Categories: PAINTERS

WHEN EVERYONE WANTS TO HAVE SOME PAINTINGS OF A MASTER – Arturo Michelina, Venezuelan shades of talent

ARTURO MICHELENA 1/3 – He was born on a June day, 1863 in Valencia (Carabobo State), and began to paint at a young age. Michelena was a precocious artist, endowed with an extraordinary talent for drawing and color. In 1874, he made his first self-portrait. Traveled to Paris (where he studied in the famous Académie Julian), with his first great success occurred in 1887. Between 1885 and 1889 the artist acquired a technique refined and precious, not exempt of a colourful sensationalism put at the service of the trending topics in the halls of the French artists. In 1889 it ends its big picture about Carlota Corday presenting in the great Universal exhibition, obtaining the first class gold medal.

ARTURO MICHELENA 2/3 – In 1897 he decided to return to los Teques and attempts to recover a health deteriorating every day. It then receives latest assignments of his career by the Church, the multiplication of the loaves and fish and last supper, work that will leave unfinished. He also developed other genres for which is not so well known (in which met the numerous commissions he received from Venezuelan families), ranging from light and decorative flowers hung in the halls of some caraqueñas houses, even some landscapes (such as sailor made for Torres Cardenas) family.

ARTURO MICHELENA 3/3 – Along with the public and official works, Michelena rested his hand on that series of small social orders, because everyone wanted to have some sample teacher. At the end of nineteenth century Venezuela, so far from the iconoclastic pictorial subversion of other latitudes, Michelena emerged as the highlight of his contemporaries.