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Inspiration From Artists Week 117 Featuring Artists : Mike Hall and MHV de Silva.
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Posted
Welcome to the second of this week's featured artists. Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908-1992) lays claim to being Portugal's most important female artist, though she spent most of her working life in Paris, where she became the first woman to receive the French Grand Prix des Arts. Besides abstract and semi-abstract paintings, she produced tapestry, stained glass and ceramics -- not such a strange combination as much of her work has a patchworky/fragmentary quality. She created eight stained glass windows for Reims Cathedral and her ceramics can be found in the Lisbon Metro.
She has been described as forming part of the post-war Art Informel movement, related to lyrical abstraction or tachisme. Her work shows an influence of the cobbled streets and tiles (azulejos) of her country of birth, combined with a sort of post-cubist (re-)introduction of perspective -- a collage of cubist fragments papering the walls of a perspective-heavy space. (Arty talk maybe, but all my own ;-)
I first came across her paintings at the 2023 Female Abstract Expressionists exhibition at the Whitechapel in London, and more recently at the Kunstmuseum in Basel. A couple of the photos below are from those trips. I find her work appealing for many of its qualities, not least the rhythm and colour, and detail that keeps the eye moving across the surface. I could imagine living with any of her paintings and finding new details on each viewing.
Oh, and she has a crater on Mercury named after her, something we can all aspire to...
Paintings to follow!
Posted
Another one I'd not encountered before - I'll take a further look, because there's considerable variety between these paintings but not enough of them yet to come to an overall view: if indeed that's even possible. Interesting that your favourite is the one I'm least attracted to, but there we are - different eyes, different impression. The white painting is clever; and I like the first four. Perhaps No. 5 will grow on me.
Posted
An intriguing artist, unknown to me. Here are some that have appealed to me. Some are so different to Martin's selections, that I hope I haven't be led up the garden path by the internet's tendency to make wrong attributions. I hope not. Artists evolve.
Two self portraits...the first labeled as Auto Portrait-pastel-Da Silva...
At first glance, I thought this one MIGHT be a Kandinsky, but it's labeled 'D Silva, composition, XXe siecle (after)'...puzzling to me...perhaps 'after' Kandinsky?? I like it.
Passage of mirrors, da Silva, 1942. Pleasing shapes and textures...
Da Silva composition, 1936...
At first glance, I thought this one MIGHT be a Kandinsky, but it's labeled 'D Silva, composition, XXe siecle (after)'...puzzling to me...perhaps 'after' Kandinsky?? I like it.
Passage of mirrors, da Silva, 1942. Pleasing shapes and textures...
Da Silva composition, 1936...