Spanish Artists – Humoring the Goddess

Francisco Goya (1746- 1828, Bordeaux, France) was a Spanish artist whose paintings, drawings, and engravings reflected contemporary historical upheavals and influenced important 19th- and 20th-century painters.A Spanish romantic painter and printmaker, Goya is considered the most important Spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.As an Old Master, he honored the works of his predecessors like Velázquez and Rembrandt, working in a traditional manner as seen in his many court portraits.At the same time, his bold departure from the artistic conventions of his day earns him a place as one of the first Modern Western painters. Between the years of 1792 and 1793, Goya suffered from a mysterious illness, which made him deaf, and affected his mental behavior.Some current medical scientists believe that his deafness was a result of the lead in which he used in his paints, whereas others believe it may have been some sort of viral encephalitis.After his illness, he became withdrawn and introspective, and began painting a series of disturbing paintings on the walls of his house in Quinta del Sordo.His earlier themes of merry festivals and cartoons changed into depictions of war and corpses, representing a darkening of his mood.

More of Francisco Goya’s paintings can be found at https://www.wikiart.org/en/francisco-goya and https://www.theartstory.org/artist/goya-francisco/.

Arnau Alemany was born in Barcelona in 1948, at the foot of a hill in one of those neighborhoods that have grown in an anarchic way, without order or planning.Up the mountain in a range that imprisons the city, buildings were built in unusual places with difficult access, creating an unusual urban complex, close to nonsense.Alemany is Spain’s foremost painter of surrealistic environments and industrialized cities of the past/future, and is recognized worldwide as one of today’s leading surrealists. He conceives his work as an effort to challenge the viewer, not to leave him indifferent, be it for better or for worse.The artist creates imaginary urban landscapes, either with signs of destruction or general abandonment, which he hopes will show that visual surprise is possible through the use of magical realism.With the security of long years of drawing, graphic, pictorial and sculptural training, Alemany works to elaborate plausible and unreal landscapes.In his world, non-existent cityscapes with a perfect geometry and coherence in their individual elements, impossible to achieve in the real work, form what he calls an “imperfect landscape”.Surreal or not, his art makes us wish we could visit his world in person.