Cy Twombly
Proteus, 1984
Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly, Jr. was born on April 25, 1928 and died July 5, 2011. He was an American artist well known freely scribbled, graffiti paintings.
Twombly used the nickname "Cy", after his dad, also nicknamed Cy, was a Major League Baseball player.
After his return in 1953, Twombly served in the U.S. army. From 1955 to 1959, he worked in New York, where he became friends with many other artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.
He became interested in tribal art. Twombly soon developed a technique of gestural drawing that was characterized by thin white lines on a dark canvas that appear to be scratched onto the surface. Twombly also did sculptures assembled from discarded objects, similarly cast their gaze back to Europe and North Africa. He stopped making sculptures in 1959. In the 1970s, Twombly began to use similar colours in his paintings favouring brown, green and light blue. In 1978 he worked on the Fifty Days at Iliam, a ten-part cycle inspired by Homer's Iliad, since then Twombly continued to draw on literature and myth.
This painting (although looking simply like a lot of expressive stokes) is actually an abstract painting of a flower and shows themes of romance and passion. The red in this represents the petals of a rose or similar red flower and the singular green stroke is the stem. The eye is almost instantly drawn towards the center where there is an explosion of red and other similar colours.
I don't think that this relates to my current work but i do really like the abstract themes and how Cy Twombly paintings could be whatever the viewer wants them to be and in future i will apply methods and themes similar to this in my work.
Antoni Tapies
Antoni Tapies - 500 Anys Libre Catala (1974)
The son of Josep Tàpies i Mestre and Maria Puig i Guerra, Antoni Tàpies Puig was born in Barcelona on December 13, 1923 and dies in February 2012. His father was a lawyer who served briefly with the Republican government. Tàpies suffered a near-fatal heart attack at only 17 caused by tuberculosis.Tàpies studied in Barcelona. In 1943 he ended up devoting himself to art. He lived mainly in Barcelona and was represented by the Galerie Lelong in Paris and the Pace Gallery in New York.
Tàpies was perhaps the best-known Catalan artist to emerge in the period since the Second World War. While he was still at school, he taught himself to draw and paint. After came into contact with contemporary art through the magazine D’Ací i D’Allà,
In 1948, Tàpies helped co-found the first Post-War Movement in Spain known as Dau al Set which was connected to the Surrealist and Dadaist Movements.
Tàpies' international reputation was well established by the end of the 1950s. From the late 1950s to early 1960s, Tàpies worked with Enrique Tábara, Antonio Saura, Manolo Millares and many other Spanish Informalist artists.
The paintings colour scheme is interesting and different to most of his other works, it pops out and is hard to miss. The viewer is forced to look at the thing as a whole instead of one part of the paiting. I am unsure of the themes in this, to me it suggests struggle because of the finger prints. i feel my work is similar to this as there are expressive strokes and leyers that almost make it look like a collage.
