The notable French-Canadian abstract expressionist Jean-Paul Riopelle is known for his signature large-format mosaic composition to establish explosive engagement. The monumental Chevreuse II (Figure 1) in his Mosaiques series was created during 1953 to 1954, measured in 3m x 3m. This work is currently on exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). The AGO decided to put up a co-exhibition of Riopelle and his romantic partner Joan Mitchell’s works, and titled the exhibition Nothing in Moderation. Chevreuse II was composed with dense, thick oil paint on a large squared canvas, the trace of Riopelle could be observed through the uneven texture of paint. There is a sense of texture since the shattered oil paint has been forcefully laid on …show more content…
The paintings can be regarded as a container that includes the complex activity and emotion of Riopelle in that particular segment of time. Though the emotion of Riopelle may change, the theme of nature is permanent in his oeuvre. His works were abstract, but it is clear that they are purified from real objects, mostly derived from natural landscape environments and his Quebecois life experience that close to …show more content…
Riopelle received professional training in fine art at the École du Meuble from 1943 to 1946 and was one of the students of another important Canadian artist, Paul-Émile Borduas. Borduas was known as the father of abstraction in Quebec. Borduas encouraged his students to discover a form of freedom and reject all academic constraints, invited them to think “painterly” rather than “literally”. This ideology had laid foundation to Riopelle’s oeuvre. Later, Riopelle joined a group of young abstract artists that led by Borduas, which lately was known as the “Automatist”. He adopted a stance in clear opposition to geometric abstraction. In Riopelle’s works from the late 1940s, he developed the spontaneous expression which favored by the surrealist painters. By Automatism, it means that allow the hands to work freely, that is no particular result in mind. The Automatism encourages total openness, the artist who draws unconsciously and repeat indefinitely the same shape. There is no metaphysical interpretation hides behind the works. According to Riopelle “painting is never the reproduction of an image, it always starts with a vague feeling… the desire to paint… Not a clear idea. The painting starts where it wants, but after, everything falls into place. That’s the important
By the late 1950s, Voulkos had established an international reputation for his muscular fired-clay sculptures, which melded Zen attitudes toward chance with the emotional fervor of Abstract Expressionist painting. Some 20 works -- including five "Stacks" (4-foot-tall sculptures) as well as giant slashed-and-gouged plates and works on paper -- recently went on view at the Frank Lloyd Gallery. This non single show is his first at a Los Angeles gallery in 13 years, although a survey of his work was seen at the Newport Harbor Art Museum (presently carries a different...
The painting’s canvas has been exploited perfectly. All the space on the canvas had been used. However, space was not used to create depth, and there was no layering or recession present. The painting does not feel that it has motion, apart from what it looks like the creatures eating from the tree of life. The eating motion was depicted by the posture of the creatures, with arms extending towards the plants – in the case of creatures – or beaks being wide open – in the case of birds. All these factors 'accord' the painting with a unique
“A picture is a poem without words” – Horace, the purpose of art is to reveal the sensations of life but also allows humans to express their emotions and views on certain aspects. Jean-Michel Basquiat was a Neo-Expressionist painter throughout the 1980’s who was known for his style. He was African American artist and musician that was part of the SAMO. The SAMO was a graffiti group that wrote epigrams. While growing up, one of Basquiat inspirations that encouraged him to paint was his diverse cultural heritage. Basquiat was a creative self-taught artist who thought outside of the box when it came to painting. Most of the pieces he made were a collaboration of different ideas and constructed them together into a collage. During the 1980’s Basquiat’s art used the human figure to portray Minimalism and Conceptualism. His target market that were in many of his pieces was on suggestive dichotomies that focused on the lower class versus the higher class. Even though Basquiat work was remarkable, he was criticized and faced some challenges among his journey because of the symbols and words that were used his paintings. Despite the criticism,
The Interpretation/Meaning (III) will be written without any guideline points, the aim of this part will be to determine what the painter wanted to express with his piece of work and what it tells us in a symbolic or not instantly clear way. This part will also handle why the artist drew the painting the way he did it and why he chose various techniques or tools.
Pablo Picasso is one of the most famous and well-documented artists of the twentieth century. Picasso, unlike most painters, is even more special because he did not confine himself to canvas, but also produced sculpture, poetry, and ceramics in profusion. Although much is known about this genius, there is still a lust after more knowledge concerning Picasso, his life and the creative forces that motivated him. This information can be obtained only through a careful study of the events that played out during his lifetime and the ways in which they manifested themselves in his creations (Penrose).
... study for the overall concept they appear rather as abstract patterns. The shadows of the figures were very carefully modeled. The light- dark contrasts of the shadows make them seem actually real. The spatial quality is only established through the relations between the sizes of the objects. The painting is not based on a geometrical, box like space. The perspective centre is on the right, despite the fact that the composition is laid in rows parallel to the picture frame. At the same time a paradoxical foreshortening from right to left is evident. The girl fishing with the orange dress and her mother are on the same level, that is, actually at equal distance. In its spatial contruction, the painting is also a successful construction, the groups of people sitting in the shade, and who should really be seen from above, are all shown directly from the side. The ideal eye level would actually be on different horizontal lines; first at head height of the standing figures, then of those seated. Seurats methods of combing observations which he collected over two years, corresponds, in its self invented techniques, to a modern lifelike painting rather than an academic history painting.
Diego Rivera was deemed the finest Mexican painter of the twentieth century; he had a huge influence in art worldwide. Rivera wanted to form his own painting fashion. Although he encountered the works of great masters like Gauguin, Renoir, and Matisse, he was still in search of a new form of painting to call his own (Tibol, 1983). His desire was to be capable of reaching a wide audience and express the difficulties of his generation at the same time, and that is exactly what h...
Salvador Dalí is probably one of the most well-known artists of the Surrealist period, as well as a very influential figure in modern art. Even though he was formally expelled from the Surrealist movement years before his death, one could not consider him/herself a true Surrealist without having studied Dalí’s background, methods, philosophies, inspirations and influences.
Rene Magritte was an enigmatic and strange man who painted surrealism paintings. Little is known about his childhood except that his mother, Regine Magritte took her own life by drowning herself in the Sambre river. Young Magritte is thought to have discovered her body floating with her night garment covering her face. There is speculation that this trauma was an influence on many of Magritte’s works. When Rene Magritte took up his brushes, he created beautiful visual riddles that delight and bewilder the viewer. His clean lines and highly detailed finishes made his brush strokes nearly invisible; his paintings look as if they came from a printing press. Magritte referred to his paintings as “his labors.” He did labor over the paintings and the questions and answers that spawned them in his imagination. His art poses questions, seeks answers, and challenges the conventional definition of ideas. He came to the surrealist style of art in the 1920’s and has produced some of the most beautiful and moving art in the world. He was a shy and introverted man who loathed the social familiarity that society imposed on its celebrities. He liked to maintain social boundaries and was rather reclusive, ironically, he routinely used people as objects and removed the boundaries of association between objects to create his visual riddles. He did not like to be recognized and that came to be one of the running themes in his works. Always the enigmatic secret agent man, Magritte is as much a riddle as his paintings.
...laced on the style and materials presented in the painting. While evaluating and comparing various paintings the author feels that at the beginning of the Renaissance era the skill level of the artist was often not acknowledged whereas materials were, but at the end of the era, skill level played a larger factor in who was chosen to complete the artwork. Therefore, fresco painting, which emerged near the end of the period, changed this so called “deposit”, along with the relationship of the artist and the patron, allowing for the talent and skill of the artist to shine.
This book is a note written by Roland Barthes to record the dialectical way he thought about the eidos(form, essence, type, species) of Photographs. Roland Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist in his lifetime, but surprisingly he was not a photographer. As Barthes had a belief that art works consists with signs and structures, he had investigated semiotics and structuralism. However, through Camera Lucida, he realized the limitation of structuralism and the impression to analyze Photography with only semiotics and structuralism. Barthes concludes with talking about unclassifiable aspects of Photography. I could sense the direction Barthes wanted to go through the first chapter ‘Specialty of the Photograph’. He tried to define something by phenomenology
Art is said to be the expression of the soul; however, quite often, one is unable to truly know the artist by his or her works alone. So is the case of the postimpressionist painter Paul Gauguin. while the paintings of Paul Gauguin do not reveal all of his life, the paintings are very much so a reflection of Gauguin’s views on life.
In this essay, I shall try to examine how great a role colour played in the evolution of Impressionism. Impressionism in itself can be seen as a linkage in a long chain of procedures, which led the art to the point it is today. In order to do so, colour in Impressionism needs to be placed within an art-historical context for us to see more clearly the role it has played in the evolution of modern painting. In the late eighteenth century, for example, ancient Greek and Roman examples provided the classical sources in art. At the same time, there was a revolt against the formalism of Neo-Classicism. The accepted style was characterised by appeal to reason and intellect, with a demand for a well-disciplined order and restraint in the work. The decisive Romantic movement emphasized the individual’s right in self-expression, in which imagination and emotion were given free reign and stressed colour rather than line; colour can be seen as the expression for emotion, whereas line is the expression of rationality. Their style was painterly rather than linear; colour offered a freedom that line denied. Among the Romanticists who had a strong influence on Impressionism were Joseph Mallord William Turner and Eugéne Delacroix. In Turner’s works, colour took precedence over the realistic portrayal of form; Delacroix led the way for the Impressionists to use unmixed hues. The transition between Romanticism and Impressionism was provided by a small group of artists who lived and worked at the village of Barbizon. Their naturalistic style was based entirely on their observation and painting of nature in the open air. In their natural landscape subjects, they paid careful attention to the colourful expression of light and atmosphere. For them, colour was as important as composition, and this visual approach, with its appeal to emotion, gradually displaced the more studied and forma, with its appeal to reason.
Barnett, Peter. “The French Revolution in Art”. ArtId, January 7th 2009. Web. 5th May 2013.
The Gallery presented a set of bronze sculptures made by a French artist called Valerie Andrianoff. Val’s works of art can be perceived as a search for balance and stability as the heading of this exhibition has already suggested “The Balance of Life” (Byrs-Lasquier, n.d.). In the following, a few of her works will be selected to illustrate what kind of ideas she is trying to express and how I feel about these sculptures.