Like every artist, I have some great masters in my mind whose style inspires me to create my work. I believe that you cannot define your style without learning from the past chapters of history. In this blog series, I'll tell you about the influencers who helped me build the visual and ideological basis of my art.
So let's start from one of my favorite artists. It's Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015), one of America's incredible twentieth-century dynamic artists, who in the years after World War II molded a particular style of American painting. He bound the solid shapes and beautiful colors of European forms distilled from daily life.
Early Life and Education
Brought into the world in Newburgh, New York, in 1923, Ellsworth Kelly was the second eldest of all his siblings. From childhood, he was in northern New Jersey, where he invested a lot of his energy alone, regularly watching birds and bugs. These perceptions of nature would later educate his novel way of making and looking at art. After moving from secondary school, he concentrated on specialized art at the Pratt Institute from 1941 to 1942. His parents, an insurance agency leader, and an instructor would only let him follow his art career if he pursued his technical career.
Kelly got enlisted in the Engineer's Camouflage Battalion of the military, having numerous artists. In World War 2, Kelly served the Ghost Army with different artists. After his time in the U.S military, Kelly got enrolled in Boston at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. In 1948, having heard a talk on Paul Cezanne, Kelly proceeded to study in Paris.
His Art Description and Style
Ellsworth Kelly was a prominent American artist known for his visionary paintings. His utilization of extraordinary colors, and basic shapes, added to the talk of twentieth-century painting. Ellsworth lived from 1948 to 1954 in Paris, and when he was there, he just sold one work. Something that has forever been said, with regards to, Ellsworth is that when he was in Paris, they said his art was excessively American, and when he returned to America, they said his art was very European. So, he was marginally not in the sync, and thus, he didn't follow Mondrian, and I think of him as the quintessential American artist.
Kelly started to draw flowers and plants at the end of 1940. It is fascinating to follow Kelly's evolution towards minimalism through his drawings. Ordinarily, Kelly's plant studies are shape drawings of the leaves, flowers, and stems. The strokes of the pen or pencil are perfect and purposeful, and that's what I love the most of all his art. Kelly was additionally an eager printmaker, and he injected his lithographs with the similar freedom and exploration as his paintings.
However, popular as a painter of bold geometrical form series, Ellsworth Kelly considered attracting plants in his art. The thorough perception of the world helped him, to refine his work more, and therefore, I agree with Kelly saying how all of his drawings have a story. To be sure they do, yet where the story lies is regularly about the actual subject.
His Artistic Philosophy
The New York City art world in 1954 was overwhelmed by Abstract Expressionism. Like the Abstract Expressionists, Kelly, at times, worked on large scale. His paintings are flat and comprise geometrical panels of vivid colors. Kelly's sculptures, which he started making in the last part of the 1950s, are, similar to his paintings, geometric with flamboyant primary colors and are made of modern materials like steel and aluminum. His pieces were not quite the same as others available during his day - a trademark that turned into Ellsworth's brand name.
While he started as a metaphorical painter, the experience of WWII and his later experiences drew him nearer to abstraction. He concentrated more on crafts by incredible color artists in Paris from 1948 to 1954. These impacts changed his art, and he started exploring different colors and easy structures. Kelly's prints show the limit of his creative mind, and their creation regularly elaborates preparation, the choice of color, and the new printing solutions.
Impact on My Work
Inspired by his imaginative thinking, I was fascinated by his striped artworks. One of the reasons him being my favorite artist is because his style is very similar to mine. I've found it out way later after I had started creating abstract pieces.
Whenever I notice Ellsworth Kelly's art in general, I can see how critical his work was for laying out Abstraction as an individual field of art-making. His use of light, forms, and colors was vital for advanced and contemporary art, having enormous effects on Pop Art, painting, and Minimalism. His sculptures, botanical drawings, and paintings are the absolute best pieces made.
Some pieces from his art collection are still on sale at different galleries. I have a dream to buy a screen print from his botanical series one day!