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Whose in your icon?


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I noticed a pretty pattern: a lot of great paintings are now doubling as GradCafe avatars. I'd love to know why you all chose the paintings you did.

 

 

My icon is from Thomas Anshutz's A Rose (1907). Anshutz's portraiture is always very dynamic. I love this painting in particular because of the look of undisguised disgust/boredom on her face, despite her elegant pose. It's at the Met still, I believe.

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Who's in my icon? Picasso's Old Man with Guitar. I have a thing for ekphrastic paintings (or rather, paintings that inspire ekphrasis). This painting, of course, inspired Stevens' "Man With the Blue Guitar." Picasso also happens to be my favorite painter in general (though Van Gogh is a close second). I used to have a very large print of this painting, though it was too large to make the trip across the country when I immigrated (I had packed all of my belongings into my car and drove 3000 miles from Vancouver to D.C. in three days).

 

My favorite ekphrasis-inspiring painting is Brueghel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, which is the focus of Auden's "Musee Des Beaux Arts," though it's not really avatar material, sadly. It's all about the details.

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I've got to say, I haven't always been a fan of Picasso. Then I went to his museum, which has an enormous collection of his paintings, ordered chronologically from boyhood. His process is astounding. Las Meninas is stupendous, exhausting, and itself ekphrasistic.

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My icon was illustrated by the great Theodor Seuss Geisel. Critics claim that this figure represents the relationship between empathy and advocacy.

 

Also, he is known to speak for the trees. 

 

A healthy dose of ecocriticism in response to the devastation of the Vietnam War, tbh.

 

My picture comes courtesy of Beyonce. Because she's awesome. The end.

 

All you need.

 

Some dweeb.

 

That's fair. (Kidding.)

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Its me and the Native American statue at Disneyland. There's a picture of my grandpa who passed doing the same pose with the same statue that was taken just shortly after the park opened. Its a tradition for my family to imitate the pose whenever we visit Disneyland.

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Mine is a close-up of a pseudo-medieval tapestry from a little church I visited in Cornwall last summer... I don't know who she is, but most likely a local female saint. I thought she had graceful hands. :)

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Evgeni Malkin, serving as the representative of the intersection between my personal and professional interests. 

 

I should have used Kessel :P oh well! Mine is just a small piece of art that I found on tumblr; I'm still trying to figure out which visual artist made it!

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