Derain's The Drying Sails 1905


Andre Derain (1880-1954) was a French artist, painter and sculptor. Along with Matisse, he is considered the father of Fauvism. Fauvism can be classified as an extreme development of Van Gogh's Post Impressionism fused with the pointillism of Seurat and Signac. Other influences of Fauvism were Gaughin whose employment of areas of saturated colour strongly influenced Derain's work. Fauvism is recognised by wild brush strokes and vivid colours with the subject matter having a degree of simplification and abstraction.
Derain met Matisse in 1898 and they worked together through the summer of 1905 in the Mediterranean village of Collioures. With the above picture Derain employs the large scale pointillist technique which was called Divisionism (separation of colours) and here is is particularly effective in showing how the water is moving in the sunlight. In this painting he uses a lot of the complementary colours blue and orange. I would describe the colours  as quite nautical with limited use of green and more traditional red and yellow.
Derain exhibited in the 1905 Salon d'Automne along side his Fauvist colleagues.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner - printmaking report

Image
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) was a German expressionist painter and printmaker. He volunteered for army service in WW1 but soon suffered a breakdown and was discharged. In 1933 his work was branded degenerate by the Nazis and in 1937 over 600 of his works were sold or destroyed. He committed suicide in 1938. I have selected two of his woodcuts of portraits just so I could consider how portraits could be done in linocuts instead of etching. Clearly they have a lot fewer lines and, in my mind, they look less realistic. The second one looks a bit like Frankenstein! The black and white is striking however I think an etching has a bigger potential to be more atmospheric. The woodcuts don't capture the subtleties of the face so well and you would need to hope the face had a few stand out features which could help the viewer identify it as the sitter. I prefer the first print as it is less black and white as the lines and shapes are smaller, the second one is too "chunky...
Read more

Richard Wentworth - contemporary artist

Image
For my second contemporary art blog I am choosing Richard Wentworth. He was born in 1947 in Samoa and made his life in London. Between the years of 1971-87 he taught at Goldsmiths College and has been thought to have influenced the Young British Artists. He does do photography however it was his sculpture that caught my eye. He uses “ready made” and found objects and he is interested in putting together objects that don’t belong together, that are in an unusual setting and are broken. It is not obviously clear what the deeper underlying messages Wentworth is trying to put across in his work. Having watched a few of his interviews I can honestly say I didn’t have much of a clue what he was going on about (and I wasn’t the only one from what I could find). However as a basic message he is interested in using objects in ways they weren’t, on the surface, designed for and challenging our perceptions of what an object is for. He is telling us to not take objects for granted as th...
Read more

Claire Beattie - visiting artist

Image
Claire Beattie got an arts degree from Edinburgh in the 1990's and is now making a living from her art. She works in oil paint and tends to do a single motif e.g. tree, Bass rock, in an abstracted background and her style is fairly minimalistic. While she does take lots of photos and does a little sketching, her paintings are mostly about colour and they can take months to complete. She can have up to 15 paintings on the go at one time, moving around them when the oil paint is dry. She feels success as an artist is partly due to luck however you can make your own luck by establishing  a routine of observing and drawing and developing your own style and flair in order to stand out. She herself put her work forward to open exhibitions and got a couple of pieces accepted. A gallery owner saw them, liked them and approached her and a long term arrangement has been made between her and this Brighton gallery. They will show and sell her work at affordable art fairs and that galler...
Read more