I like the work of Alexej von Jawlenski, who was a contemporary of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky (and all members of The Blue Rider group, founded in the early 20th century in Munich, Germany). I love the colors and the mood of his paintings. I was able to convey a mood that I wanted […]
I’m trying my luck with markers. Inspired by Alexij Jawlensky.
I like the rendition of Dirty Blond I did for yesterday’s post. It seems to abstract the salient features of my own portrait captured from that 8mm film my dad took many years ago. Today I tried to replicate what I did yesterday, only with complimentary colors. My thinking was that the Dirty Blond image was […]
I remember when I was I kid, my aunt called me a dirty blond. She was of course referring to my hair color at the time, but I thought she was insulting me. I cried. The photograph from yesterday is from that period (the late 1950s). You can tell that my hair is light-colored. I […]
I got a few books out of the library about Alexej Jawlensky. I love his abstract portraits. One aspect of his work that interested me quite a bit was its repetitive nature. He developed his vision from more representational to abstract. Among his portraits are several series ‘Constructivist Heads’ , ‘Meditations’, ‘Variations’. The major elements of […]
Today’s watercolor experiment: I looked at a lot of Jawlensky‘s portraits today and did a lot of drawings trying to distill the photograph seen in the Mike Crying post. I took the advice of Paul Klee and ‘took my pencil point for a walk’ to define Mike’s* features in as simple a way as possible. One of the paintings I wanted […]
Today’s watercolor experiment: I continue to be inspired by the portraits of Alexej Jawlensky. I love his simplification of the shapes of the heads he portrays and the color patches that he applied to emphasize features of his subjects. Today I painted a rendition of a photograph I took of my brother Mike at his […]
A couple of days ago I painted a portrait of Mike, my older brother. Mike is autistic, low functioning and nonverbal. I borrowed from the artwork of Alexej von Jawlensky and his fantastic fauvist-colored portraits to add a sense of other-reality to my portrayal of Mike. Yesterday, I painted a self portrait in the same style. […]
I painted another portrait of Mike today. Mike is my older brother who is autistic, low functioning and nonverbal. Mike was home during my early childhood, but was institutionalized when I was about 10 years old. Now he is in a geriatric group home. I haven’t seen him in a while but oddly, he still […]
I really enjoy the art of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. Both artists taught at the famous Bauhaus and both have written about their philosophies. There is a compilation of Klee’s Bauhaus lectures and essays about art in two notebooks (The Thinking Eye and The Nature of Nature); Kandinsky also wrote down his ideas about […]
