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Inspiration from Artists Wk 157 Featuring Artists : Paul Gauguin and Saul Robertson
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Message
Posted
Welcome to this weeks Inspiration thread the featuring artists this week are :
Paul Gauguin and Saul Robertson.
Jenny will open the week with here introducing to Paul Gauguin , Wednesday lunchtime I will introduce the artwork of Saul Robertson.
I hope you will join us throughout the week and find some of the artwork from these two artists that you like .
Have a good week and enjoy your artwork be it doing your own or looking at our featuring artist .
Edited
by Paul (Dixie) Dean
Posted
PAUL GAUGUIN (1848-1903) was born in Paris but spent his early childhood in Lima, Peru, which gave him a love of exotic faraway places. He was a Post-Impressionist and Symbolist artist, influenced by both folk art and primitive art.
His art education was largely self taught and shaped significantly by his association with other artists such as Pissarro, a leading Impressionist who took on a mentor role for Gauguin, introducing him to other Impressionist artists and techniques. He exhibited with them in the 1890s but soon began developing his distinctive style characterised by a bolder use of colour and less traditional subject matter. He famously worked one summer alongside Van Gogh in the South of France before turning his back entirely on western society and moving to Tahiti. He had already abandoned life as a stockbroker by the time he began travelling regularly to the South Pacific in the early 1890s where he developed a new style strongly influenced by the primitive arts of Africa, Asia and French Polynesia. He was also an influential practitioner of wood engraving and woodcuts. During this time in the South Pacific he controversially married three young Tahitian girls with whom he fathered children. His later years in
Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands were marked by health issues and financial struggles.
While only moderately successful during his lifetime, he has since been recognised for his experimental use of colour and a style that was distinct from Impressionism.
Edited
by Jenny Harris
This post has been removed as it violates our forum rules and guidelines.
Posted
An artist I have reservations about, but I do like most of his South Sea paintings. This first one I saw recently at the Courtauld Museum in London, the colours were more muted than I was expecting...also the canvas seemed rough to me. He was poor for most of his life, and it's said he used old sacks to make his canvasses while in the South Seas.
As Jenny said, he did sell paintings but not enough to sustain his lifestyle, he died in poverty. Now of course he sells for millions, rather like his 'friend' Van Gogh.'
As Jenny said, he did sell paintings but not enough to sustain his lifestyle, he died in poverty. Now of course he sells for millions, rather like his 'friend' Van Gogh.'
Posted
I can't think of either Gauguin or Van Gogh without reflecting on the corruption of the art market; and whether "corruption" is the word I really want; there's an injustice anyway, in that they struggled with money issues throughout their lives, and the art market has grown fat on dealing in their works after their deaths. I don't know what to call that, but "right and proper" are not words that feature in whatever thoughts I might have.
Plus, a good point up above on Impressionism: I've never thought that either Gauguin or Van Gogh were Impressionists: for one thing, they were both afflicted by poverty more than just about any Impressionist painter, and for another their work is very different; Pissarro has been called "the father of Impressionism", but while that might be true, he seemed to me to break the rules of the classicists quite knowingly and deliberately, but their methods by and large dominated his work; Impressionists moved on in terms of colour, largely in response to advances in colour-making but also by taking their canvases outside (as the other three did); even so, if you look at Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Sisley, then at Pissarro, Gauguin, and Van Gogh, the differences are stark. Anyway, while I could expand on that, I'd bore everyone! I'm not fond of inventing "schools" and then cramming individual artists into them regardless of fit.
Gauguin was a bad boy - it's a little difficult to separate his activities in the South Seas from paedophilia, to modern sensibilities; and the ill health from which he suffered was, as I remember, syphilis. Should that affect one's opinion of him as an artist? I don't know that, either - but it does. His paintings of young women inevitably raise questions and for me they get in the way of enjoying much of his work. On the whole, I have to admit to liking some of his early work more than that which has made him famous - the comfortable bourgeois Gauguin, oddly enough, appeals to me more than the wilder spirit of his later years and work. However, given this is about him, not me - he was clearly a great artist and visionary, who made a conscious decision to reject the approach of almost every other artist of the day and previous days - he was also deeply problematic.
Edited
by Robert Jones, Napa
