Artists research

Gerrard Richter:

Richter gave the title ‘Abstract Painting’ to one of his works. By presenting a painting without even a few words to name and explain it, he felt he was "letting a thing come, rather than creating it." In his abstract pictures, Richter builds up cumulative layers of non-representational painting, beginning with brushing big swaths of primary color onto canvas. The paintings evolve in stages, based on his responses to the picture's progress: the incidental details and patterns that emerge. Throughout his process, Richter uses the same techniques he uses in his representational paintings, blurring and scraping to veil and expose prior layers. Richter used a homemade squeegee to rub and scrape the paint that he had applied in large bands across his canvases. The artist ran his squeegee up and down the canvas in an ordered fashion to produce vertical columns that take on the look of a wall of planks. Richter's abstract work and its illusion of space developed out of his incidental process: an accumulation of spontaneous, reactive gestures of adding, moving, and subtracting paint. Despite unnatural palettes, spaceless sheets of color, and obvious trails of the artist's tools, the abstract pictures often act like windows through which we see the landscape outside. As in his representational paintings, there is an equalization of illusion and paint. In those paintings, he reduces worldly images to mere incidents of Art. Similarly, in his abstract pictures, Richter exalts spontaneous, intuitive mark-making to a level of spatial logic and believability.

Oscar Murillo:

Oscar Murillo leaves his calligraphic, mixed-media canvases on his studio floor to gather dirt and dust; the resulting paintings explore incompletion, transformation, and the realities of maintaining a studio practice. Murillo repurposes discarded scraps of previous works, turning his gestural abstractions into layered palimpsests that meditate on time and process. The artist’s inventive, itinerant practice also spans drawing, sculpture, installation, video, and performance and often considers notions of circulation and globalisation. Murillo is a contemporary Colombian painter and installation artist. Working in a wide-ranging practice that incorporates a variety of different media and techniques, Murillo investigates the cross-cultural ties in a globalized economy. He is noted for his use of text, recycled materials, and fragments collected from his studio. As a painter, he uses a scribbling method of applying looping lines and the occasional word such as milk, pollo, yucca, to the canvas, which is then slowly covered in debris by being left out in the open of his studio, a process the artist has likened to aging cheese. Taken as a whole, his body of work demonstrates a sustained emphasis on the notion of cultural exchange and the multiple ways in which ideas, languages, and even everyday items are displaced, circulated, and increasingly intermingled. Murillo's work conveys a nuanced understanding of the specific conditions of globalization and its attendant state of flux, while maintaining the universality of human experience.

Joan Mitchell:

Memories and feelings she associated with remembered landscapes provided the primary source material for her work. The meaning and emotional intensity of her works are produced structurally by a whole series of oppositions: dense versus transparent strokes, gridded structure vs more chaotic, ad hoc construction, weight on the bottom of the canvas vs weight at the top, light vs dark, choppy vs continuous strokes, harmonious and clashing juxtapositions of hue – all are potent signs of meanings and feeling. Mitchell was very influenced by feelings and incorporated them into her work, she even compared these feelings that influenced her paintings to poetry.Mitchel cited Cezanne,, Kandinsky, Matisse and Van Gogh as influences on he work. Her paintings are expansive often covering multiple panels, she painted primarily with oil paints on primed canvas or white ground, using gestural sometimes violent brushwork.She established a singular visual vocabulary rooted in gestural abstraction. She observed her landscape intensely and her acute visual observations of form, space, and colour in life were part of the visual memories she drew upon while painting.

Clare Price:

Her work explores ideas around the voluptuous materiality of paint, in the paintings visceral oil paint is set against more defined lines to create a rupture. Stains and poured goo onto raw canvas refer both to the body and to abstract expressionism, Joan Mitchel and Helen Frankenthaler in particular. Geometric shapes interplay with gestural elements creating ambiguous spaces. Her painting investigate the sensuousness of making, the palpable “stuff” of paint that freezes the hidden performance, the interaction with the body and materials in the studio, traces and residues of moments are captured like photographic exposures. Her paintings are intimate and bold, they have a definite connection to the language of the female body, not necessarily in its palette or tone but with the actions and gestures, signalling femininity at its rawest. The expression is both strong and fragile, honest and open. Abstract painting has remained central to Prices practice and thinking but has changed with her: from a language which merged digital and analogue (projecting and drawing antiquated computer outputs onto the canvas) to a looser more fragile and sensuous style.

Helen Frankenthaler:

As an active painter for nearly six decades, Frankenthaler went through a variety of phases and stylistic shifts. Initially associated with abstract expressionism because of her focus on forms latent in nature, Frankenthaler is identified with the use of fluid shapes, abstract masses, and lyrical gestures. She made use of large formats on which she painted, generally, simplified abstract compositions. Her style is notable in its emphasis on spontaneity, the term colour field painting was used to describe the work of Frankenthaler. In general, this term refers to the application of large areas, or fields, of a single color to the canvas. This style was characterized by the use of hues that were similar in tone or intensity, as well as large formats and simplified compositions, all of which are qualities descriptive of Frankenthaler's work. The color field artists differed from abstract expressionists in their attempted erasure of emotional, mythic and religious content. Frankenthaler often painted onto unprimed canvas with oil paints that she heavily diluted with turpentine, a technique that she named "soak stain." This allowed for the colors to soak directly into the canvas, creating a liquefied, translucent effect that strongly resembled watercolor. Soak stain was also said to be the ultimate fusing of image and canvas, drawing attention to the flatness of the painting itself. The major disadvantage of this method, however, is that the oil in the paints will eventually cause the canvas to discolor and rot away. Paintings by Paul Cezanne and John Marin were important early influences on Frankenthalers work.

Per Kirkeby:

Per Kirkeby was a Danish painter, poet, film maker and sculptor. He was one of the great experimenters of the so-called neo-expressionist style of painting, he rejected conceptualism, reviving a more emotional, instinctive approach to the canvas. Kirkeby’s canvases retained their organic palette throughout his career, his work oscillating between outright abstraction and landscape painting, often within a single composition. As time progressed, Kirkeby began painting over reproductions and amateur paintings as well. The artist says of these paintings, “the strange thing was that they came to play a big role for me...they became a kind of key-picture.” In some of his paintings, Kirkeby seeks to reveal or create structures based on memory and form.

Vincent Hawkins:

Vincent Hawkin’s monotype relief prints explore the idea of surface and spontaneity. Using colour, material, form and an extensive library of of sketchbooks Hawkins creates abstract works that evolve intuitively creating visceral suggestive works. Hawkins emphasises his use of play when making artworks, constantly exploring new ideas and process. Working in acrylic on canvas, cardboard, and paper, painter and draughtsman Vincent Hawkins creates rhythmic compositions of lightly colored abstract forms. “Play is part of the process, it’s where you discover through a kind of excavation,” he says. “I move the forms around and reconfigure them, if needed.” Hawkins cites Pablo Picasso, Paul Nash, and Kurt Shwitters as influences; the latter is particularly evident in Hawkins’ recent work, in which he liberates forms from the strictures of the picture plane, painting onto cutout pieces of cardboard and oval sheets of paper. Hawkins’ paintings have drawn comparisons with those of Henri Matisse and Paul Klee.

Part 2: fine art painting specialism

Part 2: fine art painting specialism

Scale and illusion project : Artist research

Confirm copying

Restore backup