ECCENTRIC and just crazy ARTISTS

farmerman, I'm PO'd. I looked up two of my favorite writers--Dostoevsky and Faulkner. Turns out the Fyodor was an anti-Semite. Bill was a plain old drunk. Nothing exceptional.

None of my favorite painters was especially meshuga. I guess I have very tame taste.

Well, then why not give us some artist who isnt necessarily your favorite.

My favourite Romantic poet is Blake, but unlike his aristocratic contemporaries like Byron and Shelley, he had to earn a living. A lot of the crazy artists, not all, are rich kids off on a jolly.

Blake has always been a favorite of mine also. He was a young poet, and then an emerging painter and engraver. He had bouts of extreme poverty to which I always thought he suffered in extreme manner cause he could have gotten out of his "chosen" lifestyle rather quickly.
Was he a bit of a psychotic? I recall that one of his first watercolor over engraving shows wasnt recieved well which sent him into a reclusive depression for almost 10 years. His combination of his paintings and engravings around his poems are magical (to me). But Ive always liked illustrators (which I suppose these works could have been called).

I read a shortened biography of Blake maybe 20 years ago and found his whole life pretty depressing.
Did he get overcome by his printing fluids?

He may well have done, people have only recently discovered the toxicity of certain industrial substances. In my first year at secondary school we used asbestos paper in chemistry lessons. It was banned by the time I was in my second year.

Hey, fm. Is this nuts enough for you?

Richard Dadd (1 August 1817 – 7 January 1886) was an English painter of the Victorian era, noted for his depictions of fairies and other supernatural subjects, Orientalist scenes, and enigmatic genre scenes, rendered with obsessively minuscule detail. Most of the works for which he is best known were created while he was incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital.
Convinced that his father was the Devil in disguise, Dadd murdered him with a knife and fled for France. En route to Paris Dadd attempted to murder another tourist with a razor.
In the mental hospital he was allowed to continue to paint and it was here that many of his masterpieces were created.
Dadd probably suffered from a form of paranoid schizophrenia.
Dadd became increasingly delusional and increasingly violent, and believing himself to be under the influence of the Egyptian god Osiris.
After 20 years of painting at Bethlem Mental Hospital, Dadd was moved to the criminal lunatic asylum at Broadmoor, outside London. Here he remained, painting constantly and receiving infrequent visitors until 7 January 1886, when he died.

Sounds like my kinda guy.

Couldn't figure where to drop this article. Figured it would be pretty much ignored if I opened a new thread:
Experts Says Painting Found in French Attic is Long-Lost Caravaggio Masterpiece

Caravaggio is my all time favorite painter, murderer or not.
He was some piece of work but what an eye.

Speaking of nut jobs, they are having the play about Mark Rothko's quadryptic set of paintings for the Four Seasons. This was when he began flipping out

The BBC teamed up an art critic and an Italian chef for two travel programmes. Italy unpacked and Sicily unpacked. They're very good, a heady mix of Italian art, cuisine and landscape. I think in Sicily unpacked they talked about Caravaggio a lot.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b019f8vm

I can't see it on my old computer, but I like Locatelli. Other guy is cute too..

They're probably out on DVD, either dirt cheap or ridiculously expensive.