CASPER DAVID FREIDRICH
I have had a look at the Artist Casper David Freidrich 1774-1840, a german painter from the romantic period. The movement validated strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and terror and awe—especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities, both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, and argued for a “natural” epistemology of human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of language and customary usage. What I like about his work apart from the mist, the mood and the melancholy, is the symmetry.
MARIELE NEUDECKER
I went to Mariele Neudecker’s show at Room last weekend. She makes amazing landscapes – diminishing the human element, thereby directing the viewer towards the metaphysical dimension. She explores Romanticism and its elevation of nature and landscape as vehicles for transcendence, contemplation and identity.
http://www.roomartspace.co.uk/past_detail.php?even…
MICHAEL BORREMANS
I have re-discovered the Belgian artist Michael Borremans. He is dealing with similar concerns and juxtapositions as me, he represents disquiet in the everyday using odd juxtapositions, scale and repetition. He is so good that I have artist block.
His biography from zeno x gallery reads
Michaël Borremans paintings are dream-like and haunting, their highly suggestive atmosphere lingering long in the mind of the viewer. He is a painter of psychic states – scenes full of introspection and narrative disjunction. In an atmosphere akin to the unreality of a film set, he chooses the unnoticed, the detail or the scene away from centre-stage, and transforms it, charging it with new meaning.
His brushwork and definition shorthand Manet, the forms themselves occasionally echoing Goya, but his paintings seem arrested in a particular moment in time – that of the 1950s and early 1960s, a post-war world, pre-sexual revolution, devoid of bright colour, where pragmatism and stoicism ruled over beauty and luxury. His palette is full of subtle, often gloomy hues, but their juxtaposition creates a jewel-like composition whose power can quietly dominate an entire wall.
Borremans deliberately plays down the potential drama in his scenes. Instead his work is infused with an atmosphere which is both gentle and sinister.
http://www.zeno-x.com/artists/michael_borremans.ht…
RESEARCH
The internet is a wonderful place. I am finding the most amazing imagery, as well as using things I see daily. My starting points are expanding. I have thought it might be time to leave my sketch book and start on some real work, this prospect seems a bit daunting, I feel safe in the starting point/experimenting zone. I have decided to continue through to the end of my sketch book as first planned, I dont want to spoil the process by rushing.
LESS IS MORE
I saw a magpie out of my window the other day, perched on the top of a tree swaying in the wind –
One for sorrow, Two for joy, Three for a girl, Four for a boy, Five for silver, Six for gold, Seven for a secret never to be told.
