Annotated Bibliography Shan Thomas - VAST 410 - 2014
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Annotated Bibliography Shan Thomas - VAST 410 - 2014 I’ll start with an excerpt from the song “As It Seems” by 22 year old artist/ songwriter Lily Kershaw... beautiful stuff! “Cause this life is as Fragile as a dream, and Nothing’s ever really As it seems...” I am interested in capturing mood, eliciting emotion, exploring the edge of realism, and the fragility of our perceptions. Veering towards a dreamlike magical world, introducing uncertainty, questioning our assumptions about reality, what we assume and take for granted. In my work i explore transitions, edges, dusk, dawn, subliminal moments. I saw this painting at the Kunstmuseum in Basel, and found it captivating. It is large, gestural, and full of emotion. The contrasting expressions of the lovers - he, who is about to lose her, she who sleeps peacefully, (having already moved on in her heart), are compelling and poignant. Bride of the Wind (1914) Oskar Kokoschka Annotated Bibliography Shan Thomas - VAST 410 - 2014 I am drawn to the German Expressionists - especially the Blaue Rieters - not so interested in Kandinsky’s subsequent controlled and more self conscious work as he strived to create the “first abstract painting”. There is an exuberence and emotion in the paintings of this group, to say nothing of the gorgeous colour field. I also am drawn to the incorporation of animals in my work, and especially appreciate the horses. Franz Marc The Large Blue Horses 1911 German Expressionism/Blaue Reiter Annotated Bibliography Shan Thomas - VAST 410 - 2014 August Macke Lady in a Green Jacket 1913 Blaue Rieter Annotated Bibliography Shan Thomas - VAST 410 - 2014 Wassily Kandinsky Winterlandschaft 1909 Annotated Bibliography Shan Thomas - VAST 410 - 2014 Franz Marc - Cheval dans un paysage - 1910 - 85x112 cm 14 / 21 < > [Diaporama] Annotated Bibliography Shan Thomas - VAST 410 - 2014 A more contemporary artist who works at the edge of representation and abstraction is Anselm Kiefer. I find his landscapes very beautiful and moody - and the WWII inspiration for his work is bold and compelling - below is an earlier one from the 70’s. I am especially drawn to his works related to Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue”, and his use of symbolism, using wheat sheaves to represent the hair of “Margarete” March Heath 1974 (260 Kb); Oil, acrylic, and shellac on burlap, 118 x 254 cm (46 1/2 x 100 in); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands Your Golden Hair, Margarete, 1980 Anselm Kiefer (German, born 1945) Watercolor, gouache, and acrylic on paper; 16 3/8 x 21 7/8 in. (41.6 x 55.6 cm) Annotated Bibliography Shan Thomas - VAST 410 - 2014 Gift of Cynthia Hazen Polsky, in memory of her father, Joseph H. Hazen, 2000 (2000.96.7) SEE COMPLETE RECORD . In the early 1980s, Kiefer made more than thirty paintings, painted photographs, and watercolors that refer in their titles and inscriptions to the Romanian Jewish writer Paul Celan's "Todesfuge" ("Death Fugue"), a poem composed in German in late 1944 and 1945. Celan's parents, along with many other Jews from Czernowitz, Romania, where he had been raised, were killed in the Trisnistria camp in eastern Romania in 1942. Celan himself endured two years of forced labor under the Germans, after which he exiled himself to Paris until his suicide in 1970. Celan's "Death Fugue," widely read and anthologized in postwar Germany, is set in an extermination camp. Its narrative voice, in the first person plural, is that of the camp's Jewish inmates who suffer under the strict watch of the camp's blue- eyed commandant. Singing "your golden hair, Margarete / your ashen hair, Shulamith," the narrators contrast German womanhood, as personified by Margarete, to whom the commandant addresses letters at night (she is named after Goethe's heroine, Gretchen, in Faust), and Jewish womanhood (Shulamith was King Solomon's dark-haired beloved in the Song of Songs). Here, as in most of Kiefer's Margarete works, the German heroine is depicted only by the synecdoche of her "golden hair," in the form of sheaves of wheat in the country side. Annotated Bibliography Shan Thomas - VAST 410 - 2014 Your Golden Hair, Margarete, 1980 Anselm Kiefer (German, born 1945) Watercolor, gouache, and acrylic on paper; 16 3/8 x 21 7/8 in. (41.6 x 55.6 cm) Gift of Cynthia Hazen Polsky, in memory of her father, Joseph H. Hazen, 2000 (2000.96.7) Annotated Bibliography Shan Thomas - VAST 410 - 2014 Much as I enjoy Kiefer’s earlier work, I find his most recent work even more engaging - he is moving to a less dark place, still anchored in landscape/nature, but this time undeniably portraying flowers, in an abstracted, gestural and beautifully painterly way. © Anselm Kiefer Morgenthau Plan, 2012 Oil, emulsion, acrylic, on photograph on canvas 74 13/16 x 149 5/8 inches (190 x 380 cm) Annotated Bibliography Shan Thomas - VAST 410 - 2014 Anselm Kiefer, “Morgenthau Plan” (2012), acrylic, emulsion, oil, and shellac on photograph mounted on canvas, 113 x 149 5/8 inches (© Anselm Kiefer, courtesy Gagosian Gallery, photography by Charles Duprat) Annotated Bibliography Shan Thomas - VAST 410 - 2014 I have been drawn to the work of Peter Doig for many years. Part of it is his Canadian connection, having spent a good part of his childhood in Canada, the influence of which is reflected in his work. I find his work to be lyrical and again somewhere at the edge of realism and abstraction. His approach, starting with photographs and then moving away into his painterly world is how I like to approach my work. His work has been described as “magical realism” - what a great perspective! Each of his works is to me evocative and somewhat mystical, plus I appreciate his sense of humour which also comes through - as with the snowboarder in the sky, or his own self portrait, snoozing at the bow of his rowboat. Finally, his use of colour I find beautiful. Peter Doig Doig,_Blotter.jpg (239 × 300 pixels, file size: 12 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) Low resolution, fair use image of Blotter, 1993. Oil on canvas, by Peter Doig. Annotated Bibliography Shan Thomas - VAST 410 - 2014 Artist: Peter Doig Completion Date: 2001 Style: Magic Realism Genre: genre painting Annotated Bibliography Shan Thomas - VAST 410 - 2014 Peter Doig, Orange Sunshine, 1995, oil on canvas, 276 x 201 cm The contemporary snowboarders seem oddly out of place in t Annotated Bibliography Shan Thomas - VAST 410 - 2014 Peter Doig: Swamped, 1990 oil on canvas 197 x 241 cm Annotated Bibliography Shan Thomas - VAST 410 - 2014 Installation shot of works by Peter Doig at Michael Werner Gallery, Mayfair, London - 2012 Annotated Bibliography Shan Thomas - VAST 410 - 2014 Peter Doig, Cave Boat Bird Painting 2010-12 Image: Peter Doig, Cave Boat Bird Painting, 2010-2012, Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery Annotated Bibliography Shan Thomas - VAST 410 - 2014 Image: Peter Doig, Riding in Water (Red), 2012, Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery - See more at: http:// artobserved.com/2012/10/london-peter-doig-new-paintings-at-michael-werner-gallery-through- dec-22-2012/#sthash.WDZGR3tp.dpuf Annotated Bibliography Shan Thomas - VAST 410 - 2014 I found these excerpts of an interview between Chris Ofili and Peter Doig to be very interesting - especially concerning the way in which Doig works - starting with photographs and “living” with his paintings as they develop, going through bad and good stages. EXCERPTS FROM PETER DOIG AND CHRIS OFILI INTERVIEW Posted by madelinewinter on October 17, 2011 · Leave a Comment Excerpts from Peter Doig and Chris Ofili Interview Chris Ofili Except #1: CO What’s been exciting is living in a place where you want to take photographs every day. That’s something people normally do when they’re on holiday. Changing locations heightens visual awareness; suddenly everything has different values. Since I left England, it’s been a relief really; it’s been like leaving behind what I was and restarting the engine. It felt as if I were going back in time to certain values I had in art school fifteen to twenty years ago. Then the approach to making art was much more ruthless. There was a hunger to make decisions, a hunger that was almost a slight disregard for the image, for the painting itself. PD At art school, you have this incredible momentum that’s fueled by the other artists working around you. That energy is the first thing you miss when you leave. When I moved to London as a 19-year-old, I constantly took photos. London was as exotic to me as Trinidad was when I first arrived. CO But after a while the visual vocabulary becomes so familiar, like listening to the same record over and over again. PD I started painting this idea of landscape in London via my memories of Canada, but that didn’t happen for a long time, not until I’d been in London for almost ten years. And they were filtered through found images. It was an escape to make these paintings in London, because what was outside the door was so different. The work became a different world. I guess that’s always the case, but this was the excitement, trying to find this other place in my head. In Trinidad, the landscape is so present and powerful; it’s everywhere, even in Port of Spain. I’d experienced this growing up in Canada, and here it hit me again. Correct me Annotated Bibliography Shan Thomas - VAST 410 - 2014 if I’m wrong, but you’ve always lived in an urban place. You haven’t had, other than on some school holidays, that type of experience with landscape.