Artists are always responding to the world around them trying to express their perception and feelings in artistic form.
Across each unit in year 8 you will have common environmental themes: 'Our School, Our World', 'The Bush and the Burbs' and 'Our Environment'.
You will learn to see well and find an individual visual way to express your perception of the world around you just as the Fauve artists did.
This presentation provides a context to understand the influences and inspiration that led to the artists making their artworks.
WORLD, ARTIST, ARTWORK AND AUDIENCE
The Artist
This youthful vigor and hostility to the conventions of Impressionism, led the Fauves to challenge the traditions of art. They were more interested in making paintings that expressed their sensations and feelings about places than merely describing the visible world.
The Audience
These works displayed such vibrant colours and brushstrokes that the artists were referred to by an art critic as as 'la cage aux Fauves' (wild beasts) and at Collioure the new art movement of Fauvism developed.
The World
Collioure is a small town on the Mediterranean Sea in Southern France. Matisse and his family spent many summers in Collioure, with 1905 being the most notable. During this time he was joined by Derain, and together they produced 242 artworks in and around the village.
Collioure was the opposite to grey, urban, industrialised Paris. It was full of light, space and colour and inspired a sense of Joy and Freedom. This is the environment that inspired the young Fauves in 1905.
The other influence on their painting was the work of Post Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin. It was Gauguin’s use of symbolic colour that inspired the Fauves to use colour to represent a range of emotions.
The Fauves in turn influenced the emerging German Expressionist painters
The Fauve artists were young, energetic and carefree when they visited Collioure.
THE FAUVES IN COLLIOURE
(THE WORLD)
Perhaps Fauvism wouldn’t have been different if Matisse and Derain hadn’t spent the summer of 1905 in Collioure
Other artists responding to their environment
Its interesting to understand the different ways artists have responded to their environments.
Note that the artists below don't copy rather they interpret the landscape in their own personal ways.
Translating your own environment
In this unit you will learn to translate objective, non personal drawings of your environment into a subjective (personal) artwork.
You will draw, using careful observation and understanding of linear perspective (SEEING), letting go of pre conceived notions of what a building might look like (KNOWING).
You will then make a painting using the French Fauve style as a model to interpret your drawing, employing freedom of expression through application of paint, choice of colour and distortion of perspective (FEELING)
In the first exercise you must use observation (seeing well).
In your interpretive painting you should create interesting angles, choose something that will translate well, look at light and find interesting ways to interpret the environment according to your experience and feelings using a Fauve style.