I’ve loved Franz Kline’s black and white abstracts for years. I didn’t know until recently that the forms were sparked by the shapes of a rocking chair, and that he used a projector to see his inspirations large on the wall before he painted. OMG because I use a projector too! I must be just like Franz Kline. But… it was William de Kooning’s projector. What did he use it for?
From Wikipedia:
It is widely believed that Kline’s most recognizable style derived from a suggestion made to him by his friend and creative influence, Willem de Kooning. A romanticized interpretation of events by Elaine de Kooning described how in 1948, Willem de Kooning advised an artistically-frustrated Kline to bring in a sketch to his studio and project it onto a wall with a Bell-Opticon projector. Kline described the projection as such:
“A four by five inch black drawing of a rocking chair…loomed in gigantic black strokes which eradicated any image, the strokes expanding as entities in themselves, unrelated to any entity but that of their own existence.”
As Elaine de Kooning suggests, it was then that Kline dedicated himself to large-scale, abstract works. Over the next two years, Kline’s brushstrokes became completely non-representative, fluid, and dynamic. It was also at this time that Kline began only painting in black and white. He explains how his monochrome palette is meant to depict negative and positive space by saying,
“I paint the white as well as the black, and the white is just as important.” – Franz Kline (wikipedia)
In the last post called Yogurt Holds the Blueberry, I talked about thinking of everything in a composition as an active shape, painting the spaces between things, instead of painting an object floating on nothing. If we are painting the space between things, we start to see the “background” as an active shape on the …
As a genre, daily paintings tend to use high contrast colors and values that translate well to the internet, and have very easy subject matter for buyers (still lifes, landscapes, pets). Posted online, these artists get instant feedback on their work. They know within 24 hours what subject matter, colors, and styles attract the most …
One way to use broken color is to create optical color mixing, which is to put colors side by side, instead of mixing them together. Viewed from a far-ish distance, the colors visually mix. Viewed a bit closer up, the difference in colors visually pop and vibrate, giving the sensation or the impression of light. Think …
Claire Sherman is an American painter currently living and working in New York City. I first learned about her work in a recent Landscapes class with Fran O’Neill. I admired the use of color and form as each brush stroke popped and slid me around the composition. She is a direct painter who, like Sargent, …
Franz Kline’s Chairs
I’ve loved Franz Kline’s black and white abstracts for years. I didn’t know until recently that the forms were sparked by the shapes of a rocking chair, and that he used a projector to see his inspirations large on the wall before he painted. OMG because I use a projector too! I must be just like Franz Kline. But… it was William de Kooning’s projector. What did he use it for?
It is widely believed that Kline’s most recognizable style derived from a suggestion made to him by his friend and creative influence, Willem de Kooning. A romanticized interpretation of events by Elaine de Kooning described how in 1948, Willem de Kooning advised an artistically-frustrated Kline to bring in a sketch to his studio and project it onto a wall with a Bell-Opticon projector. Kline described the projection as such:
As Elaine de Kooning suggests, it was then that Kline dedicated himself to large-scale, abstract works. Over the next two years, Kline’s brushstrokes became completely non-representative, fluid, and dynamic. It was also at this time that Kline began only painting in black and white. He explains how his monochrome palette is meant to depict negative and positive space by saying,
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