Art online

Rosie uncovered this extremely neat website while working on a cheesedog essay on "What is art?" Artcyclopedia not only pulls up information and photos of artwork created by specific artists, the site has information on art movements, art museums around the world, current art news and offers monthly art feature articles. So far it is free, thanks to banner display, but after reading the "about us" section, the future of a free Artcyclopedia may be limited.

While surfing the site, I checked out a couple of artists' whose work I enjoy immensely, but hadn't thought about for a while. Willem de Kooning was an abstract expressionist painter. He was born in Holland in 1904, but as a young man moved to New York City, where he established himself as an artist. The painting that drew me to de Kooning's work is Woman and Bicycle.

Alice Neel was an American painter as well. She absorbed the essense of her models and reconstituted it on her canvas. "Like Chekhov, I am a collector of souls... if I hadn't been an artist, I could have been a psychiatrist," Alice Neel.