s subsequent recount of the event became one of the most controversial aspects of his artistic persona. He claimed to have been rescued from the crash by nomadic Tatar tribesmen, who had wrapped his broken body in animal fat and felt and nursed him back to health:

“Had it not been for the Tartars I would not be alive today. They were the nomads of the Crimea, in what was then no man’s land between the Russian and German fronts. They discovered me in the snow after the crash, when the German search parties had given up. I was still unconscious then and only came round completely after twelve days or so, and by then I was back in a German field hospital. So the memories I have of that time are images that penetrated my consciousness. The last thing I remember was that it was too late to jump, too late for the parachutes to open. That must have been a couple of seconds before hitting the ground. Luckily I was not strapped in – I always preferred free movement to safety belts… My friend was strapped in and he was atomized on impact – there was almost nothing to be found of him afterwards. But I must have shot through the windscreen as it flew back at the same speed as the plane hit the ground and that saved me, though I had bad skull and jaw injuries. Then the tail flipped over and I was completely buried in the snow. That’s how the Tartars found me days later. I remember voices saying ‘Voda’ (Water), then the felt of their tents, and the dense pungent smell of cheese, fat and milk. They covered my body in fat to help it regenerate warmth, and wrapped it in felt as an insulator to keep warmth in.”

This painful event gave birth to Beuys career as an artist.

Eugen Delacroix

Delacroix's most influential work came in 1830 with the painting Liberty Leading the People, which for choice of subject and technique highlights the differences between the romantic approach and the neoclassical style. Less obviously, it also differs from the Romanticism of Géricault and the Raft of the Medusa.

"Delacroix felt his composition more vividly as a whole, thought of his figures and crowds as types, and dominated them by the symbolic figure of Republican Liberty which is one of his finest plastic inventions…"

Probably Delacroix's best known painting, it is an unforgettable image of Parisians, having taken up arms, marching forward under the banner of the tricolour representing liberty, equality, and fraternity; Delacroix was inspired by contemporary events to invoke the romantic yet painful image of the fight for liberty. The soldiers lying dead in the foreground offer poignant counterpoint to the symbolic female figure, who is illuminated triumphantly, as if in a spotlight.

Paint with your own blood
paint until you faint
keep painting until you die"

— Yoko One