Paintings by Chartow: Influences

I try to look at paintings every day. This means looking at books or online. Paintings which I come back to time and again are as follows:

When I visited the Uffizi Gallery in Florence a few years back it was wonderful to see in person the Botticellis, Pieros, and Michelangelos, but I spent the most time in front of The Portinari Triptych of Hugo van der Goes. The individual humanity of the figures in this scene of Christ and the Virgin in the manger was overwhelming.
Bruegel. No one has ever quite said more about the human condition in the way he placed man in the landscape. He takes man as he is, at his saintly best or murderous worst, and places his comedies and tragedies in the midst of a sublime landscape that transcends human cares. His landscapes make us understand the preciousness of human existence by showing us how insignificant we are.
Vermeer, Turner, Claude, and Caravaggio.
The swirling apocalyptic visions of John Martin.
The permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where I spent many hours in my youth. I was frightened and fascinated by the Surrealists Yves Tanguy, Paul Delvaux, Giorgio Di Chirico and Salvador Dali and by works by Peter Blume and George Tooker.
Lucian Freud. Strongest painter of the human figure working today.
American landscape painters have a unique heritage, and a unique attitude toward the landscape. To name but a few: Thomas Cole, Martin Johnson Heade, Frederick Church, Albert Bierstadt, Winslow Homer, Charles Sheeler and the Precisionist School of the 1930s-1940s, Fairfield Porter, Neil Welliver. I realize this is a wide range of tastes and attitudes, from the moralizing of Cole to the theatricality of Bierstadt and Church, to the cool modernism of Sheeler or Welliver. Landscape is a big deal for Americans. I've seen the American landscape called "unpaintably stupendous." Maybe it is, maybe that's why we keep trying.
R. Crumb's comix had an effect on me early on, and I admire his hard stance against the commodification of culture. Check out the movie "Crumb."
Kafka, Borges, Stanislaw Lem, Vonnegut, Mark Helprin, Garcia Marquez, Hemingway, Jim Harrison, Chekhov, Emerson, Thoreau.
Mahler.
Ukiyo-e.
In my youth I spent many hours in the American Museum of Natural History. I would wander the halls of the mammals of North America, Asia, and Africa, and stand before the wonderful giant dioramas and make up stories in my head of what it would be like to be there, on a hillside in India or a river in Africa. The painted walls wrap around and above, and blend into the floor of the display, where painted casts of actual flora join with animal models (presumably stuffed) to create an uncanny realism. These dioramas, painted maily by James Perry Wilson, had a huge influence on my sense of pictorial space.
Alexis Rockman paints scenes of eco-disaster by fusing scientific naturalist painting with the nightmare visions of Hieronymus Bosch. He spent more time in the Museum of Natural History than I did.
Craig McPherson's amazing mezzotints
Galen Rowell's photography. More than anyone else I can think of he embodies the principle of going out and getting, of being willing to do whatever it takes to get the image. My own work is most successful as a result of doing just a small bit of what Galen did. He will be missed.
On a recent trip to Russia I discovered a number of fine landscape painters little-known outside of Russia, the most amazing of whom is Kuindzhi. A master of using color to express the emotional qualities of light in the landscape. Also loved Shishkin.