Tag: Blog Post 9

Chris Ware:

Chris Ware is a cartoonist known for his New Yorker magazines covers and is hailed as a master of the comic art form. He has contributed cartoons and many covers to the New Yorker since 1999 and his complex graphic novels tell stores that reflect on the role that memory plays in constructing identity.

Ware’s style of comic art is like no other’s. His work is usually devoid of the hatching or rendering that is found in most comics and his drawings are mostly outlines filled with colour. Linear perspective is often flattened or replaced with orthographic projection and he sidesteps atmospheric perspective in favour of utilizing colour for design and mood. His often muted colours are carefully chosen in relationship to not only to other colours on the panel, but also to the entire page as a work of design. In addition, Ware plays with the conventions of comic art page design and storytelling.

Continue reading “New Forms: Chris Ware (b. 1956)”

Ad Reinhardt:

Ad Reinhardt was an American abstract artist who was a major influence on conceptual art, minimal art, and monochrome painting. He was a member of the American Abstract Artists and The Club, a meeting place for the New York School’s abstract expressionist artists during the 1940s to the 1950s. Although Reinhardt was associated with Abstract Expressionists, his works had origins in geometric abstraction. In his exploration of geometric abstraction, he sought to purify his paintings of everything he saw as extraneous to art. He believed that the ultimate in abstract paintings were concerned with art alone and bore no reference to anything outside the paintings themselves. Thus, he sought to remove all references from the external world from his pictures- even the hints of soul and angst typically found in Abstract Expressionists pictures. He maintained an interest in various types of mysticism, as shown in his barely delineated forms in his Black Paintings that viewers struggled to understand.

Continue reading “Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art: Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967)”