JOHN SLOAN

 

Post 183 -Gautam Shah

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SUNDAY Feature on ART of Architecture 

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John French Sloan (1871-1951) was born in Pennsylvania, USA. He, at young age, began working as an illustrator. He worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Press. He pioneered the Realist movement.

He came to New York in 1904 where he created his large collection based on the life on the city streets. He was a zealous walker, who explored Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side, areas of Coney Island, Union Square, and the Bowery. He continued to promote the spirit and vitality of the city. But found time to visit other places and people like Gloucester, Massachusetts, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Sloan consistently painted the female figures in a variety of activities and settings.

He was very much affected by the modernist painting movements, particularly the Post-Impressionist, Fauvism, and the Cubist. He experimented with radical painting styles. He believed ‘Consistency is the quality of a stagnant mind’.

He was not steadfast to any particular combinations of colours. He tried with different paint applications and colours, for the interpretation of the subjects. Many of the fundamentals of painting technique derived from his years of practice as illustrator and the etching expertise.

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EUGENE BOUDIN

 Post 182 -by Gautam Shah  

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SUNDAY Feature on ART of Architecture

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Eugene Louis Boudin (1824-1898) was the pioneer Plein air (out-door) marine landscape painter. He was first generation of Impressionists. In 1857/58, Boudin, befriended, a young Claude Monet. Monet inspired him ‘a love of bright hues and the play of light on water’. It was after watching Boudin, “apprehensively and then more attentively,” Monet, later paid tribute to Boudin's skills that he owed his becoming a painter to Eugene Boudin.

Boudin believed that “Everything that is painted directly and on the spot always has strength, a power, and a vivacity of touch which one cannot recover in the studio.” “Three strokes of the brush in front of nature are worth more than two days of work at the easel (in the studio).” “Nature is richer than I represent it”. “I am tortured by her splendour. How fortunate we are to be able to see and admire the glories of the sky and earth, if only I could be content just to admire them! But there is always the torment of struggling to reproduce them, the impossibility of creating anything within the narrow limits of painting”.

Boudin’s method, in spite of being an impressionist, was meticulous. It is said, he would prepare large number of sketches, before preparing a composition on canvas. Boudin eventually stopped painting beach scenes with fashionable men and women, and from late 1860s started working on studies of the sky, water, boats, etc. Corot, said to him, "You are the master of the sky." Boudin had extra ordinary skills to paint the clouds and the various shades of atmosphere, filling a large part of the canvas. In a career that lasted nearly 50 years, he produced more than 4,000 paintings and more than 7,000 drawings, water-colours, and pastels. .

 

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