FLORENCE HELENA MCGILLIVRAY

 

Post 219 -by Gautam Shah

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SUNDAY Feature on ART of Architecture 

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Florence Helena McGillivray (1864 -1938) was a Canadian artist. After her studies, she travelled extensively in search of new landscapes. She travelled across Canada, the West Indies, France, Europe, North and South America. She was a prolific painter and art educator, who influenced early 20^th C Canadian modernists art movement. She was associated with the Group of Seven artists.

McGillivray stressed ‘abstract qualities of line, colour, and form’ through mass of colours applied with a palette knife. The colour and texture, reflect the Post-Impressionist and Fauvist movements, which she had encountered in Europe. She delineated her landscape forms with strong dark out-lines. She painted the organic elements and painted them with vivid colours. Her handling of the reality was not through shadows or perceptive distances but through colour and little visual aberration.

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JOAQUÍN TORRES GARCIA

 

Post 218 -by Gautam Shah

SUNDAY Feature on ART of Architecture -by Gautam Shah

Joaquín Torres García (1874-1949) was a Uruguayan-Spanish artist. He began his art career at Catalunya, Spain. He was an artist, sculptor, muralist, novelist, writer, teacher, and theorist. Torres-García published ‘more than 150 books, essays and articles in Catalan, Spanish, French and English, and delivered more than 500 lectures’.

Torres-García's art encompasses many classical traditions and 20^th C ‘isms’ of the current period like Cubism, Dada, neo-plasticism, primitivism, surrealism, abstraction, etc.

Torres-Garcia and Picasso were contemporaries and friends. Both began their artistic lives in modern Barcelona. ‘His work evolved from classicism to Cubism, whereas, Picasso's work did the reverse’. During 1903 Torres-García collaborated with Antoni Gaudy on the stained-glass windows for the Palma Cathedral and the Sagrada Família. He also executed a large mural for the medieval Palau de la Generalitat de Catalunya.

Torres-García art is rich with metaphors to connect with old with new, classical with modernism, or figurative art versus the abstraction. His portraits are rich with abstracted emotions. His city street or marine vessels form an articulated chaos entwined in multiple layers. His architectural forms and the colour remained distinct entities.

He lived and worked in Spain, but was well in touch with the art scenes of Europe, United states and Uruguay, He was an erudite scholar who influenced European, and North American and South American modern art.

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PAULINE PALMER

 

Post 217 -by Gautam Shah

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SUNDAY Feature on ART of Architecture 

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Pauline Lennards Palmer (1867-1938) was the most famous artist based in Chicago in the early 20^th C. She first studied art at the Art Institute of Chicago, than pursued it further at Paris, in the Académie Colarossi, the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and with American painter Richard E. Miller. She Palmer enjoyed a successful career that spanned for over half a century.

Palmer achieved recognition as a versatile artist through her portraits, landscape, still life and genre paintings. Her expertise of human figures was well received. She was adept in oil, pastel, tempera, and watercolour.

She began with an academic approach using dark tones but her exposure to Europe through frequent visits lead her to ‘conservative impressionism’. She began to exploit the brush strokes and pallette knife, for capturing the light and atmospheric effects. She was en plein-air artists.

Palmer maintained a studio in Chicago. During the first decade of the twentieth century (till WW-I), Palmer travelled extensively abroad, spending a few summer months, every year in Europe.

In 1919, Palmer became the first woman to be elected president of the Chicago Society of Artists. She was also active with the Chicago Water-colour Club, the Chicago Art Guild, the Chicago Arts Club, and the Municipal Art League, among other affiliations.