2019 Photography Challenge

Urban Environment, July 2019

I take a lot of photos every day, as do many of us. I’m always keeping an eye out for inspiring, interesting or amusing sights. I already have an ongoing project, the Lost Collection which I first began 13.5 years ago: I looking for ‘lost things’ to photograph and add to my collection which! However, towards the end of 2018, I started thinking about a more purposeful and short-term photographic project.

I had been seeing a lot of monthly photo challenges floating around on social media, and I decided that could be a fun thing to do. However, none of the shared lists I had seen appealed to me wholly, so I wrote my own 30-day list that I intended to roll over each month. In addition, since I would be using my phone, I would use my favourite camera app, the Hipstamatic, and apply a different combination of lens, film and flash effects to each monthly set.

Some of the subjects I chose included obvious cues: self-portrait, nature, urban and domestic environments, clouds, sunsets/sunrises, animals etc, but I also included some prompts that would encourage lateral thinking, such as time, inspiration, nostalgia, literary. One of my prompts was the phrase, ‘Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue’ – quite broad, but sadly I managed only one ‘borrowed’ item! In November I even added an extra degree of difficulty and used fashion as a general theme for the entire month, which was fun.

With 33,000 photos on my phone, I only recently managed the Herculean labour of downloading my camera roll in its entirety, and finally finished collating the last few months. You can read a bit more and view the entire portfolio here – each month is separated into its own gallery.

Upside-down, February 2019

The Mystery and Melancholy of de Chirico

Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, 1913I am sorry to say that I never studied Metaphysical Art when I was at art school – I don’t even remember the term – but I must have been familiar with one of its founders even then, the artist Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1878), for his work has long been a favourite of mine.

In Italian, Metaphysical Art translates as pittura metafisica, and de Chirico and fellow Italian painter Carlo Carrà (a leader of the Futurist movement as well) developed it in the second decade of the twentieth century. ‘Metaphysical art combined everyday reality with mythology, and evoked inexplicable moods of nostalgia, tense expectation, and estrangement.’ [Wikipedia]

The Anguish of Departure, 1914

there is a disturbing and vaguely menacing mood in the dreamlike cityscapes.

When you look at de Chirico’s Metaphysical paintings (all produced over a decade, between 1909 and 1919), not only do they certainly evoke such moods, but you are not surprised to learn that they greatly influenced the Surrealists, for there is a disturbing and vaguely menacing mood in the dreamlike cityscapes. It is an effect achieved in part through the juxtaposition of tiny figures against monumental architecture. 

Delights of the Poet, 1913De Chirico was inspired by the writings of Nietzsche, ‘with its suggestions of unseen auguries beneath the appearance of things’, which translated into his own unexpected responses to quotidian surroundings and objects. He wrote in 1909 about the ‘host of strange, unknown and solitary things that can be translated into painting ... What is required above all is a pronounced sensitivity’— and both imagination and inclination I would think, to look beyond the surface of accustomed sights, such as the archways and piazzas of Turin where he spent a few days while on his way to Paris in 1911.

The Agonizing Morning, 1912His deserted cityscapes of saturated colour – inspired by the ‘metaphysical aspect’ of Turin, especially its architecture – depict strange streets laid out with illogical perspectives, littered with strange objects, all in the high contrast lighting of the bright Mediterranean sun that produced such long shadows. While he focussed first on these, he gradually moved on to explore cluttered interiors that were sometimes occupied by surreal figures, faceless hybrids of statuary and wooden mannequins.

The Red Tower, 1913Fleeing Horse, 1917But it is the cityscapes that I love the most, for their disquieting sense of mystery and emptiness, a kind of visual poetry. I would like to run into those paintings, just like the girl with the hoop in Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, to explore those empty streets and discover what is hiding around the corner.

The Nostalgia of the Infinite, 1913

All images found on Pinterest

Reflecting the Female

I only recently discovered the art of Tina Berning, thanks to that magical font of information: Pinterest. I love her technique – the use of mixed media, collage and ephemera as a base, the unfinished look of them  – more than the subject, although ‘reflecting the female role in media is one of the core issues in her artistic work. Her early passion for editorial illustrataion led her to an intensive contemplation on the human figure.’ [Wikipedia]

Berning has been focused on drawing and illustration since 2000; she has been published widely, and has had numerous solo exhibitions. Her website doesn’t seem to hold much information on her, but there is plenty more gorgeous and inspiring work to browse through.

Drawn to Lines

Femme se reposant, 1937

Henri Matisse (1869-1954) is one of my favourite artists. One of the Fauves, he was famous for his use of colour, and was known mainly for his paintings, but I in fact love his drawings, sketches and paper cutouts even more. The quote below from an article in The Boston Globe about an exhibition of Matisse’s drawings describes their elegant purity so perfectly:

The drawings of Henri Matisse must surely be among the most beautiful objects made by any human hand in the 20th century — or, come to think of it, ever. You look at them, you register their legendary ease and simplicity, and it’s very easy indeed to take them for granted — to assume that in some strange way they were born and not made.

Matisse’s characteristic line, at once classically concise and dreamily unmoored, has in that sense become a cliché, part of the visual air that we breathe. [Sebastian Smee, from The Boston Globe]

Arabesque, 1924

La Fleur, 1937The Handkerchief, 1935The Romanian Blouse, 1942I have been using Pinterest actively only for a year or two, and began mainly for the purposes of research. The more I used it of course, the more personalised my home page became: amongst a sea of vintage hats and fashion, out pop the works of Matisse, and in particular his line drawings, sketches and cutouts. With time, it’s been interesting to see the algorithms at work, refining my homepage according to my personal aesthetic. Obviously, the more Matisse drawings I saved – the ones I was naturally drawn to – the more I was shown. Then my love of Matisse drew in other artists who also employ linework in their art (more on them another time).

I don’t know how many artworks Matisse made – they seem innumerable, and he kept on working almost until his death at 84, but here are a few of his monochrome drawings that I like.

(All images found on Pinterest. I have tried to discover the correct titles and dates for each work, but searching in the Google is like looking for a needle in a haystack sometimes, and there are a few which don't include full information.)

Hanging branches, 19481942Tete de femme (Head of a Woman)Étude pour La Dormeuse, 1939Femme au fauteuil, 1941Lithograph, 1935Linocut; Sleeper with the long eyelashes, 1944

Simply Colour

Gaspé – Pink Sky, 1940Can you believe I had never heard of the painter Milton Avery before today? Thanks to Pinterest I discovered his beautiful paintings. The large stretches of almost flat colour of the first one I saw, Gaspé – Pink Sky (1940) immediately put me in mind of Rothko, except that it was representational. What I love about it besides the muted tertiary hues is the simplicity of the stylised shapes that form the landscape, and indeed all his compositions.

Seated Lady, 1953Conversation, 1956Avery (1885–1965) is considered a seminal American painter but seemed to have suffered from first being ahead of his times (too abstract early in his career), and when the times caught up and Abstract Expressionism bypassed him, he was dismissed as being too representational.

Like Rothko, he was concerned with the relation of colour as opposed to creating the illusion of depth, and was influenced early on by French Fauvism and German Expressionism. He was likened to an American Matisse (another of my favourite artists), and the art critic Hilton Kramer said of him:

“He was, without question, our greatest colorist … Among his European contemporaries, only Matisse—to whose art he owed much, of course—produced a greater achievement in this respect.” [Wikipedia]

Three Cows on a Hillside, 1945Fall in Vermont, 1935Horse in a Landscape, 1941Vermont Hills, 1936Working in New York City in the 1930s–40s he became a part of the artistic community and in fact friends with Mark Rothko, who paid him a high compliment:

“What was Avery’s repertoire? His living room, Central Park, his wife Sally, his daughter March, the beaches and mountains where they summered; cows, fish heads, the flight of birds; his friends and whatever world strayed through his studio: a domestic, unheroic cast. But from these there have been fashioned great canvases, that far from the casual and transitory implications of the subjects, have always a gripping lyricism, and often achieve the permanence and monumentality of Egypt.” [Wikipedia]

Read about him in more detail here.

Yellow Sky, 1958Interlude, 1960Images from Wikiart and Pinterest.