BERTHE MORISOT

 

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SUNDAY feature on ART of Architecture -by Gautam Shah

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Berthe Marie Pauline Morisot (1841-1895) was a French Impressionists. She was married to Eugène Manet, the brother of her friend and colleague famous modernist painter Édouard Manet. In 1861 she was introduced to Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, the famous pioneer landscape artist of the Barbizon school. Under Corot's influence, she took up the plein air painting.

Morisot was a regular exhibitor at the Salon, but in 1874, she joined a group of ‘rejected Impressionists’ (by the Salon). The group included Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley. Art critic Gustave Geffroy, in 1894, described her as one of the three great ladies of Impressionism.

Morisot preferred to work with water colours of limited pallette and subtle contrasts, rather than the oil colours. Unlike her Impressionist colleagues, Morisot used clearer forms rather than blurring. She in spite of adopting the plein air painting worked with home and family scenes.

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CLARKSON STANFIELD

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SUNDAY Feature on ART of Architecture -by Gautam Shah

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Clarkson Frederick Stanfield (1793-1837) was an English Marine scene painter. His one of the sons (George Clarkson Stanfield) is also a famous painter. He was apprenticed to a heraldic painter in Edinburgh. He went to sea in a merchant ship at the age of fifteen (1808). Later he started on a career of a theatre scene painter. Here he became known for the quality and speed of his work. But Clarkson throughout his life remained connected with the sea, painting in both oil and watercolour the marine scenes.

According to Ruskin, Clarkson was ‘the leader of the English realists’. He was considered Turner's nearest rival in depiction of cloud forms. He always worked on sketches, and rarely did an oil or watercolour from the actual site. He travelled to Italy, France, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Spain, etc. He used slightly brighter tones to counter the mellowing effect of ageing on colours.

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JOHN PUGH

 

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SUNDAY Feature on ART of Architecture -by Gautam Shah

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John Pugh (born 1957) is an American artist, who creates murals that give illusionistic architectural scenes. He creates illusion (Trompe-l'œil =French for 'deceive the eye) of 3D image on wall.

Pugh depicts the wall, as being opened and the surface like skin folded outward. His works are often called ‘Narrative Illusionism.’

Pugh offers the simultaneity of interior-exterior and reality-illusion, while scaling as well as descaling the wall and the building. He recalls the dream ‘where the wall broke open and it showed the columns’.

Pugh has been creating such murals since the late 1970s is United States, Canada, Mexico, Barbados, Japan, Taiwan, and New Zealand. He has produced more 250 murals in 30 years.

Pugh states that creating a ‘sense of place’ is paramount and for this, he conceptually includes ‘historical, environmental, and cultural viewpoints of the location’. His themes and the treatment are mundane and create ‘a pride for the place’.

The wall art in Trompe-l'œil (French for 'deceive the eye) style. These began in Baroque period (16-17th C) to mainly paint ceilings. It created illusion of the sky and integrated the upper section of interior architecture with the theme or story line of artwork. Since then many artworks from little cards to wall murals have been created. In the past few decades floor based Trompe-l'œil have been created offering depressions, protrusions and textures through manipulation of pattern and colour have been created. 

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