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Austrian Oil Paintings bear testimony to a great artistic tradition. A country with a rich cultural heritage, Austria naturally has a rich tradition of painting. Painters like Petr Brandl, Alfred Kubin have redifned the world's perception of Austrian Oil Paintings.
Oil Paintings :
The magic of Oil Paintings is indeed remarkable. Humble pigments mix with linseed oil to create poetries on canvases. But the process of oil painting, as any oil painter will tell you, is not that magical, it involves sweat, toil and incredible perseverance.
History of Oil Paintings
The recipe books of ancient Greek chemists show the discovery of a strange method of preserving colors- drying oils like walnut oil, poppy oil, hempseed oil, castor oil, and linseed oil as varnishes to seal pictures and protect them from water.
These very recipe books tell us the story of the birth of Oil Paintings. Through centuries monks carefully guarded these recipes, until it resurfaced in the 13 th century when this very method was used for painting details over tempera pictures.
However the brothers Van Eyck in the first half of the fifteenth century perfected this method and they are called the fathers of Oil Painting today.
Peter Brandl
Petr Brandl ( Peter Johannes Brandl or Jan Petr Brandl ) was a painter of the late Baroque, famous in his time but - due to isolation behind the Iron Curtain - rather forgotten until recently. He was of German-speaking Austrian descent in the bilingual kingdom of Bohemia, which is no longer existent, but whose center is the present-day Czech Republic. The major art museum in Prague, called the National Gallery, has an entire hall devoted to the artist's works, including the wonderful "Bust of an Apostle" from some time before 1725.
Alfred Kubin
Alfred Leopold Isidor Kubin (April 10, 1877 – August 20, 1959) was an Austrian Expressionist illustrator and occasional writer of Czech ancestry.
He is considered an important representative of Expressionism, noted for dark, spectral, symbolic fantasies (often assembled into thematic series of drawings).
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