ART & ARTISTS: 2011

Saturday, 31 December 2011

Matthias Weischer - part 1

Some more contemporary painting. This is part 1 of a 2-part post on the works of Matthias Weischer, a painter from Leipzig, Germany, who is gaining international acclaim from critics and collectors for his individual work, and through his association with David Hockney.

Dr Jean-Christophe Ammann, former director of Frankfurt’s Museum für Moderne Kunst: “I understood that I was confronted with a real painter, and not only with somebody who is moving the brushes around, as is often the case today,” said in 2001 when he first saw Weischer’s paintings – and bought one for the museum’s collection.

Weischer enrolled at the influential Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig (Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts) in 1995 and, following three years’ tuition with a master painter, received a diploma with distinction in 2000. His paintings explore space through the construction and deconstruction of imagined interiors, creating rooms within rooms and building up layers of paint, while simultaneously creating overlapping perspectives. The interior spaces Weischer paints are the stage sets of everyday life, often decorated with patterned carpets, furnishings or other props. The recipient of the 2002 prize for young artists in Saxony, Weischer has received several grants for his work, which is exhibited at galleries, museums and institutions in Europe and the United States. Most recently, he was invited to exhibit eight paintings at the prestigious Venice Biennale. An entire room of the Italian Pavilion was dedicated to his work.

“The central focus of my art work is the fusion of the experience of space and time,” says Weischer who acknowledges that there are both parallels and differences between his paintings and those of his Mentor David Hockney, his lifelong “model”.

David Hockney is very appreciative of Matthias Weischer’s work and reflects fondly on his time spent with him. “His work interested me at first because of his attitude to pictorial space and as I got to know it, more layers were revealed,” Hockney says. “He knows looking is a very positive act. The more one looks the more one sees. His skills as a draughtsman are revealed here, the deep pleasures of the hand, the eye and the heart.”

Title and date unknown

2001 Familie 0-Mittag
oil on canvas 190 x 240 cm

2002 Untitled
oil on canvas 102 x 120 cm

2002 Untitled
oil on canvas 190 x 170 cm

2003 Chair
oil on canvas 190 x 170 cm

2003 House
oil on canvas 180 x 240 cm

2003 Interior
oil on canvas 75 x 96 cm

2003 KO
oil on canvas 75 x 85 cm

2003 Living Room
oil on canvas 170 x 190 cm

2003 Untitled 11
oil on canvas 150 x 300 cm

2003 Zweiteilig (Bisected)
oil on canvas 235 x 304 cm

2004 Automat
oil on canvas

2004 St. Ludgerus
oil on canvas 300 x 251 cm

2006 Tuch (Cloth)
oil and tempera on canvas 150 x 200 cm

2008 Zwölf Blicke (Twelve Eyes)
oil on canvas 120 x 200 cm

2009 Bühne mit 9 Objekten
oil and egg tempera on canvas 200 x 400 cm

2009 Die blaue Wand (The Blue Wall)
oil and egg tempera on canvas 200 x 300 cm

2010 Ab
oil on canvas 40 x 30 cm

Wednesday, 28 December 2011

Claude Monet - caricatures

Claude Monet is of course famous for being one of the founders of The Impressionist movement. His water lily paintings will be familiar to everybody. Less well known is that fact that as a teenager his first forays into art were through caricature portraits.
On November 14, 1840, two days after the birth of Rodin, Claude-Oscar Monet was born in Paris, Rue Laffitte. The family moved in 1845 to Le Havre, in Normandy, where Monet's father, entering into partnership with his brother-in-law, Monsieur Lecadre, hoped to make a fresh start in the grocery business.

In Monet’s own words: "At fifteen I was known all over Le Havre as a caricaturist. My reputation was so well established that from all sides people came to me and pestered me for caricatures. I had so many requests, and the pocket money my mother could spare me was so meager, that I was led to take a bold step, one which needless to say shocked my parents: I started selling my portraits. Sizing up my customer, I charged ten or twenty francs a caricature, and it worked like a charm. Within a month my clientele had doubled. Had I gone on like that I'd be a millionaire today. Soon I was looked up to in the town, I was 'somebody'. In the shop-window of the one and only framemaker who could eke out a livelihood in Le Havre, my caricatures were impudently displayed, five or six abreast, in beaded frames or behind glass like very fine works of art, and when I saw troops of bystanders gazing at them in admiration, pointing at them and crying 'Why, that's so-and-so!', I was just bursting with pride."

When Boudin saw Monet's caricatures, he realized that the youngster had genuine talent. He made inquiries about him in the shop and the frame-maker tried to arrange a meeting between them. But Monet showed no interest and even went out of his way to avoid Boudin until one day by chance, they ran into each other at the frame-maker's. The shopkeeper seized the opportunity and introduced them.

"Boudin came over at once and started talking to me in his soft voice, saying nice things about my work: 'I like your sketches, they're very amusing, very neatly done. You're gifted, anybody can see that. But you're not going to stop there, I hope. This is all right for a start, but you'll soon have had your fill of caricature. You want to buckle down and study hard, learn to see and paint, go out and sketch, do some landscapes. What beauty there is in the sea and sky, in animals, people and trees, just as nature made them, just as they are, with a character of their own, with a life of their own in the light and air of nature.' But Boudin's advice was lost on me. As for the man himself, I couldn't help liking him. He meant what he said, he was sincere all right, I felt that. But I couldn't stomach his painting, and whenever he offered to take me out sketching with him in the open country, I always had some pretext or other for a polite refusal. Summer came, my time was more or less my own, I could hardly put him off any longer. So to get it over with I gave in and Boudin, with unfailing kindness, took me in hand. In the end my eyes were opened and I gained a real understanding of nature, and a real love of her as well."