Robert Venosa (January 21, 1936 – August 9, 2011) was an American
artist
An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse refers to a practitioner in the visual arts only. However, th ...
who resided in
Boulder, Colorado
Boulder is a home rule city that is the county seat and most populous municipality of Boulder County, Colorado, United States. The city population was 108,250 at the 2020 United States census, making it the 12th most populous city in Colora ...
, USA. He studied with what are termed the New Masters. His artworks reside in collections around the world.
Life and works
Venosa first studied under
Mati Klarwein in New York. Later, he moved to Europe and studied
with one of the founders of the Fantastic Realist movement,
Ernst Fuchs (artist)
Ernst Fuchs (13 February 19309 November 2015) was an Austrian painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, architect, stage designer, composer, poet, and one of the founders of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism. In 1972, he acquired the derel ...
.
From these masters, he learned variations of a venerated painting technique developed in the mid 1400s, called the Mische Technique, which involves underpainting in water-soluble tempera with transparent oil paint glazes. While living in Vienna, Venosa met his second wife, the Austrian painter Jutta Venosa (born Cwik), with whom he had three children: Marcus, Celene and Christan. They moved to the coastal village of
Cadaques, Spain, where he lived for fifteen years and befriended the surrealist painter
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquess of Dalí of Púbol (; ; ; 11 May 190423 January 1989) was a Spanish Surrealism, surrealist artist renowned for his technical skill, precise draftsmanship, and the striking and bizarr ...
. He later introduced
H. R. Giger to Dalí.
Venosa traveled the globe with his partner Martina Hoffmann, teaching their painting technique. The technique derived from what Venosa learned from his teachers, differing in the material used for the
underpainting
In art, an underpainting is an initial layer of paint applied to a ground, which serves as a base for subsequent layers of paint. Underpaintings are often monochromatic and help to define color values for later painting. Underpainting gets its name ...
(
casein
Casein ( , from Latin ''caseus'' "cheese") is a family of related phosphoproteins ( αS1, aS2, β, κ) that are commonly found in mammalian milk, comprising about 80% of the proteins in cow's milk and between 20% and 60% of the proteins in hum ...
versus
egg tempera
Tempera (), also known as egg tempera, is a permanent, fast-drying painting medium consisting of colored pigments mixed with a water-soluble binder medium, usually glutinous material such as egg yolk. Tempera also refers to the paintings done ...
) but, largely, following the same processes.
Venosa died on August 9, 2011 having had cancer for eight years.
See also
*
Society for the Art of Imagination
The Society for Art of Imagination (AOI) is an international artists' society whose stated mission is to promote art of vision and craftsmanship. It has branches all over the world, and the American branch is a registered charity. AOI is affiliat ...
*
Fantastic Realism
The Vienna School of Fantastic Realism (german: Wiener Schule des Phantastischen Realismus) is a group of artists founded in Vienna in 1946. It includes Ernst Fuchs, Maître Leherb (Helmut Leherb), Arik Brauer, Wolfgang Hutter and Anton Lehmd ...
School of art
Related museums galleries collections
*
Fantastic Art Centre
The fantastic (french: le fantastique) is a subgenre of literary works characterized by the ambiguous presentation of seemingly supernatural forces.
Bulgarian-French Structuralism, structuralist Literary criticism, literary critic Tzvetan Todoro ...
* Temporary Galerie in H.R. Giger Museum
References
Bibliography
* 1978 - ''Robert Venosa: Manas Manna'' (Big "O" Publishing)
* 1991 - ''Robert Venosa: Noospheres'' (
Pomegranate Communications Inc, US)
* 1999 - ''Robert Venosa: Illuminatus'' (with Terence McKenna, Ernst Fuchs, H. R. Giger, and Mati Klarwein) (Craftsman House)
* 2006 - ''True Visions'' (
Erik Davis and Pablo Echaurren) (Betty Books)
* 2007 - ''Metamorphosis'' (beinArt)
External links
*
Talk
{{DEFAULTSORT:Venosa Robert
American contemporary artists
Psychedelic artists
Artists from Colorado
2011 deaths
1936 births
Deaths from cancer in Colorado
Visionary artists