Category: Abstraction

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Abstraction Inspiration Printmakers

Toko Shinoda

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Spanish slideshow of her work

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Toko Shinoda Exhibit by The Tolman Collection, Tokyo at Musee Kikuchi

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Google images

Toko Shinoda (篠田 桃紅 Shinoda Tōkō?, born March 28, 1913) is a Japanese artist working with sumi ink paintings and lithograph prints. Her art merges traditional calligraphy with modern abstract expression. She says she prefers her paintings and original drawings, because sumi ink presents unlimited colour spectrum. In printmaking, Shinoda uses lithograph as her medium. Unlike woodcut that requires chisel, or etching that requires acid, lithograph allows Shinoda to work directly and spontaneously on the plate with her fluid brushstroke. Shinoda’s strokes are meant to suggest images and vitality of nature. She says, “Certain forms float up in my mind’s eye. Aromas, a blowing breeze, a rain-drenched gust of wind…the air in motion, my heart in motion. I try to capture these vague, evanescent images of the instant and put them into vivid form.” Shinoda’s print editions are small, usually ranging from twelve to fifty-five, and after each edition has been pulled, she often adds a stroke or two of sumi color by hand to each print.

Life

Shinoda was born in Manchuria where her father managed a tobacco factory. Two years later, her family returned to Japan. Influenced by her father’s love of sumi ink painting, calligraphy and Chinese poetry, Shinoda practiced calligraphy since she was six.

Shinoda traveled the United States from 1956 to 1958. During this time her works were bought by Charles Laughton and John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet. Shinoda also became involved in the abstract expressionist movement of the time.

A 1983 interview in Timemagazine noted that “her trail-blazing accomplishments are analogous to Picasso’s”. Shinoda’s works had been exhibited in the Hague National Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, Cincinnati Art Museum and other leading museums in the world.

She turned 100 in March 2013.

Books on her work

  • Takashina, Shuji. Okada, Shinoda, and Tsukata: Three Pioneers of Abstract Painting in 20th Century Japan. Washington: Phillips Collection, c1979.
  • Tolman, Mary and Tolman, Norman. Toko Shinoda: A New Appreciation. Rutland, Vermont: Charles E Tuttle Company, 1993.
Categories
Abstraction

Zen Aesthetics and Art

Importance of Zen Aesthetics and Art for my Printmaking practice

I have been interested in Zen meditation – its focus on awareness of the here and now and the possibilities of choice – since being a teenager. In relation to art this awareness of the moment develops an ability to observe, then capture in a few flowing strokes the essence of one’s perception of something. That ability is based on years of practice and development of a sense of composition – focusing on tensions and imbalance rather than symmetry. Zen painting explores the tension between the accidental and imperfect and that flash of control.

In relation to printmaking it has particular relevance in monoprinting – markmaking on the plate as in the large monochrome monoprints of Yamamoto. But also the possible uses of watercolour inks and capturing the way they mix both on the plate and the paper.

Japanese Aesthetics (1 of 1)

Principles of Zen Aesthetics

Zen means “meditation.” Zen teaches that enlightenment is achieved through the profound realization that one is already an enlightened being. This awakening can happen gradually or in a flash of insight (as emphasized by the Soto and Rinzai schools, respectively). But in either case, it is the result of one’s own efforts. Deities and scriptures can offer only limited assistance.

Zen Buddhism’s emphasis on simplicity and the importance of the natural world generated a distinctive aesthetic, which is expressed by the terms wabi and sabi. influenced by Mahayana Buddhist philosophy, particularly acceptance and contemplation of the imperfection, constant flux and impermanence of all things. These two amorphous concepts are used to express a sense of rusticity, melancholy, loneliness, naturalness, and age, so that a misshapen, worn peasant’s jar is considered more beautiful than a pristine, carefully crafted dish. While the latter pleases the senses, the former stimulates the mind and emotions to contemplate the essence of reality. In today’s Japan, the meaning of wabi-sabi is often condensed to “wisdom in natural simplicity.” In art books, it is typically defined as “flawed beauty.”

In Search of Wabi Sabi with Marcel Theroux

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 Zen traces its origins to India, but it was formalized in China. Chan, as it is known in China, was transmitted to Japan and took root there in the thirteenth century. Chan was enthusiastically received in Japan, especially by the samurai class that wielded political power at this time, and it became the most prominent form of Buddhism between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. The immigrant Chinese prelates were educated men, who introduced not only religious practices but also Chinese literature, calligraphy, philosophy, and ink painting to their Japanese disciples, who often in turn traveled to China for further study.

Many Japanese arts over the past thousand years have been  Such arts can exemplify a wabi-sabi aesthetic. Examples include:

A contemporary Japanese appraisal of this concept is found in the influential essay In Praise of Shadows by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki.

Sumi-e or Zen Ink Painting

You Tube videos on history of Chinese and Japanese ink painting

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Other Sources

Met Museum

Zen Buddhism and Art  Lieberman

Zen Painting Google images

Sumi-e or Japanese ink wash painting uses tonality and shading achieved by varying the ink density, both by differential grinding of the ink stick in water and by varying the ink load and pressure within a single brushstroke. Ink wash painting artists spend years practicing basic brush strokes to refine their brush movement and ink flow. In the hand of a master, a single stroke can produce astonishing variations in tonality, from deep black to silvery gray. Thus, in its original context, shading means more than just dark-light arrangement: It is the basis for the beautiful nuance in tonality found in East Asian ink wash painting and brush-and-ink calligraphy.In his classic book Composition, American artist and educator Arthur Wesley Dow (1857–1922) wrote this about ink wash painting: “The painter …put upon the paper the fewest possible lines and tones; just enough to cause form, texture and effect to be felt. Every brush-touch must be full-charged with meaning, and useless detail eliminated. Put together all the good points in such a method, and you have the qualities of the highest art”.

See Wikipedia article. See articles from British Museum collection.

A key practise is ensō (円相 , “circle”?) – a circle that is hand-drawn in one or two uninhibited brushstrokes to express a moment when the mind is free to let the body create. The ensō symbolizes absolute enlightenment, strength, elegance, the universe, and mu (the void). Drawing ensō is a disciplined practice of Japanese ink painting—sumi-e (墨絵 “ink painting”?). The tools and mechanics of drawing the ensō are the same as those used in traditional Japanese calligraphy: One uses a brush (筆 fudé?) to apply ink to washi (a thin Japanese paper). Usually a person draws the ensō in one fluid, expressive stroke. When drawn according to the sōsho (草書?) style of Japanese calligraphy, the brushstroke is especially swift. Once the ensō is drawn, one does not change it. It evidences the character of its creator and the context of its creation in a brief, contiguous period of time. Drawing ensō is a spiritual practice that one might perform as often as once per day.

This spiritual practice of drawing ensō or writing Japanese calligraphy for self-realization is called hitsuzendō (筆禅道 “way of the brush”?). Ensō exemplifies the various dimensions of the Japanese wabi-sabi perspective and aesthetic: Fukinsei (asymmetry, irregularity), kanso (simplicity), koko (basic; weathered), shizen (without pretense; natural), yugen (subtly profound grace), datsuzoku (freedom), and seijaku (tranquility).

Today, ink monochrome painting is the art form most closely associated with Zen Buddhism. In general, the first Japanese artists to work in this medium were Zen monks who painted in a quick and evocative manner to express their religious views and personal convictions. Their preferred subjects were Zen patriarchs, teachers, and enlightened individuals. In time, however, artists moved on to secular themes such as bamboo, flowering plums, orchids, and birds, which in China were endowed with scholarly symbolism. The range of subject matter eventually broadened to include literary figures and landscapes, and the painting styles often became more important than personal expression.

It has also inspired many modern Japanese Abstract artists like Toko Shinoda and Western abstract artists like John Cage.

Series of interesting videos on a contemporary Western Zen ink painter: Nikolai Jelneronov

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Categories
Abstraction Inspiration Landscape Printmakers

Brenda Hartill

Website: http://www.brendahartill.com

Brenda Hartill collagraph course

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Inking a collagraph plate

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Carborundum

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Google images for Brenda Hartill collagraph

Brenda Hartill R E is a British painter, collage artist and printmaker. Her work explores the texture, pattern and light of the landscape, and ranges from finely drawn figurative works to bold, heavily embossed abstract images. Far the past 10 years she has been most interested in drawing abstract imagery from the landscape, rugged mountain erosion, structure of the land and the the dynamics of plant growth. She loves the strong light and shadow of Southern Europe, and remote New Zealand, where she was brought up, as well as the gentler greyness of the light in London and Sussex. Many of her early more figurative works are still available, and are well represented in the portfolio collections here. She is based in her studio near Rye in East Sussex.

Previously her main medium has been print, both etching and collagraph, and she has written a book (available on Amazon) “Collagraph and mixed media printmaking” for A and C Black, which is now in its 5th printing. She also recently produced a DVD, available direct from the studio.(see DVD section for details)

She is becoming increasingly interested in painting, creating a series of embossed watercolour paintings (see new works), as well as her mixed-media collage paintings using oil paint and encaustic wax . Her recent work includes a series of unique monoprints, in muted colours, and black and white, and there is a strong element of embossing in the latest prints. In addition the three dimensional have always interested her. The more sculptural embossed etchings and collagraphs have led to a breaking away from print on a single piece of paper to mixed media compilations – for example the “floating landscapes”.

Categories
Abstraction Inspiration Memory Portrait

Ibrahim El-Salahi

Ibrahim el-Salahi  (1930 – present) is a Sudanese artist painter and former politician and diplomat.He is considered a pioneer in Sudanese art. He developed his own style and was one of the first artists to elaborate the Arabic calligraphy in his paintings.

website: http://ibrahimsalahi.com

Google images

Ibrahim El-Salahi: A Visionary Modernist Tate Modern: Exhibition 3 July – 22 September 2013    Tate Exhibition site

Ibrahim El Salahi Interview Tate Modern, July 2013

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African Art on Display at London’s Tate Modern

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Starts with in-depth interview with El-Salahi on his experiences in 1970s.

Tate Shots exhibition overview
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Ibrahim El Salahi Focus on Africa BBC World

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Development of his art

El-Salahi was born on September 5, 1930, in Omdurman, Sudan. He studied Art at the School of Design of the Gordon Memorial College, currently the University of Khartoum. On the basis of a scholarship, he subsequently went to the Slade School of Fine Art in London from 1954 to 1957. He also stayed in Perugia in Italy for some time, to enlarge his knowledge of renaissance art. Back in Sudan, he taught at the School for Applied Arts in Khartoum.

In 1950s, 1960s and 1970s his work is dominated by elementary forms and lines. When El-Salahi returned to Khartoum to teach at the Technical Institute in 1957, he became one of the lead artists in a movement known as the ‘Khartoum School.’ Having gained its freedom from British colonial rule only one year previously, Sudanese artists were trying to define a new artistic voice and means of expression for the country. Yet when he held an exhibition of his work from the Slade at the Grand Hotel in Khartoum, Salahi’s academic style was uniformly rejected. Salahi took some time out from painting to travel around the country to seek inspiration. Here, the influence of Arabic calligraphy, which he had learned as a young child, became more pronounced in his painting, as he began to integrate Islamic signs and scripts into his compositions. Speaking of this era, the artist himself said:

‘The years 1958-1961 were a period of feverish activity on my part in search of individual and cultural identities […] Those years, as it turned out, were the years of transformation and transformation that I went through as far as my work was concerned.’

In 1962 he received a UNESCO scholarship to the United States, from where he visited South America. From 1964 to 1965 he returned to the US with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, and in 1966 he led the Sudanese delegation during the first World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar, Senegal.

Self-Portrait of Suffering (1961) is one of his best-known works from this time. The distended face that becomes almost equine, the dry brush marks and muted palette, show influence of Picasso, who himself appropriated distorted facial features from West African masks. The inability to trace the visual language to a root source is an articulate allegory for the artists’ sense of creative displacement at this time. Other works, such as Reborn Sound of Childhood Dreams (1961-5), integrated the crescent, a motif of Islamic art that recurred frequently throughout his work. El-Salahi also explored the formal properties of paint. Some canvases are incredibly heavy, with a thick impasto crust of paint (Victory of Truth (1962); Dry Months of the Fast (1962)); others with such thin layers of paint the image barely sits above the canvas, such as Vision of the Tomb (1965), crisp detail echoes traditional Arabic miniature painting.

After working for the Sudanese Embassy in Britain for a time in the early 1970s, El-Salahi was offered the position of Deputy Under Secretary of Culture at the Ministry of Information in Sudan under the military dictatorship of General Gaafar Nimeiry. After a failed military coup in which a relative was implicated, he was arrested in 1975, accused of anti-government activities and incarcerated for just over six months. El-Salahi is a Muslim of a Sufi sect, and during this trying time he discovered that the harrowing conditions he was subjected to could be escaped only through his deep spirituality. This was, according to the artist, a time of great personal change. The quiet pen and ink drawings and prose that make up Prison Notebook show a period of introspection and self-examination, with linear and fluid gestures that skirt tentatively across the page.

Upon his release, the artist relocated to Qatar. His work becomes rather meditative, abstract and organic. Subsequently his work is characterized by lines, while he mainly uses white and black paint.

In the late 1980s, El-Salahi began to absorb more of the forms of futurist figures. Still using a pen, his figures become machine-like, solid and heavy, composed of lines, tangents, and geometric shapes. The interlocking ellipses of Boccioni can be found in compositions such as The Inevitable (1984-85), and Female Tree (1994), and dense cross-hatched lines cement the image to its support.

TateShots: Ibrahim El-Salahi’s ‘The Inevitable’

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Often considered El-Salahi’s masterpiece, The Inevitable was first conceived by the artist during his wrongful imprisonment. Deprived of paper, El-Salahi would sketch out plans for future paintings on the back of small cement casings, before burying them in the sand whenever a guard would come near. Working in this manner led to the artist developing a new style, one seen in The Inevitable, where a painting spreads out from what he refers to as the ‘nucleus’, or the germ of an idea, with a meaning hidden even from the artist himself until the work is finished. Only when he saw The Inevitable completed did El-Salahi realise how clear the message was; that people must rise up and fight tyranny and those that suppress them. This was something he felt was relevant not just to his own life when he created the work in the mid-eighties, but to all of Sudan.

When in 1998 El-Salahi moved to Oxford, this new interest in bold geometric lines was pushed further. Using the english countryside as his subject, he began using vertical parallel lines to describe the form of a tree across a series of paintings and drawings. The use of geometric shapes to evoke natural forms perhaps harks back to the Islamic tradition of using geometric pattern to describe the order of the world. Yet through the prism of El-Salahi’s oeuvre, works such as Tree (2008) become Mondrian-esque divisions of canvas, panels of colour against white, that are nonetheless representational.

Many of his compositions suggest painting as meditation or a means of transcendance. Often praying before beginning to work, he says he has little control over the final image on the canvas; the creation of his works becomes almost an autodidactic gesture. Unlike so many established painters, who in later life fall into a distinct, comfortable style, El-Salahi continues to experiment and test himself and his art, integrating Western and Sudanese influences, exploring the boundaries of visual language and transcending a fixed cultural identity.

Rebecca Jagoe: Ibrahim El-Salahi: Painting in Pursuit of a Cultural Identity

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
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
Abstraction Inspiration

Sandra Blow

Sandra Blow (1925 – 22)

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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

Copyright

Barns-Graham Charitable Trust

“You may download the material featured on this website to file or printer for non-commercial research and private study. You will need a licence from us for any other form of re-use. Applications can be sent to us at:

Barns-Graham Charitable Trust
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Categories
Abstraction Chiaroscuro Etching Inspiration Landscape Lithograph Media Monoprint Natural Portrait Self-portrait

Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas has been influential in my work for:

Degas produced many prints as well as paintings, and often worked in pastels over prints.

Lithographs

He produced lithographs from some of his paintings – some of these have a beautiful dreamy quality, benefiting from a monochrome treatment to enhance the total contrasts.

Degas After the Bath 1891–92 Lithograph, transfer, and crayon on laid paper; fifth (final) state
Degas After the Bath 1891–92 Lithograph, transfer, and crayon on laid paper; fifth (final) state
Degas La-Chanteuse-1888-89 lithograph

Etching

His etching uses a range of styles, often based on drawings of intimate scenes that have a . In ‘The laundress’ his energetic lines echo the frenzy of work in the laundry, and the ink tone on the plate conveys the steam and mist. His ‘whorehouse scenes’, some based on monoprints have an immediacy and poignancy not found in his painting.

Degas The laundress, 1879-80. Etching on copper plate.
Degas The laundress, 1879-80. Etching on copper plate.
Degas Whorehouse scene 'The drunk prostitutes'
Degas Whorehouse scene ‘The drunk prostitutes’

Monoprints

Degas (1834-1917) took up monotype printing in 1874-75. In his lifetime Degas produced more than 250 subjects and 400 separate impressions in monotype, far exceeding his etchings or lithographs. He used ghost prints as a basis for pastels. Between 1876-1881 nearly 70% of his works in colour were monoprints enhanced with pastel, sometimes drawing with them, sometimes wetting them for watercolour effects to give different moods, and to add and take away figures.

Degas Le Sommeil c 1885 Courtesy of British Museum
Degas Le Sommeil c 1885 Courtesy of British Museum

Degas found monotype gave him greater freedom to improvise and be spontaneous than drawing on paper allowed. The ability to wipe and smear ink on the plate, and the darkness of tone from the ink, allow a range of mark=making and tone very difficult to achieve with charcoal. It was ideal for capturing secret and intimate scenes, such as women engaged in their toilet or in brothel scenes. He was influenced by Japanese woodblock prints and was interested in the ways shapes and lines can be organised on paper to indicate figures in movement. From 1870s he started to have problems with his eyesight, so he was more sensitive to light/dark contrasts and created dramatic chiaroscuro effects.

He was introduced to the process by his friend the amateur etcher Vicomte Ludovic Napoléon Lepic (1839-1889).  Lepic enjoyed experimenting tonal wiping (l’eau forte mobile or variable etching) to create many variations on a basic landscape composition. He used one etched plate and  wiped off this plate, and also ‘retroussage’,  a way of adding ink to previously wiped plates to produce much richer tones on the prints.

Degas adopted this  ‘dark-field’ method. He covered the entire surface of the printing plate in oily, slow-drying ink and then removed it as necessary to create the image. He scratched and brushed it, wiped it with a rag and manipulated it with his fingers to create the composition, before fixing it by printing it onto paper. He worked and reworked his plates, wiping off and adding ink with rags, fingers and brushes. Later he began to draw on the plate with Indian ink, often diluting it with turpentine and working directly on the plate with a paintbrush.

Degas usually printed two impressions of each monotype subject, one strong, the other weak. He would keep untouched the first impressions (this is a first impression), but he would rework the second with pastel or gouache.

A Strange New Beauty: Monoprint Landscapes

His monoprint landscapes, included in a MoMA exhibition in 2016, are particularly beautiful and innovative. These use oil based ink and solvents to produce misty effects with strong abstraction.

 

Edgar Degas, Factory Smoke, 1877–79, monotype on paper, 4¾ x 6¼ inches

Sources

Hauptman, J. (2016). Degas: A Strange New Beauty, New York: MoMA.

Google images for Degas chiaroscuro

Degas Creative Commons site for paintings only.