Matisse Monday: Miscellany

{This is the third in a series of Monday posts dedicated to Henri Matisse, part of a self-learning experiment dedicating the month of April to his study. As always, I invite you to take what you like and leave the rest. For the rest of the posts click here.}

I'm taking in so much information during this self-learning experiment that it's hard to choose what to share here and even harder to put it all together into a cohesive post. Hence today's Matisse miscellany, a mish-mash of interesting-to-me morsels gleaned from the mish-mash of books and Websites I've been reading.

 The Dancer, from my 2005 Mandala line art series

Matisse-inspired art without even knowing it!

Et voici, the promised morsels...

Initial attempts at art training foiled. Matisse's initial attempts at art school didn't turn out so well. One of his first teachers at the Académie Julien said he couldn't draw and soon after, Matisse failed an entry exam to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Finally he was noticed by a less stodgy Symbolist painter, Gustave Moreau, who knew a good thing when he saw it and brought him into his studio. The rest is history. The moral of this story? Persist and the right person will come along!

The Cone Collection. Many of Matisse's works were donated to the Baltimore Museum of Art by the Cone sisters, Claribel and Etta. Friends with Gertrude Stein, they met Matisse on a visit to Paris and became fans of his work; throughout his career they collected "42 oil paintings, 18 sculptures, 36 drawings, 155 prints, and seven illustrated books, as well as 250 drawings, prints, and copper plates from the artist’s first illustrated book, Poésies de Stéphane Mallarmé." The Cone collection also includes pieces from other artists like Picasso, Cézanne and Gauguin. For more information check out the Museum's Website.

Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskra), Matisse, 1907

Albert Barnes and the Barnes Foundation. Again, another important collection of Matisse works and hundreds of other Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and early Modern paintings by folks like Picasso, Cézanne, Degas and Monet - all housed in the US. Located in the Philadelphia area (Merion, PA), the Barnes Foundation hosts a series of galleries and an arboretum; read more about it here. Definitely a must-see if you're in the Philly area!

Multi-Creative. Matisse was a man of many talents: painter, sculptor, illustrator, printmaker, writer... When he got tired of painting he switched to something else. Often his sculptures would become fodder for paintings later on. Evidently creativity builds on creativity.

La Serpentine, Matisse, 1909

Big drawings, big pencil. Finally, I love how Matisse improvised to meet the task at hand. When drawing big images on the studio wall, he created a big pencil by attaching a piece of charcoal to the end of a long stick!

Matisse drawing big, 1950

That's it for today's meli-melo. Stay tuned for another Matisse-related post or two before the month end...

Art-making Mantra #3: Just Play

"Curiosity gets us further than curriculum. Serious art requires serious play - and play, by definition, is anarchic, naughty."

~ Julia Cameron, Walking in This World

Every time I channel this mantra I hear the sing-song voice of my first abstract painting teacher: "Just play", she'd say when I got too stressed out about a particular piece.

What does that mean?

the result of anarchic, messy, play - a piece in progress

In the context of working on a specific project, it means loosening up.

Play is letting the brush dance lightly on the canvas to the chaotic rhythms of Coltrane. It's spending half an hour following the evening sun with your camera, guided only by shadows and light. It's making wild and crazy marks on the page with your palette knife because it feels good.

Play means not thinking, not trying, not striving. It means suspending the censor and not worrying about where the piece is going. There'll be time for that later.

Play means being in your creativity.

Art-making Mantra #3: Just Play.

How could you let yourself play in your art today? Whatever your medium, I dare you to let your brush dance.

Matisse Monday: It's All About Process

{This is the second post in a series dedicated to Henri Matisse during Matisse Month, a self-learning experiment dedicating the month of April to the study of Matisse. As always, I invite you to take what you like and leave the rest. For the first post click here.}

La Blouse Roumaine, Henri Matisse, 1940

I have no art-making process except maybe the absence of a process.

I seem to function well on intuition and when I go to the table, I "see what comes." Usually when I try to paint something specific it just. doesn't. work. And I scratch my head wondering how the heck others do it?

With this in mind, I particularly enjoyed reading about Matisse's art-making process. Here are four things he did that I'd like to try*:

Reproduce emotion vs. reality: Matisse painted what he saw in front of him not necessarily as reality, but as it made him feel. Whether a still life or a nude, he painted the emotion it evoked within him rather than aiming to reproduce his subject as it was objectively visible to the naked eye.

"I put a bouquet on the table and I'd like, once the painting complete, that a gardener might be able to recognize each variety of flower; but I don't know what happens in the process, they become young girls, dancing."

~ Henri Matisse (quote translated by yours truly)

Use sketches and small scale paintings as precursors to bigger work: Matisse performed "études" - line drawings, colour studies, paper cutouts and sketches - before creating a major work. When working on his dancer series he did hundreds of sketches to study movement and line.

Danseuse, Henri Matisse, 1930-1931

Embrace re-work and practice patience: When painting La Blouse Roumaine (above) Matisse took fourteen photographs of his work in progress over nine months, depicting how he eliminated detail to come up with the essential for this piece. This absolutely floored me, to the point where I may have gotten a bit over-enthused and forced not only my husband, but my colleagues to listen to me describe how incredibly amazing this was. (Sorry guys!)

six of the fourteen photos, from the lovely little French book

Emulate or seek inspiration from the masters: In the beginning Matisse emulated and sought inspiration from masters that came before him like Davidsz de Heem, Chardin and Cézanne. Then he started giving those pieces his own twist. Apparently copies were good business back then too, he sold copies to fatten the art-making coffers!

So to recap...

1. Reproduce emotion vs. reality
2. Use sketches and small scale paintings as precursors to bigger work
3. Embrace re-work and practice patience
4. Emulate or seek inspiration from the masters

I don't expect I'll be tackling all of these immediately, but I do believe that picking these four approaches out of the pack and writing about them here will make them accessible to my creative psyche.

And really, that's what this little learning experiment is all about.

* The main reference for this post is a lovely little book on Matisse and some of his chosen pieces by Anette Robinson. The version I have is in French; I'm not sure if an English version of the book is available.

Micro-Creating (or Chocolate in the Name of Art)

Creating doesn't have to be a convoluted process. Often I intimidate myself by thinking it needs to be all or nothing. It doesn't.

These micro-creations were completed in ten minutes or less, maybe even five.

Matisse-inspired Easter egg wrapper girl (she needs a name - any ideas?)

materials: chocolate Easter egg foil wrapper on the back of a printed notepad sheet

My boss had a bowl of chocolate mini Easter eggs wrapped in foil at the office. Inspired by Matisse's "papiers collés" I chose a blue one, a yellow one and voilà! Easter egg wrapper girl is born. She spent about a week loosely put together on my desk until I finally ripped a sheet out of my notepad and pulled out a glue stick to make sure I didn't lose any pieces. I plan to hang her on my cubicle wall. Chocolate in the name of art.

my living room picture window and curtains

materials: black writing pen and a blank paper journal that was sitting on my shelf

The window above was sketched in about two minutes I spent sitting on the couch waiting for Sis to come join me at home before going for a walk. It's nothing fancy, but it's something. This micro "sketch-what-you-see" idea is directly from Week 4 of Julia Cameron's Walking in this World, and when it comes to creativity Ms Cameron knows her stuff!

Matisse-inspired sitck figure jumble (or Étude de Stick Figure)

materials: mechanical pencil on the back of daily calendar pages

Finally, to give myself a breather at the office between two tasks I pulled out a pile of old daily calendar pages and went to it. Inspired by Matisse's figures I quickly drew stick figures in a variety of positions, trying to figure out where the limbs would go, in which order and in which direction. A five-minute blitz resulted in 13 stick figures I can now study and play with on canvas.

Creating doesn't have to be an all or nothing process. Sometimes a mere few minutes is all you need.

~~~

How do you build micro-creating in your day? And if you don't at the moment, how could you?

Unpredictable Art

A few weeks ago I was into painting dancers. I created this:

Disney princess-like painting

Though I liked some of the colours and textures, it was a little too "Disney" for my taste (not dissin' Disney, it just wasn't where my headspace was at the time).

So I played, and ended up with this:

 top-down civilization, 9x12 on canvas

Seriously. There's no way I could've predicted that when I laid the first brushstrokes to the top one.

I love making art. It keeps me on my toes.