Menko Samurai by Bob Kessel

Bob Kessel has created a new art series titled, “MENKO” based on the Japanese card game. The pictures are available as limited edition fine art prints, signed and numbered by the artist. Contact Bob Kessel for prices and availability.

Menko is a Japanese card game played by two or more players. It is also the name of the type of cards used to play this game. Each player uses Menko cards made from thick paper or cardboard, with one or both side printed with images from anime, manga, etc. The pictures on these cards reflect the popular culture of their time, and Menko cards from the past reflect important information about their era. In the Edo and early Meiji period, images like ninja and samurai were popular. Before World War II, the most popular images were of the military, like fighter planes and battleships. After the war, characters from anime and manga were popular, as well as baseball players.

BAIGNEUSES DE CEZANNE by Bob Kessel

Bob Kessel has created a new art series titled, “BATHERS” based on the works of Paul Cezanne. The pictures are available as limited edition fine art prints, signed and numbered by the artist. Contact Bob Kessel for prices and availability.

Bathers appear in the work of Cezanne in a series from about 1875. Until the end of his days, the painter did not cease reconsidering the topic. The characters multiply, new sources of inspiration are integrated, the composition becomes more and more complex. in all, Cezanne carried out seventy-four scenes of bathers in oil, watercolors or drawings.

NUDE WITH MONET by Bob Kessel

Bob Kessel has created a new art series titled, “THE NUDE” based on the works of artists throughout time. The pictures are available as limited edition fine art prints, signed and numbered by the artist. Contact Bob Kessel for prices and availability.

If there is one genre of art that seems to have played a greater role than any other, it is the nude. For at least 30,000 years, humans have represented the naked form in a variety of ways. From the ideal to the real, the Romantic to the Surrealist, there has been almost no end of works devoted to the unclothed human body.

The English language, with its elaborate generosity, distinguishes between the naked and the nude. To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The word ‘nude’ on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. … In fact, the word was forced into our vocabulary by critics of the early 18th century to persuade the artless islanders that, in countries where painting and sculpture were practiced and valued … the naked human body was the central subject of art.

Rubens did for the female nude what Michelangelo had done for the male. He realised so fully its expressive possibilities that, for the next century, all those that were not slaves of academism, inherited his vision of the body as pearly and plump. Round the Venuses or Dianas of the Fontainebleau School hangs a smell of stylish erotism, impossible, like all smells, to describe, but strong as ambergris or musk. One reason is that a trace of Gothicism, with all that it implies of seductive guesswork, persists in their proportions. Up to the time of le Moyne or even Houdon, the bodies of French goddesses retain the small breasts, long tapering limbs, and slightly accented stomachs of the sixteenth century. To this tradition of quasi-Gothic elegance certain painters of the dix-huitieme, Watteau above all, added Rubens’ feeling for the colour and texture of skin. No other painter has had a more sensitive eye for texture than Watteau, and the rarity of his nudes may even reflect a kind of shyness born of too tremulous desire which the spectacle of the living surface aroused in him. Perhaps the very unfrigid statues in his parks are telling us that he could only contain his excitement when the body was supposed to be of stone.