Kazimir Malevich

Kazimir Malevich was a Russian painter and art theoretican. He was a pioneer of geometric abstract art and the originator of the advent-garde, Suprematist movement. This is relatively small painting filled with its large black square hovering over a tired white ground. Amid the visual clamour elsewhere in the museum, it acts like a sudden silence, the first thing one notices is that the surface of the black square is crazed with craquelure. Its forlorn state acts like a protest and reminds the viewer that in 1934, when socialist realism was declared the official artistic doctrine of the soviet union, this painting and many others work by Malevich were abruptly removed and hidden from sight. It was more than 40 years before Black Square returned to public view.

BLACK SQUARE:

This piece epitomized the theoretical principles of Supermarism developed by Malevich in his 1915 essay From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism : The New Realism in Painting. Although earlier Malevich had been influenced by Cubism , he believed that the Cubists had not taken abstraction far enough. Thus , here the purely abstract shape of the black square (that had been painted before the white background) is the single pictorial element in the composition. Even  though the painting seems simple, there are such subtleties as brshstrokes, fingerprints, and colours visible underneath the cracked black layer of paint. If nothing else, one can distinguish the visual weight of the black square , the sense of an "image" against a background, and tge tension around the edges of the square. But according to Malevich, the perception of such forms should always be free of logic and reason, for the absolute truth can only be realized through pure feeling. For the artist the square represented feelings, and the white, nothingness. Additionally, Malevich saw the black square as a kind of godlike presence, an icon- or even the godlike quality in himself. In fact, Black Square was to become the new holy image for non-representational art. Even at the exhibition it was hung in the corner where an Orthodox icon would traditionally be placed in the Russian home.

Early 1914, Malevig had become interested in the possibilities of flight (as had the Futurists) and the idea that the airplane might be a symbol for the awakening of the soul surrounded by the freedom of the infinite. Malevich was also interested in aerial photographs of landscapes, although he later backed away from this source of inspiration , feeling that it led him too far from his vision of a totally abstract art. However, at the time, in Airplane Flying Malevich was able to further explore the pictorial potential of pure abstraction. The rectangular and cubic shapes are arranged in a solid, architectonic composition. The yellow contrasts starkly with the black, while the red and blue lines add dynamic visual accents to the canvas. The whiteness of the background remains unobtrusive but contrasting , and has infused the interplay of colourful shapes with its energy. Malevich believed that emotional engagment was required from the viewer in order to appreciate the compostion, which constituted one of the key principles of his theory of Suprematism. Indeed, Malevich wrote about expressing the feeling of the "sensation of flight , metallic sounds" and the other technological advances of the modern age. His abstract painting was meant to convey the concept (abstract idea).

In these two images i have created my own Black Squares inspired by Malevich himself.

When creating inspirational pieces my main aim is to focus on the key things so for example in Malevich's piece his main focus was a black square agasint a white background so i used colour as my simiular feature. I used Adobe Photoshop to create these sqaures , i used the custom shape tool to create a equal four sided square but to put my own twist into the art work i decided to overlap sqaures instead of one square directly in the middle of the page, i put white on black and overlapped it with white and black squares creating a black and white squared pattern. Personally , i think that my inspired square images was successful because it shows some similarties within mine and Malevich's work.

Josef Albers

  

    Josef Albers: 

     "Homage to the Square, 1965
Accomplished as a designer, photographer, typographer, printmaker, and poet, Albers is best remembered for his work as an abstract painter and theorist. He favored a very disciplined approach to composition. Most famous of all are the hundreds of paintings and prints that make up the series, Homage to the Square. In this rigorous series, begun in 1949, Albers explored chromatic interactions with nested squares. Usually painting on Masonite, he used a palette knife with oil colors and often recorded the colors he used on the back of his works. Each painting consists of either three or four squares of solid planes of color nested within one another, in one of four different arrangements and in square formats ranging from 406×406 mm to 1.22×1.22 m.
in 1950, at the age of 62, Albers began what would become his signature series, the Homage to the Square. Over the next 26 years, until his death in 1976, he produced hundreds of variations on the basic compositional scheme of three or four squares set inside each other, with the squares slightly gravitating towards the bottom edge. What may at first appear to be a very narrow conceptual framework reveals itself as one of extraordinary perceptual complexity. In 1965, he wrote of the series: ‘They all are of different palettes, and, therefore, so to speak, of different climates. Choice of the colours used, as well as their order, is aimed at an interaction - influencing and changing each other forth and back. Thus, character and feeling alter from painting to painting without any additional ‘hand writing’ or, so-called, texture. Though the underlying symmetrical and quasi-concentric order of squares remains the same in all paintings – in proportion and placement – these same squares group or single themselves, connect and separate in many different ways.


INSPIRED BY JOSEF ALBERS:

This is an inspired image that i had created of Josef's Albers 'Homage of the squares' , to create these two images i had used Adobe Photoshop and used the custom shape tool to create equal sided sqaures containing 3 squares in each, using Albers as a inspiration i took some simulatries as in using colour and having different scaled squares within a bigger square but i also added my own taste into my inspired piece , i used three squares in a pair of squares instead of four in the first image and in the second image i used 5 and i also used the same colours but a range from light to dark, i did not mix the colours up like Albers only because its what i thought  looked better. Personally, some people think that the coloured squares are seen to be just plain and simple but i believe that plain and simple has a lot more meaning then something being complex, for example due to the colour scheme i have choosen its stereotypically seen to be childish and targeted to children but the use of the colours in my work portrays  the beauty of happiness and purity.

      



Henri Matisse (31 December 1869 – 3 November 1954) was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter. Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.

In 1887 he went to Paris to study law, working as a court administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis after gaining his qualification. He first started to paint in 1889, after his mother brought him art supplies during a period of convalescence following an attack of appendicitis. He discovered "a kind of paradise" as he later described it, and decided to become an artist, deeply disappointing his father.

Woman Reading by Henri Matisse

The 'Woman Reading' is displayed at the Museum of Modern arts in Paris. I personally think that this painting shows the subtleness of a reading women and the painting evokes a calm , reading atmosphere, however Matisse could of been presenting this painting in a different way for example Matisse doesn't state what the women is actually reading , is she reading a love letter? is she reading a suicidal note?  Matisse doesn’t state what the women is reading so there could be a meaning behind this painting. Due to the woman’s black dressing gown this could possibly mean that she is morning as someone has recently passed away hence to why there is a possibility that she has discovered the suicidal note within the person’s room or desk. 

 

'Woman with a Hat'



The Woman with a hat is an oil on canvas, it depicts Matisse's wife, Amelie. It was painted in 1905 ,in this painting it looks like Matisse slapped and scratched on a whole of different colour paints and had created a colourful image, due to the brushstrokes I would say that this image was done to show expression within the colours, primary and secondary colours have been used all throughout this painting and I believe Matisse possibly used an expressive brushstroke to bring out the brightness and pop in these certain colours Matisse has chosen. on this painting Matisse has used a variety of consistencies for example the oil paint has been applied heavily around the area of the hat and the dress as for the background and face the paint is shown to applied a lot more thinner , this is shown by the thicker the paint the darker it has come up on the canvas. Secondly, the colour on this painting has been exaggerated due to it not resembling the colours of the actual subject for example the use of the heavy green on the women's face is does not resemble to someone's skin tone especially not so heavy and dark.  



 

 

 

 "Sunglasses":

 

 I personally think that Craig-martin was trying to create a cluttered feeling due to all the mixed objects within the painting itself  I also think that Craig-Martin was also possibly trying to convey his day he had at the present time, for example the use of the sunglasses and a chair could symbolise being in the open (outdoors) and the use of the paint brushes and box could symbolise Craig-Martin possibly creating a piece of art work outside, in addition to that I think that this piece of art work gives the thought of nature.

 

This piece of work has been constructed with the use of bold black lines as its outline which has been carefully drawn. Craig-Martin uses flat colours which relates to 2D due to the objects having no form of tone within them, on the other hand it looks like Craig-Martin uses a lot of nursery colours which are stereotypically shown as bright and bold colours which creates a fun feel, this could also be mean that Craig-Martin has done this painting to attract the younger generation due to a more simple and brighter feel of work.

 

Craig-Martin also gives the illusion that some objects are further away from each other due to making the objects closer to you the biggest and the ones furthest the smallest, as an example the sunglasses have been placed in the middle of the composition making it the target focus of the image but this could possibly be because the artist wanted to create and illusion that the sunglasses was the closest thing to him which made it the biggest.