Fauvist Barns, Heightened Colour…Vlaminck & Kandinsky

‘Sechoir à Tabac’

30 x 40 cm.

Oil on Panel

© The Artist
available

Just updating the post  ‘Sechoir à Tabac’ (it’s about the above painting) in which I chatted about ‘anti-fauve’ barns ….trying to keep a barn door rusty brownish red, rather than letting it slip into heighten, saturated colour RED.

With a painter’s confession – there’s always apart of me that wishes to paint all bright & fauve. Or least prioritize colour in a composition.

POST-SCRIPTUM 2009 : well, hell…. why not? want red?   …….   I’ll give myself red. Call it ‘artistic license’, though I feel Kandinsky was nearer the truth when he called it ‘inner necessity’ … these battles for creative freedom seem easy when looking from the outside, but brush in hand  & face to face with one’s own ‘inner critic’ …. not to mention the hoards of outer critics who churp distainfully about ‘but it doesn’t look anything like that’)… red, my friend, my desire, I see you & I feel you. And my palette needs you. A cure for green sickness. No red without green?

Here’s one of my painting that’s red, primary red & with no subtle deviations…

Wassily Kandinsky… FLOURESCENT RED BARNS… (yes… and why not?)

I knew I’d seen a ‘fauve barn’ somewhere or other, once upon a time, and whilst idling away a lunchtime in a bookshop in Bergerac, I chanced upon the elusive fauve barn again … Wassily Kandinsky 1908….(OK OK so it’s a house and not a barn … but it IS a very red house)

What a heady & wild painting, even a hundred years later!

It’s only a few years till those abstracts of flying circles, wiggly black lines & crazy mathematical grids tha would fly out of Kandinsky’s painting & carry on vibrating long after the mundane is done with. Mickey Mouse in his Fantasia. Who could forget that?

The gaucherie that frequently accompanies break-through paintings. Whilst I remain essentially a plein-air painter, these epoch-making, mold-breaking pieces still attract me. There’s a heat, passion & a vision beyond the copyist of nature. Call it art, if you like.

Wassily Kandinsky.
Murnau Street with Women, 1908
Private Collection.Courtesy of the New Gallery, New York

Maurice Vlaminck
1905
‘Restaurant at Merly-le-Roi’

price : very probably more than you can afford.

It must have blown Vlaminck’s mind when he painted this wonderful painting. Jamais vu…never before seen, a red like you only see in your dreams or on yur palette or in true art….