Purple Too Visual Art Essay

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Purple Too Visual Art Essay

1
Mijas (Spain) Steps
Eleanor Woolley (circa 1979- ) British
Oil on canvas, 12" x 12" (w x h), 2023
Wychwood Art Gallery, Deddington, UK
$510

Gallery notes edited:
Inspired by a February trip to Mijas, Spain she started it plein air and finished in the studio. These are some in Mijas, slowly winding up and away, with vivid violet shadows of leaves dappling the terracotta tiles, and whitewashed walls.
        Eleanor Woolley, born in the Channel Island of Jersey, moved to Gloucestershire, UK where she was drawn to the outdoors, taking walks in the landscape. She started painting in oils at thirteen years-old. After graduating with her BA Hons in Sculpture at Leeds University Eleanor traveled in Asia before returning to the UK to study furniture making. She worked as a cabinet maker and a restorer before returning to fine art painting.
        Eleanor often paints plein air, finishing in the studio. She often finishes with a palette knife producing a texture. Her latest work is inspired by the landscape of the Cotswolds, and contrasted with long shadows created by figures in urban landscapes. "...shadows are becoming more significant, I like to play with how they fall and merge into the foreground. I love the long shadows created by the early morning or evening light."
Career:
Art Foundation, Pittville, Cheltenham, 1997
BA Hons Sculpture, Leeds University 1998-2001
Cabinet Making and Furniture Restoration City and Guilds 2004-2005
Professional Cabinet Maker 2006-2012
Art Restorer 2008-2012
Professional Artist 2010 - 2023

2
Woman in a Purple Coat
Henri Matisse (1869-1954) French
Oil on canvas, 26" x 32" (w x h), 1937
The Audrey Jones Beck Building,
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Source Wiki and Henri Matisse org edited:
Henri Matisse (1869-1954) is known primarily as a painter. His mastery of color and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century, won him recognition as a leading figure in modern art.
        Woman in a Purple Coat (1937) depicts model Lydia Delectorskaya in an exotic Moroccan costume, surrounded by a complex of abstract design and exotic colors. Although there is not a single straight line, the way the colors juxtapose each other there is no need for a straight line. There is no definite outline on some of the items, such as the fruit on the table. Everything else is surrounded by thick, black outline which accentuates all the other features, seemingly pushing out Lydia and all the other objects. The vivid, purple coat with the black outline makes Lydia almost pop out and off the chaise lounge she is on, making her the main focal point. It also gives the piece a three dimensional aspect, as if she could get up and walk away at any moment. The different patterns of the background give the impression she is in the corner of the room. The placement of the flowers to her right and the magazine at her feet, also alluding to this sense of depth. This painting is not only a piece of history, but a piece of a Matisse's legacy.
        Matisse's model and companion of many years, Lydia Delectorskaya, was a Russian from Siberia who fled from Russia during the 1917 revolution, and who said she was different from other models Matisse used with their dark eyes, black hair and olive complexions. Lydia had long golden hair, blue eyes, fair skin. Matisse approved, referring to her saying she had "The look of an ice princess." When their paths had crossed in Nice, France Lydia was penniless at the age of 25 and Matisse was a well-known artist of 65. He was nice to her and never asked her to pose nude. She respected him for that. During a brief rivalry with Matisse's wife who accused of Matisse of sleeping with Lydia, Lydia was fired as his model. But when Matisse's wife left him shortly after, still not believing Matisse when he said he had not committed adultery, he rehired Lydia as his assistant in his studio.
        This is one of the final paintings in a final group of oil paintings that he painted. It was painted in 1937. Between 1937 and 1938 he made a group of cut-outs, something he returned to much more later in life. In 1950 he stopped working on oil paintings in favor of creating paper cutouts. At a retrospective of his cutouts featuring 130 works encompassing from 1937 to 1954 The Tate Modern show was the first in its history to attract more than half a million people.

3
Green and Purple
Jack Bush (1909-1977) Canadian
Oil on canvas, 70" x 81" (w x h), 1963
Art Gallery of Ontario, Ontario, Canada

Source Wiki edited:
Using only eight lines, three colors plus white and a raw canvas, Jack Bush creates depth out of something flat, merely by applying pressure to the essential red center.
        Jack Hamilton Bush O. C. (Order of Canada) R. C. A. (1909-1977) was a Canadian abstract painter. A member of Painters Eleven, his paintings are associated with the Color Field movement and Post-painterly Abstraction. Inspired by Henri Matisse and American abstract expressionist painters such as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, Bush encapsulated joyful yet emotional feelings in his vibrant paintings, comparing them to jazz music. Clement Greenberg described him as a "supreme colorist", along with Kenneth Noland.
        Jack Bush once said to his peer and artist friend Kenneth Noland, "What I'd really like to do is hit Matisse's ball out of the park. Noland replied, "Go ahead, Matisse won't mind at all."

4
Me in Water
Yu Hong (1966- ) Chinese
Acrylic on canvas, 60" x 70" (w x h), 2003

Yu Hong (1966- ) is a Chinese contemporary artist. Her works characteristically portray the female perspectives in all stages of life and the relationship between the individual and the rapid social changes taking place in China. She works primarily in oil paint but also in pastels, fabric dye on canvas, silk and resin. Yu Hong is routinely named among China's leading female artists. Her work is celebrated for its intimacy and honesty.
        Her 2003 Routine series is made up of two sets of works including six oil paintings on canvas and another fifteen works on paper, insight to her life and her daughter's life. The series features everyday moments and activities such as shopping at the mart, swimming, and having a good time with friends. It focuses on how valuable each moment we live is, how our routine activities fill out our days and makes them what they are, whether in China or America.
        Hong's work is included in collections at the Singapore Art Museum, Singapore; Dong Yu Art Museum, Shenyang, China; Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai, China; Upriver Art Museum, Chengdu, China; China Art Gallery, China; and Ludwig Gallery, Germany.

5
Poikia Rannalla / Boys on the Beach
Magnus Enckell (1870-1925) Finnish
Oil on canvas, 40" x 31" (w x h), 1910
Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki, Finland

Wiki edited:
Knut Magnus Enckell (1870-1925) was a Finnish symbolist painter. At first, he painted with a subdued palette, but from 1902 onward he used increasingly bright colors. He was a leading member of the Septem group of colorist painters. In Finland, Enckell is considered to have been a noted influential symbolist artist. From 1901 onward Enckell spent many summers on the island of Suursaari, where he painted his noted Boys on the Beach (1910). He organized exhibitions of Finnish art in Berlin (1903) and Paris (1908), and of French and Belgian art in Helsinki (1904). He chaired the Artists' Association of Finland from 1915 to 1918, and was elected a member of the Fine Art Academy of Finland in 1922. When Enckell died in Stockholm in 1925 his funeral was a national event.

6
Kvindeportraet. Violet kjole /
Portrait of a Lady in a Purple Dress
Olaf Rude (1886-1957) Danish
Oil on canvas, 38" x 51" (w x h), 1936

Olaf Rude (1886-1957) was a Danish painter. He was a professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Art from 1953 to 1956. He is remembered in particular for his paintings of oak trees at Skejten on Lolland. In 1911 he traveled to Paris where he was inspired by Paul Cezanne. On returning to Denmark, he became one of the classic modernists who around the time of the First World War focused on formal representation concentrating on form, line and color. Rude was one of Denmark's most important modernists, sometimes called Denmark's Matisse for his use of color in his expressive landscapes.

7
Irises (Purple Irises)
Charles Demuth (1883-1935) American
Watercolor and graphite on paper, 10" x 14" (w x h), 1921
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Charles Henry Buckius Demuth (1883-1935) was an American painter who specialized in watercolors and turned to oils late in his career, developing a style of painting known as Precisionism. Demuth's will left many of his paintings to Georgia O'Keeffe. Her strategic decisions regarding which museums received these works cemented his reputation as a major painter of the Precisionist school.

8
Nightlife
Archibald John Motley Jr. (1891-1981) American
Oil on canvas 48" x 36" (w x h), 1943
The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

Source Wiki and Museum notes edited:
Archibald Motley portrays a crowded cabaret in the South Side neighborhood of Bronzeville in Chicago. Stylized figures, an array of diagonal lines, and heightened colors keyed to shades of magenta and violet, Motley captures the exuberance of city dwellers out on the town. He creates a network of gestures and glances among the people, drawing attention to the various social interactions that animate the scene. Motley was inspired, in part, to paint Nightlife after having seen Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, which had entered the Art Institute of Chicago's collection the prior year.
        Archibald John Motley, Jr. (1891-1981), was an African-American visual artist. Motley is most famous for his colorful chronicling of the African-American experience in Chicago during the 1920s and 1930s, and is considered one of the major contributors to the Harlem Renaissance, or the New Negro Movement, a time in which African-American art reached new heights not just in New York but across America, its local expression referred to as the Chicago Black Renaissance. He studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago during the 1910s, graduating in 1918. In 1980 he was honored with nine other African-American artists by President Jimmy Carter at the White House.

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