Today’s work of art is another old painting, from the 17th century. It’s by Jan Miense Molenaer, a Dutch painter who lived from around 1610-1668. He’s mostly known for his portraits, usually depicting everyday life, though he did still life work, too. He was a student of the more well-known Frans Hals, considered a Golden Age Dutch painter.

Here’s a short biography, from Encyclopedia.com:

Dutch painter, active in his native Haarlem and in Amsterdam, where he moved in 1636 after marrying Judith Leyster; both belonged in their youth to the circle of Frans Hals. He and his wife probably collaborated and sometimes it is difficult to differentiate their work. Molenaer, however, was more prolific and more versatile. His genre scenes range from pictures of the indecorous activities of peasants to exquisitely finished interiors showing well-to-do families. He also painted portraits and religious scenes. His early works (which are considered his best) have a grey-blond tonality and touches of bright colour; his later ones are darker, in the manner of Brouwer or Ostade. He had two painter brothers, Bartholomaeus (d. 1650) and Claes (d. 1676), both active in Haarlem.

The painting below is called Man With Glass Of Beer, and, oddly enough, is up for auction on the Italian eBay through the Gallery Duval. Opening bid is just under $3,000.

 
Here is the description of Man With Glass Of Beer from the auction:

Artist:
The painting is signed with a monogram “JM” for Jan Miense Molenaer (ca.1610-1668), a well-listed Dutch Baroque Era painter of genre subjects. He shared a studio with his wife, Judith Leyster, also a genre painter, portraitist and painter of still-life. Both Molenaer and Leyster may have been pupils of Frans Hals.His style is similar to that of Dutch genre painter, Adriaen van Ostade. His works often depicted players of music, taverns, card players, scenes of games. He also depicted biblical stories.

Age:
The painting is from the 17th century.

Medium:
The painting is a genuine oil painting on wood.

Size without frame:
The picture is 22 cm /8,6 inches high and 17 cm /6,6 inches wide.
The frame itself is 5 cm /2 inches wide.

Auction record:
A painting by Jan Miense Molenaer was sold at Christie’s, New York NY on the 16th January 1992 for $ 260,000.

Description:
Here you are offered a fine early 17th century oil painting of museum quality featuring a seated peasant man in a blue jacket, red trousers and a red hat, shown against a dark background. He is amused and coarsely smiling while raising a full glass of beer. On a plinth beside him stands a glistening ceramic pitcher. The work is marked by naturalistic precision in rendering the male figure captured in a dynamic and emotional gesture, excellent handling of colour and virtuoso effects of light and shadow.

 
This is perhaps his most beer-centirc work, though because he painted scenes from everyday life, many of his paintings involve drinking since it, too, was a part of everyday life in 17th century Holland. Here are a few more of his paintings that featured beer in them.

Drinking Peasants
Unknown date
Oil on panel, 62 x 79 cm
Private collection

Amorous Couple in an Inn
1640s
Oil on panel, 50 x 39 cm
Private collection

The King Drinks
1636-37
Oil on panel, 42 x 55 cm
The Collection of the Prince of Lichtenstein, Vaduz

Peasants in the Tavern
Unknown date
Oil on wood, 30,3 x 24,6 cm
Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

 
If you want to learn more about the artist, Wikipedia, the Artnet or the ArtCyclopedia are all good places to start. And to see more of his work, check of the Web Gallery of Art.

I found yet another artist using discarded beer bits, in this case crowns — what most people call bottle caps — to create fine art. Robert Melee is an artist from New Jersey, who also maintains a studio in New York. The main piece for today is entitled Unrendered Quasi-Articulated Chic Substitution, and was completed in 2003. It’s made of enamel, plaster, beer bottle caps on wood, and is 48 1/2 inches in diameter.

He currently has an exhibition at Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York City. The exhibition also includes a few other beer bottle cap works, such as Anti-Disassembled Substitution.

Another art blog, Edward Winkelman, describes this work as follows.

Robert titles each of these works some sort of “substitution.” And although I’ve actually discussed what this means with him, I’m still not totally sure. Beer as a substitution for love? It’s a painful notion.

Edward Winkelman has one more Melee bottle work, Redefined Gradual Substitution.

This work described like so:

As noted, the circles are beer bottle caps sunk in plaster, and although they do reference the alcoholism, suburbia, and dysfunction explored in his photography and videos, here they obviously serve a formal function and reference Pop Art and Op Art, and eyes, and give Robert a recognizable, accessible vocabulary unit that lends the work a clunky elegance (I LOVE “clunky elegance”). Besides, polka dots have been hot for a while (think Damien Hirst or Sigmar Polke) and whenever a motif crops up in various artists’ work, it usually suggests a zeitgeist of some sort.

There’s one more bottle cap woth at the Kreps Gallery, which is a curtain of crowns entitled Substitute Anti Sucklucking Substitution.

From Wikipedia:

Robert Melee (born 1966) is an artist based in NYC and Asbury Park, New Jersey. Melee was born in New Jersey. He makes multimedia art – videos, installations, collages. – His work is often compared to that of John Waters and Andy Warhol due to its overt campness. He is also a painter. He attended the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1986 – 1990.

There’s not much else about Melee out there, though there a post about his public sculptures at School of Visual Arts’ Continuing Education Blog, a New York Times review, and a piece about an exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Just in case you thought I was an art snob, I offer today’s beer-themed work into evidence that I can appreciate art in almost any form. Having visited the kitschy motel resort South of the Border that’s just over the border into South Carolina from North Carolina several times as a kid on family vacation road trips, I have a special place in my heart for black velvet paintings. Sadly, my parents never picked one up though I had my share of black light posters as a teenager in the 1970s, including one or two that were simulated velvet.

This week’s work of art has the formal title Custom Black Velvet Painting of a Monkey King With A Beer, and it’s from a company called Indignico Inc. Back in the “velvet painting purchasing heyday of the late ’60’s and early ’70s that there was enough business to justify the multiple-artists-per-painting, production-line techniques of mass production” so during that time there were no individual artist because back then the paintings were collaborative works of art, meaning each painting was done by several different artists. Usually they were done in an assembly line of sorts, where each painter did a portion of the work, one small part, and then passed it on to the next artist, who added his bit before passing it on himself, a pattern which continued until the painting is completed.

But according to William Travis Robison, owner of Indignico, “here in the present day, and for at least the last 20 years, such methods are no longer used — at least not in Tijuana. Today in Tijuana any painting you might buy that was painted on black velvet will have been hand-painted by a specific actual human being. To be sure, some of the professional Mexican velvet Elvis artists from Tijuana painting today are more naturally talented than others, but not one of them would consider what he does to have anything to do with the soulless, rote work of the production line, be it Jorge Terrones, or Lino Zamora, or Abel Velezquez, or Argo, or Francisco Romero, or Ramirez, or Santos, or Felix, or Salvador….”

Indignico appears to be the biggest purveyor of black velvet paintings on the planet, with an unbelievable array of different types of paintings, including Elvis, scary and funny clowns, cowboys and Indians, unicorns, and a wide range of politicians from Nixon to George W. Bush. Check out the galleries and prepared to be amazed. The section called “Tijuana Standards” is four pages and alone has more velvet paintings than I think I’ve ever seen in one place. They range is price from $75 for standard images and can go as high as $350 for more unusual subjects like Dick Cheney and Joe the Plumber. Today’s painting is a custom painting, and you can find it in that particular gallery. That means it was commissioned by a customer, which brings up an interesting question. If you could have any person or subject painted on black velvet, what would you choose?

Believe it or not, in Portland, Oregon, there is a museum devoted to black velvet paintings, the Velveteria. It’s interesting that it’s Portland because a few years ago I found a pretty cool black velvet painting in the men’s room of a restaurant during the Oregon Brewers Festival.

Did you know that velvet painting may be as old as the 14th century, when Marco Polo wrote that he saw painting on velvet in Kashmir during his travels. But it was the 1950s when its modern popularity began, originating from Tijuana, Mexico.

Here’s some more history from AFCNewsource:

The popularity of American black velvet painting can be traced to the work of one man known as the “American Gauguin” — Edgar Leeteg, a native of Sacramento, California, who lived and painted in Tahiti from 1933-to-1953. Leeteg’s vast output of thousands of black velvet paintings served as the inspiration for imitators who flocked to create a vast industry churning out a form of art that would be indelibly associated with tourism. Many of Leeteg’s works were purchased by navy personnel based in Hawaii, who would return to San Diego, bringing Leeteg nudes and commission Mexican painters in Tijuana to make similar portraits of their girlfriends in black velvet.

If you want to learn more about velvet painting — there’s more to it than you might think — Wikipedia has an entry, but the AFCNewsource has probably the best description from an art history point of you. If you want even more, check out Jennifer Heath’s book, Black Velvet. And check out the Velvet Store.

In a few hours I’ll be attending a memorial for the beer community celebrating the life of fellow beer writer and friend Bill Brand at The Trappist in Oakland. Someone discovered in Bill’s archives, a column in which he discloses Anchor Porter to be his favorite beer, so today’s work of art is the entitled the Anchor Brewery, by British artist Peter French. Sadly, it’s not our Anchor Brewery, but one from England, though I’m not entirely sure which one.

As for which Anchor Brewery this is, perhaps one of my Brit friends knows? There was an Anchor Brewery in Southwark owned by Barclay Perkins, and another, Charrington’s Anchor Brewery on Mile End Road, both in north London. According to the book British Breweries by Lynn F. Pearson, Courage also had one in Horsleydown and Charrington had another one in Tower Hamlets. Then there was Bullard & Sons Anchor Brewery in Norwich and yet another in Hull, by Freeman, Gaskell & Sons. The name Anchor, I suspect, was quite common, s there could have been many more for all I know.

Which makes it all the more infuriating that the artist doesn’t tell us which Anchor Brewery he’s painted. C’est la vie. Still, it’s a nice watercolor and you could even buy yourself a print of it at Art.com, among others.

There’s not much more about the artist, Peter French, and even the biography at his own website is blank, though you can see a number of his other works, most of which are watercolors of buildings. You can also see a number of his architectural drawings, cityscapes and landscapes on the Artist’s Web,

The last few works have been fairly recent and modern, so today’s work goes back pretty far into history, to the 17th Egyptian Dynasty, the New Kingdom period of time, around 1539-1425 BCE. It’s in the Brooklyn Museum, an excellent museum that I visited the last time I was in New York. The Brooklyn Museum is one of the largest Museums in the United States and is the second largest in New York State. Today’s piece is part of their world renowned Egyptian collection, considered by experts to be one of the finest in the world. The work, a stone table really, is known as Woman With Offerings, and is described as a “Fragment of a Tomb Painting with Seated Woman Holding a Lotus.” It was found in a tomb in Thebes, Egypt in an area known as the Valley of the Kings.

Click here to hear the Brooklyn Museum’s docent discuss the artwork.
 

The Brooklyn Museum’s website for this work also has the following about this tomb painting.

This fragment of wall painting from a tomb depicts a woman sitting on a green mat, inhaling the fragrance of a blue lotus. Sealed jars of beer and wine rest under a table loaded with other offerings of white and yellow loaves of bread and a dark red calf’s head. A grid of red lines that guided the draftsman in positioning the objects and proportioning the figures shows through where the paint has worn thin.

What’s important for our purposes, is the three jars below the table which more than likely contained beer, a veritable necessity when packing for the afterlife. To me, what this — and the countless others that are similar — point out is that while the Ninkasi tablet may be the most well-known, the ancient world is littered with references to beer and drinking. It was obviously a very ordinary part of daily life for ancient man, given its ubiquity in what they left behind. See, for example, an Egyptian Memorial Stone of a Syrian Soldier Drinking Beer, this one dating from the 18th Egyptian Dynasty; or this painted relief from ancient Memphis, from the 5th Dynasty, the Funerary mastaba of Ti that shows jars of beer.

For more about brewing in ancient Egypt, see Ancient Egyptian Beer, Ancient Egypt Beer Making, and Beer in Antiquity.

Today’s work of art is another modern one, painted just two years ago, by Ann Erpino, a California artist. The title of the painting is The Brewery, curious because it depicts not a brewery but a mug of beer with scientific symbols and formulas on and all around it.
 

The Brewery is part of a larger series of paintings, known as “The Science Series,” consisting of “sixty small paintings about DNA programming, mechanical thinking, life’s mineral origins, nanotechnology, and other research projects of the Erik Winfree Laboratory at Caltech are on exhibit during biannual Brewery Artwalks.”

It seems natural to me that brewing would be included, since so much of brewing is a mix of art science. But the caption seems to ignore that aspect, saying simply. “Some great and inspired ideas have been brewed over a cold mug of beer.” And while that is undoubtedly true, brewing itself is a science yet none of the symbols and formulas in the painting appear to be brewing related, just random. So while I like the idea of the painting, it feels a bit like a missed opportunity to really bridge the worlds of art and science more literally as well as symbolically, in the very way that craft brewers are doing right now. The fact that she’s lived in California for a long time makes that doubly troubling, since it seems more likely that she would have been exposed to craft beer and its artisan leanings. But c’est la vie, just enjoy the painting for what it is — which is quite a lot — and not for what it could have been.

Below is her biography from Erpino’s website:

Ann Erpino earned a bachelor’s degree in Fine Art at U.C. Berkeley. She has traveled to many archaeological sites and natural landscapes, collecting reference material for her paintings.

Ann taught art classes for five years, and worked as a scenographic artist, mural painter, portraitist, curator, workshop organizer, and docent before becoming a full time painter in 2001.

She is currently finishing ‘The Science Series,’ 80 small paintings depicting nanotechnological research projects of the Erik Winfree Laboratory at Caltech. Ten of her paintings illustrating consciousness, commissioned by Dr. Christof Koch at Caltech, will be published this Spring.

Ann won the Los Angeles 2007 Open Call Award, and the Peoples’ Choice Award at Juried International Exhibition, A Taste of Chico. Her work belongs to collectors worldwide.

There isn’t much more information about Ann Erpino’s artwork, although a search will reveal she’s involved in numerous projects in the L.A. art scene. You could also visit her MySpace page and, of course, her own website, annerpino.com.

I’ve been trying to present a mix of old master and contemporary art featuring beer. If art is a reflection of real life, then beer should — and is — as much a part of art as any other aspect of our lives. That beer is also an art and craft all its own I think magnifies its importance, because it then becomes art reflecting art. Today’s painting is by a Tibetan artist by the name of Zhungde. The painting is titled “Barley Beer Song,” and depicts three women engaged it what appears to be some sort of ritual.

The painting was completed in 2001 and is 100 x 100 cm (or about 40 x 40 in.), making it not too large. That’s really all I know about it.

As for beer in Tibet, it’s traditionally an unhopped barley beer known as Chhaang, or more often simply Chang.

From Wikipedia:

Barley, millet (finger-millet) or rice is used to brew the drink. Semi-fermented seeds of millet are served, stuffed in a barrel of bamboo called the Dhungro. Then boiling water is poured and sipped through a narrow bore bamboo pipe called the Pipsing.

When the boiled barley has gone cold, some yeast or dried barm is added and it is left to stand for 2 or 3 days when fermentation begins when it is called glum. The barm consists of flour and, in Balti, at least, often has ginger and aconite added to it. After fermentation is complete, some water is added to it and is then ready for use.

“If proper care is taken (and the people of Ü and Ladakh generally do so), the pale beer, thus obtained, is not amiss, and sparkles a good deal, but not being hopped it does not keep long.”

In Lahaul and some other places the glum is pressed out by hand instead of by filtering, making quite a cloudy drink. The residue of malt can be pressed through a strainer and then mixed with water or milk and used instead of barm in baking bread or cakes.

Near Mt. Everest chaang is made by passing hot water through the fermenting barley, and is then served in a big pot and drunk through a wooden straw.

In Nepal, it is called tongba by the Limbus. There is another term called jand which refers to the turbid liquor obtained by leaching out the extract with water from the fermented mash. Unlike chhang or tongba, it is liberally served in large mugs. These alcoholic beverages are prepared by using traditional starter called murcha. Murcha is prepared by using yeast and mold flora of wild herbs in cereal flours.

The brew tastes like ale. Alcohol content is quite low, but it produces an intense feeling of heat and well-being, ideal for enduring the temperatures which go well below freezing in winter.

Most accounts say that’s it’s aromatic, sweet and low in alcohol. Singing and drinking seems to figure quite prominently in Tibetan culture and is a fixture in virtually all holidays and celebrations.

Here are the lyrics to just one of their folk songs sung in celebrations.

May you have long life,
may the house be filled with grain,
May you have the good fortune
to make use of this abundance.

The China Tibet Tourism Board adds an interesting tidbit about drinking customs in Tibet:

As a guest, one should use the third finger of the right hand to dip into beer or wine three times and flick it up to the sky to show the respect to heaven, the earth and the older generations. When the host serves the wine or beer, after the three dips, drink a little, the host will fill up your glass and do like this three times, the fourth time is bottoms up if you are able.

So it seems clear that Zhungde is reflecting an important aspect of Tibetan life, and how beer figures into it. Knowing now about Chang, one assumes that the three women are singing in celebration and enjoying the barley beer as a part of that celebration.

From Zhungde’s biography at Gendun Choephel Artists’ Guild:

In my childhood, there were some odd pictures always emerging in my dreams, I do not remember the concrete contents of the dream, but visible or invisible appearance of these forms always entwine with my soul together, often making me fidgety. Later one day I unintentionally drew a few sketches and my heart started to feel calm, and had an indescribable pleasant feeling, then I took the paintbrushes and another world was discovered.

I do not understand what is art, and do not want to understand, and I feel only to paint, and this lets me feel happy, and I paint to pursue a simple, innocent life. Emphasizing this kind of emotion, I paint in fact to examine my own heart, pacify my uneasy emotion. I and the canvas rightly meet each other in the process of seeing one’s soul. If I can’t paint, life seems to be pale and meaningless, because painting has already constituted my life and it has become indispensably part of myself.

Regardless of any circumstances, I would continue to paint for ever.

There’s precious little additional information about Zhungde and only one more painting at his Artist’s Main Page, called Sisters and Peaceful Wind gallery has a third Zhungde painting, Crowded Train.

Today’s featured paintings are by an artist whose work we first looked at in week one, three months ago. Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, is probably one of the most famous works of art to prominently display beer bottles, but because he so often set his paintings in Parisian nightlife, a number of his paintings have beer in them. There are two paintings today, because they are so similar that there names are even often confused. Both appear to be painted at the same concert, with the same characters, but at different moments in time. The two paintings are known as The Waitress and Corner of a Café-Concert. Both are believed to be painted between 1878-1880, with most sources giving 1879 for The Waitress. The painting below is, I believe, Corner of a Café-Concert, because it’s at London’s National Gallery and that’s the name they’ve given it, so I’m going with them since they own the painting. Various sources throughout the internet have the names of the two paintings interchanged.

In the first painting the dancer on stage looks more like she’d been painted by Edgar Degas than Manet. The National Gallery also has the following to say about the Corner of a Café-Concert:

This work was originally the right half of a painting of the Brasserie de Reichshoffen, begun in about 1878 and cut in two by Manet before he completed it. This half was then enlarged on the right and a new background was added. The left half of the composition is in the Oskar Reinhart Collection, Winterthur.

The Brasserie de Reichshoffen was in the Boulevard Rochechouart, Paris. At the time, brasseries with waitresses were fairly new in the city.

The second painting, The Waitress, is closer in, tighter, with the same waitress stopping from her work and looking at the viewer. The same man is smoking his clay pipe at the bar in the foreground. The man next to the pipe smoker is either a different man or has changed hats and we can catch a glimpse of a dancer, possibly the same one, on stage behind them both.

Though most sources give the common name, at least one says the title is actually La Serveuse de Bocks. And while my French is awful, that sure sounds like “Serving Bocks,” “The Serving of Bocks,” or something like that.

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 painting is by a Japanese artist, Mieko Anekawa, who grew up in Kyoto but now lives in New York City. This painting is called Beer! Beer! Beer!. It’s an acrylic on canvas and measures 11″x14.” Apart from the fact that she won’t sell the painting, that’s about all I know about it.
 

The choices she made for the panels are interesting to me. The first is, naturally, a can of Kirin from her native Japan. The only other Japanese beer is Hitachino Nest Beer. Two others are imported, but the majority are American craft beers. Only the can of Genesee isn’t. Of the dozen panels, seven are beer bottles, two are cans, one is a full pint glass, one is a growler and the only non-beer panel is of a bag of Utz potato chips. Sadly, the chips appear to be the “Red Hot” flavor, whereas I’m a purist when it comes to potato chips — only potatoes fried in lard (or oil) with salt added for me. As a hardcore chips geek, I can’t abide flavored chips at all.

Also at the website is her statement as an artist:

Being an artist doesn’t always mean making a pretty piece. Art should be able to give people a powerful impression, a full frontal impact. And in my opinion, what gives people that great impression is color contrast and dynamic composition.

My hometown is Osaka, Japan. Osaka has lots of excitement and people there love bright, powerful colors. There is a strong feeling of energy when you go through the streets. Our city is insanely using crazy colors for anything. People wear bright colors, stores are decorated in high tones, and there is color everywhere in advertisements and magazines. It is a beautiful place. While I grew up there, I observed and absorbed that energy, and I think it comes through in my art. It was my inspiration for the animal series with the bright checkered background and color contrast. It’s a representation of me and my life. I think I can give people some of that excitement, that energy, with my art.

After I moved to NY, I was doing a lot of graphic design and layouts of typography for part of corporate identity designs. I found beauty in the straightforward, uncomplicated images of logos and typography. I wanted to include that beauty of simple objects in my paintings. My goal was to combine 2-dimensional, flat objects without depth or shadow gradation with more realistic 3-dimensional images to create contrast.

There isn’t much more information about Mieko Anekawa, except for an exhibition at New York’s ICO Art & Music Gallery, a nice article in a student newspaper — The Pendulum — from Elon University, and her Facebook page. You can see a lot of her work, though, at her own website.