Text 1 Water-Colour and Drawing

From the beginning to the end of his life Turner’s first artistic aim was to show light and atmosphere on his pictures.

Throughout life he constantly used water-colour for immediate studies from nature; and amid the thousands of sketches which he had painted, every variety of scenery in England and abroad may be found represented, treated in the most varied manner, some can be simply a few blots of colour to show the relation of light and tone between two objects, others careful studies of one object and a few finished pictures. Besides these there are numerous pencil sketches, details of foliage, an architecture, forms of mountains and trees, birds and men.

Text 2 First Meeting With oil-Painting

An oil-painting caught and held him… He forgot his awkward walk and came closer to the painting, very close. The beauty faded out of the canvas. He stared at what seemed a careless daub of paint, then stepped away. Immediately the beauty flashed back into the canvas. “A trick picture” was his thought… He did not know painting. He had been brought up on chromos and lithographs that were always definite and sharp, near or far. He had seen oil-paintings, it was true, in the show-windows of shops, but the glass of the windows had prevented his eager eyes from approaching too near.

Text 3 Flower Piece

In the Low Countries during the seventeenth century the still life achieved great popularity and varied from simple, clear assemblages of crockery, clay pipes, bread, and cheese, to tables groaning beneath a lash disorder of goldsmith’s work, lobsters and grapes. Among these new types was the flower piece, which has enjoyed continuous popularity until the present day. Many artists practiced both kinds of still-life painting, and combinations of flowers with fruit were popular. On the typical flower piece the blossoms and grasses were usually arranged in a jug of vase as for a domestic decoration, and the container disposed on a table or stone ledge, often with fallen petals or buds, snails and insects, sometimes bird’s nests, scattered with an artful casualness about its base.

Text 4

Man-Made in Still-Life Painting

The American “Magic Realist” William Harnett concentrated on painting a man-made world, but always excluding man, so that his works never represent human beings, but only representations of human beings, deprived of all the personal history and psychology that one can detect in a Rembrandt portrait.

Harnett had to earn his living, in nineteenth-century New York, by painting compositions to decorate public bars, and it appears that he never sold a single picture, in his lifetime, to any of the important American art-collectors of his day. He did manage, however, to frequented the bars where his paintings were exhibited. One of there happened to represent a still-life arrangement of various objects that included a dollar-bill which looked as if it could be literally lifted out of the picture and taken away in one’s pocket.

Exercise 11. Render into English:

1. Абстракціонізм – це напрямок мистецтва, що виник на початку 20 століття. Цей напрямок виник із інших напрямків в мистецтві, таких як: кубізм, фовізм, експресіонізм та ін. Першими представниками абстракционізму були Кандинський та Клеє в Германії, в Росії – Малевич. На картинах абстракціоністів не можна побачити людей, дерев, будинків, тобто реальні предмети. Там можна побачити лінії, та кольорові плями, які використовуються щоб передати форми, почуття, емоції. Абстракціоністи стверджують, що хочуть «абсолютної свободи» від дійсності та суспільства. Абстракціонізм називають «мистецтвом для мистецтва» В середені 20-го століття абстракціонізм був провідним напрямком декоративного живопису в країнах Заходу.

Exercise 12. Listen to the story and answer some questions:

1. Do you think the fisherman knew all the meanings of the verb “to paint”? Why do you think so?

2. What are the meanings of the verb “to paint”?