James Ensor

                            

James Ensor is a Belgian artist, he was known as one of the greatest 19^th century realists, a pioneer of modern art in Belgium. He was a very extremely talented colorist.  He did art is whole life pretty much, he would go get lessons from the local drawing school, and in the summers he painted nature on pink cardboard. He started the artist association Les Vingt with some of the people he went to school with.  Some people view his work as scandalous; I personally think his works are beautiful. Painting, drawing, and printmaking, each one with more character, breaking the border of naturalism in his time. He didn’t just use those as his medium though. Ensor played around with the qualities of light, and line. Some of his most famous works are The Entry of Christ into Brussels, which is oil paints on canvas, The Oyster-eater. These two pieces of works are amazing to me, especially The Entry of Christ; the detail that he adds is remarkable. Every person in it does not look the same. Something makes all of them individuals and it stands out. And how he has Jesus just standing in the middle, no one noticing him at all. He also made Jesus smaller than most of the others in the painting, showing that being small you will get lost in the midst of all the big people. I feel like Ensor portrays himself as Jesus here, because of that reason. It makes me feel like Ensor is trying to show through the painting artistic isolation. The Oyster-eater when I look at it, it makes me smile. She is just sitting there at the table herself, enjoying it, probably after a hard day of doing chores around the house. It makes me happy seeing him paint a woman happy in that time, doing something that she wanted to do with no one telling her otherwise. A couple of my favorites are The Bathing Hut, The Frightful Musicians, and Doctrinal Nourishment. The Bathing Hut is one of his seascapes. All of them are gorgeous, but this one stands out to me the most. It is the simplicity of it; there is not much color, just the neutral shades. How everything just blends together really. The Frightful Musicians is just whole bunch of crazy characters playing instruments. They all have either a head or a body of an animal, and an instruments. It is a lively piece and I find it funny. He has a great color scheme in this piece, even though there is a lot of red it all goes together, because all the other colors cancel it out. Finally the last piece is Doctrinal Nourishment. It is very clear that this is a political piece of his, with the higher ups, sitting crouching on a brick wall pooping into the mouths, and onto the people below them. It is a dark colored piece, but the splashed of yellow brings it out. You can see the etchings in the painting, and his brush strokes, which brings it to life almost. This piece speaks a lot to me, because it clearly has a story behind it. The people are taking the higher ups shit, literally in this piece and they keep letting them. It’s the church doing it, like the pope, and the bishop. I do like it because it is also comical in a way. All of Ensor’s pieces are great works, I do love them all. So much creativity behind them, he uses great color schemes that bring his works to life, making them pop right of the canvas.