Author: lindamayoux

Categories
Abstract Abstraction Inspiration Landscape

Kurt Jackson

Kurt Jackson (1961-present)

A British painter whose large mixed media canvases reflect a concern with natural history, ecology and environmental issues.

The majority of Jackson’s work reflects his commitment to the environment and the natural world within Cornwall, although he also works elsewhere in Britain and mainland Europe; recent projects include bodies of work on the Thames, the Avon, the Forth, Ardnamurchan and the Glastonbury Festival series. He has been Artist in Residence on the Greenpeace ship Esperanza, at the Eden Project, an ambassador for Survival International and frequently works with Friends of the Earth, WaterAid, Oxfam, Surfers Against Sewage and Cornwall Wildlife Trust.

His paintings frequently carry small commentaries on the scene depicted and show a fascination particularly with the detail of plants and animals within an overall ecology and evoke a calm, spiritual and warm relationship with the landscape, even of apparently bleak scenes.

website

Google images

Importance of feeling and working process

How Jackson approaches landscape composition.

Environmental Activism

Bibliography

Cocker, M., Dunmore, H., Hare, B., Jacobson, H., Mabey, R., Marsden, P., Mooney, B., Packer, W., Taylor, J. R., Smit, T. & Tooby, M., (2010) Kurt Jackson: A New Genre of Landscape Painting, Farnham, Surrey: Lund Humphries.

Livingstone, A. & Kackson, K., (2012) Kurt Jackson Sketchbooks, Farnham Surrey: Lund Humphries.

Categories
Inspiration Media Memory Portrait

Njideka Akunyili

website: http://njidekaakunyili.com

Google images

Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s complex, multi-layered works reflect contemporary transcultural identity drawn from the artist’s memories and experiences.  Her large-scale figurative compositions combine drawing, painting and collage on paper.  She uses the visual language and inherited traditions of classical academic western painting, particularly the portrait and still life but combines these with collage of colours and textures that give them an African identity.

She portrays images of family and friends, in scenarios with details derived from everyday domestic experiences in Nigeria and America. These include recollections from the formative years of her upbringing, as well as more recent relationships and experiences. Her work often features an element of self-portrait, as in a series of intimate scenes of the artist with her husband made in the early years of their marriage. Her collaged paintings present a compelling visual metaphor for the layers of personal memory and cultural history that inform and heighten the experience of the present.

Biography

Akunyili Crosby was born in Enugu, Nigeria in 1983 and lived there lived until the age of sixteen. In 1999 she moved to Los Angeles, where she has remained since that time. Her cultural identity combines strong attachments to the country of her birth and to her adopted home, a hybrid identity that is reflected in her work.

Technique

She complements and enhances her paintings by carefully chosen and integrated collage elements, predominantly acetone-transfer prints of small photographic images. Some of these images are from the artist’s archive of personal snapshots, magazines and advertisements, while others are sourced from the internet; they feature images with a thematic resonance to each particular work.

Source Victoria Miro website

Inspiration for my own practice

It would be interesting to try chine colle for more figurative work like this – using ready printed African textured papers under linocut would work well. Though it would require a lot of preparation and planning to get the collages elements properly in place.

 

Categories
Abstract Inspiration Landscape Natural Printmakers

Sue Lowe

Google images

website: http://www.somersetprintmakers.co.uk/Sue_Lowe.html

Sue’s work draws on the landscape of west Somerset. Her imagery sits on the borderline between landscape and abstract. The work is concerned with textures and surfaces and draws inspiration from the lines and patterns found in the landscape that tell stories of formation, growth, erosion and decay. Sue has developed a range of collagraph techniques that allow her to use found organic and recycled materials to create richly-textured prints. She also makes extensive use of chine colle.

Many of her images are layered in horizontal strips and represent the seasons and landscape elements. They have a unity of colour and delicacy that I like.

Sue received a fine art degree in 2004 from the University for the Creative Arts at Farnham. Since graduating she has combined development of a printmaking practice with teaching in adult education and a career in arts administration. Sue exhibited regularly in galleries and art fairs in London and the South East before moving to Somerset, (where she was born and grew up), in Spring 2011.

Categories
Abstraction Inspiration Media Printmakers

Mark Graver

website: http://www.markgraver.com

Google Images

In a Landscape: etching carborundum and chine colle

Mark Graver is an award winning New Zealand based artist/printmaker specialising in Acrylic Resist Etching and Video Art.

Born in St.Albans, UK in 1964, he moved to New Zealand in 2003.  He established the Wharepuke Print Studio in Kerikeri in 2005, New Zealand’s only dedicated acrylic resist etching studio, and in 2009 with partner Tania Booth, set up Art at Wharepuke a gallery specialising in international printmaking.

He is a tutor at Kerikeri NorthTec on the BAA Visual Arts degree course.

His current practice involves working with printmaking, digital video and sound with interest concentrated at the point where these approaches meet and cross – the editonable act/event/encounter of pulling a print or screening a film, the re-presenting of this act/event/encounter and its relationship with time and memory.

He is author of the printmaking handbook ‘Non-Toxic Printmaking’2011, London, A&C Black.

Categories
Inspiration Landscape Media Natural Printmakers Woodcut

Helen Brown

Google images

“I work directly from the landscape in either lino or woodcut. Working outdoors enables me to capture the line and fluidity of scenes and localities.

My landscapes are landscapes of self-possession and movement. Through their layered and textured forms they express the tectonic flow of the earth, as mountains and valleys rise and fall in an experience of time much more immense than our own.

I spend time in the places my work depicts, returning to them. From the Sussex Downs to the foothills of the Himalayas, my prints are imbued with the emotion of place. Each one of my pieces is given individual life though colour and chine colle (paper overlay) or hand tinting, just as the mood of a scene shifts with light, time and experience.

My work takes shape in the place between landscape and dreamscape. Whether in architectural or animal forms, it connects the experiential world to the imagination, the material to the emotional.

Our thoughts and feelings colour the things we encounter, and they in turn colour us. In my prints I give visual expression to this conversation.”

See page on Art of Illustration

Biography

Helen Brown grew up in Cambridge and did an Art Foundation course there then an art degree at Brighton. She learned screen printing, etching and linocut.

Techniques

While in Brighton she started to focus on linocut because she could do observational prints outdoors :

“I went to Devil’s Dyke, just outside Brighton and cut the block while sitting outside the pub. They gave me free food and loads of people asked what I was doing. The print worked very well, and people bought it. I thought I would follow this path for a while because I enjoyed it, and it worked well with my travelling.”

“I like the stages; you make the block and then there is the never-ending choice of how to print it. I might print the block in ten different colours. I really like chine colle, where I use coloured papers that I have cut up beforehand. This technique I have taken to extremes.”

“I have recently been thinking more about the marks, so I feel very inspired with my work.I made a lot of blocks from my last trip to Guatemala, which I print to have a bright, strong colour blend, like their dyed and woven fabrics. The landscape in Guatemala is quite unreal, so using unrealistic colours would not seem right. That is what is good about printmaking: I can print the blocks and it might look great, or not, but I can easily change the way I print it.”

The  prints are individually made by the artist in tranches of a few prints – the edition is not all printed at once.

See profile in D’Arcy and Vernon-Morris pp223-225

Categories
Inspiration Media Printmakers

Yuji Hiratsuka

Yuji Hiratsuka sees Japan as a land of contrasts. On the surface it looks rather westernized with McDonald and Coca Cola. But underneath the facade traditional Japanese culture and values remained unchanged. His graphic work is a witty and original synthesis of old Japanese ukiyo-e tradition and modern Western elements.

website: http://www.artelino.com/articles/yuji_hiratsuka.asp

Google images

Japanese gardens are cultivated high atop thirty story Western skyscrapers, or people dine on McDonald’s hamburgers while watching Sumo wrestling. In my work I explore this chaotic coexistence.

“There are many and varied points of view in modern Japan. Some survive from historic periods of significant aesthetic and philosophical development. Two periods in particular contribute to what is known as traditional Japanese art.”

“During the first, in the middle of the 16th century, the Shogun lords closed Japan to all foreign interactions and evolved an art independent of Chinese models. The most important influence was the simplicity born in the spirit of the Zen sect. Art based on Zen was an art of suggestion rather than expression; it emphasized the importance of empty spaces and simple forms.”

“The second period is the Edo era of the 17th century in which the Ukiyo-e school developed a popular art form, largely prints and reproductions, inexpensively designed for common people. Ukiyo-e art was decorative and brightly colored and often featured poster-like caricatures of national personalities (Yakusha-e).”

“In my work I draw from the ancient and the contemporary to express the mismatched combinations and hodgepodge which is Japanese daily life. The Zen aspect can be seen in my portraits. In this case, I always leave the face blank or flat and profile very simple.”

“I do not draw eyes or noses on my portraits. The human face is always changing; the face at work is different from the face that enjoys the love. Aging changes the faces also. I want my prints to express this change. The portraits are left ambiguous so that the viewer can add his/her interpretation. This is the aspect of suggestion rather than expression. Also, I am interested in the humorous and colorful aspects of Ukiyo-e poster art.”

“In my portraits I want to incorporate an element of wit through exaggeration and distortion. For emphasis, I fill in small areas with bright, whimsical colors. To express contemporary influences I use the figure dressed in Western style. My primary source of subject matter is photographs, frequently black and white, which I tear from books, magazines and newspapers. These materials are kept in my studio or in my bag, and whenever I am ready to begin a drawing for the print, I rummage through the wrinkled images.”

“There are small transitions in my work from time to time, and my interest is always based on unpredictable texture that is printed from the etched surface of the copper plate. My prints explore the complex relationship of paper, ink and etched plates to describe my thought, as well as the relationship which occurs between figures and space to express other human experiences. Always I try to investigate the maximum potential available to me as a printmaker.”

Biography

Yuji Hiratsuka was born in Osaka, Japan. In 1973 until 1978 he studied at Tokyo Gakugei University, Koganei-shi, Tokyo, Japan. In 1978 he graduated with a BS (Batchelor of Science) in Art Education.

In 1985 the young artist, then 33 years old, decided to take a plane in Eastern direction, and moved to the United States. Hiratsuka has not been the first one to make this step. Many Japanese artists of the 20th century went to the United States – some for studies, others for teaching. Some remained only one or two years in the U.S.A. and others forever.

Yuji Hiratsuka has stayed until now in his new homeland. He first extended and intensified his studies. From 1985 until 1987 he made his MA (Master of Arts) in printmaking at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, NM. And from 1987 until 1990 he studied at Indiana University, Bloomington, and graduated with an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in printmaking.

In 1987 Hiratsuka began to work as an art instructor. Since 1992 he is an Associate Professor at the Department of Art, Oregon State University in Corvallis.

Technique: Chine Collé with Etching

The artist uses a mixed media combination of Chine Collé with etching. Thisis a  time-consuming printing process that requires a lot of skill and experience.

“My personal technique using Chine Collé with traditional and innovative etching is the following:

With continuous alterations to a copper plate I print a sequence of black, yellow, red and blue, passing the same plate through the press for each design and color change.

To start with; the first tones to the plate are given with line etching, drypoint, aquatint, softground, photocopy transfer or roulette. I pull my first color. With these first impressions, I work back into the plate with a scraper, burnisher and emery paper to enhance the lights and accent the motif. I then go on to the second, third and fourth colors.

Finally, the print is completed from the back with a relief process of woodcut or linocut to intensify shapes and/or colors.

I print on the paper which best suits my work; this is a thin Japanese paper known as Toyama Kozo (Japanese Mulberry). As in the French use of Chine Colle I apply glue to the back of the Kozo print and pass it through the press, with a heavier rag paper (BFK Rives or Somerset, etc.) beneath. What the viewer sees; is my four color intaglio print saturated with subtle tones that come through the back of a Toyama Kozo paper which is set deep into a rag paper.”

Categories
Abstraction Inspiration

Sandra Blow

Sandra Blow (1925 – 22)

[wpdevart_youtube]zgimoBXyEN4[/wpdevart_youtube]

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A Talk About Sandra Blow  Video You Tube

Sandra Blow – A view of her working in the studio on a day to day basis.  Video You Tube 

website of the Sandra Blow Estate

Sandra Blow Google images

Every movement we make is a sort of balancing act

 

What do I know about finishing a painting? i can’t separate the calm, strong vertical movement of this painting from the shifting bands of evening light across its lower right-hand corner. I wouldn’t change what I can see at this moment for another, more ‘finished’ kind of vision”

For me, as well as the natural interactions of colour and line, there is a biological facor in a painting, in which all the parts contribute to the functional whole, as our bodies do. When it ‘lives in that way, it is finishedIn addition, there is a God-sent gift, a balance of magic.

The crucial thing is that although [a shape or colour is] perfect in its place, there is an unexpected quality about it, an element of surprise. It is something I find with great difficulty. It doesn’t come naturally to me…But it occsasionally occurs, as in Green and White(1969) where the thin line next to the two broad bands produces that sort of contrast that stops the composition from being heavy. It gives the thrill of a leap, a daring, a lightness – like Salisbury Catherdral where you have the great heavy spire beside a magically thin small spire which is perfectly, thrillingly balanced with it.” p19

I have two equal sources of inspiration. One is art, first the Renaissance art I saw in Italy at the same time as I sawAlberto Burri and Nicolas Carone…and later African sculpture and, among m,ay other painters, Roger Hilton and Morris Louis. The second influence is nature. I marvel at the beauty and construction of the leaves and flowers outside the studio. I love London skies, because they are framed and one sees them like a moving painting. I’m often amazed at the juxtaposition of trees, parts of buildings and the sky, and constantly changing, subtle colours. I also love great sweeps of moorlands, where you have wonderful undulating lines.

 

influence of african art: pulls and pushes not on an even line. structural tensions.

emotion, vulnerability, exhuberance.

there are certain patterns on the beach, which are sand ridges that are caused by the tide, and when the tide goes out, they’re visble, and running across them are inlets of water, which makes a sort of grid   p147

what matters for blow is where things will go from here. not the work that already exists but the painting that has yet to happen, that may take shape, tomorrow or the next day…  p159

Sandra Blow was an abstract painter who has also used materials such as polyethylene, and willow cane to construct pictures, Blow was concerned pre-eminently with the problems of pure painting: balance and proportion, tension and scale.

Sandra Blow was born in London and studied at Saint Martins School of Art from 1941 to 1946, at the Royal Academy Schools from 1946 to 1947, and subsequently at the Academy of Fine Arts Shortly after the Second World War, Blow studied at the Royal Academy Schools. Here she gained the patronage of Ruskin Spear, Carel Weight and Robert Buhler would remain the pattern throughout her career.

In 1947 she lived in Italy for a year. She motorcycled around the countryside, discovering at first hand the architecture and pre-Renaissance frescos. She came to know the well-known Italian painter Alberto Burri. While Blow did not produce work of her own in Italy, she learnt a great deal from the Italian master of “art informel” and later adapted Burri’s manner of composing with sackcloth, tar and other low-grade materials for her own, perhaps more naturalistic, ends. In the late 1940s she travelled to Spain and France.

1950s: matter paintings

During the 1950s, Sandra Blow was one of the pioneering abstract painters along with Denis Bowen, Patrick Heron, Roger Hilton, Gillian Ayres and many others. She established a calligraphic style in sensitive landscape drawings and a pronounced gestural handling of material in the paintings. Her use of dingy earth pigments like ochre, beige, brown, black and white to some extent mitigated the explosive and expansive spatial feeling engendered by splattered and flying paint marks.

She was sometimes called a ‘matter painter’, introducing into British art a new expressive informality, using cheap, discarded materials such as sawdust, sackcloth and plaster alongside the more familiar material of paint. A tactile as well as visual emphasis on surface resulted in powerful and complex images, exuding a rooted earthiness, yet full of mysterious flux and ambiguity. She worked in Cornwall for a year from 1957 to 1958.

Following her first painting sale, to Roland Penrose (a founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts), Blow’s career took off. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, she regularly exhibited with Gimpel Fils, the leading London gallery whose association with St Ives artists like Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Peter Lanyon anticipated her move in 1957 to live for a year in a cottage at Zennor near St Ives. Blow was widely exhibited abroad throughout this time, establishing the international profile that her cosmopolitan outlook warranted. Participation in peripatetic displays of contemporary British art saw her work promulgated in Italy, Holland, Germany, the United States and later Australasia.

In 1957 she featured in the first John Moores biannual exhibition in Liverpool and was included in the Young Artists Section at the Venice Biennale the following year. She won the International Guggenheim Award in 1960 and won second prize at the third John Moores exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery in 1961.

untitled 1951  p48

plaster and sacking 1956

winter 1956

cornwall 1958

painting 1957

Space and matter 1959 stormy

1960s and 1970s

From 1960 she went on to teach at the Royal College of Art. David Hockney, Patrick Caulfield and Ron Kitaj were among the students. In response to the optimistic climate of the 1960s, Blow’s palette lightened and for most of the rest of her career, easily manipulated collage materials, like torn paper or brightly coloured canvas cut-outs, littered her often large-scale pictures. The Matisse-inspired decorative manner of her middle and late periods was a seamless collaboration between the constructed and the freely painted.

She was appointed Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art in 1973

Green and white 1969 – 10 foot square offset green quadrants and pale intersecting bands that nevertheless appears to be subtly and continually balancing itself in several directions at once.

green and red variations 1972

1980s

sacking indigo and white 1982

sacking brown and white 1982

Vivace 1988

glad ocean 1989

mid 1990s-to 2006

In moving to St Ives during the mid-1990s, Blow came full circle, reinvigorating a Cornish art scene bereft of the glories she had sampled 35 years before. For the first few years she worked in a beachfront studio at Porthmeor, but later built a large studio and home at Bullens Court above the town.

She exhibited locally but also fulfilled her obligations as a Royal Academician, participating in every Summer Exhibition at Burlington House, where she enjoyed a retrospective in 1994 at the newly built Sackler Galleries. An exhibition to mark Blow’s 80th birthday was held at Tate Britain in 2004, coinciding with the publication of a biography, Sandra Blow, by Michael Bird.

Selva Oscura 1993

Brilliant Corner II 1993

untitled porthmeor series 1996

porthmeor 1996

clodgy 1996

laurentian trail 2004

final painting 2006 from video dynamic window spiralling into light

 

———————

every movement we make is a sort of balancing act  sandra blow on video.

What do I know about finishing a painting? i can’t separate the calm, strong vertical movement of this painting from the shifting bands of evening light across its lower right-hand corner. I wouldn’t change what I can see at this moment for another, more ‘finished’ kind of vision”

For me, as well as the natural interactions of colour and line, there is a biological facor in a painting, in which all the parts contribute to the functional whole, as our bodies do. When it ‘lives in that way, it is finishedIn addition, there is a God-sent gift, a balance of magic.

The crucial thing is that although [a shape or colour is] perfect in its place, there is an unexpected quality about it, an element of surprise. It is something I find with great difficulty. It doesn’t come naturally to me…But it occsasionally occurs, as in Green and White(1969) where the thin line next to the two broad bands produces that sort of contrast that stops the composition from being heavy. It gives the thrill of a leap, a daring, a lightness – like Salisbury Catherdral where you have the great heavy spire beside a magically thin small spire which is perfectly, thrillingly balanced with it.” p19

I have two equal sources of inspiration. One is art, first the Renaissance art I saw in Italy at the same time as I sawAlberto Burri and Nicolas Carone…and later African sculpture and, among m,ay other painters, Roger Hilton and Morris Louis. The second influence is nature. I marvel at the beauty and construction of the leaves and flowers outside the studio. I love London skies, because they are framed and one sees them like a moving painting. I’m often amazed at the juxtaposition of trees, parts of buildings and the sky, and constantly changing, subtle colours. I also love great sweeps of moorlands, where you have wonderful undulating lines.

 

influence of african art: pulls and pushes not on an even line. structural tensions.

emotion, vulnerability, exhuberance.

there are certain patterns on the beach, which are sand ridges that are caused by the tide, and when the tide goes out, they’re visble, and running across them are inlets of water, which makes a sort of grid   p147

what maters for blow is where things will go from here. not the work that already exists but the painting that has yet to happen, that may take shape, tomorrow or the next day…  p159

untitled porthmeor series 1996

porthmeor 1996

clodgy 1996

The paintings she herself considers pivotal are:

Vivace 1988

glad ocean 1989

untitled 1951  p48

plaster and sacking 1956

winter 1956

cornwall 1958

painting 1957

Space and matter 1959 stormy

Green and white 1969 – 10 foot square offset green quadrants and pale intersecting bands that nevertheless appears to be subtly and continually balancing itself in several directions at once.

green and red variations 1972

sacking indigo and white 1982

sacking brown and white 1982

Selva Oscura 1993

Brilliant Corner II 1993

laurentian trail 2004

final paintng 2006 from video dynamic window spirallibng into light

 

Categories
Abstraction

Terry Frost

Terry Frost 1915–2003

Tate collection has the main works from the Terry Frost Estate.

TateShots: Sir Terry Frost You Tube video

Sir Terry Frost Trailer

Sir Terry Frost, RA: A Review You Tube video

Stories Behind the Collection – Sir Terry Frost RA, Grey Painting December-January 1959

Walk along the quay   the idea was initially expressed in collage.

Frost spoke of the ‘walk through space [as] an experience and not a window perspective thing at all it was a Time experience’

it was quite a simple experience. I just happened to notice that the boats were there with a different colour when the tide was out and they were all propped up and there I saw all those semi-circles propped up on a stick…Things were happening to my right and beneath my feet…The strange feeling of looking on top of boats at high tide and at the same boats tied up and resting on their support posts when the tide’s out

With Peter Lanyon

Peter would drive me all over the place, along the coast and up on the moors…he taught me to experience landscape…so you lay down in the landscape, you looked up into a tree…you walked over the landscape so that you understood its shape, you looked behind rocks so that you knew what their shape was all the way round and what lay beyond them, you walked over the hills and the high ground so that you knew what was above and below you, and what was above and below the forms all through, you’re travelling through the landscape.

Biography

Sir Terry Frost RA (born Terence Ernest Manitou Frost) (13 October 1915 – 1 September 2003) was an English abstract artist, who worked in Newlyn, Cornwall.

Born in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, England, in 1915, he did not become an artist until he was in his 30s. During World War II, he served in France and the Middle East, before joining the commandos. Whilst serving with the commandos in Crete in June 1941 he was captured and became a prisoner of war. As a prisoner at Stalag 383 in Bavaria, he met and was taught by Adrian Heath. He said of his prison experience that it was a ‘tremendous spiritual experience, a more aware or heightened perception during starvation’.

He started painting while a prisoner of war in Germany 1943. Moved to St Ives 1946 and studied under Leonard Fuller; then studied from 1947 at the Camberwell School of Art under Pasmore and Coldstream. Member of the Penwith Society, St Ives, 1950. In 1951 he worked as an assistant to the sculptor Barbara Hepworth.

First one-man exhibition in London at the Leicester Galleries 1952 and in New York at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery 1960. Taught at Bath Academy, Corsham, 1952. Gregory Fellow at Leeds University 1954–6; taught at Leeds College of Art 1956–9. Member of the London Group 1958. Lived at St Ives 1959–63, then moved to Banbury.

Frost’s academic career included teaching at Bath Academy of Art, the Cyprus College of Art and the University of Leeds. Later he became Artist in Residence and Professor of Painting at the Department of Fine Art of the University of Reading.

In 1992, he was elected a Royal Academician and he was knighted in 2000.

Categories
Abstraction Inspiration

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham 1912 –  2004

from Wikipedia

Google Images

Barns-Graham Charitable Trust images

Looking In Looking Out  You Tube video

My Aunt Wilhelmina Barns Graham  You Tube video

 

I want my work to be a simple statement. To have an atmosphere and integrity – this is a presence…To have interesting space relationships, relationships of colour, and colour to form – that is form suggesting colour and vice versa. One plane over another in a totality of image, with something of the fun of the unexpected. A world in itself – of small area against large mass.

 

The positive aspect of working in an abstract way for me, is the freedom of choice, i.e.medium, space, texture, colours, the challenge of feeling out the truth of an idea – a process of inner perception and harmony of thought on a high level…Abstract is a refinement and greater discipline to the idea, truth to the medium thus perfecting the idea, only using that which perfects or adds to that idea.

 

At my age, there’s now no time to be lost. I say to myself, ‘Do it now, don’t be afraid.’ I’ve got today, but who knows about tomorrow? I’m not ready for death yet, there’s still so much I want to do. Life is so exciting. Trying to catch one simple statement about it. That’s what I’m aiming for, I’ll keep on trying.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s work generally lies on the divide between abstract and representational, typically drawing on inspirations from landscape.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham was born in St Andrews, Fife. She enrolled in Edinburgh College of Art in 1931, after some dispute with her father. After periods of illness,  she graduated with her diploma in 1937. In 1940, she moved to St Ives, Cornwall, in 1940, near to where a group of Hampstead-based modernists had settled, at Carbis Bay, to escape the war.This was a pivotal moment in her life. Early on she met Borlase Smart, Alfred Wallis and Bernard Leach, as well as the painter Ben Nicholson and the sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo.  Perhaps the most significant innovation at this time derived from the ideas of Naum Gabo, who was interested in the principle of stereometry – defining forms in terms of space rather than mass.

Her pictures from this period are exploratory and even tentative as she began to develop her own method and visual language. Later, local shapes and colours appear in the images – the Cornish rocks, landscape and buildings.

At the suggestion of the College’s Principal Hubert Wellington, Barns-Graham became a member of the Newlyn Society of Artists and the St Ives Society of Artists but was to leave the latter when, in 1949, the St Ives art community suffered an acrimonious split, and she became a founder member of a breakaway group of abstract artists, the Penwith Society of Arts. She was also one of the initial exhibitors of the significant Crypt Group. In the same year she married the art critic David Lewis (they divorced in 1960).

She travelled regularly over the next 20 years to Switzerland, Italy, Paris, and Spain. With the exception of a short teaching term at Leeds School of Art (1956–1957) and three years in London (1960–1963), she lived and worked in St Ives. From 1960, on inheriting a house outside St Andrews from her aunt Mary Niesh (who had been a support to her throughout her art college years), she split her time between summers in Cornwall and winters in Scotland.

Barns-Graham’s series of glacier pictures that started in 1949, inspired by her walks on the Grindelwald Glacier in Switzerland, reflect the idea of looking at things in a total view, not only from the outside but from all points, including inside. In 1952 her studies of local forms became more planar and two dimensional, but from the mid-1950s she had developed a more expressionist and free form attitude following journeys to Spain.

In the early 1960s, reflecting the turmoil in her personal life, Barns-Graham adopted a severe geometrical form of abstraction as a way of taking a fresh approach to her painting. Combined with a very intuitive sense of colour and design, the work often has more vitality than is immediately apparent. Squares tumble and circles flow across voids. Colour and movement come together and it is at this point in her work that St Ives perhaps exerts the least influence; rather, this approach more likely reflects an interest in the work of Josef Albers who was exciting UK artists at this time, in embracing new possibilities offered by the optical effects of a more formulaic abstraction.

Nonetheless there is evidence to suggest that many images did stem from observations of the world around her. This is seen in a series of ice paintings in the late 1970s and then in a body of work that explores the hidden energies of sea and wind, composed of multiple wave-like lines drawn in the manner of Paul Klee. The Expanding Form paintings of 1980 are the culmination of many ideas from the previous fifteen years – the poetic movement in these works revealing a more relaxed view.

From the late 1980s and right up until her death, Barns-Graham’s paintings became more and more free; an expression of life and free flowing brushwork not seen since the late 1950s. Working mainly on paper (there are relatively few canvases from this period) the images evolved to become, initially, highly complex, rich in colour and energy, and then, simultaneously, bolder and simpler, reflecting her enjoyment of life and living. “in my paintings I want to express the joy and importance of colour, texture, energy and vibrancy, with an awareness of space and construction. A celebration of life — taking risks so creating the unexpected.” (Barns-Graham, October 2001) This outlook is perfectly expressed in the extraordinary collection of screen prints that she made with Graal Press, Edinburgh, between 1999 and 2003.

Post-war, when St Ives had ceased to be a pivotal centre of modernism, her work and importance as an artist was sidelined, in part by an art-historical consensus that she had been only as a minor member of the St Ives school. In old age, however, she received belated recognition, receiving honorary doctorates from the University of St Andrews in 1992 and later from the universities of Plymouth, Exeter and Falmouth . In 1999 she was elected an honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Scottish Watercolourists. She was awarded a CBE in 2001, the same year that saw the publication of the first major monograph on her life and work, written by Lynne Green — W.Barns-Graham : A Studio Life (Lund Humphries). This publication was followed in 2007 by The Prints of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham : a complete catalogue by Ann Gunn (also a Lund Humphries publication). Her work is found in all major public collections within the UK.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham died in St Andrews on 26 January 2004. She bequeathed her entire estate to The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust, which she had established in 1987. The aims of the trust are to foster and protect her reputation, to advance the knowledge of her life and work, to create an archive of key works of art and papers, and, in a cause close to her heart, to support and inspire art and art history students through offering grants and bursaries to those in selected art college and universities. Information about the trust and its activities is to be found at http://www.barns-grahamtrust.org.uk

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Barns-Graham Charitable Trust

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St Andrews
Fife
KY16 6AT”

Categories
Design

Gestalt laws and principles

THE GESTALT LAWS OF PERCEPTUAL ORGANIZATION:

  1. Law of Proximity. Visual elements are grouped in the mind according to how close they are to each other.
  2. Law of Similarity. Elements that are similar in some way, by form or content, tend to be grouped.
  3. Law of Closure. Elements roughly arranged together are seen to complete an outline shape. The mind seeks completeness.
  4. Law of Simplicity. The mind tends towards visual explanations that are simple; simple lines, curves, and shapes are preferred, as is symmetry and balance.
  5. Law of Common Fate. Grouped elements are assumed to move together and behave as one.
  6. Law of Good Continuation. Similar to the above, this states that the mind tends to continue shapes and lines beyond their ending points .
  7. Law of Segregation. In order for a figure to be perceived, it must stand out from its background. Figure-ground images exploit the uncertainty of deciding which is the figure and which is the background, for creative interest.

‘Grouping plays a large part in Gestalt thinking, and this is known as “chunking.”

GESTALT PRINCIPLES INCLUDE:

  1.  Emergence. Parts of an image that do not contain sufficient information to explain them suddenly pop out as a result of looking long enough and finally grasping the sense .
  2.  Reification. The mind fills in a shape or area due to inadequate visual input. This includes closure (above).
  3. Multistability. ln some instances, when there are insufficient depth clues, objects can be seen to invert spontaneously. This has been explolted more in art (M. C. Escher, Salvador Dali) than in photography.
  4. Invariance. Objects can be recognized regardless of orientation, rotation, aspect, scale, or other factors.

Michael Freeman The Photographer’s Eye p38