Artist Research
Welcome to my Art & Design Foundation Blog. This is where I will be keeping track of my work over the next year as I progress through the course.
One of our first tasks is to find paintings we like by the following artists and research the materials, processes and techniques they have used to produce the work. The paintings I have chosen have taken into account our theme of World of Water (realism - abstract). The list of artists provided are as follows:
Terry Setch
Anselm Kiefer
Roy Litchenstein
ClaudeMonet
J M W Turner
Henri Matisse
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Terry Setch
Terry Setch - Above & Below the Tide
I have chosen this piece because of the intriguing layers of texture. It reminds me of the rocks around rock pools where the incoming and outgoing tide has created permanent layers of residues over centuries. The rust colour showing through brings warmth to the pieces and gives the feeling of being exposed to the elements. In his interview with Michael Sandle (link below) he describes how he came up with a process of adding encaustic wax to slow down the drying of the paint and to bind elements of his paintings together. He also uses plastics and heating processes, sometimes even including pieces of flotsam and jetsam found on the beach in his work.
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RESEARCH
From the Royal Academy website: "He lives in Penarth, Wales and draws inspiration from his surroundings. Employing diverse materials, he explores the tensions between society and the natural world. The painted surfaces of his large scale works are often amplified with found matter, which articulates an atmosphere of elemental and emotional turmoil."
Terry Setch Personal Statement:
My activity is concentrated on a two-mile stretch of the local beach, between Penarth and Lavernock Point. I have regarded that area, the beach, cliffs and the margin with the waters of the Severn estuary, as my place. I have observed it, worked in it and thought about it almost daily since I settled in Penarth in 1969. It has become for me the source and inspiration for ideas about the genre of landscape and about living within in it. It has been the catalyst for ideas about painting as an activity, about finding forms of visual expression for the experience of powerful phenomena. A painting is as much the channel or filter for how I ‘picture landscape in my physical and emotional absorption of it. From that point, I attempt to find counterparts in paint and matter for what I see and sense within both the place and the painting. Because it is alive, the terrain never stops changing although man rather than nature most often brings about the changes now. Issues about recycling and pollution surfaced when I started going onto the beach. For a time Lavernock Point was a dumping ground for fly tippers, stolen cars and general rubbish. The tidal current has long added to this accumulation with the flotsam and jetsam from passing ships. This is what my work is about, the despoliation of landscape.
A Conversation Between Michael Sandle and Terry Setch
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Anselm Kiefer
Anselm Keifer - The Land of the Two Rivers
I have chosen this piece as I love the verdigris colour, the moody, leaden atmosphere and sense of distance. Firstly the colour - I love copper - always have! The warmth, the glow, the shiny pinkness that magically turns to the coolest most calming shade of matte green with weathering over time. It reminds me of church roofs, scrap yards, abandoned buildings and spaces - places of solitude and history. I love how the lead grey in this picture turns the area into an instantly recognisable body of water and implies a sky above, giving a sense of a landscape with horizon and sky that wouldn't be there otherwise. The materials he used to create this piece were: Emulsion, acrylic, lead, salt through electrolysis and zinc plates-condenser, on canvas.
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RESEARCH
From the Guggenheim Website:
Anselm Kiefer
The Land of the Two Rivers ( Zweistromland )
During the 1980s, Anselm Kiefer became one of the foremost representatives of Neo-Expressionism, an approach characterized by violent, gestural brushwork and a return to the personal. His large-scale works, infused with references to both the German romantic tradition and his country’s political heritage, combine a nearly monochromatic palette with mixed media, including the application of materials such as strips of lead, straw, plaster, seeds, ash, and soil. The result is an oeuvre whose monumental scale and rich interplay of textures heighten the solemnity and transcendental nature of its contents.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, it seemed that the long period of national mourning might finally be over. Kiefer left Germany, settling first in New York and then in the South of France, without producing any significant works for around three years. After two decades of dealing almost exclusively with the horrors of the Holocaust and Germany’s Nazi past, Kiefer began to explore a more universal set of themes, still based on religion, myth, and history, but now focusing on the spirituality of man and the internal workings of the mind. The artist’s subject matter changed markedly and ranged from the sunflowers of Arles to the queens of France. In a series of works devoted to French female royalty, Kiefer paid homage to the likes of Catherine de’ Medici, Marie Antoinette, and Anne d’Autriche. In Les Reines de France, the women are rendered like Byzantine icons against a background of distressed gold-leaf mosaic. This new iconography, while still engaged with the weight of history, indicates that Kiefer now approached his subject matter with admiration, even joy.
The color of lead—a “support for ideas” in Kiefer’s words—stands out in his painting The Land of the Two Rivers (Zweistromland). This monumental work features an inscription with the names of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, a reference to the Mesopotamian civilization, in whose banks settled some of the most ancient peoples in humankind. Records have gone beyond the decay and ruins of these cultures and have made their past a present in this painting. The Land of the Two Rivers was preceded by a sculpture with the same title where books made of lead conveyed a sense of history’s durability.
Anselm Kiefer
B. 1945, DONAUESCHINGEN, GERMANY
Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945, in Donaueschingen in the German state of Baden-Württemberg. After taking courses in law at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg from 1965 to 1966, he studied art there under Peter Dreher. He continued his studies with Horst Antes at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe in 1969 before transferring the following year to the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he met Joseph Beuys. Beuys’s interest in deploying an array of cultural myths, metaphors, and symbols as a means by which to engage and understand history inspired Kiefer. He first addressed the problem of history, particularly Germany’s contentious history, in 1969 in a series dubbed Occupations, a collection of photographic self-portraits taken in France, Switzerland, and Italy, which show him in military garb with his arm raised in a Hitlerian salute. That same year, Kiefer had his first solo exhibition, at Galerie am Kaiserplatz in Karlsruhe.
Occupations signaled the future direction of Kiefer’s work. In his endeavor to explore his identity and heritage through art making, he boldly confronted Theodor Adorno’s declaration: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Early works, like Winter Landscape (1970) and Man in the Forest (1973), highlight human suffering and loneliness. In 1973 Kiefer turned his attention to architecture, painting a series of large-scale canvases set in the wood-grained attic of his home. With highly symbolic titles, including Father, Son, Holy Ghost (1973) and Germany’s Spiritual Heroes (1973), these interiors possess a distinct psychological charge, much like van Gogh’s representations of his own bedroom. The cavernous attic is a metaphor for the artist’s mind, a universe in which conflict and contradiction are resolved through creation.
The profane realities of history overtook myth in Kiefer’s work as of 1974. His canvases, with backdrops of charred and smoldering ploughed earth, became increasingly hermetic in their iconography, decipherable only with the help of the words and phrases he inscribed on them. Cockchafer Fly (1974) includes text from a German nursery rhyme, revealing the subject to be Pomerania, a German region annexed by Poland following World War II. Others, like Operation Winter Storm (1975) and Operation Sea Lion I (1975), reveal the artist’s continued preoccupation with his homeland’s Nazi past. During this same period, Kiefer commenced a series of paintings examining art’s redemptive role in history. Nero Paints (1974) and To Paint (1974) consist of landscapes overlaid with a huge palette.
In the early 1980s, Kiefer’s interest in content was accompanied by an equal focus on both the materiality of the canvas and the visual complexity of its surface, a concept he first began to explore in his book designs, the earliest of which dates to 1969. Kiefer introduced a host of new materials to his aesthetic vocabulary, including wood, sand, lead, and straw. These natural elements lend his work a marked fragility, often in contradiction to their stark subject matter. Margarete (1981) and Nuremberg (1982), for instance, invoke Nazi atrocities against Jews, but the shimmering presence of straw across their surfaces imbues them with a tactility of unsettling delicacy and beauty. Kiefer’s preoccupation with Nazi rule precipitated another series of paintings during this period, which take the architecture of Albert Speer, the Führer’s official builder, as their point of departure. Interior (1981), for example, shows the Mosaic Room in Hitler’s Reich Chancellery.
Through the late 1980s and 1990s, mystical and mythological themes continued to proliferate in Kiefer’s ongoing dialogue with the past. With the approach of the new millennium, he looked beyond Germany for subject matter. Between 1995 and 2001, he undertook a cycle of monumental paintings of the cosmos. Light Compulsion (1999), the largest to date, shows the Milky Way, its depth and composition echoing that of Pollock’s drip paintings. Architecture returned to the fore in 1997 with a series of archaic desert clay structures. In Your Age and My Age and the Age of the World (1997), an Egyptian pyramid rises from the barren earth. Since the late 1990s, Kiefer has devoted his energy increasingly to sculpture in mixed media; lead, however, remains a preferred material. Plants, too, are prominent in Kiefer’s recent work. The pages of his artist’s book The Secret Life of Plants(1997) as well as the surfaces of two paintings of the same title (1998 and 2001) contain images of sunflowers made using seeds from that blossom. Every Plant Has Its Related Star in the Sky (2001) ruminates on the related mysteries of the plant and celestial worlds. His more recent series of works, shown in 2005 at White Cube in London, incorporates oil, emulsion, acrylic and lead, and was inspired by the poetry of Russian modernist Velimir Chlebnikov.
The Japan Art Association presented Kiefer with the Praemium Imperiale Award in 1999. Comprehensive solo exhibitions of his work have been organized by the Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (1984), Art Institute of Chicago (1987), Sezon Museum of Art in Tokyo (1993), Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1998), Fondation Beyeler in Basel (2001), Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2005), and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao(2007). He lives and works in Barjac, France.
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Roy Litchenstein
Roy Litchenstein - Water Lilies with Japanese Bridge
OK, so not my favourite artist or style of art. I have chosen this piece primarily because of it's Monet reference (who I love!). Whilst not really my thing, I can appreciate the different take on the subject - using different patterns and solid blocks of colour to emphasise changes in shade and tone. Having researched the artist more, I am intrigued that many of his pieces are actually hand painted rather than printed, however the waterlilies series are screen printed on enamel on stainless steel. I chose this piece over others because most of his work that I have seen has been in primary colours only - blue, red and yellow with black & white. I like the use of Monet colours in this piece - the periwinkle blue, burgundy and jade green colours appeal to me.
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RESEARCH
From the National Galleries of Scotland Website:
This is from a group of six works that form Lichtenstein’s Water Lilies series which pay homage to the water lily paintings of Impressionist artist Claude Monet (1840-1926). They were made in collaboration with a master printmaker, Donald Saff at his studio, Saff Tech Arts . Working with the printmakers, Lichtenstein was able to realise a swirl motif on stainless steel that he remembered from the metal dashboards of 1920s and 1930s automobiles. As one commentator has explained: ‘At Saff Tech, a method was developed to create the swirls, using a drill press fitted with a rubber end and suspended upside down from the ceiling. Production of the pattern was labour intensive, as each swirl was executed individually.’
Lichtenstein experimented with a variety of painting techniques as a young artist. In the 1960s, he developed a series of processes for creating artworks that looked machine-made, but were in fact carefully designed and rendered by hand. In an interview with John Coplans for Artforum in 1967 Lichtenstein said, ‘I want to hide the record of my hand’ (quoted in Coplans 1970, p.8).
To create his designs Lichtenstein developed systems for imitating, but not copying, his graphic or cartoon sources. First he would sketch the image, making his own changes, then he would trace this drawing onto canvas using an opaque projector, while continuing to recompose the image. Finally he would paint this image using broad areas of flat Magna paint, strong contours and areas filled with Benday dots. This three-part process gave Lichtenstein boundaries within which to work, but enough freedom to take ownership over the final design.
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Claude Monet
Claude Monet - Water Lilies - Setting Sun
Don't get me started on Monet! I love his work. I have chosen this piece because of the gorgeous deep colours and the beautiful reflection of sunset. I find it fascinating that he worked at creating such beautiful images in such trying times, having recently lost his wife, his eyesight was failing and whilst being surrounded by the ugliness and turmoil of the First World War, his son Michel fighting on the front line. I love the enormous scale of the Water Lilies pieces. He painted en plein air, attempting to capture the natural light and movement with quick brush strokes in oil paint. He started with a base of Lead white to make sure all the colours popped out and lost himself in trying to capture the beauty of his gardens at Giverny - especially the lily ponds and the beautiful reflections in them.
Palette:
Lead white (modern equivalent = titanium white)
Chrome yellow (modern equivalent = cadmium yellow light)
Cadmium yellow
Viridian green
Emerald green
French ultramarine
Cobalt blue
Madder red (modern equivalent = alizarin crimson)
Vermilion
Ivory black (but only if you're copying a Monet from before 1886)
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RESEARCH
From the National Gallery Website:
Here Monet looks down at the surface of the pond, in his water garden at Giverny. 'Bending over the magic mirror' of the canvas, in the words of Marcel Proust, we see the pink and yellow rays of the setting sun shimmering on the still surface of the pond, and the inverted reflection of a weeping willow over which water-lilies float. Monet kept the painting until 1923 when, circumstantial evidence suggests, he may have reworked it.
From the Art Story Website:
Synopsis
Key Ideas
Monet's early work is indebted to the Realists' interests in depicting contemporary subject matter, without idealization, and in painting outdoors in order to capture the fleeting qualities of nature.
Inspired in part by Edouard Manet, Monet departed from the clear depiction of forms and linear perspective, which were prescribed by the established art of the time, and experimented with loose handling, bold color, and strikingly unconventional compositions. The emphasis in his pictures shifted from representing figures to depicting different qualities of light and atmosphere in each scene.
In his later years, Monet also became increasingly sensitive to the decorative qualities of color and form. He began to apply paint in smaller strokes, building it up in broad fields of color, and exploring the possibilities of a decorative paint surface of harmonies and contrasts of color. The effects that he achieved, particularly in the series paintings of the 1890s, represent a remarkable advance towards abstraction and towards a modern painting focused purely on surface effects.
An inspiration and a leader among the Impressionists, he was crucial in attracting Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Edouard Manet and Camille Pissarro to work alongside each other in and around Paris. He was also important in establishing the exhibition society that would showcase the group's work between 1874 and 1886.
Claude Monet was the leader of the French Impressionist movement, literally giving the movement its name. As an inspirational talent and personality, he was crucial in bringing its adherents together. Interested in painting in the open air and capturing natural light, Monet would later bring the technique to one of its most famous pinnacles with his series paintings, in which his observations of the same subject, viewed at various times of the day, were captured in numerous sequences of paintings. Masterful as a colorist and as a painter of light and atmosphere, his later work often achieved a remarkable degree of abstraction, and this has recommended him to subsequent generations of abstract painters.
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J M W Turner
J M W Turner - Shields on the River Tyne
I have chosen this watercolour over his dramatic oil seascapes because of the contrasts - the calm, peaceful, cool blue of the moonlit sky reflecting on the river, contrasting with the hot orange of the hard working labourers, busily shovelling coal onto the boats and the grey, dreary industrial landscape in the background.
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RESEARCH
From the Tate Museum Website:
In this moonlit nocturne Turner depicts keelmen shoveling coal from flat-bottomed barges into the hold of a collier brig. Coal was carried down the river Tyne by these vessels from the coalfields near Newcastle and processed by the Shields keelmen who worked through the night to meet the insatiable demand for the fuel. The rectangular North Shields lighthouse can be seen in the distance below the moon, and on the opposite bank, on the right, South Shields is identifiable by the ‘artificial hills formed by the cinders from the salt and glass works and the ballast discharged by the colliers’.1 Tyneside coal was a keystone of the national economy: by 1826, three years after this drawing was produced, of the two million tons of coal imported to London only 125,000 came from other domestic sources.2
‘Few rivers’, writes Barbara Hofland, ‘can boast such as union of picturesque beauty and commercial importance as the Tyne’.3The sky is eerily lit with a full moon, projecting a beam of silvery light onto the river. Sombre cirrus and cumuli amass, encroaching on the moon, threatening to occlude it. The waters are still and rendered in a similar colour range to the sky: blues and greys heightened with white and pale yellow. At the right of the picture in brilliant vermilion and white, is the glow of a burning brazier of coal. The elemental rudiments of industry are represented here, harnessed and exploited: earth signified by coal, soot and salt, water by the Tyne, fire by the incineration of coal. The ‘arresting vitality born of this combustion’ and the cover of cool evening moonlight transforms these industrial activities into an embodiment of ‘the industrial sublime’.4 Ian Warrell also points out that the composition of this watercolour is much like one of Claude’s seaport views. This association, he writes, ‘lends a heroic stature to the men and women working amid the ruddy firelight, who replace Claude’s stock mythical figures’.5
According to art historian William Rodner, ‘Turner’s watercolour reveals much about the early coal business, particularly advances in transporting the material’ and the implied consequences of these innovations to the community of keelmen.6 The ‘laborious process of shovelling cargo by hand from the keel into the vessel’ was being streamlined by technological developments.7 As George Head observes that ‘the hardy race of keelmen’ were slowly, but inevitably, being ‘deprived of their ancient occupation...by means of new appliances’ designed to improve efficiency and speed of transportation.8 One of these ‘new appliances’ is depicted in Turner’s watercolour at the top right: a wheeled container on a primitive railway link installed by the mines to take buckets of coal straight from the source to the riverbank.
As with all the drawings in this series, the colouring is rich and complex, comprised of layered stipples and hatches of complementary and contrasting tones to achieve a striking prismatic effect.
From the William Turner Website:
Turner's talent was recognised early in his life. Financial independence allowed Turner to innovate freely; his mature work is characterised by a chromatic palette and broadly applied atmospheric washes of paint. According to David Piper's The Illustrated History of Art, his later pictures were called "fantastic puzzles." However, Turner was still recognised as an artistic genius: the influential English art critic John Ruskin described Turner as the artist who could most "stirringly and truthfully measure the moods of Nature." (Piper 321)
Suitable vehicles for Turner's imagination were to be found in the subjects of shipwrecks, fires (such as the Burning of Parliament in 1834, an event which Turner rushed to witness first-hand, and which he transcribed in a series of watercolour sketches), natural catastrophes, and natural phenomena such as sunlight, storm, rain, and fog. He was fascinated by the violent power of the sea, as seen in Dawn after the Wreck (1840) and The Slave Ship (1840).
Turner placed human beings in many of his paintings to indicate his affection for humanity on the one hand (note the frequent scenes of people drinking and merry-making or working in the foreground), but its vulnerability and vulgarity amid the 'sublime' nature of the world on the other hand. 'Sublime' here means awe-inspiring, savage grandeur, a natural world unmastered by man, evidence of the power of God - a theme that artists and poets were exploring in this period. The significance of light was to Turner the emanation of God's spirit and this was why he refined the subject matter of his later paintings by leaving out solid objects and detail, concentrating on the play of light on water, the radiance of skies and fires. Although these late paintings appear to be 'impressionistic' and therefore a forerunner of the French school, Turner was striving for expression of spirituality in the world, rather than responding primarily to optical phenomena.
His early works, such as Tintern Abbey (1795), stayed true to the traditions of English landscape. However, in Hannibal Crossing the Alps (1812), an emphasis on the destructive power of nature had already come into play. His distinctive style of painting, in which he used watercolour technique with oil paints, created lightness, fluency, and ephemeral atmospheric effects. (Piper 321)
One popular story about Turner, though it likely has little basis in reality, states that he even had himself "tied to the mast of a ship in order to experience the drama" of the elements during a storm at sea.
In his later years he used oils ever more transparently, and turned to an evocation of almost pure light by use of shimmering colour. A prime example of his mature style can be seen in Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway, where the objects are barely recognizable. The intensity of hue and interest in evanescent light not only placed Turner's work in the vanguard of English painting, but later exerted an influence upon art in France, as well; the Impressionists, particularly Claude Monet, carefully studied his techniques.
It has been suggested that the high levels of ash in the atmosphere during the 1816 "Year Without a Summer," which led to unusually spectacular sunsets during this period, were an inspiration for some of Turner's work.
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Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse - Open Window
I love the joyous use of bold, contrasting yet complimentary colour in this oil painting. It feels alive and makes me want to lean out the window to see what's going on outside - you can almost feel the coastal breeze and hear the seagulls. I also love how the detail is all directly in front of you, with the walls feeling almost blurry - as would be the case if you were standing there, the walls only appearing hazy in your peripheral vision.
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RESEARCH
From the National Gallery of Art Website:
EXPLORE THIS WORK
The vista may look out to a small French fishing port—but, really, this window opens on the future of painting in the twentieth century.
Henri Matisse painted Open Window, Collioure in the summer of 1905, when he and André Derain worked together near the Spanish border. The light-filled scene is vibrant and inviting. Blue-hulled boats float on pink waves below a sky banded with turquoise, pink, and periwinkle. These unnatural colors—Derain would later liken them to “sticks of dynamite”—provoked an outrage that year at the Salon d'Automne in Paris.
Eyewitness accounts tell of laughter emanating from the room where this painting hung with similarly bold works by Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, and others. Gertrude Stein, avant-garde writer and collector, reported that some people scratched at the canvases, and a critic, noting the presence of a Renaissance-style statuette in the center of the room, quipped, "Well, well, Donatello among the wild beasts (fauves).” Soon these artists were being called the fauves.
The fauves liberated color from any requirements other than those posed by the painting itself. "When I put a green," Matisse would say, "it is not grass. When I put a blue, it is not the sky." Art exerted its own reality. Color was a tool of the painter's artistic intention and expression, uncircumscribed by imitation. Matisse’s imperative was to "interpret nature and submit it to the spirit of the picture."
Note the logic of his colors. They function in complementary pairs—orange-red masts over blue hulls, red blossoms amid green leaves on the wall, opposing reflections of turquoise and pink. Complements such as these become more intense when seen next to each other. Isolated by bare areas of the canvas, the combinations generate a visual vibrato that keeps our eye fixed on the surface. The angled, out-flung doors invite into the scene, but different brushstrokes in each “zone” set up cross-rhythms that impede recession: wide sweeps in the room’s interior, short wavy lines or staccato dabs in the view beyond.
About the Artist
Introduced to painting while recovering from appendicitis at age 19, Henri Matisse abandoned his job as a law clerk to compose conventional Dutch-inspired still lifes and interiors using a somber palette. After moving from northern France to Paris in 1891, his colors brightened and his style evolved under the influence of Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and others.
In 1904, while working along the Mediterranean coast, he fully liberated his colors in bold hues that eliminated shadows and defined forms. This experimentation—dubbed fauvism (from “wild beasts”)—was a brief but crucial step in Matisse’s lifelong goal of expression through color. As he traveled throughout North Africa and Moorish Spain from 1906 to 1913, his sense of abstraction heightened, expressed in mural-sized canvases that explored color intensity in relation to human form and studio objects.
During the 1920s, Matisse reverted to more conventional modeling, cohesive space, and blended brushwork, depicting figures in exotic costumes in the textile-sheathed interior of his Nice studio. With a commission to design a mural for the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia, however, Matisse reentered the avant-garde fray.
Throughout the 1930s, his paintings became more boldly decorative as the illusion of depth was compressed into solid planes of color. This culminated in his return to the cutout technique, which he had first explored in designing costumes and scenery for the Ballets Russes in 1919. By cutting sheets of paper painted with meticulously mixed hues, Matisse “painted with scissors.” These ensembles allowed him to continue creating art despite his failing health once he reached in his early 70s. He also translated these shapes—along with a rekindled love of drawing—to book arts.
Throughout his life, Matisse published personal artist statements and dedicated at least an hour a day to writing letters to friends and family. These written and visual records illuminate a man consumed by color, fascinated by pattern, and enamored with the act of creation in wide-ranging materials and forms.
One of our first tasks is to find paintings we like by the following artists and research the materials, processes and techniques they have used to produce the work. The paintings I have chosen have taken into account our theme of World of Water (realism - abstract). The list of artists provided are as follows:
Terry Setch
Anselm Kiefer
Roy Litchenstein
ClaudeMonet
J M W Turner
Henri Matisse
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Terry Setch
Terry Setch - Above & Below the Tide
I have chosen this piece because of the intriguing layers of texture. It reminds me of the rocks around rock pools where the incoming and outgoing tide has created permanent layers of residues over centuries. The rust colour showing through brings warmth to the pieces and gives the feeling of being exposed to the elements. In his interview with Michael Sandle (link below) he describes how he came up with a process of adding encaustic wax to slow down the drying of the paint and to bind elements of his paintings together. He also uses plastics and heating processes, sometimes even including pieces of flotsam and jetsam found on the beach in his work.
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RESEARCH
From the Royal Academy website: "He lives in Penarth, Wales and draws inspiration from his surroundings. Employing diverse materials, he explores the tensions between society and the natural world. The painted surfaces of his large scale works are often amplified with found matter, which articulates an atmosphere of elemental and emotional turmoil."
Terry Setch Personal Statement:
My activity is concentrated on a two-mile stretch of the local beach, between Penarth and Lavernock Point. I have regarded that area, the beach, cliffs and the margin with the waters of the Severn estuary, as my place. I have observed it, worked in it and thought about it almost daily since I settled in Penarth in 1969. It has become for me the source and inspiration for ideas about the genre of landscape and about living within in it. It has been the catalyst for ideas about painting as an activity, about finding forms of visual expression for the experience of powerful phenomena. A painting is as much the channel or filter for how I ‘picture landscape in my physical and emotional absorption of it. From that point, I attempt to find counterparts in paint and matter for what I see and sense within both the place and the painting. Because it is alive, the terrain never stops changing although man rather than nature most often brings about the changes now. Issues about recycling and pollution surfaced when I started going onto the beach. For a time Lavernock Point was a dumping ground for fly tippers, stolen cars and general rubbish. The tidal current has long added to this accumulation with the flotsam and jetsam from passing ships. This is what my work is about, the despoliation of landscape.
A Conversation Between Michael Sandle and Terry Setch
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Anselm Kiefer
Anselm Keifer - The Land of the Two Rivers
I have chosen this piece as I love the verdigris colour, the moody, leaden atmosphere and sense of distance. Firstly the colour - I love copper - always have! The warmth, the glow, the shiny pinkness that magically turns to the coolest most calming shade of matte green with weathering over time. It reminds me of church roofs, scrap yards, abandoned buildings and spaces - places of solitude and history. I love how the lead grey in this picture turns the area into an instantly recognisable body of water and implies a sky above, giving a sense of a landscape with horizon and sky that wouldn't be there otherwise. The materials he used to create this piece were: Emulsion, acrylic, lead, salt through electrolysis and zinc plates-condenser, on canvas.
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RESEARCH
From the Guggenheim Website:
Anselm Kiefer
The Land of the Two Rivers ( Zweistromland )
During the 1980s, Anselm Kiefer became one of the foremost representatives of Neo-Expressionism, an approach characterized by violent, gestural brushwork and a return to the personal. His large-scale works, infused with references to both the German romantic tradition and his country’s political heritage, combine a nearly monochromatic palette with mixed media, including the application of materials such as strips of lead, straw, plaster, seeds, ash, and soil. The result is an oeuvre whose monumental scale and rich interplay of textures heighten the solemnity and transcendental nature of its contents.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, it seemed that the long period of national mourning might finally be over. Kiefer left Germany, settling first in New York and then in the South of France, without producing any significant works for around three years. After two decades of dealing almost exclusively with the horrors of the Holocaust and Germany’s Nazi past, Kiefer began to explore a more universal set of themes, still based on religion, myth, and history, but now focusing on the spirituality of man and the internal workings of the mind. The artist’s subject matter changed markedly and ranged from the sunflowers of Arles to the queens of France. In a series of works devoted to French female royalty, Kiefer paid homage to the likes of Catherine de’ Medici, Marie Antoinette, and Anne d’Autriche. In Les Reines de France, the women are rendered like Byzantine icons against a background of distressed gold-leaf mosaic. This new iconography, while still engaged with the weight of history, indicates that Kiefer now approached his subject matter with admiration, even joy.
The color of lead—a “support for ideas” in Kiefer’s words—stands out in his painting The Land of the Two Rivers (Zweistromland). This monumental work features an inscription with the names of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, a reference to the Mesopotamian civilization, in whose banks settled some of the most ancient peoples in humankind. Records have gone beyond the decay and ruins of these cultures and have made their past a present in this painting. The Land of the Two Rivers was preceded by a sculpture with the same title where books made of lead conveyed a sense of history’s durability.
Anselm Kiefer
B. 1945, DONAUESCHINGEN, GERMANY
Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945, in Donaueschingen in the German state of Baden-Württemberg. After taking courses in law at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg from 1965 to 1966, he studied art there under Peter Dreher. He continued his studies with Horst Antes at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe in 1969 before transferring the following year to the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he met Joseph Beuys. Beuys’s interest in deploying an array of cultural myths, metaphors, and symbols as a means by which to engage and understand history inspired Kiefer. He first addressed the problem of history, particularly Germany’s contentious history, in 1969 in a series dubbed Occupations, a collection of photographic self-portraits taken in France, Switzerland, and Italy, which show him in military garb with his arm raised in a Hitlerian salute. That same year, Kiefer had his first solo exhibition, at Galerie am Kaiserplatz in Karlsruhe.
Occupations signaled the future direction of Kiefer’s work. In his endeavor to explore his identity and heritage through art making, he boldly confronted Theodor Adorno’s declaration: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Early works, like Winter Landscape (1970) and Man in the Forest (1973), highlight human suffering and loneliness. In 1973 Kiefer turned his attention to architecture, painting a series of large-scale canvases set in the wood-grained attic of his home. With highly symbolic titles, including Father, Son, Holy Ghost (1973) and Germany’s Spiritual Heroes (1973), these interiors possess a distinct psychological charge, much like van Gogh’s representations of his own bedroom. The cavernous attic is a metaphor for the artist’s mind, a universe in which conflict and contradiction are resolved through creation.
The profane realities of history overtook myth in Kiefer’s work as of 1974. His canvases, with backdrops of charred and smoldering ploughed earth, became increasingly hermetic in their iconography, decipherable only with the help of the words and phrases he inscribed on them. Cockchafer Fly (1974) includes text from a German nursery rhyme, revealing the subject to be Pomerania, a German region annexed by Poland following World War II. Others, like Operation Winter Storm (1975) and Operation Sea Lion I (1975), reveal the artist’s continued preoccupation with his homeland’s Nazi past. During this same period, Kiefer commenced a series of paintings examining art’s redemptive role in history. Nero Paints (1974) and To Paint (1974) consist of landscapes overlaid with a huge palette.
In the early 1980s, Kiefer’s interest in content was accompanied by an equal focus on both the materiality of the canvas and the visual complexity of its surface, a concept he first began to explore in his book designs, the earliest of which dates to 1969. Kiefer introduced a host of new materials to his aesthetic vocabulary, including wood, sand, lead, and straw. These natural elements lend his work a marked fragility, often in contradiction to their stark subject matter. Margarete (1981) and Nuremberg (1982), for instance, invoke Nazi atrocities against Jews, but the shimmering presence of straw across their surfaces imbues them with a tactility of unsettling delicacy and beauty. Kiefer’s preoccupation with Nazi rule precipitated another series of paintings during this period, which take the architecture of Albert Speer, the Führer’s official builder, as their point of departure. Interior (1981), for example, shows the Mosaic Room in Hitler’s Reich Chancellery.
Through the late 1980s and 1990s, mystical and mythological themes continued to proliferate in Kiefer’s ongoing dialogue with the past. With the approach of the new millennium, he looked beyond Germany for subject matter. Between 1995 and 2001, he undertook a cycle of monumental paintings of the cosmos. Light Compulsion (1999), the largest to date, shows the Milky Way, its depth and composition echoing that of Pollock’s drip paintings. Architecture returned to the fore in 1997 with a series of archaic desert clay structures. In Your Age and My Age and the Age of the World (1997), an Egyptian pyramid rises from the barren earth. Since the late 1990s, Kiefer has devoted his energy increasingly to sculpture in mixed media; lead, however, remains a preferred material. Plants, too, are prominent in Kiefer’s recent work. The pages of his artist’s book The Secret Life of Plants(1997) as well as the surfaces of two paintings of the same title (1998 and 2001) contain images of sunflowers made using seeds from that blossom. Every Plant Has Its Related Star in the Sky (2001) ruminates on the related mysteries of the plant and celestial worlds. His more recent series of works, shown in 2005 at White Cube in London, incorporates oil, emulsion, acrylic and lead, and was inspired by the poetry of Russian modernist Velimir Chlebnikov.
The Japan Art Association presented Kiefer with the Praemium Imperiale Award in 1999. Comprehensive solo exhibitions of his work have been organized by the Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (1984), Art Institute of Chicago (1987), Sezon Museum of Art in Tokyo (1993), Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1998), Fondation Beyeler in Basel (2001), Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2005), and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao(2007). He lives and works in Barjac, France.
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Roy Litchenstein
Roy Litchenstein - Water Lilies with Japanese Bridge
OK, so not my favourite artist or style of art. I have chosen this piece primarily because of it's Monet reference (who I love!). Whilst not really my thing, I can appreciate the different take on the subject - using different patterns and solid blocks of colour to emphasise changes in shade and tone. Having researched the artist more, I am intrigued that many of his pieces are actually hand painted rather than printed, however the waterlilies series are screen printed on enamel on stainless steel. I chose this piece over others because most of his work that I have seen has been in primary colours only - blue, red and yellow with black & white. I like the use of Monet colours in this piece - the periwinkle blue, burgundy and jade green colours appeal to me.
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RESEARCH
From the National Galleries of Scotland Website:
This is from a group of six works that form Lichtenstein’s Water Lilies series which pay homage to the water lily paintings of Impressionist artist Claude Monet (1840-1926). They were made in collaboration with a master printmaker, Donald Saff at his studio, Saff Tech Arts . Working with the printmakers, Lichtenstein was able to realise a swirl motif on stainless steel that he remembered from the metal dashboards of 1920s and 1930s automobiles. As one commentator has explained: ‘At Saff Tech, a method was developed to create the swirls, using a drill press fitted with a rubber end and suspended upside down from the ceiling. Production of the pattern was labour intensive, as each swirl was executed individually.’
Lichtenstein experimented with a variety of painting techniques as a young artist. In the 1960s, he developed a series of processes for creating artworks that looked machine-made, but were in fact carefully designed and rendered by hand. In an interview with John Coplans for Artforum in 1967 Lichtenstein said, ‘I want to hide the record of my hand’ (quoted in Coplans 1970, p.8).
To create his designs Lichtenstein developed systems for imitating, but not copying, his graphic or cartoon sources. First he would sketch the image, making his own changes, then he would trace this drawing onto canvas using an opaque projector, while continuing to recompose the image. Finally he would paint this image using broad areas of flat Magna paint, strong contours and areas filled with Benday dots. This three-part process gave Lichtenstein boundaries within which to work, but enough freedom to take ownership over the final design.
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Claude Monet
Claude Monet - Water Lilies - Setting Sun
Don't get me started on Monet! I love his work. I have chosen this piece because of the gorgeous deep colours and the beautiful reflection of sunset. I find it fascinating that he worked at creating such beautiful images in such trying times, having recently lost his wife, his eyesight was failing and whilst being surrounded by the ugliness and turmoil of the First World War, his son Michel fighting on the front line. I love the enormous scale of the Water Lilies pieces. He painted en plein air, attempting to capture the natural light and movement with quick brush strokes in oil paint. He started with a base of Lead white to make sure all the colours popped out and lost himself in trying to capture the beauty of his gardens at Giverny - especially the lily ponds and the beautiful reflections in them.
Palette:
Lead white (modern equivalent = titanium white)
Chrome yellow (modern equivalent = cadmium yellow light)
Cadmium yellow
Viridian green
Emerald green
French ultramarine
Cobalt blue
Madder red (modern equivalent = alizarin crimson)
Vermilion
Ivory black (but only if you're copying a Monet from before 1886)
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RESEARCH
From the National Gallery Website:
Here Monet looks down at the surface of the pond, in his water garden at Giverny. 'Bending over the magic mirror' of the canvas, in the words of Marcel Proust, we see the pink and yellow rays of the setting sun shimmering on the still surface of the pond, and the inverted reflection of a weeping willow over which water-lilies float. Monet kept the painting until 1923 when, circumstantial evidence suggests, he may have reworked it.
From the Art Story Website:
Synopsis
Key Ideas
Monet's early work is indebted to the Realists' interests in depicting contemporary subject matter, without idealization, and in painting outdoors in order to capture the fleeting qualities of nature.
Inspired in part by Edouard Manet, Monet departed from the clear depiction of forms and linear perspective, which were prescribed by the established art of the time, and experimented with loose handling, bold color, and strikingly unconventional compositions. The emphasis in his pictures shifted from representing figures to depicting different qualities of light and atmosphere in each scene.
In his later years, Monet also became increasingly sensitive to the decorative qualities of color and form. He began to apply paint in smaller strokes, building it up in broad fields of color, and exploring the possibilities of a decorative paint surface of harmonies and contrasts of color. The effects that he achieved, particularly in the series paintings of the 1890s, represent a remarkable advance towards abstraction and towards a modern painting focused purely on surface effects.
An inspiration and a leader among the Impressionists, he was crucial in attracting Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Edouard Manet and Camille Pissarro to work alongside each other in and around Paris. He was also important in establishing the exhibition society that would showcase the group's work between 1874 and 1886.
Claude Monet was the leader of the French Impressionist movement, literally giving the movement its name. As an inspirational talent and personality, he was crucial in bringing its adherents together. Interested in painting in the open air and capturing natural light, Monet would later bring the technique to one of its most famous pinnacles with his series paintings, in which his observations of the same subject, viewed at various times of the day, were captured in numerous sequences of paintings. Masterful as a colorist and as a painter of light and atmosphere, his later work often achieved a remarkable degree of abstraction, and this has recommended him to subsequent generations of abstract painters.
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J M W Turner
J M W Turner - Shields on the River Tyne
I have chosen this watercolour over his dramatic oil seascapes because of the contrasts - the calm, peaceful, cool blue of the moonlit sky reflecting on the river, contrasting with the hot orange of the hard working labourers, busily shovelling coal onto the boats and the grey, dreary industrial landscape in the background.
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RESEARCH
From the Tate Museum Website:
In this moonlit nocturne Turner depicts keelmen shoveling coal from flat-bottomed barges into the hold of a collier brig. Coal was carried down the river Tyne by these vessels from the coalfields near Newcastle and processed by the Shields keelmen who worked through the night to meet the insatiable demand for the fuel. The rectangular North Shields lighthouse can be seen in the distance below the moon, and on the opposite bank, on the right, South Shields is identifiable by the ‘artificial hills formed by the cinders from the salt and glass works and the ballast discharged by the colliers’.1 Tyneside coal was a keystone of the national economy: by 1826, three years after this drawing was produced, of the two million tons of coal imported to London only 125,000 came from other domestic sources.2
‘Few rivers’, writes Barbara Hofland, ‘can boast such as union of picturesque beauty and commercial importance as the Tyne’.3The sky is eerily lit with a full moon, projecting a beam of silvery light onto the river. Sombre cirrus and cumuli amass, encroaching on the moon, threatening to occlude it. The waters are still and rendered in a similar colour range to the sky: blues and greys heightened with white and pale yellow. At the right of the picture in brilliant vermilion and white, is the glow of a burning brazier of coal. The elemental rudiments of industry are represented here, harnessed and exploited: earth signified by coal, soot and salt, water by the Tyne, fire by the incineration of coal. The ‘arresting vitality born of this combustion’ and the cover of cool evening moonlight transforms these industrial activities into an embodiment of ‘the industrial sublime’.4 Ian Warrell also points out that the composition of this watercolour is much like one of Claude’s seaport views. This association, he writes, ‘lends a heroic stature to the men and women working amid the ruddy firelight, who replace Claude’s stock mythical figures’.5
According to art historian William Rodner, ‘Turner’s watercolour reveals much about the early coal business, particularly advances in transporting the material’ and the implied consequences of these innovations to the community of keelmen.6 The ‘laborious process of shovelling cargo by hand from the keel into the vessel’ was being streamlined by technological developments.7 As George Head observes that ‘the hardy race of keelmen’ were slowly, but inevitably, being ‘deprived of their ancient occupation...by means of new appliances’ designed to improve efficiency and speed of transportation.8 One of these ‘new appliances’ is depicted in Turner’s watercolour at the top right: a wheeled container on a primitive railway link installed by the mines to take buckets of coal straight from the source to the riverbank.
As with all the drawings in this series, the colouring is rich and complex, comprised of layered stipples and hatches of complementary and contrasting tones to achieve a striking prismatic effect.
From the William Turner Website:
Turner's talent was recognised early in his life. Financial independence allowed Turner to innovate freely; his mature work is characterised by a chromatic palette and broadly applied atmospheric washes of paint. According to David Piper's The Illustrated History of Art, his later pictures were called "fantastic puzzles." However, Turner was still recognised as an artistic genius: the influential English art critic John Ruskin described Turner as the artist who could most "stirringly and truthfully measure the moods of Nature." (Piper 321)
Suitable vehicles for Turner's imagination were to be found in the subjects of shipwrecks, fires (such as the Burning of Parliament in 1834, an event which Turner rushed to witness first-hand, and which he transcribed in a series of watercolour sketches), natural catastrophes, and natural phenomena such as sunlight, storm, rain, and fog. He was fascinated by the violent power of the sea, as seen in Dawn after the Wreck (1840) and The Slave Ship (1840).
Turner placed human beings in many of his paintings to indicate his affection for humanity on the one hand (note the frequent scenes of people drinking and merry-making or working in the foreground), but its vulnerability and vulgarity amid the 'sublime' nature of the world on the other hand. 'Sublime' here means awe-inspiring, savage grandeur, a natural world unmastered by man, evidence of the power of God - a theme that artists and poets were exploring in this period. The significance of light was to Turner the emanation of God's spirit and this was why he refined the subject matter of his later paintings by leaving out solid objects and detail, concentrating on the play of light on water, the radiance of skies and fires. Although these late paintings appear to be 'impressionistic' and therefore a forerunner of the French school, Turner was striving for expression of spirituality in the world, rather than responding primarily to optical phenomena.
His early works, such as Tintern Abbey (1795), stayed true to the traditions of English landscape. However, in Hannibal Crossing the Alps (1812), an emphasis on the destructive power of nature had already come into play. His distinctive style of painting, in which he used watercolour technique with oil paints, created lightness, fluency, and ephemeral atmospheric effects. (Piper 321)
One popular story about Turner, though it likely has little basis in reality, states that he even had himself "tied to the mast of a ship in order to experience the drama" of the elements during a storm at sea.
In his later years he used oils ever more transparently, and turned to an evocation of almost pure light by use of shimmering colour. A prime example of his mature style can be seen in Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway, where the objects are barely recognizable. The intensity of hue and interest in evanescent light not only placed Turner's work in the vanguard of English painting, but later exerted an influence upon art in France, as well; the Impressionists, particularly Claude Monet, carefully studied his techniques.
It has been suggested that the high levels of ash in the atmosphere during the 1816 "Year Without a Summer," which led to unusually spectacular sunsets during this period, were an inspiration for some of Turner's work.
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Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse - Open Window
I love the joyous use of bold, contrasting yet complimentary colour in this oil painting. It feels alive and makes me want to lean out the window to see what's going on outside - you can almost feel the coastal breeze and hear the seagulls. I also love how the detail is all directly in front of you, with the walls feeling almost blurry - as would be the case if you were standing there, the walls only appearing hazy in your peripheral vision.
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RESEARCH
From the National Gallery of Art Website:
EXPLORE THIS WORK
The vista may look out to a small French fishing port—but, really, this window opens on the future of painting in the twentieth century.
Henri Matisse painted Open Window, Collioure in the summer of 1905, when he and André Derain worked together near the Spanish border. The light-filled scene is vibrant and inviting. Blue-hulled boats float on pink waves below a sky banded with turquoise, pink, and periwinkle. These unnatural colors—Derain would later liken them to “sticks of dynamite”—provoked an outrage that year at the Salon d'Automne in Paris.
Eyewitness accounts tell of laughter emanating from the room where this painting hung with similarly bold works by Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, and others. Gertrude Stein, avant-garde writer and collector, reported that some people scratched at the canvases, and a critic, noting the presence of a Renaissance-style statuette in the center of the room, quipped, "Well, well, Donatello among the wild beasts (fauves).” Soon these artists were being called the fauves.
The fauves liberated color from any requirements other than those posed by the painting itself. "When I put a green," Matisse would say, "it is not grass. When I put a blue, it is not the sky." Art exerted its own reality. Color was a tool of the painter's artistic intention and expression, uncircumscribed by imitation. Matisse’s imperative was to "interpret nature and submit it to the spirit of the picture."
Note the logic of his colors. They function in complementary pairs—orange-red masts over blue hulls, red blossoms amid green leaves on the wall, opposing reflections of turquoise and pink. Complements such as these become more intense when seen next to each other. Isolated by bare areas of the canvas, the combinations generate a visual vibrato that keeps our eye fixed on the surface. The angled, out-flung doors invite into the scene, but different brushstrokes in each “zone” set up cross-rhythms that impede recession: wide sweeps in the room’s interior, short wavy lines or staccato dabs in the view beyond.
About the Artist
Introduced to painting while recovering from appendicitis at age 19, Henri Matisse abandoned his job as a law clerk to compose conventional Dutch-inspired still lifes and interiors using a somber palette. After moving from northern France to Paris in 1891, his colors brightened and his style evolved under the influence of Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and others.
In 1904, while working along the Mediterranean coast, he fully liberated his colors in bold hues that eliminated shadows and defined forms. This experimentation—dubbed fauvism (from “wild beasts”)—was a brief but crucial step in Matisse’s lifelong goal of expression through color. As he traveled throughout North Africa and Moorish Spain from 1906 to 1913, his sense of abstraction heightened, expressed in mural-sized canvases that explored color intensity in relation to human form and studio objects.
During the 1920s, Matisse reverted to more conventional modeling, cohesive space, and blended brushwork, depicting figures in exotic costumes in the textile-sheathed interior of his Nice studio. With a commission to design a mural for the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia, however, Matisse reentered the avant-garde fray.
Throughout the 1930s, his paintings became more boldly decorative as the illusion of depth was compressed into solid planes of color. This culminated in his return to the cutout technique, which he had first explored in designing costumes and scenery for the Ballets Russes in 1919. By cutting sheets of paper painted with meticulously mixed hues, Matisse “painted with scissors.” These ensembles allowed him to continue creating art despite his failing health once he reached in his early 70s. He also translated these shapes—along with a rekindled love of drawing—to book arts.
Throughout his life, Matisse published personal artist statements and dedicated at least an hour a day to writing letters to friends and family. These written and visual records illuminate a man consumed by color, fascinated by pattern, and enamored with the act of creation in wide-ranging materials and forms.
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