What first drew me to Klimt were his renditions of red-haired goddesses, usually portrayed with mischievous smiles and an anti-gravitational effect. Painting with gold usually overwhelms me- it is far too easy to create a shiny, obscure mess-- but Klimt somehow manages to fleck it perfectly across the canvas, highlighting pattern in a great nuance.
"Whoever wants to know something about me, they should look attentively at my pictures and there seek to recognize what I am and what I want," -Klimt.
Klimt seems like someone who speaks with candid honesty, and was probably quite charming.
To the left is Goldfish, and my favorite part is the small purple butt-crack at the bottom of the canvas. Oh, I love how he paints skin. Most "old" painters glazed and glazed until their skin was so smooth it was flat. Here it is fleshy, ample, undertones of blush-pink and glowing blues. It is not stagnant at all.
The second thing that drew me to Klimt were his green, (green is my absolute favorite color), his green, green layered, dotted, multiple shaded, paintings of nature- most notably Rosebush, secondly Sunflower. God, something about how he paints the countryside, it is so painfully, beautifully real. Hardly anyone can do it.
"Truth is like fire; to tell the truth means to glow and burn," -Klimt.
That reminds me of the Margaret Atwood poem...
Eating fire
is your ambition
to swallow the flame down
take it into your mouth
and shoot it forth, a short or an incandescent
tongue, a word,
exploding from you in gold, crimson
unrolling in a brilliant scroll
To be lit up from within
vein by vein
To be the sun
The painting above genuinely makes me excited to age, I am sitting on the edge of my seat. How beautiful is that?
❤Kitty