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Dear Artist,

Spring and summer are creative times. The sun brilliantly shines and nature invites its viewers to enjoy its blossoming beauty. The beckoning of the outdoors inspires many artists. What inspires you?

 

Do you create exactly what you see in front of you? Or do push to create something beyond what you just see going further into something that you also feel?

 

The world can appreciate artists who express what they feel and see in thoughtful forms of communication. But often the normal is championed over the extraordinary when the public doesn’t recognize something as being expressed in a new or innovative manner. Sometimes artists need to break free from what others are doing but it takes the general public a few years or longer to catch up and appreciate what artists are actually doing.

 

Back in the early 1900’s artists Henri Matisse and Andre Derain were two artists who decided to take the current style of Impressionism into their own hands and together created Fauvism. Take a look at The Turning Road, L'Estaque painted by Derain. It can be viewed in person at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas but see it HERE online.

 

What are your thoughts about the use of color in this piece? Derain made The Turning Road, L'Estaque well over a hundred years ago, but it still feels avant-gard in many ways. How does it make you feel?

 

Color can do so much within a painting. But is it just the color scheme that pulls the viewer into Derain’s Fauvist piece seen above? Let’s compare Derain’s work with a piece using the same basic color scheme but that has totally different results. Louisa Matthiasdotti painted Icelandic Landscape with Sheep, Man and Red Roof in 1983. It can be found HERE.

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Matthiasdotti is an Icelandic painter who, like Derain, was considered avant-gard during her career. When looking at both of these pieces, similar in color scheme, how do they feel different from one another? What emotions surface when viewing these works? Are they similar or quite different? If different, why or how can this be, as the colors are quite similar?

 

Isn’t if fun looking at other work and pondering how it makes us feel?  Keep feeling what you see and your art will expand tenfold.

 

Paint like the world requires it of you,

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Uncle Salvador