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Artists Exhibition Inspiration Portrait

Andrew Salgado

Andrew Salgado portraits Google

website http://www.andrewsalgado.com

Interview for Artnet

Andrew Salgado is a Canadian artist who works in London and has exhibited his work around the world. His paintings are large-scale works of portraiture that incorporate elements of abstraction and symbolic meaning.

Storytelling on vimeo

Categories
Portrait Self-portrait

Frida Kahlo

Ill paint myself because I am so often alone, because I am the subject I know best.

Frida Kahlo portraits Google

Tate Modern exhibition 2005

Feel My Pain by Natasha Walters

Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition 2018 video

Wikipedia

 

Frida Kahlo de Rivera ( 1907 – July 13, 1954) was a Mexican artist.  She used a naïve folk art style to explore questions of identity, postcolonialism, gender, class, and race in Mexican society.

Her paintings often had strong autobiographical elements and mixed realism with fantasy. She was disabled by polio as a child. Then at age eighteen a traffic accident caused lifelong pain and medical problems. It was during her recovery that she decided to leave her earlier ambitions to study medicine and become an artist.

In 1927, she joined the Mexican Communist Party. Here she met the  muralist Diego Rivera and they married in 1928. The relationship was volatile and included a year-long divorce; both had extramarital affairs.  Throughout her life Kahlo was mainly known as Rivera’s wife. From the 1930s Kahlo’s always fragile health began to decline. She had her first and only solo exhibition in Mexico in 1953, shortly before her death in 1954 at the age of 47.

In the late 1970s her work was rediscovered by art historians and political activists. Kahlo’s work has been celebrated by feminists for what is seen as its uncompromising depiction of the female experience and form. By the early 1990s, she had become not only a recognized figure in art history and the Feminism movement, but also an icon for Chicanos and the LGBTQ movement.

Categories
Drypoint Etching Memory Portrait Self-portrait

Louise Bourgeois

Google images for Louise Bourgeois drypoints

See MoMA catalogue of Bourgeois drypoints

Google images for Louise Bourgeois self-portraits

Louise Bourgeois was the main source of inspiration for my series of abstract self-portraits: Assignment 4:  Life in Red White Black

Life and sources of inspiration

Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911. Her parents  ran a tapestry restoration business where she  helped out by drawing missing elements in the scenes depicted on the tapestries.

Bourgeois’s work is based, more or less overtly, on memory. Much of her work probes  themes of loneliness, jealousy, anger, and fear. Many of these emotions originate in her vivid memories and sense of betrayal by her father who carried on an affair with Sadie Gordon Richmond, the English tutor who lived in the family house. This led her to seek psychoanalysis – a subject she wrote about a lot in her diaries. Through her work she is able to access and analyse hidden (but uncomfortable) feelings, resulting in cathartic release from them. She has said:

Some of us are so obsessed with the past that we die of it. It is the attitude of the poet who never finds the lost heaven and it is really the situation of artists who work for a reason that nobody can quite grasp. They might want to reconstruct something of the past to exorcise it. It is that the past for certain people has such a hold and such a beauty … Everything I do was inspired by my early life.
(Destruction of the Father, p.133.)

Bourgeois started printmaking in 1938, the year she moved to New York with her husband Robert Goldwater (1907-73). She experimented widely with techniques and effects, producing an important portfolio of etchings titled He Disappeared into Complete Silence (The Museum of Modern Art, New York) in the 1940s.

She used drypoint more frequently than any other technique. She produced around 1,500 prints that use only drypoint, or in combination with other intaglio techniques. She liked the fact that the drypoint needle was easy to manipulate and that no acid or special equipment was required. She referred to the scratching as an “endearing” gesture, a kind of “stroking.” While it could not “convert antagonism,” something she admired in engraving, she liked the immediacy of drypoint’s effects, with its soft, irregular line and tentative qualities. She used drypoint in some her most iconic print projects, such as the Sainte Sébastienne series,  the portfolio Anatomy, and the illustrated book Ode à Ma Mère, which presents a range of her celebrated spider imagery.(https://www.moma.org/explore/collection/lb/techniques/drypoint)

Bibliography

Malbert, R., (2016) Louise Bourgeois: Autobiographical prints, London: Hayward Publishing.

Muller-Westermann, I. (ed.) (2015) Louise Bourgeois: I Have Been to Hell and Back, Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag.

Wye, D., (2017) Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait, New York: MoMA.

See MoMA Catalogue for Louise Bourgeois work

See Tate catalogue of works by Bourgeois

Videos and interviews on her life and work

 

Categories
Artists Inspiration Memory Portrait Self-portrait

Tracey Emin

See:

Google images for Tracey Emin Self Portrait

Tate page on Tracey Emin Self

Categories
Chiaroscuro Landscape Media Portrait Self-portrait Urban

Rembrandt van Rijn

Rembrandt’s was a key inspiration for:

Sources and references

  • Bikker, J. and G. J. M. Weber (2015). Rembrandt: The Late Works. London: National Gallery.
  • Royalton-Kisch, M. (2006). Rembrandt as Printmaker. London: Hayward Gallery Touring.

Goldmark exhibition (has a loupe to see the detail of markmaking)

CD of Rembrandt etchings purchased from Rembrandthuis.

https://www.rembrandthuis.nl/en/rembrandt-2/collection/etchings/

Christie’s exhibition

Rembrandt as printmaker

Rembrandt (1606-1669) was a Dutch  painter, draughtsman and printmaker. His works cover a wide range of style and subject matter, from portraits and self-portraits to landscapes, genre scenes, allegorical and historical scenes, biblical and mythological themes as well as animal studies.

Rembrandt’s fame while he lived was greater as an etcher than as a painter (he did no engravings or woodcuts). He experimented with different etching and drypoint techniques. He used different mark-making tools to create different types of line – in contrast to the much more mechanical engraving techniques. Rembrandt sometimes employed even the V-shaped engraver’s burin in his etchings, combining it with the fine etching needle and thicker dry point needle, as in the work opposite, for richer pictorial effects.

Landscape

Rembrandt The Three Trees Etching and Drypoint
Rembrandt The Three Trees Etching and Drypoint

See also Google images

Rembrandt’s landscape etchings and drypoints are in the classic Dutch ink and watercolour tradition with broody skies over low horizon and dark, cold foreground.

Portrait prints

He makes the subjects look alive through the way he uses tone to draw the eye to visual features.

Rembrandt Old Bearded Man
Rembrandt Old Bearded Man
Rembrandt with Saskia etching
Rembrandt with Saskia etching

Chiaroscuro

He also experimented with different inking variations for chiaroscuro, producing very different interpretations of the same plate. Etching allows a lot of correction and burnishing to change the image. In some instances his etching were explorations of light and shade that he then transferred into his paintings.

Rembrandt The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds, 1634, etching, engraving and drypoint printed in black ink on cream paper.
Rembrandt The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds, 1634, etching, engraving and drypoint printed in black ink on cream paper.

Technique

Detailed discussion of Rembrandt’s techniques and the background to his etchings.

Portrait paintings

‘Warts and all’

Rembrandt’s self portraits

Rembrandt The Late Works

Categories
Abstraction InProcess Memory Portrait Self-portrait

Francis Bacon

!!to be further elaborated as I finalise Assignments 4 and 5

Francis Bacon’s edgy, visceral paintings tapping the unconscious a key source of inspiration for:

Quotations from the videos below:

We do with our lives what we can. And then we die. What else is there?

If anything ever does work in my case chance, and what I call ‘accident’ takes over.

Gamble everything on the next brush stroke…different strokes trying to do something else then develop themselves

How are you going to trap reality? How are you going to trap an appearance without making an illustration of it?

  • Colour of meat is beautiful

Issues for my printmaking:

  • Feeling the form as it emerges – particularly with monoprint or inking collagraph plates. One thing can turn into another.
  • Can work from photographs for portraits. But observe – Bacon could not draw.
  • Shadows do not need to relate to a subject – making them different can create considerable tension
  • his tryptichs ‘don’t relate to each other, but they play off one another…the balance seems better with three’

 

Key images

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion c.1944 The work’s exhibition in April 1945 coincided with the release of the first photographs and film footage of the Nazi concentration camps. (Tate Modern website)
Triptych August 1972. This work is generally considered one in a series of Black Triptychs which followed the suicide of Bacon’s lover, George Dyer. Dyer appears on the left and Bacon is on the right. The central group is derived from a photograph of wrestlers by Edward Muybridge, but also suggests a more sexual encounter. The seated figures and their coupling are set against black voids and the central flurry has been seen as ‘a life-and death struggle’. (Tate Modern website)
Study for a self-portrait. Also known as Businessman I 1952 or Man’s Head 1952

Other paintings

 1940s

Man in a Cap

Videos

BBC documentary

Tate Gallery Retrospective with words from Francis Bacon spoken by John Hurt

BBC Archive film

His last interview

Works set to music

Resources and references

Categories
Figure Portrait

Human Condition

Five Ways to Paint a Body

lucien freud

francis bacon

jenny saville

euwan Uglow

paula rego

 

 

Categories
Abstraction Figure Memory Portrait

Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville’s extremely tactile approach to painting women’s bodies, including her own, as a feminist critique of the way the female nude has been portrayed by the male art establishment has influenced my work in:

Assignment 2: The Human Condition 2: Flesh Here my focus is on the tactility of the body and ways in which different types of paper eg wrinkled blotting paper or tracing paper give different body textures. As well as meanings of different shapes.

Assignment 4: Abstract Self-Portrait (forthcoming)

Assignment 5: Memory? (forthcoming influenced by Aleppo)

“The way to change peoples’ attitudes is just to do it.”

“The struggle is part of making things work”

“Try to create a balance of being unbalanced”

References and resources

Gray, J., L. Nochlin, D. Sylvester and S. Schama (2005?). Jenny Saville. New York, Rizzoli.

Google images

Katy Cowan (2018) “A major exhibition of works by British artist Jenny Saville to launch in Edinburgh” Creative Boom

Videos below

Key points for my printmaking:

  • She works from photos and sketches, not painting from live models
  • She plays with colours and composition in Photoshop
  • Some of her paintings use text – following the example of feminist photographers like Jo Spence
  • Mixing red and cyan on flesh creates tension because we do not know how to read it.
  • Body as narrative of traces, a copperplate to be etched on – possibilities for over-printing
  • Cut out the shape of a body and draw around and over it, then remove the mask. Keep going till you have something believable.

Videos

Jenny Saville discussing her painting process in 2018 in relation to the All Too Human exhibition at Tate Britain. This is a detailed discussion of her working process and evolution as an artist. She is interested in:

  • Relationship between ‘how you are’ and ‘how you are seen’ eg in work on plastic surgery, people saw themselves as ill because they did not have the nose or breasts they wanted. They saw surgery as enabling them to be their ‘real self’.
  • Paint as vocabulary and anatomy of paint traces from Pollock and de Kooning and document of the process of making

 

Earlier interview with Jenny Saville, focussing particularly on her recent work with its interest in time and traces, multiple figures and memory.

Aleppo

in exhibition ‘All Too Human’ pieta of people carrying bodies out from war zones. she used lots of photographs of a woman in burqa and lots of bodies.

Jenny Saville Aleppo

“I have been working on Pietas [depictions of the Virgin Mary holding the dead body of Christ] quite a bit, and a series of children being carried.

“Over 20 years I have collecting images of babies being carried out of bombings, war situations, in Pieta poses knowing that one day I will do a piece, so this work has been a long time in the making.

“Aleppo is the first one I have released like it.

“I have done paintings linked to war before, but not linked to a political situation – I have endless images from the internet, or from newspapers, of babies that have been killed in these bombings, and when I finished the piece, I have two children myself, how long will it be before we as humans know not to do this?

“When I was titling it, I thought I would link it – for the first time – to what is going on in Syria.

Interview with Phil Miller for Scottish Sunday Herald

Music Video of more of her paintings

Categories
Figure Landscape Media Urban

Rika Deryckere

website: http://www.rikaderyckere.com/index.shtml

Rika Deryckere I’m a stranger here myself
Rika Deryckere Bicycles on the Street
Rika Derykere Nude in Cazilhac 1
Rika Deryckere Fluide
Categories
Abstract Abstraction Figure Landscape Media Memory Portrait

Hughie O’Donoghue

O’Donoghue was born in England but lived and worked for many years in County Kerry, Ireland. He graduated from Goldsmiths in 1982 and was Artist in Residence at the National Gallery, London from 1984-85.

His work is characterised by an engagement with the past. He uses figuration and abstraction to explore themes of human identity, memory, remembering and experience; and draws on history, mythology and personal records to create works which resonate with emotional intensity.

His printmaking includes very large carborundum plates of figures. He mixes fine grain carborundum, acrylic paste and black acrylic paint. He paints this on the plate with a thick brush, wiping off and reworking the image on the plate before it dries. This makes a complex, multi-layered texture. He often uses aluminium plates. Prints on thick Arches paper.

Hughie O’Donoghue installation at IMMA  2009

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The Measure of All Things Introduction

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‘The Road’

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Lost Histories

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‘Artists never completely control the meaning of their work’

Artist’s Laboratory Royal Academy 2005  review

The Measure of all Things Westminster Abbey 2014

bbc your paintings page