Rembrandt's flayed Ox

Soutine was apparently inspired by Rembrandt's "Flayed Ox". I was not familiar with the painting so I looked it up. It is very typical of Rembrant's style. The tone of the paint is similar and the palette also. However, I have never greatly loved Rembrandt, probably because of my fixation with colour. I can see the similarities between the two, yet I prefer Soutine's because of his is use of colour. Though, I find them both quite depressing to look at!

Soutine Original

This is the original Soutine piece, which I am publishing so the comparisons between the two are obvious.

As I didn’t really enjoy the Soutine piece, I tried to find other pieces by him. After doing that I researched his life to try and understand more about him. He was a depressive who’s lack of confidence in his work caused him to destroy his own pieces and he lived and died in extreme poverty. It is these kinds of tragic tales that really give meaning to paintings. Though, the sympathy I feel will not simply make me like the piece. I can’t because you cannot force the feelings, however, behind that painting is passion. For his paintings of meat, Soutine visited abattoirs and even brought carcasses into his studio. The rotting smell of meat caused a neighbour to involve the Police who Soutine angrily told, “art is more important than Sanitation”.

Certain qualities, besides sheer devotion, stand out for me in Soutine’s work. His layers of colour are quite amazing and since the copies we did, I feel a new respect and sense of understanding as to how he achieved them.

Soutine

Although I did not like the soutine piece for reasons I have already stated, I did enjoy the process of making the paitings. This is a copy of the black and white piece before I added the coloured/textured layers.

Soutine sketches

Some very fast biro sketches to get to grip with the shapes of the piece











This is an uncompleted version of the cows head I was working on - it didn't work very well as I couldn't fit it all on! Nevertheless it was useful to practise the head and get really confident with the detail.








Charcoal version of the cow, I used these to reference from the black and white photocopies as I thought it would be useful to build the tone up. I quite like the finished charcoal piece anyway and am intrigued by a possible pastel version.

Soutine

This is a picture of one of the pieces after I added the colour layer. I am quite pleased with it, but I hope to do some more interesting aspects of the piece, such a larger version of the cows head.

Chaim Soutine

I have been working on the tonal pieces for the Chaim Soutine piece. I have also researched other examples of his work.
I really like the piece above, it inspires me much more than the piece we have been working on. I also like some of his portraits such as "farm girl" and "woman in pink".

Joan Miro

I discovered Joan Miro in the book, Artist's and Prints a while ago. Since then I have fallen in love with many of his works. Recently I went to the town in Majorca where Miro's Studio was. It happened to be the worst day of weather I have encountered in my life and was soaked through so never got to go inside the studio - much to my dissappointment.

The last visit I took to London's tate gallery held quite a number of Miro's pieces which was very exciting for me. When I am lacking inspiration I often revert back to Miro's pieces, and have a couple of framed postcards by him.

Kandinsky

Kandinsky is another popular artist that I like. Just today I found a book on psychology that used his painting as the cover piece. The piece above (colour study) shows Kandinsky beautiful techniques, and brilliant washes.




The piece above shows how effective the use of colour can be. It also uses shapes in a very interesting way, thus I felt it was particularly relevant to this unit. The amount of bright colour and background wash is perfect and sets the foreground of well, and it avoids looking to busy unlike the Picasso one.




Another very famous piece even found in Pizza Hut toilets! It summarises colour and simplicity to me and shows just how effective colour and shape can be.

Shape Work

I really like this piece too, it really reflects how effective shapes can be on a darker background, one of the reasons I wanted to use a black hue for the background.