Tag: Blog Post 8

Francis Livingston:

Francis Livingston is an American painter and is considered to be in the top ranks of American illustrators. In the beginning of his career, he painted primarily in a monochromatic style until he studied the work of the Bay Area Figurative Movement. This led him to experimenting with colour and developing a fondness for the California and French Impressionists.

Livingston’s paintings and works are famous and unique. He painted the Santa Cruz boardwalk for 8 years and did numerous portrayals of scenes from New York City and Coney Island. In these, he focussed mainly on the dramatic architecture and colour. However, his paintings of western landscapes and pueblo architecture are what makes him one of the West’s premier living artists: he is able to capture colours and light effects that are unique to west.

Continue reading “New Voices: Francis Livingston (b. ?)”

Piet Mondrian:

Piet Mondrian was a Dutch painter who was recognized for the purity in his abstractions and the methodical practices he used to get to them. As an advocator of pure abstraction, he was also one of the founders of the Dutch modern movement, De Stijl. He believed that art reflected the underlying spirituality of nature and simplified elements of his paintings in order to show this, creating a clear universal aesthetic language on his canvases. To do this, he reduced shapes to lines and right angles, and his palette to the primary colours as well as black, white, and grey.

Mondrian also distilled representations of the world to basic vertical and horizontal elements, representing two essential forces (ex. positive vs negative, dynamic vs static, masculine vs feminine… etc.). This dynamic balance of his compositions reflected what he saw as the universal balance of these forces. His uses of asymmetrical balance and simplified pictorial elements were crucial in the development of modern art.

Continue reading “Cubism, Dadaism, and Surrealism: Piet Mondrian (1872-1944)”