Today it’s back to the Old Masters, a work painted in 1647, most likely by Jan Jansz Van de Velde III. The piece is entitled Still Life with Tall Beer Glass.

Click on the image above for a larger, more detailed view.

The painting is at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It’s relatively small, only 64 cm by 59 cm (25 in. x 23 in.) Below is the description of the painting from the museum’s gallery page.

Halfway along the wooden table the tablecloth is pulled back. All kinds of household objects and food are displayed on the tabletop. A large beer glass towers over everything. It is a pass glass, an unusual kind of glass that was used in drinking games. Also on the table are one or two dishes and a pewter jug on its side. Behind the pass glass are a firepan and a pipe. The background of this still life has been kept rather dark, and the objects almost fade into it. It makes the catchlights on the objects are all the more distinct. This was typical of the style of the still life painter Jan Jansz. van de Velde.

That page attributes the painting to his father, Jan Van de Velde II, whereas another page at the Rikjsmuseum website attributes the same painting to the son, Jan Jansz. Van de Velde III. Throughout the web, sources attribute the same painting variously to father or son so I’m at a loss to which one actually painted it. The one clue that seems to suggest that it was III is that Jan Van de Velde II was born in 1593 but died in 1641. If the date of the painting — 1647 — is correct, then it almost has to have been painted by Jan Jansz. Van de Velde III, as he would have been the only Van de Velde painter still alive that year.

Van de Velde III was born in Haarlem, The Netherlands, in 1620 and died in 1662, in the town of Enkhuizen, also in The Netherlands. Throughout his career, he painted a number of still lifes, and several more with beer. For example, the painting below, Still Life with a Beer Glass, a Pipe, Tobacco and Other Requisites of Smoking, from 1658, was sold by Sotheby’s in January of 2009.

Then there’s this one, Still Life with a Pipe-lighter, from the Ashmolean museum at Oxford in England.

It was painted in 1651, and the museum describes the objects in the painting like this:

The objects in this painting reappear in many of van de Velde’s still-life compositions. The same pewter dish (or one very similar) appears in works extending across the artist’s career while the pasglas is found in works dating from 1641 onwards. The details refer to the pleasures of the public house: smoking, drinking and playing cards. The chalk would have been used by the card-players to chalk up the score.

Another Van de Velde at the Ashmolean was the painting below, Still Life with a Clay Pipe, where the Ashmolean has a little more information about the painter:

Van de Velde was born in Haarlem. The hard, brittle translucency of the drinking glasses which appear in many of van de Velde’s still-life compositions is clearly inspired by the Haarlem painter, Willem Claesz. Heda. The accessories in this still life, which include a clay pipe, a glass of beer, a bowl of burning charcoal, playing cards and a piece of chalk, can be found in the work of Jan Jansz. Treck, a painter from Amsterdam whose work would have become familiar to van de Velde after he had settled in Amsterdam.

And TerminArters describes the painting like this.

The hard, brittle translucency of the drinking glasses which appear in many of van de Velde’s still-life compositions is clearly inspired by the Haarlem painter, Willem Claesz. Heda. The accessories in this still life, which include a clay pipe, a glass of beer, a bowl of burning charcoal, playing cards and a piece of chalk, can be found in the work of Jan Jansz. Treck, a painter from Amsterdam whose work would have become familiar to van de Velde after he had settled in Amsterdam.

If you want to learn more about the artist, the ArtCyclopedia is about the only place to start. The artist was the third in his family, and not the most well known apparently. Presumably to avoid confusion, Jan is also sometimes referred to as Jan Jansz Van de Velde. His father, Jan Van de Velde II, was better known, and his grandfather, Jan Van de Velde I was fairly well-known, too. Both were also artists and draftsmen. Here’s a short biography of III from the Web Gallery of Art:

Jan Jansz. van de Velde was born in Haarlem to a Dutch family of artists. His father, Jan, drew and made prints, while his nephews Esaias and Anthonie (1617-1672) were both painters. Jan was trained in Haarlem, although who taught him is not known. He specialised in still-life painting. Jan Jansz. van de Velde moved to Amsterdam in 1656. His early still-lifes resemble the work of Pieter Claesz and Willem Heda in both style and content. While in Amsterdam, Van de Velde specialised in small intimate compositions of just a handful of objects.

Finally back after a day of being locked out of the Bulletin due to a combination of a weird glitch and slow customer support, and this fun piece of art just in from Sea Dog Brewing in Maine. Robert Cochrane, presumably a local artist, created a large piece of art depicting Barney, the Sea Dog logo and mascot, using only crowns, or bottle caps. Here are photos of it, which are posted on Sea Dog’s Facebook page. Apparently the original is at their newest location in South Portland, Maine. I’ve featured art here before using crowns, but never one done specifically for a brewery. Pretty cool.

Barney as Cap Dog.

Artist Robert Cochrane.

A close-up of the artwork.

Today’s work of art, while thoroughly modern, is painted in a style reminiscent of the old masters by Dutch artist Jos Van De Ven. Van De Ven’s work featured today is entitled Still Life With Beer Bottle and Book.

The work is done in oil, and measures 61 x 46 cm, roughly 18 x 24 in. The artist himself describes the painting:

When I was in Lithuania, I found the little painting you can see on the wall in the background. It is a typical landscape of that area. The cup in the foreground is a Russian antique and the old handmade beer bottle is French. In order to see the shadows on the wall, I used a light background. Here again, I had to use a white cloth on the shelf in order to create a balance with the light wall.

So Van De Ven paints in the style of old Dutch masters, and here’s why:

Technique for the sake of technique and for showing off a kind of virtuosity may create some “wow”, but to my mind it has no real value. A painting has to be an illusion with a soul, not an exact replica of reality. Photography can do that much better.

That’s why I like the art of painting. The artist can create something, using reality as a tool, that a photographer may never be able to do. They can create their own light, mix colours that may not really exist, or forms that would be difficult to find in the real world. A painting is the product of an artist’s fantasy or imagination, giving them the opportunity to create their own universe. The artist can make a painting “come alive”.

As much as I enjoy painting classical still lifes, I strive to give them a contemporary touch. For instance, in the 17th century, the interior of houses were dark because of all the wood paneling on the walls and the small windows. That’s often reflected in the still lifes of the time, particularly in the dark brown colour schemes and sparse lighting. But I want my still lifes to he fresh, full of life and light, with vivid colours I want them to be alive, to show that simple things in life have a right to exist, too. As such, I use many of the best classical techniques but with a modern day spin.

And here’s a biography of the artist, from his website:

Jos Van De Ven is a modern artist with a classically inspired style who considers painting to be an adventure and a search for conceptual communication. Currently he likes to express a peaceful state of mind using objects in a timeless setting. At the heart of his work is the play and poetry of light and color. His work may be “still”, but it is alive.
“The richness of life lies within sincerity, elegance and a bit of mystery: I like my paintings to reflect states of being and my quest towards a better comprehension of man and his nobility, and that they open a window for those who know how to look beyond appearances”, says Jos Van De Ven.

His artistic journey has taken many twists and turns. In his younger days, he was devotee of the French Impressionists until he met Salvador Dali at his home in Spain. Jos was only 23 at the time. He continued with surrealism until he felt the need to break loose, painting in a totally abstract way, wild, uncontrolled, very colourful. Still not happy with his work, Jos studied art in Spain after which he felt revitalised. Unfortunately, due to various circumstances in his life at the time, he stopped painting for a while.

Years later, Jos picked up his paint brushes again, but did not know what to paint. He had changed and was looking for something that would allow him to express what he wanted say with his art. He became interested in the techniques of the Old Masters and turned to Dutch painter, Cornelis LeMair, for guidance. Under his tutelage, Jos experimented with a variety of traditional materials and approaches. His work took on another form. He liked the traditional techniques but wanted to give his paintings a more contemporary look. Now he has a definite signature and is very much appreciated.

Jos shows regularly at galleries throughout the Netherlands, France, the USA and elsewhere. His work is included in numerous collections and he regularly receives commissions from an international clientele.

His sister, Monique Van De Ven, is a well-known actress in The Netherlands and his daughter, Nadia Van De Ven, is an actress who recently started working in Hollywood. She’s been on Days of Our Lives and an episode of “ER.” She even has a MySpace page.

If you want to learn more about the artist, you’re on your own, unfortunately. Apart from his own website, there’s not much else out there about his work.

Today’s works of art are more depictions of traditional, pre-industrial brewing, these ones from Africa, specifically Zimbabwe, in southeastern Africa. The title of the first painting is Brewing Traditional Beer and was painted by Morgen Chandomba in 2007.

Click on the image above for a larger, more detailed view.

There is very little information about the artist, Morgen Chandomba. At Absolute Arts, the only place I could find mention of him on the internet, there is a small galley of his work, which is primarily depictions of everyday life, along with the occasional abstract. His biography only gives very basic details, such as the fact that he’s only 24, single and enjoys “watching movies, painting, socializing, and hanging around with guys or drinking.”

 
Chandomba lives in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, the second-largest city in that African nation. And while there is industrial beer in Africa, the primary type of beer for centuries has been millet beer, which is also known as “Bantu beer, kaffir beer, or opaque beer, [which] is an alcoholic beverage made from malted millet.”

As one website tells it:

Millet beer has been brewed in Africa for millennia. It is one of the staples of religious and social life. No prayer to the ancestors can begin without an offering of millet beer, no funeral can be held without copious amounts of millet beer. Very few visitors to Africa have ever watched beer being brewed, or know that it is safe to drink in rural villages.

To buy a DVD on Brewing Millet Beer in Africa or to watch the trailer, check out CreateSpace.

There’s also an interesting story on homebrewing in Zimbabwe on Michael & Doria’s Travel Tales. And check out this Weya Story Quilt depicting beer brewing (it’s at the bottom of them page).

But not all beer in Zimbabwe is only for personal use. Some Millet beer is made to be sold, as can be seen in this painting, Brewing Beer For Sale by Milcah Mashonganyika.

On the reverse of the painting, is the following legend to help explain what’s going on in the artwork.

Two women are carrying sacks of millet.
They are putting the sacks of millet in the river.
They want it to germinate.
Mother is putting the germinated millet on a flat stone to dry.
Mother is winnowing the millet.
Mother is grinding peanut butter.
Tendai is paying with a ball.
Two women are brewing the beer in the big drum.
Now they are filtering the beer.
People are drinking beer.

It looks like she did at least a second painting by the same name, though showing more detail and brighter colors.

As for Milcah Mashonganyika, there’s slightly more information at her biography:

Born in 1966, Milcah was raised in a family of 6 children. She was married in 1982 and has 5 children. Her husband died in 1994, at the age of 32. She is now the sole support for her children.

Milcah learned to paint at the Weya Community Training Centre in 1988. She moved to Harare in February 1998, to paint on hand-thrown pottery at Ros Byrne Pottery. She says she moved to the city because “every week there was money,” thus enabling her to “give my children a better life.”

Harare is the capital of Zimbabwe and its largest city.

Here’s the Wikipedia summery for Zimbabwe:

Zimbabwe, (officially the Republic of Zimbabwe and formerly Southern Rhodesia, the Republic of Rhodesia and Zimbabwe Rhodesia) is a landlocked country located in the southern part of the continent of Africa, between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers. It is bordered by South Africa to the south, Botswana to the southwest, Zambia to the northwest and Mozambique to the east. The official language of Zimbabwe is English; however the majority of the population speaks Shona, a Bantu language. Its other native language, Sindebele, is spoken by the Matabele people.

Zimbabwe today is under the reign of President Robert Mugabe. Human rights abuses[2] and economic mismanagement leading to hyperinflation and impoverishment have increased popular support for newly sworn-in Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change – Tsvangirai.

It’s interesting that wherever cereal grains grow, native populations have figured out how to make beer with them. I don’t believe I’ve ever had a beer brewed with Millet, but now I’m extremely curious to get my hands on some. Does anyone use millet in homebrewing?

Given that I’ve been in Boston for the last week, it only seems fitting to feature a portrait of one of Beantown’s own. So this week’s work is a portrait of Samuel Adams painted by John Singleton Copley.

The painting hangs in Boston’s Museum of Fine Art, and I had a change to see the original on Saturday. It was smaller than I expected at 49 1/2 x 39 1/2 in. and is believed to have been painted around 1772. Its first owner, after the artist, was none other than John Hancock. His wife later gave it to Adams’ grandson and in 1876 it was given to the City of Boston. In the painting, he’s pointing at the Massachusetts Charter, which Adams believed was a constitution that protected peoples’ rights.

Copely was one of the most famous early American painters, especially of portraits. He also did paintings of John Hancock, John Adams and Paul Revere, as well.

Whether or not Adams was in fact a brewer is open to some debate. Stanley Baron’s Brewing in America suggests that he may have been involved in his father’s malting business, making him a Malster. In the footnote in the Wikipedia entry on Samuel Adams, it tells the following story.

Baron, Brewed in America, 74–75; Alexander, Revolutionary Politician, 231. However, Stoll (Samuel Adams, 275n16) notes that James Koch, founder of Boston Beer Company, reports having seen a receipt for hops signed by Adams, which indicates that Adams may have done some brewing.

It seems to me we might rarely hear of Sam Adams’ connection to the world of beer were it not for the Boston Beer Co. Historically, it doesn’t seem like that was a driving force in his life. There’s a statue of Adams at Faneuil Hall, often referred to as the “cradle of liberty.”

Below the statue, this is all it says:

No mention of his brewing, though to be fair this is a historical site. But I still think absent Jim Koch, our history would likely not include his background in beer, whatever it really was. It’s certainly been a powerful and very successful association.

If you want to learn more about the artist, you can start with his Wikipedia page. There’s also information at Art Archive, the ArtCyclopedia, and the National Gallery of Art. Also, the John Singleton Copely Virtual Gallery purports to have a complete gallery of his works.

Beer bottle caps, a.k.a. crowns, seem to be a favorite material for artists to use. Here’s yet another very cool use of crowns to make something spectacular looking. The artist, Eung Ho Park, has painted the inside of the crowns in pairs to resemble staring eyes and creates entire walls of them to great effect, as if a crowd of people were looking back at you from the wall of the museum. The piece is called, appropriately, I’m Looking At You and was completed in 2008.

Click on the image above for a larger, more detailed view.

 
A different version of the same piece was exhibited at the Queens International 2004, when another art blog, Edward Winkelman, chose Park as his Artist of the Week.

Here’s a detail of I’m Looking At You.

And this what it looks like on a wall, from an angle.

 
Here’s his biography from his website:

Eung Ho Park was born in Woonchun, South Korea and he received his BFA from Pratt Institute. Eung Ho Park has exhibited at Exit Art, the Drawing Center in New York City, Sculpture Center, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Queens Museum of Art, the Long Island University, DM Contemporary, Maxwell Davidson Gallery, Sabina Lee Gallery in Los Angeles, and Wake Forest University in South Carolina. Park has created a permanent sculpture for PS 270 in Queens, New York. His work had been reviewed in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Baltimore Sun, Art on Paper, The Boston Globe, and other publications. He lives in Jackson Heights Queens and maintains a studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

And here’s an even closer close-up, giving a good idea of the amount of detail Park put into painting each set of eyes.

 
And here’s his statement about his work in general:

As a Korean transplant to New York, I ponder the notion of identity and continuously question racial and ethnic divide. My work evolves through a gradual thought process beginning with the selection of ordinary objects used in routine daily consumption. These manufactured goods, like items in a time capsule, represent and preserve ideas of culture. Based upon my observations of social relationships and my personal experiences as an immigrant, I transform groupings of these mundane objects, whether spoons, bottle caps or bowling balls, into installations that depict contemporary narratives of humanity.

There’s not much else about Park out there, though there’s another post about this work at Y Gallery New York and DM Contemporary, plus a cool video by Ray Rapp for Kuf-Mold Exhibition, showing a number of Eung Ho Park’s works.

I’m starting to believe Édouard Manet may be the most besotted artist of his era. This is the third time I’ve featured a work of his. Today’s painting is known as Le Bon Bock or “A Good Glass of Beer,” though sometimes it’s called Study of Emile Bellot.

The painting is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Gallery Label is: “Bock is a dark, rich beer made in the spring. This vivid depiction of a drinker recalls the animated portraits by seventeenth-century Dutch masters like Frans Hals that Manet greatly admired.”

And they have this to say about it in their Handbook of the Collections:

In 1872 Edouard Manet traveled to Holland, and the trip reinvigorated his longstanding appreciation of seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting. At the Paris Salon the following year he showed this lively picture of a man enjoying his bock, or springtime beer, that is directly influenced by such images. The warm tonalities and lively handling of paint particularly recall the work of Frans Hals. The painting was well received at the Salon, where the evocation of old master painting styles was much appreciated. This work also presented few of those surprising disjunctions of color to which conventional critics of Manet often reacted violently. Manet’s model, who endured more than sixty sittings, was a neighbor of the artist named Bellot. Christopher Riopelle, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 194.

If you want to learn more about the artist, the Art Archive or the ArtCyclopedia are both good places to start and Wikipedia also has a nice summary. Also the Edouard Manet Gallery purports to have a complete gallery of his works.

Today’s works of art bring us forward again for some contemporary painting. The four works below are by a Chicago artist, Michael Naples, who painted Broken Beer Bottles in 2007.

According to the biography, on his website, He “is an artist from Wheaton, IL. He earned his BFA degree from the American Academy of Art in Chicago. In 2001 he was accepted into the Society of Illustrators and published in their annual.” The bio continues:

For the next decade he filled his time doing various illustration jobs, murals, and many, many commissioned portraits for people all over the US. But it wasn’t until a chance encounter with an article about Daily Painting that he found his passion for oils. He began his own Daily Painting Project in August 2006 and hasn’t lost a bit of momentum.

Michael has won several awards and had numerous articles published about his paintings. These Daily Paintings have been purchased by collectors all over the world including Australia, United Kingdom, Canada, Sweden and almost every state in the US.

Looking through his gallery of works at Daily Painters, he’s done at least three more with a decidedly beer theme. This one, entitled Blue Moon, was done in August of last year.

And here’s another one, which is titled Imported, a Heineken bottle painted in February of 2008.

In August of 2006, he began a blog called Daily Paintings (different from Daily Painters) where he paints and posts a new work almost every day, usually five or six times each week. Here’s another one from that project, titled Twist Off, and completed just a few weeks ago at the end of February.

 
Apart from Daily Painters and his own Daily Paintings, there’s not too much more information about Naples out there. He does have his own eponymous website, and will also do custom hand-drawn artwork on commission, which can be ordered at Hand-Drawn Portraits.

I’m not sure exactly who Guusagain is — could that be “guess again” in Dutch? — but she loves drawing mice that at least somewhat resemble Danger Mouse. There are hundreds of photos with mice drawn into the scene. But the one I stumbled on was this one of several mice drinking and even swimming in a glass of beer.

Apparently “Guus” is the name of the mouse, based on a testimonial on her Flickr profile page.