Ivan Aivazovsky - Style and Subject Matter

Style and Subject Matter

Aivazovsky is best known for his seascapes and coastal scenes. His technique and imagination in depicting the shimmering play of light on the waves and seafoam is especially admired, and gives his seascapes a romantic yet realistic quality that echoes the work of English watercolorist J. M. W. Turner and Russian painter Sylvester Shchedrin. Especially effective is his ability to depict diffuse sunlight and moonlight, sometimes coming from behind clouds, sometimes coming through a fog, with almost transparent layers of paint. A series of paintings of naval battles painted in the 1840s brought his dramatic skills to the fore, with the flames of burning ships reflected in water and clouds. He also painted landscapes, including scenes of peasant life in Ukraine and city life in İstanbul. Some critics have called his paintings from İstanbul Orientalist, and others feel the hundreds of seascapes can be repetitive and melodramatic.

Read more about this topic:  Ivan Aivazovsky

Famous quotes containing the words style and, style, subject and/or matter:

    I am so tired of taking to others
    translating my life for the deaf, the blind,
    the “I really want to know what your life is like without giving up any of my privileges
    to live it” white women
    the “I want to live my white life with Third World women’s style and keep my skin
    class privileges” dykes
    Lorraine Bethel, African American lesbian feminist poet. “What Chou Mean We, White Girl?” Lines 49-54 (1979)

    The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.
    Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)

    I assure you that in our next class we will concern ourselves solely with the history of Egypt, and not with the more lurid and non-curricular subject of living mummies.
    Griffin Jay, and Reginald LeBorg. Prof. Norman (Frank Reicher)

    It is not a matter of desire, but of coercion and duty.
    Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)