This is nice, yeah?: 2011

Friday, 1 July 2011

James Brooks

While painting in Maine in the summer of 1948, Brooks had an artistic breakthrough. He discovered that the glue paste he used to attach his paper to canvas accidentally bled through to the side with his images. He started to exploit this staining technique, moving beyond the more rigid format of his Cubist-inspired compositions. In addition, he relied more heavily on automatism and free brushwork, creating images that showed the influence of Pollock’s action painting methods.

Beginning in the 1950s, while continuing to construct multi-layered canvases filled with small, irregular shapes and thin, fluid lines, Brooks transformed the surface of his pictures. He experimented with the thinning and drying of the medium and with applying mixtures of commercial enamels and oils directly from the tube to create a matte surface and to limit the viscosity of the pigment. From the 1960s on, Brooks simplified his compositions, abandoning the densely packed character of his earlier works. Color, however, remained a consistent and essential ingredient in his pictures, and he frequently started with colored grounds rather than plain white canvas. As the art historian Lisa Mintz Messinger observes, “It is interesting to note that Brooks’s Long Island home, which he shares with his wife, the artist Charlotte Park, is filled with delightful and unexpected accents of bright color. White walls and white furniture are juxtaposed against painted wooden floors of mustard yellow, green, and blue and painted yellow ceiling beams.”

Biography snippet from hollistaggart.com

James Brooks - Ehr

James Brooks - Aamo

James Brooks - Arnar

James Brooks - Frangle

James Brooks - Irro

Tuesday, 28 June 2011

Helen Frankenthaler

Although greatly influenced by Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky and others, she soon developed her own approach to painting. She treated each painting as a new work that had its own unique requirements. She started experimenting with stain painting, where an unstretched and unprimed canvas lying on the floor would be treated with heavily diluted oilt-based paints to be soaked directly into the fabric. She created silky pools of color that, although abstract, evoked images of landscapes. As Whitney Chadwick said of Frankenthaler, "She was not the first artist to stain canvases but she was the firsy to develop a complete formal vocabulary from the technique." Her techniques influenced other artists, especially Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis.

Frankenthaler is significant to the 1950s because of her contributions to Abstract Expressionism. As the name suggests, this form of art is important in any understanding of the Fifties because it combines abstraction and expressionism. Expressionism itself emphasizes the emotional responses from both the artist and the viewer. The voices of a new America as heard in authors such as Jack Keroauc and Allen Ginsberg are seen in artists such as Frankenthaler. It is also important that Frankenthaler, as a woman, steps beyond the traditional gender roles. Helen Frankenthaler is nonconformist both in her art and life.

Biography from artinthepicture.com

Helen Frankenthaler - Causeway

Helen Frankenthaler - Orange Underline

Helen Frankenthaler - Nightmare

Helen Frankenthaler - Coalition

Wednesday, 22 June 2011

Joan Mitchell

Joan Mitchell is perhaps best known as a second-generation member of the New York School. Yet although she was included in the celebrated 1957 exhibition Artists of the New York School: Second Generation at the Jewish Museum in New York, Mitchell lived and worked primarily in France. While her dramatic, lushly painted works possess an active, gestural quality that connects her work to New York School artists such as Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Philip Guston, her work also evokes the paintings and pastels of French Impressionists through their vivid palette and frequent references to nature. As her work incorporated both of these influences, Mitchell is frequently termed an Abstract Impressionist. Such an association is reinforced by the fact that Mitchell work primarily out of Vétheuil, a town outside of Paris where Claude Monet lived and worked, and in a strange twist of fate, that she also lived on Avenue Claude Monet.

Biography from hollistaggart.com

Joan Mitchell - Barge Peniche