Artists Who Paved The Way

Tell me, who's inspired you?

7/27/10


Vincent van Gogh

Vincent Willem van Gogh was born on 30 March 1853 in Groot-Zundert, a village close to Breda in the province of North Brabant in the southern Netherlands. He was the son of Anna Cornelia Carbentus and Theodorus van Gogh, a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church. Vincent was given the same name as his grandfather—and a first brother stillborn exactly one year before. The practice of reusing a name in this way was not uncommon. Vincent was a common name in the Van Gogh family; his grandfather (1789–1874) had received his degree of theology at the University of Leiden in 1811. Grandfather Vincent had six sons, three of whom became art dealers, including another Vincent who was referred to in Van Gogh's letters as "Uncle Cent." Grandfather Vincent had perhaps been named in turn after his own father's uncle, the successful sculptor Vincent van Gogh (1729–1802). Art and religion were the two occupations to which the Van Gogh family gravitated. His brother Theodorus (Theo) was born on 1 May 1857. He had another brother, Cor, and three sisters: Elisabeth, Anna and Willemina.

A bit later. . .

Arles
Van Gogh moved to Arles hoping for refuge; at the time he was ill from drink and suffering from smoker's cough. He arrived on 21 February 1888, and took a room at the Hôtel-Restaurant Carrel, which, idealistically, he had expected to look like one of Hokusai (1760–1849) or Utamaro's (1753–1806) prints. He had moved to the town with thoughts of founding a utopian art colony, and the Danish artist Christian Mourier-Petersen became his companion for two months. However, Arles appeared exotic and filthy to Van Gogh. In a letter he described it as a foreign country; "The Zouaves, the brothels, the adorable little Arlesiennes going to their First Communion, the priest in his surplice, who looks like a dangerous rhinocerous, the people drinking absinthe, all seem to me creatures from another world".
100 years after his stay there, he was remembered by 113-year-old Jeanne Calment—who as a 13 year old was serving in her uncle's fabric shop where Van Gogh wanted to buy some canvas—as "dirty, badly dressed and disagreeable" and "very ugly, ungracious, impolite, sick". She also recalled selling him colored pencils.

Yet, he was taken by the local landscape and light. His works from the period are richly draped in yellow, ultramarine and mauve. His portrayals of the Arles landscape are informed by his Dutch upbringing; the patchwork of fields and avenues appear flat and lack perspective, but excel in their intensity of colour. The vibrant light in Arles excited him, and his newfound appreciation is seen in the range and scope of his work. He painted local landscapes using a gridded "perspective frame" that March. Three of these paintings were shown at the annual exhibition of the Société des Artistes Indépendants. In April, he was visited by the American artist Dodge MacKnight, who was living nearby at Fontvieille. On 1 May, he signed a lease for 15 francs month in the eastern wing of the Yellow House at No. 2 Place Lamartine. The rooms were unfurnished and uninhabited for some time. He had been staying at the Hôtel Restaurant Carrel, but the rate charged by the hotel was 5 francs a week, which he found excessive. He disputed the price, took the case to a local arbitrator and was awarded a twelve franc reduction on his total bill.

He moved from the Hôtel Carrel to the Café de la Gare on 7 May, where he became friends with the proprietors, Joseph and Marie Ginoux. Although the Yellow House had to be furnished before he could fully move in, Van Gogh was able to utilise it as a studio. Hoping to have a gallery to display his work, his major project at this time was a series of paintings which included: Van Gogh's Chair (1888), Bedroom in Arles (1888), The Night Café (1888), The Café Terrace on the Place du Forum, Arles, at Night (September 1888), Starry Night Over the Rhone (1888), Still Life: Vase with Twelve Sunflowers (1888), all intended to form the décoration for the Yellow House. Van Gogh wrote about The Night Café: "I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime."

He visited Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer that June where he gave drawing lessons to a Zouave second lieutenant, Paul-Eugène Milliet. MacKnight introduced Van Gogh to Eugène Boch, a Belgian painter who stayed at times in Fontvieille, and the two exchanged visits in July.

Gauguin agreed to join him in Arles, giving Van Gogh much hope for friendship and his collective of artists. Waiting, in August, he painted sunflowers. Boch visited again and Van Gogh painted his portrait as well as the study The Poet Against a Starry Sky. Boch's sister Anna (1848–1936), also an artist, purchased The Red Vineyard in 1890. Upon advice from his friend, the station's postal supervisor Joseph Roulin, whose portrait he painted, he bought two beds on 8 September, and he finally spent the first night in the still sparsely furnished Yellow House on 17 September. When Gauguin consented to work and live in Arles side-by-side with Van Gogh, he started to work on the The Décoration for the Yellow House, probably the most ambitious effort he ever undertook. Van Gogh did two chair paintings: Van Gogh's Chair and Gauguin's Chair.

After repeated requests, Gauguin finally arrived in Arles on 23 October. During November, the two painted together. Gauguin painted Van Gogh's portrait The Painter of Sunflowers: Portrait of Vincent van Gogh, and uncharacteristically, Van Gogh painted some pictures from memory—deferring to Gauguin's ideas in this—as well as his The Red Vineyard. Their first joint outdoor painting exercise was conducted at the picturesque Alyscamps.

The two artists visited Montpellier that December and viewed works in the Alfred Bruyas collection by Courbet and Delacroix in the Musée Fabre. However, their relationship was deteriorating. They quarreled fiercely about art; Van Gogh felt an increasing fear that Gauguin was going to desert him as a situation he described as one of "excessive tension" reached crisis point.

On 23 December 1888, frustrated and ill, Van Gogh confronted Gauguin with a razor blade. In panic, Van Gogh left their quarters and fled to a local brothel. While there, he cut off the lower part of his left ear lobe. He wrapped the severed tissue in newspaper and handed it to a prostitute named Rachel, asking her to "keep this object carefully." Gauguin left Arles and never saw Van Gogh again. Days later, Van Gogh was hospitalized and left in a critical state for several days. Immediately, Theo—notified by Gauguin—visited, as did both Madame Ginoux and Roulin. In January 1889, he returned to the Yellow House, but spent the following month between hospital and home suffering from hallucinations and delusions that he was being poisoned. In March, the police closed his house after a petition by 30 townspeople, who called him "fou roux" (the redheaded madman). Paul Signac visited him in hospital and Van Gogh was allowed home in his company. In April, he moved into rooms owned by Dr. Rey, after floods damaged paintings in his own home. Around this time, he wrote, "Sometimes moods of indescribable anguish, sometimes moments when the veil of time and fatality of circumstances seemed to be torn apart for an instant." Two months later he had left Arles and entered an asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.
From Wikipedia

I've always loved his (van Gogh) paintings from the period he was in Arles. He moved there at the ripe age of 35, close to my age now. Many think of the mid 30's as when we just start coming into our stride. We've made our mistakes, and experimented with who we are and have found our voice. This, some say is the most productive period in adult life; yet for Vincent it wasn't quite as prolific as his time in Paris where he produced around 200 paintings.

During his time in Arles, van Goh was able to collaborate with his long time friend Gauguin. Unfortunately he eventually drove him away further reinforcing his mental anguish. Perhaps his suffering was his muse and in his thirties it was all coming to a head. Whatever the reason, he helped father the expressionist movement, quite possibly during this phase of his career.

I particularly like van Gogh's concept of taking a somewhat impressionist technique and making it less literal. Through expressionism he seemed to use the brush strokes and colours in a more subjective manner capturing a largely emotional tone.

There's a haunting quality to his work perhaps carried through in his madness.


6/12/10



M.C. Escher
Escher's first print of an impossible reality was Still Life and Street, 1937. His artistic expression was created from images in his mind, rather than directly from observations and travels to other countries. Well known examples of his work also include Drawing Hands, a work in which two hands are shown, each drawing the other; Sky and Water, in which light plays on shadow to morph the water background behind fish figures into bird figures on a sky background; and Ascending and Descending, in which lines of people ascend and descend stairs in an infinite loop, on a construction which is impossible to build and possible to draw only by taking advantage of quirks of perception and perspective.

He worked primarily in the media of lithographs and woodcuts, though the few mezzotints he made are considered to be masterpieces of the technique. In his graphic art, he portrayed mathematical relationships among shapes, figures and space. Additionally, he explored interlocking figures using black and white to enhance different dimensions. Integrated into his prints were mirror images of cones, spheres, cubes, rings and spirals.

n addition to sketching landscape and nature in his early years, he also sketched insects, which frequently appeared in his later work. His first artistic work, completed in 1922, featured eight human heads divided in different planes. Later around 1924, he lost interest in "regular division" of planes, and turned to sketching landscapes in Italy with irregular perspectives that are impossible in natural form.

n addition to sketching landscape and nature in his early years, he also sketched insects, which frequently appeared in his later work. His first artistic work, completed in 1922, featured eight human heads divided in different planes. Later around 1924, he lost interest in "regular division" of planes, and turned to sketching landscapes in Italy with irregular perspectives that are impossible in natural form.

. . .Overall, his early love of Roman and Italian landscapes and of nature led to his interest in the concept of regular division of a plane, which he applied in over 150 colored works. Other mathematical principles evidenced in his works include the superposition of a hyperbolic plane on a fixed 2-dimensional plane, and the incorporation of three-dimensional objects such as spheres, columns and cubes into his works. For example, in a print called "Reptiles," he combined two and three-dimensional images. In one of his papers, Escher emphasized the importance of dimensionality and described himself as "irritated" by flat shapes: "I make them come out of the plane."
From Wikipedia


My house always had a few interesting books on the coffee table. One of which was M.C. Escher, Graphic Work.  Whenever I was feeling particularly uninspired I would find my self sinking into the soft couch cradling this book in my lap, completely mesmerized by what lie in between the pages. I marveled at the complexity of his designs, the maniacal detail in which he painstakingly illustrated his images, and the imagination he had for creating trickery that befuddled the mind's eye.

I was around twelve or thirteen at the time, and because of this book I became obsessed with drawing hyper-realistic imagery. One image I remember doing was an 11"x17" ink drawing of a Brazilian waterfall using the technique known as pointillism with rapidiograph pens. It took me two months, and I nearly went insane. Needless to say I gained a new respect for this man's patience, and determination.  Since that time I haven't attempted such an ambitious project.  Looking back I can say it forced me to push my boundaries both in technical prowess, and in perspective.  It was one of many things that helped me to hone my sills as an artist.

Although he isn't considered a surrealist; his ability to bend reality later led me to the works of a few other artists like Salvador Dali, and Heironymus Bosch.

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6/5/10




Pablo Picasso

In the early 20th century, Picasso divided his time between Barcelona and Paris. In 1904, in the middle of a storm, he met Fernande Olivier, a Bohemian artist who became his mistress. Olivier appears in many of his Rose period paintings. After acquiring fame and some fortune, Picasso left Olivier for Marcelle Humbert, whom he called Eva Gouel. Picasso included declarations of his love for Eva in many Cubist works. Picasso was devastated by her premature death from illness at the age of 30 in 1915.

After World War I, Picasso made a number of important associations and relationships with figures associated with Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Among his friends during this period were Jean Cocteau, Jean Hugo, Juan Gris and others. In the summer of 1918, Picasso married Olga Khokhlova, a ballerina with Sergei Diaghilev’s troupe, for whom Picasso was designing a ballet, Parade, in Rome; and they spent their honeymoon in the villa near Biarritz of the glamorous Chilean art patron Eugenia Errázuriz. Khokhlova introduced Picasso to high society, formal dinner parties, and all the social niceties attendant on the life of the rich in 1920s Paris. The two had a son, Paulo, who would grow up to be a dissolute motorcycle racer and chauffeur to his father. Khokhlova’s insistence on social propriety clashed with Picasso’s bohemian tendencies and the two lived in a state of constant conflict. During the same period that Picasso collaborated with Diaghilev’s troup, he and Igor Stravinsky collaborated on Pulcinella in 1920. Picasso took the opportunity to make several sketches of the composer.

In 1927 Picasso met 17-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter and began a secret affair with her. Picasso’s marriage to Khokhlova soon ended in separation rather than divorce, as French law required an even division of property in the case of divorce, and Picasso did not want Khokhlova to have half his wealth. The two remained legally married until Khokhlova’s death in 1955. Picasso carried on a long-standing affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter and fathered a daughter, Maia, with her. Marie-Thérèse lived in the vain hope that Picasso would one day marry her, and hanged herself four years after Picasso’s death. Throughout his life Picasso maintained a number of mistresses in addition to his wife or primary partner. Picasso was married twice and had four children by three women.
From Wikipedia


Picasso was my first BIG influence. I was first introduced to him in grammar school. We had a woman coming in to teach us art history once a week. She would come and talk about the various periods, and I remember getting bored and preferring to draw little scenes on my notebook of helicopters, and funny cars, birds and tanks--rather than look at some old paintings of stuffy aristocrats, and fat people lying around eating grapes.

Then, one hot day in late spring, just after lunch (I was so ready for a nap), in walks Ms. Art teacher and starts giving her lecture. I automatically tuned out and started doodling while she went on in a monotone voice similar to that of Charlie Brown's teacher, "Wah, wah wah, wahwahwahwah." I decided to look up as she's talking about some Spanish guy and holding up this painting...



...and telling us it's a picture of some woman. I was dumbfounded, "A painting of a what?". It took me a few seconds to wrap my brain around it. It was like a puzzle that made my head hurt. To me here was someone who decided to throw out all the rules, someone who challenged our perception as we understood it.

As she went on to show some of his works from the cubist period I became more and more enthralled with this man. It baffled me to think of what must have been going through his mind! How the hell could someone just come up with something like that?

Picasso inspired me and told me it was OK to rebel against conformity, something I loved to do even at that age. (I love you Mom!) To this day he continues to inspire me, especially when I think I've run out of ideas, or want to just give up and tow the line. He reminds me that we all have a voice which is unique, and needs no explanation.


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