Expressionism

Introduction and Influences:

This piece is a ripple of my previous expressionism pieces. I used Ernst Ludwig Kirchner as an inspiration for this piece, but I inverted his artwork stylistically. In essence, the way that Kirchner captures emotions and expressions is something I kept in mind as I carried out this piece. I did, however, reinvent several facets of his work, including the colors and the primary expression. 

 

This piece is an extension of my previous oeuvres in that I develop similar themes and messages. These include the subjective and equivocal nature of certain fundamental aspects of society, including emotions and language. At the same time, however, I attempt to convey them in a slightly different way. In my previous pieces, I used the medium and the motif of the text to develop the theme. I feel, howver, that through this development, I am now able to comment on my theme without the use of those facets. This piece features a face in its primal and fundamental form and as a fusion with an infinite black symbolic of the cosmos.

 

Historical Context:

Expressionism was a modernist movement that originated in Germany. Expressionism presents the world subjectively and distorts the perspective to an extreme in order to convey certain moods or ideas. Art was now meant to come forth from within the artist, rather than from a depiction of the external visual world, and the standard for assessing the quality of a work of art became the character of the artist's feelings rather than an analysis of the composition. In effect, the movement was a response to the dehumanizing atmosphere engendered by the Industrial Revolution and urbanization. It was avant-garde in that it subverted notions of realism: artists sought depict the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse within a person rather than the objective reality. Such art often transpires amidst periods of chaos and oppression, such as during the Spanish Occupation and Eight Years' War . Expressionism emerged simultaneously in various cities across Germany as a response to a widespread anxiety about humanity's increasingly discordant relationship with the world and accompanying lost feelings of authenticity and spirituality. Both of the aforementioned ideas are reflective of the oppression of emotions and the lack of sincerity, which are my key themes.

 

The style had many influences, including Edvard Munch - who painted The Scream, the most emblemic piece of Expressionism - van Gogh, and African art, which defined the arbitrary colors and jarring compositions present in Expressionism. Ernst Ludvig Kirchner is the primary figure in Expressionism; his group lead the foundation for the the style and had a major impact on the evolution of modern art. They felt that it was not important to reproduce an aesthetically pleasing impression of the artistic subject matter but rather to represent vivid emotional reactions by powerful colours and dynamic compositions. Even more so than Kirchner's group, Kandinksy embodied the nature of Expressionism, even though he gravitated towards the abstract side of the art form. I tend to conform to the more realistic facet of the style.

 

The inspiration for this piece came from Ernst Kirchner, a figure I had referenced in my previous works. Kirchner's studio was a venue which overthrew social conventions to allow casual love-making and frequent nudity. Moreover, Kirchner had conflicting attitudes about the past and present: his fears concerned humanity's place in the modern world, its lost feelings of spirituality and authenticity. Kirchner believed that powerful forces - enlivening yet also destructive - dwelt beneath the veneer of Western civilization, and he believed that creativity offered a means of harnessing them. This related to my theme in that it commented on the negative effects of progressive society: it structures things that should be left to govern itself. In that way, creativity, not order, transcends.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Process:

This was the first project I had undertaken where I used acrylic paint on canvas. In my previous pieces, my primary mediums were water color and charcoal. I did use acrylic paint in my last piece, but the surface was paper not canvas as I wanted to incorporate my theme through the textual background. As I whole, I really enjoyed working with acrylic on canvas as it was possible to go over what I had already done and correct mistakes. This was very much in line with my style as I go over my work until I feel that it's perfect. But even more so than that, I felt that I could paint freely rather than meticulously, which I feel is a more liberated form of expression.

 

I used very large paintbrushes, which were reflective of my attitide regarding painting with acryllic. As a whole, I attempted to make the piece as undefined as possible so as to be in line with my theme. I started with the general features of the face: they were somewhat surreal. I made them surreal because I wanted to distort reality in line with subjectivity, but suggest that that subjectivity is still compatible with the objective truth of the background.

 

I used red and black as my primary colors because of the tone they set. I will discuss their symbolic value later in my reflection. I had a bit of trouble initially with mixing colors as the black overdid the red; I had to wait for the paint to dry and go over it so that I could achieve the hues and colorations that I wanted.

 

The process for this piece was relatively simple, especially in comparison to my previous works. This is because of the simplicity of materials used and the somewhat abstract and surreal quality of the piece.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reflection:

This piece presents a milestone in my IB art progression. In the past, I needed supplementary ideas and digressions in order to develop my work thematically. But this piece removes these ostensible “smokescreens” (the textual backgrounds and the mediums) and directly comments on the ambiguous nature of certain constructs, such as emotions and language. The non-defined and unrefined quality of this face manifests this theme as it alludes to these elements in their raw and unconfined form. This is further developed by the primal colors: black and red. These colors are unfiltered, mirroring the objective truth that usually alludes us.

 

In the chaotic whirlpool we call life, only 5 things bring order: our senses. It is through them that we attempt to unravel a seemingly ungraspable truth. Umwelt is a term that refers to the world as it is experienced by a particular being. It hints at an underlying truth that encompasses our existence: it suggests that our “reality” is fundamentally limited and distorted by our senses.

 

We all accept the world as it’s given to us because it’s painful to acknowledge that we’re caught in a web of lies spun by our own senses or that an objective reality (whatever that is) exists outside our consciousness. It makes me wonder if our attempts to understand the universe are futile or misguided. This paradox of attempting to understand the infinite using our finite senses was one I grappled with for a long time.

 

In this piece, I attempt to reconstruct this paradigm by suggesting that we are, in one fundamental way, infinite as well: through our mind, we can overcome the restrictions placed on us by things like emotions and language. The mind transcends through imagination through which we can actually give justice to truth; it is what allowed Einstein to conceive of gravitional waves and what inspired the artistic beauty of Beethoven's "Appassionata". This is conveyed in the piece by the abyss-like blackness that coalesces with the face. The black symbolizes the infinite and our experience with it is that of a conduit in a timeless whole. The red symbolizes natural and elementary rawness. Therefore, despite our subjective outlooks, we can submerse ourselves in an objective truth or reality.