My comment: Surrealism is a long-time favorite of mine, but very selectively:
Meret Oppenheim
Salvador Dali
Max Ernst
Rene Magritte
See google images: surrrealist paintings.
Surrealism
October 9, 2010
A favorite illustrator/artist
August 21, 2010
Maura Cluthe ( at http://www.frag-ment-ed.com/index.html ) is a current favorite. Her work just makes me happy when I look at it.
12 Cool Colored-Pencil Sculptures
July 31, 2010
Andre Masson
July 27, 2010
An early Surrealist favorite of mine; I love his compositions.
The painter and graphic artist André Masson was born in Balagny (1896-1987), a village on Ile de France. In 1904 Masson moved to Brussels where he attended the academy of fine arts. In 1912 André Masson went to Paris. There Masson was admitted to the Paul Baudoin studio at the ‘Ecole National Superieure des Beaux-Arts’. When the war broke out, Masson became a soldier. In 1917 he was severely injured and spent several months in an army hospital. In 1922 André Masson returned to Paris, where his art was influenced by André Derrain and Cubism. A little later he met the Surrealist artists and subsequently joined the movement in 1924. In 1925 the first surrealist exhibition took place in the Pierre gallery, including some of Masson’s works. In protest against Breton’s authoritarian claim to leadership Masson left the group five years later. Surrealism gave Masson access to the irrational and the psychological roots of art. With the help of ‘écriture automatique’, an automatic script, which is derived from the subconscious, Masson tried to explore the depths of the irrational and the psychological roots of art. Hence Masson followed this method and went on to develop his famous sand pictures made of glue and different colored sands. His focus on lines and the free decription of shapes in his graphic works reflect his study of eastern Asian calligraphy. In his swinging lines, drawn in a trance-like state or ecstatically agitated script, Masson often captured wild and cruel visions. Most of the time an orderly Cubist structure can still be found behind the spontaneity and the passionate emotions of the pictures. From 1942, when Masson fled to the USA before the Nazi occupation of France, he painted fragmented figures and figures of terror. Up until the sixties he remained pre-occupied with these motifs. In 1945 Masson returned to Paris. He broke with Surrealism once and for all. Masson’s versatile œuvre also includes illustrations of books and stage designs. In 1966 Masson produced a ceiling painting for the Parisian Théatre Odéon. In spite of the fact that , particularly in the USA, he is celebrated as the inspiration of Abstract Expressionism, Masson’s work remained object-related throughout. Masson’s desire was turn his own vision into reality and “not to photograph the event of the day”.
One of my favorite artists who did representational and abstract works. He was an early inventor.
born Dec. 4 [Dec. 16, New Style], 1866, Moscow, Russia—died Dec. 13, 1944, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France) Russian-born artist, one of the first creators of pure abstraction in modern painting. After successful avant-garde exhibitions, he founded the influential Munich group Der Blaue Reiter (“The Blue Rider”; 1911–14) and began completely abstract painting. His forms evolved from fluid and organic to geometric and, finally, to pictographic (e.g., Tempered Élan, 1944).
Early years
Kandinsky’s mother was a Muscovite, one of his great-grandmothers a Mongolian princess, and his father a native of Kyakhta, a Siberian town near the Chinese border; the boy thus grew up with a cultural heritage that was partly European and partly Asian. His family was genteel, well-to-do, and fond of travel; while still a child he became familiar with Venice, Rome, Florence, the Caucasus, and the Crimean Peninsula. At Odessa, where his parents settled in 1871, he completed his secondary schooling and became an amateur performer on the piano and the cello. He also became an amateur painter, and he later recalled, as a sort of first impulse toward abstraction, an adolescent conviction that each colour had a mysterious life of its own.
In 1886 he began to study law and economics at the University of Moscow, but he continued to have unusual feelings about colour as he contemplated the city’s vivid architecture and its collections of icons; in the latter, he once said, could be found the roots of his own art. In 1889 the university sent him on an ethnographic mission to the province of Vologda, in the forested north, and he returned with a lasting interest in the often garish, nonrealistic styles of Russian folk painting. During that same year he discovered the Rembrandts in the Hermitage at St. Petersburg, and he furthered his visual education with a trip to Paris. He pursued his academic career and in 1893 was granted the degree equivalent of a doctorate.
By this time, according to his reminiscences, he had lost much of his early enthusiasm for the social sciences. He felt, however, that art was “a luxury forbidden to a Russian.” Eventually, after a period of teaching at the university, he accepted a post as the director of the photographic section of a Moscow printing establishment. In 1896, when he was approaching his 30th birthday, he was forced to choose among his possible futures, for he was offered a professorship in jurisprudence at the University of Dorpat (later called Tartu), in Estonia, which was then undergoing Russification. In what he called a “now or never” mood, he turned down the offer and took the train for Germany with the intention of becoming a painter.
Arshile Gorky
July 26, 2010
Gorky was one of my earliest “likes” when I “caught on” to abstract painting.
(born Vostanik Manoog Adoyan April 15, 1904, Khorkom, Van, Turkish Armenia — died July 21, 1948, Sherman, Conn., U.S.) Armenian-born U.S. painter. In 1920 he emigrated from Turkish Armenia to the U.S. In 1925, after study at the Rhode Island School of Design, he settled in New York City, where he studied and then taught at the Grand Central School of Art (1926 – 31). He sought to assimilate the aesthetic visions of Paul Cézanne, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso by painting in their styles until he encountered the émigré European Surrealists; he then developed his own style of abstraction featuring biomorphic forms that suggest plants or human viscera floating over a background of melting colours. After a series of personal calamities, he hanged himself. He is the most important direct link between Surrealism andAbstract Expressionism.
Some favorites by another hero of mine.
Jackson Pollock was the first American abstract painter to be taken seriously in Europe.
Born to Stella McClure and LeRoy McCoy Pollock, Jackson Pollock was the fifth and youngest son. He was originally from Cody, Wyoming, but was raised in Arizona and California.
 Ed Harris as Jackson Pollock from the 1999 motion picture “Pollack”. |
Jackson was attending Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles when he was encouraged to pursue his interest in art. His oldest brother, Charles, went to New York to study with painter Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. He suggested that Jackson join him and, in 1930, Pollock moved east and enrolled in Benton’s class. He studied Old Master paintings and mural paintings. He also posed for his teacher’s 1930 murals at the New School for Social Research. Also at work at this time was Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco. He was also exposed to David Alfaro Siquieros. Their experimental techniques and large scale art had a lasting impact on Pollock.
Around this time, Pollock was invited to participate in a group exhibition. Here, is where he met his future wife Lee Krasner. His work also came to the attention of Peggy Guggenheim, the wealthy New York heiress whose money built the Guggenheim Museum. She became his dealer and patron, introducing his work to audiences. In November 1943, she gave him a solo exhibition and a contract guaranteeing him one-hundred fifty dollars a month for a year.
In 1945, Guggenheim lent Pollock the down payment on a small house in The Springs on East Hampton, Long Island. He and his wife lived there till their deaths and their house is now the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center.
 Ed Harris as Jackson Pollock from the movie “Pollack”. |
Here he began creating his characteristic large scale artwork. His work was praised and dismissed at the same time. But he was gaining significant attention with a number of one- person exhibitions. While he was widely known in the New York art world, the rest of the world was introduced to him in August of 1949, when Life magazine did a piece on him.
In 1951, Pollock underwent a change in emphasis in his work. He gave up the use of color and instead created a series of black paintings on unprimed canvases.
For the next five years after, he continued to struggle with his drinking and his art continued to undergo changes and he returned to using colors. In his last year, he did not paint at all.
Around this time, his marriage to Krasner was unstable. He had taken a mistress and Krasner took the opportunity to go to Europe to re-evaluate their relationship. Unfortunately, Krasner received a call informing her of her husband’s sudden tragic death.
de Kooning was also a favorite during my formative art years.
De Kooning’s parents, Leendert de Kooning and Cornelia Nobel, were divorced when he was about five years old, and he was raised by his mother and stepfather.[1] His early artistic training included eight years at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques.[2] In the 1920s he worked as an assistant to the art director of a Rotterdam department store.[3]
In 1938, probably under the influence of Arshile Gorky, De Kooning embarked on a series of male figures, including Two Men Standing, Man, and Seated Figure (Classic Male), while simultaneously embarking on a more purist series of lyrically colored abstractions, such asPink Landscape and Elegy. As his work progressed, the heightened colors and elegant lines of the abstractions began to creep into the more figurative works, and the coincidence of figures and abstractions continued well into the 1940s. This period includes the representational but somewhat geometricized Woman and Standing Man, along with numerous untitled abstractions whose biomorphic forms increasingly suggest the presence of figures. By about 1945 the two tendencies seemed to fuse perfectly in Pink Angels.
In 1938, De Kooning met Elaine Marie Fried, later known as Elaine de Kooning, whom he married in 1943. She also became a significant artist. During the 1940s and thereafter, he became increasingly identified with the Abstract Expressionist movement and was recognized as one of its leaders in the mid-1950s. In 1948, De Kooning had his first one-man show, which consisted of his black-and-white enamel compositions, at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York. He taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1948 and at the Yale School of Art in 1950/51.
I was influenced by studying the work of Miro when I was a young painter.
The painter, Joan Miró, was born in Barcelona in 1893 and died in Mallorca in 1983. He produced works in a variety of different styles, and using a wide range of materials, but the majority of them had a surrealist flavour. This is how he is best remembered, although he preferred to think of his works as individualistic, and not necessarily falling into any particular category.
He showed an early passion for art, and attended drawing classes while he was at primary school. In 1907 he enrolled at the School of Industrial and Fine Arts (the Llotja) in Barcelona, and studied there until 1910. In 1912, Miró was recovering from a bout of Typhoid, and decided that he wanted to follow his love of painting, and not a career in accounting that he had been attempting to pursue. He spent 3 years at a school of art run by Francesc Galí, and studied life art at the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc, His first one man exhibition was in 1918, and his works showed a number of influences. These included the vibrant colours of Fauvism, Cubist shapes, Catalan art and Roman frescos.
In 1920, he visited Paris for the first time, and met Picasso. This is probably one of the main reasons why his style changed after this point, and Miró began to focus on more surreal paintings. He decided to move to Paris, and held his first solo exhibition there in 1921. He divided his time between Spain and France and met, and worked alongside, many of the surrealist artists and poets of the time. Ernest Hemingway was among Miró’s customers during this time. He bought a painting that mixed cubism with surrealism, ‘The Farm’. In 1926, Miró and his friend, Max Ernst, were commissioned to design the sets and costumes for the ballet ‘Romeo and Juliet’, performed in Paris by the Ballets Russes.
Around this time, Miró also started to become interested in object collages. The first he produced was the ‘Spanish Dancer’. He moved away from painting for a while, and concentrated on sculptures. However, he also experimented with a wide variety of other artistic forms, including lithography, engraving, and painting over copper. He married in 1929, and his daughter was born the following year. Miró then decided to spend more time in Spain, until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil war forced him to move his family back to Paris in 1936. They remained there until 1940, when they moved back to Spain. Miró continued to learn about, and experiment with, various materials and types of art, but it was his ceramic work that he concentrated on.
In the late 1950s, Miró began to produce commissioned works, particularly murals and large outdoor sculptures for locations around the world. In 1972, a building to house the Fundació Joan Miró, Centre d’Estudis d’Art Contemporani (The Joan Miró Foundation, Centre for the Study of Contemporary Art) was commissioned. It opened to the public in 1975, and it houses the largest collection of Miró’s works. This is by far the biggest collection in the world, not surprisingly because Miró himself donated the vast majority of pieces before he died. It includes 240 paintings, 175 sculptures, 9 textiles, 4 ceramics, the almost complete graphic works, and around 8,000 drawings. Other examples of Miró’s work can be found at museums and locations around the world.
John David Mooney
March 20, 2010
John David Mooney
Miami International Airport
Central Toll Collection Plaza
Miami-Dade Art in Public Places commissioned Chicago artist John David Mooney to create Miami Wave, a two-part art installation sited in the central island of the entrance and Toll Collection Plaza of Miami International Airport. Inspired by Miami’s light and water, Mooney envisioned Miami Wave as a place of welcome and memory for those entering and exiting the area. The first phase of the installation consists of a multi colored concrete paving design which has been integrated as part of the architectural design of the toll plaza, creating a visual unity across the vast hardscape of the plaza. Mooney’s creative use of color and line represents the kinetic quality of a wave moving through space and time, transmitting to the viewer a special sense of Miami’s place in the universe.
Scheduled to begin in 2005, the second phase of the installation, consisting of a 224 ft. light sculpture, will allow viewers to experience the movement of the sculpture through a moving automobile. The sculpture will consist of seven arcs composed of stainless steel columns ranging in height from twelve feet to four feet high. Miami Wave is based on the creative use of the sine curve in order to communicate the very rich, natural, and rhythmic constant of the Miami environment.
When I studied with and made a small film about John David 30 years ago, he was at Notre Dame, a visiting artist at Purdue. At that time he was making large complicated plasma light sculptures some 20 ft. long. He mixed the plasma and inserted it into the mouth-blown tubes with a cathode and anode, which caused them to glow in colors in standing waves.
