What is your favorite painting?
Mine is starry night because I'm a basic person
Politically, Magritte's "The Son of Man"
Emotionally, Van Gogh's Night Café
Solid choices for sure and Night Cafe is my favourite Van Gogh by far.
The John Brown execution painting. I was in the de Young museum in SF a few months ago and randomly ran into it totally not expecting it to be there, had to do a double take. It's even better in person
After Storming the Winter Palace by V. Polyakov
otherwise anything by Hieronymous Bosch ranks pretty highly
Also love the paintings from the walls of Francisco Goya's house, especially "Saturn devouring his son" (which is a title made up by the people who found it, it very well may not be an attempted depiction of the titan or Roman mythology)
Probably Bruegels The Procession to Calvary, I think its a really impactful moment how at first when you view the painting(assuming you don't already know the title and what its about) you're in the same position as the rowdy crowds, unaware of what is occurring right in the middle of them, but then you start piecing things together and understanding.
I also like Hunters in the Snow from the same painter, its also very beautiful and has a huge amount of detail put into it, but it doesnt have the same kind of "ooooh shit" moment from realizing exactly what is going on as Procession has.
I love the sort of fisheye perspective of The Procession to Calvary and how it does exactly what you said by emphasising and enlarging not the subject but the people like us around the edges before slowly drawing you into the centre and the realisation of what's happening.
I used to have a print of Hunters in the Snow on my halway wall.
I painted a shitty dresser in a starry night motif, get on my level of basic.
I don't know if I have a favourite painting, but my favourite painter, currently, is probably Egon Schiele. I just love his paintings of figures.
Probably John Martin's 'Judgement' triptych, but especially The Great Day of His Wrath. Both the size of the canvases themselves and the sheer scale of their scenes and detail is breathtaking in person, they're extremely metal for biblical paintings, and they're partly inspired by the landscapes and coast of (roughly) where I grew up. The painting itself and his work in general has been through so many fascinating periods of huge popularity and total disregard too, almost as if they channel something cyclical about human nature and societal concerns rather than just being dubbed 'classics' and then universally loved.
I also love Harbour Window with Two Figures, St Ives: July 1950 by Patrick Heron. Perhaps it's my coastal obsession again but the texture-like colour and warmth in the home with the cool but subtly beautiful tones outside are a joy and the whole painting as such a sense of motion, as though its the sea that remains steadfast and the world swells and rocks around it. He was also a great writer and a righteous activist (as were his pacifist parents) for the vast majority of his life - a concientious objector to WW2, a socialist, and of course a founding member of the CND (campaign for nuclear disarmament).
Special shoutout to a pair of paintings by George Grosz, Metropolis and Explosion. They were painted at the same time basically, while WW1 was still intermittently tearing apart Berlin. In Metropolis I'm obsessed with the sense of movement of the rushing figures representing modern city life (and the single figure, perhaps the artist, watching from a window) set against the towering structures that go from being a distinctive street to a seemly endless Escher-like labyrinth the further back in the skyline you get. Always the doomer socialist, many of his paintings of cities have this dark red sense of dread that hangs over them, doom and violence that most of the figures ignore. Which is why I think Explosion is such a brilliant companion piece, the movement and excitement of Metropolis exploded into harsh splinters and shards, moving only outward in destruction. Brick, buildings, even limbs and half figures wailing amongst the smoke and fire and yet there's still the calm figure in the window, powerless to stop it but not reacting, as though he knew this was inevitable.
La Grenouillere because impressionists make water and leaves so pretty :powercry-1:
Depending on my mood it is The bean eater.Annibale Carracci. or the storming of the winter palace one. It has come to pass Sergei Lukin
Though, Hu Ming's super gay Chinese propaganda ones hit hard to.
Hard for me to ever choose a favorite anything but lately https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barge_Haulers_on_the_Volga
or Goya's black paintings, especially https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dog_(Goya)
or the red guards liberating the winter palace https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DOQHy-nWkAA5kyZ.jpg
