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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