Month: September 2016

Odilon Redon

Odilon Redon, “A Knight”, 1885, Oil on Canvas, 53.5 x 37.5 cm, Private Collection

Odilon Redon, born in 1840 in Bordeaux, France, was a Symbolist painter, lithographer, and etcher. His work developed along two distinctive genres. His oil paintings and pastels were mostly still lifes with flowers; these gave him a reputation among Henri Matisse and other painters as an important colorist. His prints, however, were quite different, foreshadowing the Surrealist and Dadaist movements  with their exploration of fantastic, haunted, and macabre themes.

Redon studied under painter and teacher Jean-Leon Gérôme, one of the most prominent late 19th century academic artists in France. He mastered engraving under the tutelage of Rodolphe Bresdin, who was noted for his highly detailed and technically precise prints. Redon learned lithography under printmaker and illustrator Henri Fantin-Latour who became known for his group compositions of contemporary French celebrities.

Odilon Redon produced nearly two hundred prints, which included many series of multiple images. In 1879 he produced the lithograph series collectively titled “In the Dream”. a portfolio of ten lithographs. Redon dedicated a series to Edgar Allan Poe in 1882 which evoked the private torments in Poe’s life. His series “Homage to Goya” done in 1885 included imaginary winged demons and menacing shapes.

Odilon Redons’s lifework represented an exploration of his inner feelings and psyche. His source of inspiration and the force behind his work are explained by himself in his journal “To Myself”:  “I have often, as an exercise and as a sustenance, painted before an object down to the smallest accidents of its visual appearance; but the day left me sad and with an unsatiated thirst. The next day I let the other source run, that of imagination, through the recollection of the forms and I was then reassured and appeased.”

 

 

Blue Boxer Briefs

Photographer Unknown, (Blue Boxer Briefs), Selfie

“There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.

This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad in a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight.”
― Jack London, The Call of the Wild

Rufino Tamayo

Rufino Tamayo, :Dia y Noche”, (Night and Day), Oil on Canvas, 1953, Museo Nacional de Antropologia, Mexico City

Rufino Tamayo, along with other muralists such as Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros, represented the twentieth century in their native country of Mexico. After the Mexican Revolution, Tamayo devoted himself to creating a distinct identity in his work. He expressed what he envisioned as the traditional Mexico and eschewed the overt political art of such contemporaries as José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, Oswaldo Guayasamin and David Alfaro Siqueiros. He disagreed with these muralists in their belief that the revolution was necessary for the future of Mexico but considered, instead, that the revolution would harm Mexico.

Tamayo expanded the technical and aesthetic possibilities of the graphic arts by developing a new medium which they named Mixografia. This technique is a unique fine art printing process that allows for the production of prints with three-dimensional texture. It not only registered the texture and volume of Rufino Tamayo’s design but also granted the artist freedom to use any combination of solid materials in its creation. Rufino Tamayo was delighted with the Mixografia process and created some 80 original Mixographs. One of their most famous Mixografia is titled “Dos Personajes Atacados por Perros” (Two Characters Attacked by Dogs).

ROA

‘ROA’, “Metazoa: Mixed-Media Cabinets”

The new series of mixed media works entitled “Metazoa”by Belgium artist ‘ROA’ features the artist’s familiar black and white depictions of animals painted on various cabinet-like furniture pieces that can be opened or shifted to reveal anatomical details. ROA often chooses to depict animals native to where he is working, specifically species that have been forced from their native habitats and now live on the outskirts of urban areas.

Jesse Reno

Paintings by Jesse Reno

Jesse Reno is a self-taught American painter and muralist, whose art is based on his interest in native and primitive societies. Reno himself terms his art as “neo-primitivism”.

Jesse Reno was born in Teaneck, New Jersey in 1974. He was born with an extreme fever, which caused severe damage to his optic nerve. Because of this, Reno spent almost his entire first year in a hospital, where doctors were trying to examine and evaluate all of the damages caused by the high temperature. As it turns out, fever affected blindspots in over half the visual field of his right eye, and left him with a lazy eye and bad vision.

All of these damages, as well as the chronic pain caused by the problems, affected his perception as a painter and an artist, but hasn’t stopped him to draw since he could hold a pencil. His damaged vision causes strange distortions in depth perception, forcing his to always stay close to his works while painting. In addition, Reno’s vision is sensitive to both light and color, caused by a high level of contrast. Jesse Reno’s different vision greatly shaped his art, both in a color pallet and in terms of depth within his paintings, murals and commissioned works.