World Paintings

“What is mastery? What would it be for you
to recreate a masterful piece of art?”

Hikaru Miyakawa did just that and recreated Leonardo da Vinci’s "The Last Supper”.

Hikaru is an internationally exhibiting Japanese artist based in the US. As Leonardo da Vinci, whom Hikaru has followed since he was ten, he is a man of multiple expressions: art, music (opera), acting, writing, dancing, and teaching to name a few. As a writer and researcher, Hikaru is currently writing books/articles on several subjects including among others: Leonardo da Vinci, Old and New Testaments through Hebrew and Aramaic, Parzival / Holy Grail, Subconsciousness / Dream.

Last year Hikaru gave a TEDxBoulder talk on his artistic path, relationship with Leonardo’s works and thoughts on mastery. Enjoy!

Vincent van Gogh

L'Allée des Alyscamps (with detail), 1888, oil on canvas, 91.7 x 73.5 cm, private collection.

This masterpiece by the Dutch post-impressionist was sold to a private Asian collector for a total of $ 66.3 million at a New York auction, becoming Van Gogh’s most expensive work sold since 1998.
Van Gogh painted L'Allée des Alyscamps while working side-by-side with Paul Gauguin in Arles during their short-lived but intense collaboration. 

Plenty of that cash has been coming from China at auctions, where buyers purchased 22% of all global art last year.

Henri Matisse considered his drawing to be a very intimate means of expression. The method of artistic execution — whether it was  pencil, charcoal, crayon, lithographic tusche or paper cut — varied according to the subject and personal circumstance. Some of his favorite subjects were the female form, the nude figure or a beautiful head of a favourite model. 

“I have always considered drawing not as an exercise of particular dexterity… but as a means deliberately simplified so as to give simplicity and spontaneity to the expression, which should speak without clumsiness, directly to the mind of the spectator.” - Henri Matisse

Poetry has always inspired artists and vice versa. Ever since the Roman poet Horace put down in his Ars Poetica (c. 13 BC) “ut pictura poesis” (“as is painting, so is poetry”), the two arts have been bounded together. Poets and painters have turned to one another for inspiration, and the dialogue has been mutually beneficial. 

1. William Holman Hunt
   The Lady of Shalott, 1905, oil on canvas.
   Poem “The Lady of Shalott” (fragment) by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1842 version).
   Background: The character Lady of Shallot is based on the legendary Elaine, Donna di Scolatta from the 13th century. She has been cursed to view the world only as reflections in a mirror and to weave images in her tapestries. If she ever actually gazes outside her window, this will bring about the mysterious curse. Sir Lancelot rides past her window, she is enthralled enough to look directly at him, and the curse takes fatal effect. 
   
   She left the web, she left the loom,
   She made three paces thro’ the room,
   She saw the water-lily bloom,
   She saw the helmet and the plume,
   She look’d down to Camelot.
   Out flew the web and floated wide;
   The mirror crack’d from side to side;
   “The curse is come upon me,” cried
   The Lady of Shalott.
   
   
2. Gustav Klimt
   The Kiss, 1908-1909, oil on canvas.
   Poem ”More than a Kiss” by Isa Ampersand (2015).
   
   It’s more than a kiss. It’s a secret being shared between lips.
   It’s a light that only ignites when these two mouths collide.
   It’s a way to start a forest fire and a means of breathing underwater.
   It’s being born again and rekindling a desiring to live.
   It’s a dream and it’s an awakening.
   It’s how we connect to another person’s soul.
   
   
3. Pablo Picasso
   The Old Guitarist, 1903-1904, oil on panel
   Poem “The Man with the Blue Guitar” by Wallace Stevens (1937).
   
   I
   The man bent over his guitar,
   A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
   They said, “You have a blue guitar,
   You do not play things as they are.
   ”The man replied, “Things as they are
   Are changed upon the blue guitar.
   ”And they said then, “But play, you must,
   A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
   A tune upon the blue guitar
   Of things exactly as they are.”
   
   II
   I cannot bring a world quite round,
   Although I patch it as I can.
   I sing a hero’s head, large eye
   And bearded bronze, but not a man,
   Although I patch him as I can
   And reach through him almost to man.
   If to serenade almost to man
   Is to miss, by that, things as they are,
   Say that it is the serenade
   Of a man that plays a blue guitar.
   
   III
   Ah, but to play man number one,
   To drive the dagger in his heart,
   To lay his brain upon the board
   And pick the acrid colors out,
   To nail his thought across the door,
   Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,
   To strike his living hi and ho,
   To tick it, tock it, turn it true,
   To bang if form a savage blue,
   Jangling the metal of the strings…
   
   IV
   So that’s life, then: things as they are?
   It picks its way on the blue guitar.
   A million people on one string?
   And all their manner in the thing
   And all their manner, right and wrong,
   And all their manner, weak and strong?
   The feelings crazily, craftily call,
   Like a buzzing of flies in the autumn air,
   And that’s life, then: things as they are,
   This bussing of the blue guitar.