Although I prefer to call my artwork a Contemporary Visual Art with an Internal meaning, it is not quite accurate.
Because a definition of Contemporary Art Style is extensive and quite indefinite. Simply put, it is innovative expressive and unique style, which uses harmony of colors and allows combination of techniques and different textures to achieve the highest level of expression.
So, if I want to be more precise, I would say that in my paintings there are elements of Surrealism as well as Expressionism. Indeed, you might find in my paintings some similarities with styles of Salvador Dali and Yves Tanguy (surrealists) and Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky (Expressionists). The similarity is not only limited to the visual aspect. Both of these styles have a philosophical and even theological base, which is quite unique for visual art.
SURREALISM
A literary and artistic movement in the early 20th century that attempts to express the unconscious thoughts and imaginative dreams and visions without control from conscious rational side. The Surrealists proposed to unify the contrary levels of conscious and unconscious, dream and reality, objectivity and subjectivity into a new level of "super-realism".
Surrealism developed in reaction against the "rationalism" that had led to World War I. The movement was founded in 1924 by Andre Breton, however the first elements of surrealism can be traced to the French poets Rimbaud and Apollinaire.
Philosophic aspect: Based on the theories of Sigmund Freud, Andre Breton concluded that the unconscious was the wellspring of the imagination. Breton was a poet, but Surrealism's major achievements were in painting.
Surrealists used various forms of expression: some artists practiced organic, emblematic, or absolute Surrealism, expressing the unconscious through suggestive yet indefinite images. For example, Max Ernst and Ren'e Magritte constructed fantastic imagery from combinations of visibly inapt elements of reality painted with photographic attention to detail. Others, like Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte and Yve Tanguy, created realistically painted images, removed from their context and reassembled within a paradoxical or shocking framework and used dreamlike perception of space and dream-inspired symbols. “Absolute” surrealism depends upon images derived from psychic automatism, the subconscious, or spontaneous thought. The movement survived but was greatly diminished after World War II.
Some of the movement's leading visual artists are:
- Max Ernst;
- Jean Arp;
- Andre Masson;
- Joan Miro;
- Rene Magritte;
- Yves Tanguy*;
- Salvador Dali**;
*YVES TANGUY
Yves Tanguy (1900-1955) was a French surrealist painter who specialized in unusual unidentifiable, often amorphous, objects, figures and personages placed in imaginary landscapes with dreamlike perception of space and infinite horizons.
Born in Paris on Jan. 5, 1900, to Breton parents, Yves Tanguy spent his childhood vacations in Finist`ere, an area of Brittany that contained many prehistoric menhirs and dolmens. His memories of this place may have transformed into the fascinating landscapes in his future paintings.
In 1923, after serving in the merchant marine, after seeing a painting of the "metaphysical" Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico, he was inspired to become an artist, although he had no formal art training or art education. He joined the Surrealist group in 1925 and participated in all their major exhibitions. He developed a unique style, reminiscent of Salvador Dali’s. Despite their smooth, painstaking detail, his pictures have a timeless, dreamlike quality (e.g., The Invisibles, 1951).
He met Andr'e Breton in 1925, and the following year, some of his work having appeared in the magazine La R'evolution surr'ealiste, Tanguy officially joined the surrealist movement. In 1927 his artworks has suddenly matured. In some of his paintings there is an illusion of a deep space, yet laws of geometrical perspective do not operate logically. The unusual organic objects - some floating, some growing out of the ground - are surrounded by a cool light and are placed in an unearthly looking landscape marked by a strong horizon line. In other paintings of the 1920s there is no horizon line: the bone and stone like and vegetal forms seem to be either airborne or floating at the bottom of the sea, as in The Lovers (1929).
As a result of a trip to Africa in 1930-1931, Tanguy painted a series of stonelike formations, monumentally conceived and vividly lighted.
In 1939 Tanguy moved to America and settled in Woodbury, Connecticut. The colors of his paintings became deeper and richer; the objects “grew” larger. Several paintings, such as Indefinite Divisibility (1942) and Slowly toward the North (1942), along with the organic elements, contain geometrical constructions. His last painting, the ambitious Multiplication of the Arcs (1954), contains a number of unidentifiable, shell-like elements set in great clusters.
Tanguy died in Woodbury on Jan. 15, 1955. A number of his paintings are in the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.
**SALVADOR DALI
The Spanish painter Salvador Dali (1904-1989) was one of the best-known (to the point of legendary) and most flamboyant surrealist artists. Possessed with an enormous facility for drawing, he painted his dreams and bizarre moods in a precise illusionistic fashion.
Salvador Dali was born May 11, 1904 near Barcelona, Spain. Starting from an early childhood, his drawings were highly sophisticated. He studied painting in Madrid and Barcelona, influenced by the metaphysics and mysticism of painting by Giorgio de Chirico, the cubism of paintings of Picasso and Sigmund Freud’s writings on the erotic significance of subconscious imagery and psychological theories.
AsGradually, Dali began to evolve his own style, which was executed in an extremely precise manner the strange subjects of his fantasy world. Each object was drawn with meticulous exactness, yet it co-existed in weird unrealistic way with other objects. He used bright colors applied to small objects set off against large patches of dull color. His personal style was evolved from a combination of influences, but increasingly from his contact with surrealism, which group he joined in 1928. Once Dal'i hit on this method, his painting style matured with extraordinary rapidity, and from 1929 to 1937 he produced the paintings that made him the world's best-known Surrealist artist. During this period he has begun to extensively build up a whole repertoire of symbols, mainly drawn from handbooks of abnormal psychology, stressing sexual fantasies and fetishes. His paintings also reflect a dream world in which realistic objects, subjects or personages, painted with meticulous realism, are deformed or metamorphosed in bizarre ways. In his most famous painting, The Persistence of Memory (1931), limp watches melt in an eerie landscape.
A key event in Dali's life was his meeting with his wife, Gala, who was at that time married to another surrealist. She became his deliberately cultivated main influence, both in his personal life and in many of his paintings.
After breaking with other surrealist artists in the 1940s, Dali's later paintings were more realistic and filled with religious and scientific imagery. In 1940 Dal'i escaped from Nazi-occupied France and immigrated to the United States.
Famous for his flamboyant personality as well as his art, he worked in several media: he wrote a book The Secret Life of Salvador Dal'i (1942); also made surrealist ventures in films (e.g., Luis Bu~nue's Un Chien andalou, 1928 and L'Age d'Or (1930)), as well as designed stage sets, jewelry, interiors, and book illustrations. His highly accessible art, as well as his charisma, eccentricity and extravagant behavior, attracted public attention to his persona throughout his life.
In 1983, Dali exhibited a major retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid, Spain. This show made him immensely famous in Spain and brought him further into favor with the Spanish royal family and major collectors around the world. After 1984, Dali was confined to a wheel chair after suffering injuries as the result of a house fire.
Dali died on January 23, 1989 at Pigueras Hospital in Figueras, Spain. Dali was remembered as the subject of controversy and substance, although in his last years, the controversy had more to do with his associates and their dealings then with Dali.
The largest collections of Dal'i's work are at the Dali Theatre and Museum in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain, followed by the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersbutg, Florida, and the Salvador Dal'i Gallery in Pacific Palisades, California; Espace Dali on Montmartre in Paris, France contains a large collection of his drawings and smaller sculptures.
EXPRESSIONISM
An artistic movement, born in Northern Europe in the early part of the 20th century that emphasized subjective expression of the artist's inner experiences, intense emotions and feelings, rather than imitates the nature and reflects reality. This way artist’s own subjective emotions create certain events and objects, none of which necessary exist in nature. The main goal is to express the inner vision; and it is reached through the distortion and exaggeration of shape and the vivid, bright and sometimes even violent colors. The basic characteristics of expressionism are: bold colors, distorted forms, painted in a careless manner, two-dimensional, without perspective, and based on feelings (the child) rather than rational thought (the adult). Paintings are often aggressively executed, personal, and often visionary.
Although it is considered that the roots of this artistic movement/style can be found in the works of Van Gogh, Gauguin and Munch, as well as some artistic movements (such as the Brucke, 1905; New Objectivity, 1911), the first elements of expressionism can be traced to the paintings of earlier artists El Greco and Goya. Although it is used as term to reference, there has never been a distinct movement that called itself Expressionism. The term is usually linked to artists who worked independent of recognized schools or movements; and whose paintings challenged the academic traditions.
Philosophic aspect: Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche played a key role in originating modern expressionism by clarifying and serving as a conduit for previously neglected currents in ancient art. According to Nietzsche, any art work should represent a dualism between a world of the mind, of order, of regularity and a world of emotions, feelings and chaos.
Some of the movement's leading visual artists in the early 20th century were: - Vincent Van Gogh; - Hendrik Werkman; - Constant Permeke; - Mario Eloy; - Georges Rousult; - Gen Paul; - Oskar Kokoschka; - Franz Marc*; - Wassily Kandinsky**;
*FRANZ MARK
The German painter Franz Marc (1880-1916) was a cofounder of the Blaue Reiter, or Blue Rider, an influential avant-garde art group.
Franz Marc was born on Feb. 8, 1880, in Munich, the son of a painter. At the age of 20 Franz entered the Munich Academy, which had a strong academic tradition. His early works were academic, but in 1903 Marc made his first trip to Paris, where he came into contact with impressionism. That changed his vision and influenced his style. When revisiting Paris in 1907, he saw the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh, which made a deep impression on him and complete the transformation. From then on Marc went his own way, deepening his vision into a kind of nature symbolism.
Since originally Marc had intentions to become a theologian, he carried his religious visions and opinions into his art works, treating the shapes of nature as images filled with secret meaning. He started using certain cubist elements to enrich his art with a kind of mystical constructivism. With time he developed a rich, chromatic symbolism. He depicted a mystical world of animals, employing devices of distortion to express the animals' own awareness of their lives. He believed nonhuman forms of life to be the most expressive manifestation of the vital force of nature. Marc's pictorial conception of nature became increasingly abstract, resulting in the formation of colorful, crystalline patterns.
In 1911, together with Wassily Kandinsky and other abstract painters, Marc became a founding member of the Blaue Reiter group.
When World War I broke out Marc entered the army when World War I broke out. On March 4, 1916, he was killed at Verdun.
Characteristic examples of his art are the Gazelle (Mus. of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, R.I.) and Blue Horses (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minn.).
**WASSILIY KANDINSKY
The Russian painter and theorist Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was one of the great masters of modern art. He was often regarded as the originator of abstract art and inventor of a language of abstract forms. His ultimate intention was to mirror the universe in his visionary world. He felt that painting possessed the same power as music and that sign, line, and color ought to correspond to the vibrations of the human soul.
Kandinsky was born on Dec. 4, 1866, in Moscow. The young Kandinsky drew, wrote poems, and played the piano and the cello. He studied law and economics at the University of Moscow, and in 1893 he accepted a position on the law faculty of the university. It was not until he turned 30 did Kandinsky decide to abandon his legal career and become an artist.
The exhibition of French impressionists in Moscow in 1895, particularly the works of Claude Monet, had influenced his artistic development. In Monet's paintings the subject played a secondary role to color. Reality and fairy tale were mixed together in Kandinsky's early work, which was based on folk art, and it remained so even later although more intellectualized. In subsequent trips to Paris he came into contact with the art of Gauguin, postimpressionism. He then developed his ideas concerning the power of pure color and nonrepresentational painting.
His first work in this style was completed in 1910, the year in which he wrote an important theoretical study, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912, tr. 1947 and 1977). In this work he examines the psychological effects of color with analogies between music and art.
His early canvases are turbulent abstractions; after 1920 his work incorporated brightly colored geometric forms.
Kandinsky exhibited with the Br"ucke group, and with Franz Marc and others he founded the Blaue Reiter group. In 1915 he returned to Moscow, where he taught and directed artistic activities. During the early 1920s his style evolved from vivid bursts of color and turbulent abstractions to more precise, geometrically arranged brightly colored compositions. In 1921 he returned to Germany and the next year joined the Bauhaus faculty. In 1926 he wrote Point and Line to Plane (tr. 1947), which includes an analysis of geometric forms and colors in art. This work resulted from the inner experience of the painter who has passed years creating abstract paintings of an incredible sensorial richness, working on forms and with colors, observing for a long time and tirelessly his own paintings and those of other artists, noting simply their subjective and pathetic effect on the very high sensibility to colors of his artist and poet soul. Obviously, this analysis is not based on any scientific studies and objective observations, but rather on inner observations and purely subjective opinions and visions of a genius artist.
At the outset of World War II, he went to France, where he spent the rest of his life. Kandinsky is particularly well represented in the Guggenheim Museum, New York City, and California's Pasadena Art Museum.
CONCEPTION OF COLORS
When we look at the painting, a dual effect occurs: a purely physical effect on the eye, charmed by the visual beauty firstly, which provokes a joyful impression as when we eat a delicacy or hear a beautiful music. But this effect can be much deeper and cause a secondary reaction: an emotional vibration of the soul, which is a purely spiritual effect.
This effect of an inner resonance can by created by a painter by achieving a harmony of colors, forms, or combination of both. And it is up to a painter to recognize the music of each color, to know how they correspond with each other and to predict what particular melodies do their interaction evoke in people. Each painter is trying to reach that harmony of colors and forms through his/her own unique vision of inner beauty.
CONCEPTION OF COLORS BY KANDINSKY
Kandinsky was creating the inner resonance effect through the combination of forms and colors' harmony. He created the whole theory of how colors and forms are influencing person’s emotional perception of the painting.
According to that theory, Kandinsky defines the principle of the efficient contact of the form and color with the human soul. Every form is the delimitation of a surface by another one; it possesses an inner content, which is the effect it produces on the one who looks at it attentively.
The first obvious properties we can see when we look at isolated color and let it act alone; it is on one side the warmth or the coldness of the colored tone, and on the other side the clarity or the obscurity of the tone.
Yellow => warmth=> violence can be painful and aggressive;
Blue=> Cold => evokes a great calm;
The yellow and the blue form the first big contrast, which is dynamic. The mixing of blue with yellow gives the total immobility and the calm, the green.
White=> Clarity=> like a deep and absolute silence full of possibilities;
Black=> obscurity=> nothingness without possibility, it is an eternal silence without hope.
The white and the black form the second big contrast, which is static. The mixing of white with black leads to gray, which possesses no active force and whose affective tonality is near that of green
Red is a warmth color, very living, lively and agitated, it possesses an immense force, it is a movement in oneself.
Mixed with black, it leads to brown which is a hard color. Mixed with yellow, it gains in warmth and creates the orange which possesses an irradiating movement on the surroundings. Mixed with blue, it moves away from man to give the purple, which is cooled red. The red and the green form the 3rd big contrast, the orange and the purple the fourth one.
Every part of the basic plane possesses a proper affective coloration, which will influence on the tonality of the pictorial elements that will be drawn on it, which contributes to the richness of the composition, which results from their juxtaposition on the canvas. The above of the basic plane corresponds to the looseness and to lightness, while the below evokes the condensation and heaviness.
CONCEPTION OF COLORS AND FORMS
ACCORDING TO PHILOSOPHY OF FOUR ELEMENTS:
In my art works I use a different interpretation of Language of Colors and Forms, and it is based on Philosophy of Four Elements.
Each of Four Elements has main corresponding color(s) and geometric figure. Colors and figures act like symbols of Elements on a painting, and, thus, they automatically inherit the powers of the corresponding Elements.
Air => White, yellow or pastel colors => Crescent or Line (straight or curvy) => Mind, intellect, communication, imagination and inspiration => Creates the ideas, finds resolutions.
Fire => Red, Orange => Triangle => Love, passion, sensuality; physical power=> Gives power and energy, awakens sense of touch and passion.
Earth => Green, Brown => Square => fertility, practicality, stability, realism, reliability=> Makes things done, protects stability at home.
Water => Blue => Sphere => emotion, intuition, wisdom=> Cleanses and renews, creates harmony.
And since all my art works have been created using at least one of Four Elements, you will always be able to find a main color corresponding to Certain Element (although it will not necessarily be a dominant color. Remember – it is just the symbol of Element, not the actual Element!) present on a painting.
