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Inspiration from Artists Wk 206 Featuring Artists : Eileen Murray and Rita Angus
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Message
Posted
Welcome to this weeks thread the featuring artist this week are Eileen Murray and Rita Angus .
I will open the week with an introduction to Eileen Murray and on Wednesday Sandra will introduced us to the second of her New Zealand artist Rita Angus.
Eileen Murray 1885 - 1962. was an Irish artist born in Templemore Co Cork.
Eileen was educated privately, she studied painting g with Stanhope Forbes in Newlyn at the same time as Laura Knight. She married Major Stewart Murray in 1908 and lived with him in India where she had considerable success with her paintings winning gold medals. Following the tragic drowning of husbands father in Lock Bawn in 1920 sone moved to Mosstown House in Co , Longford .
Her husband died shortly after in 1922 leaving Eileen to mange the 500 acre estate. Her main exhibition period seemed to have been in the 1920s when she exhibited regularly with the RHA , Dublin Sketching Club and the Belfast apArts Society.
Achill subjects seem to be her favourite theme. She continued to live and work in Mosstown until she moved to Killiney in 1947 where she remained untill her death in 1962 with many painting trips to Achilly , Spain , Italy and Canada in between.
Achill is an island off County Mayo.
My selection of her work .
Edited
by Paul (Dixie) Dean
Posted
It's technically of interest that the card players painting (one of them having a resemblance to V I Lenin) is so badly crazed in the dark areas - that could suggest any number of things, from an overly flexible canvas to the use of a tube black; it'll need the attentions of a conservator sooner or later; assuming it was painted in around 1920 - 1940 - it's suffered a bit at a fairly young age. By the way, there's a date discrepancy - the bold type suggests she died in 1926, but farther down it says 1962 - let's find out, 'ang on a mo'..... yes, it was 1962.
Her real forte does seem to have been painting people, but all the same, I like the landscapes... on the whole; she just hints at forms through the use of colour in the paintings shown - the real subject, of this selection at least, is the human being in the landscape; she uses a very desaturated palette. I like the top one, and the last one, particularly - though there does seem to be a rather obvious rectangle in the lower painting - which might well have been there, though I suspect that most artists would have broken it up a bit.
Posted
I’m sorry that this intro is so long. I’ve done my best to condense a considerable amount of biographical material, trying to include the main information about her art and omitting her rather "interesting" personal life.
Henrietta Catherine Angus (12 March 1908 – 25 January 1970), known as Rita Cook early in her career, was a New Zealand painter who is regarded as one of the leading figures in twentieth-century New Zealand art. She worked primarily in oil and watercolour, and became known for her portraits and landscapes.
Her potential was recognised at high school, she then went on to study at the Canterbury College School of Art, and Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland. During her studies she was introduced to renaissance and medieval art and received traditional training in life drawing, still life and landscape painting. Byzantine art and cubism were other influences.
Her paintings are clear, hard-edged and sharply defined. In the 1930s and ‘40s she painted scenes of Canterbury and Otago. Cass (1936) portrays the bare emptiness of the Canterbury landscape using simplified forms and mostly unblended colours arranged in sections in a style reminiscent of poster art. (Cass is on the way between ChCh and the West Coast).
In the early 1950s Angus spent some time travelling around New Zealand. In 1955 she moved to Wellington and from this time her landscapes focused on Wellington and the Hawke's Bay. She also painted a large number of portraits, as well as 55 self portraits (especially in her later years when she suffered from a narcissistic disorder).
In 1958, she won a New Zealand Art Societies' Fellowship and travelled to London to study at the Chelsea School of Art and the Institute of Contemporary Arts. She also visited Scotland and Europe and studied modern and traditional European art.
Cass (1936) is the painting you immediately associate with Rita Angus, it has been reproduced so many times.
Mountains, Cass
Central Otago
Mountains, Cass
Central Otago
Boats Island, Wellington. (I think that is Somes Island in the background)
Fog, Hawkes Bay
Flight
Storm, Hawkes Bay
Another one of Central Otago
Head of a Maori Boay
Portrait of Leon Bensemann
And finally, for something completely different: Tree
Thorndon (suburb of Wellington)
Posted
I grew up in New Zealand and was always conscious of Rita Angus, probably because she was a NZ artist considered to be successful and also because NZ was in the process of shaping an arts culture. So she was always included in discussions and reviews about art and NZ. I got tired of seeing her work constantly pushed on us. Her work had nothing to do with my life or what NZ was to me. The country she painted is something other than beautiful. It’s a tough part of the South Island and her rendition of it seemed very artificial compared to someone like Toss Wollaston. For some reason I rebelled against her because, I suspect, I resented those pushing her on me. But I still don’t respond to her work. She has a very personal style but I find it cold and removed, which may very well have something to do with her mental health as commented on by Sandra.