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Inspiration From Artists Wk 107 Featuring Artists : Claude Muncaster and Piet Mondrian .
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Posted
Welcome to this weeks thread the featuring artists this week are : Claude Muncaster and Piet Mondrian.
I will open with an introduction to Claude Muncaster and on Wednesday Jenny Will introduce the artwork of Piet Mondrian.
Claude Muncaster 1903 - 1974 was a British painter in oil, pastel , watercolour and a draughtsman in pen and ink of landscape and marine pictures; etcher and illustrator.
Born in West Chilington A Sussex as Graham Hall , son of the Royal Academician Oliver Hall , who launched his son on a career as a landscape painter at the age of 15. He signed his early work as Graham Hall then changed his name to Claude Muncaster to overcome any suggestion that he gained from his fathers name . They had the same ideal “ to paint in the best traditions of British painting “. As young man he sailed as a deckhand Ona windjammer around the Horn, which cave him an expert knowledge of ships.
I hope you enjoy my rather greedy choice of his superb artwork, plus a photo of the great artist at work.
Edited
by Robert Jones, NAPA
Posted
Oh, Claude Muncaster! Yes! I had several books by him, sold to finance a move, of seabirds. though he painted so much more, and he's largely forgotten these days, it seems - he was a WONDERFUL artist, richly deserving my capital letters; there's a painting by him of terns, which just caught them as they really are: he caught their grace and movement in his own gracious and vivacious strokes of brush and pencil.
A wonderful artist = of his kind, there were few better.
First of the sketches is Stormness in the Orkneys .
Posted
A few tips on colour mixing from Claude Muncsater in 1969 can be seen here https://www.painters-online.co.uk/tips-techniques/oil/articles/colour-and-colour-mixing-in-oil-by-claude-muncaster/ for anyone who's interested!
Posted
The Muncaster recommendations would be a bit tricky to follow in their entirety these days; the Flake White he would have used would be lead - which is very hard to lay hands on; I don't think he would have liked Titanium - it was available in his time, and the fact that he chose not to use it tells us all we, or niminy-piminy governments and the flaccid EU (I feel better for that) should need to know.
Copal oil medium is likewise no longer available - there are those who label their thick, dark oil "Copal", but it isn't. Copal oil did tend to darken over time, so it's possible that Muncaster wouldn't have carried on using it, too. But it was better than the modern stuff. Substitute it with Linseed Oil or Stand Oil.
Posted
PIET MONDRIAN (1872-1944) was one of the great pioneers in Dutch modernist art and his highly individual work left a mark not only on art but also on design, architecture and fashion.
In 1892 he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Art in Amsterdam. His 3 years of academic training focussed on life drawing, copying old masters and genre painting, and in the following years he used these skills to earn a living while he tried to establish himself as a professional artist.
He painted studies of the landscape, predominantly trees, often en plein air. His paintings were always rooted in nature and he believed that art reflected the underlying spirituality of nature. In 1905 his traditional landscapes started to show a new sense of drama and light after he was introduced to the French Post-Impressionists. In 1912 he moved to Paris and the influence of Cubism marked a turning point in his career, shifting from a representational Impressionism style to modern abstraction. He used the Cubist grid, but unlike the Cubists, wished to stress the flatness of the painting surface, and continued to develop his style towards pure abstraction. In 1917 he was a founder member of De Stijl (The Style), a Dutch movement that presented an ideal of simplification and total abstraction as a model for universal harmony and order across the arts, limiting the elements in their paintings to straight horizontal and vertical lines, and using the 3 primary and 3 achromatic colours.
Mondrian’s paintings of the 1920s are the clearest expression of his ideal of purity and universal harmony, but it was only in 1925 that he began to receive recognition for his contribution to modernism. In 1938, with the threat of WW2, he moved to London and then to New York in 1940 where he died (of pneumonia) four years later. Devoted to his work, his life reflected the purity and discipline of his art; he remained unmarried and lived simply with few possessions.
Edited
by Jenny Harris