The Superstroke Art Movement by Conrad Bo: 2009

Saturday, November 28, 2009

The Superflat Art Movement

To understand Superstroke the viewer must first understand Superflat.

Age of Superflat. To mark the first major exhibition outside Japan of the sensibility / style originated by artist Takashi Murakami, a show at MOCA in Los Angeles opening on January 14th called Super Flat, we present a little taste of the bilingual book 'Superflat'. Here is the Superflat Manifesto.

The Super Flat Manifesto

The world of the future might be like Japan is today -- super flat.

Society, customs, art, culture: all are extremely two-dimensional. It is particularily apparent in the arts that this sensibility has been flowing steadily beneath the surface of Japanese history. Today, the sensibility is most present in Japanese games and anime, which have become powerful parts of world culture. One way to imagine super flatness is to think of the moment when, in creating a desktop graphic for your computer, you merge a number of distinct layers into one. Though it is not a terribly clear example, the feeling I get is a sense of reality that is very nearly a physical sensation. The reason that I have lined up both the high and the low of Japanese art in this book is to convey this feeling. I would like you, the reader, to experience the moment when the layers of Japanese culture, such as pop, erotic pop, otaku, and H.I.S.ism, fuse into one. [H.I.S. is a discount ticket agency in Japan. By lowering the price of travel abroad, the company is having a profound effect on the relationship between Japan and the West.]

Where is our reality?

This book hopes to reconsider 'super flatness', the sensibility that has contributed to and continues to contribute to the construction of Japanese culture as a worldview, and show that it is an original concept that links the past with the present and the future. During the modern period, as Japan has been Westernised, how has this 'super flat' sensibility metamorphosed? If that can be grasped clearly, then our stance today will come into focus.

In this quest, the current progressive of the real in Japan runs throughout. We might be able to find an answer to our search for a concept about our lives. 'Super flatness' is an original concept of Japanese who have been completely Westernized.

Within this concept seeds for the future have been sown. Let's search the future to find them. 'Super flatness' is the stage to the future.

Saturday, November 21, 2009

The 4 Elements of Superstroke

As most people who has been following the Superstroke Art Movement knows is that the manifesto written for Superstroke is as follows:

1. Paintings should be executed using expressive even violent brushstrokes on at least some part of the picture.

2. Should a photograph be used for a figurative painting, the objection should not be Photorealism, but Expressionism.

3. If mediums such as pen, pencil, etc are used, the pen and pencil strokes must at least be overly expressive for it to be considered a Superstroke picture.

4. Paintings can be executed in both the abstract and figurative.

5. Subject matters such as Africa, light, dark, life and death are encouraged.

6. Collage, Stencil and Calligraphy may be used for impact.

7. The concept, Art for the sake of art, does not apply in Superstroke. In Superstroke it is art for the sake of Superstroke, as the artist must always strive for paintings rich in texture, or excessive brush or pencil strokes.

Superstroke consists out of 4 elements, namely The Stylized Image, Non Representative Abstraction, Realism and Combination. All of these elements are of equal importance, and make out the total collection of images in Superstroke. There has been a notion Superstroke should consolidate and focus on only one of the four elements, instead embracing all of them. Several discussions later and it was decided although it means more work, The Superstroke Movement will still embrace all four of these elements. Superstroke is extremely complex, and it seems that it will become even more so as time goes on.

In order to achieve the goals of Superstroke, namely to produce paintings to take art forward, it is important for the Superstroke Art Movement to incorporate all the elements of modern art.
Superflat started what will be a key point in a lot of Art Movements going forward, and that is to incorporate texture as a key element of the movement.

In Superstoke texture or the illusion of texture is always very important, but when you work with pencil for instance it is difficult to add texture in comparison with what you can do in oil or acrylic paint. Then it is important to go for the expressive line. You have to use incoherent type of lines to stay within the spirit of Superstroke as described in the Manifesto.

Friday, November 13, 2009

Superstroke

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Superstroke abstraction and the inspiration from Picasso

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon)

Here is the best decscription for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon) I could find on Wikipedia.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon) is a large oil painting of 1907 by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) which portrays five nude female prostitutes in a brothel on Avinyó Street in Barcelona. All of the figures depicted are physically jarring, none conventionally feminine, all slightly menacing, and each is rendered with angular and disjointed body shapes. Two of the women are rendered with African mask-like faces, giving them a savage and mysterious aura. In his adaption of Primitivism and abandonment of perspective in favor of a flat, two-dimensional picture plane, Picasso makes a radical departure from traditional European painting. The work is one of Picasso's most famous, and is widely considered to be a seminal work in the early development of both Cubism and modern art. It is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, having been acquired by the museum in 1939.^[1]

Picasso created hundreds of sketches and studies in preparation for the work.^[2] It was painted in Paris and completed during the summer of 1907.^[3] Demoiselles was controversial from its inception, creating anger and disagreement amongst Picasso's closest associates and friends. Picasso has long acknowledged the importance of Spanish art and Iberian sculpture as influences on his painting. Demoiselles is also long thought to have been influenced by African tribal masks and the art of Oceania, although Picasso denied that connection. Many art historians familiar with Picasso and his work are skeptical about Picasso's denials. Several experts maintain that at the very least Picasso visited the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (known today as Musée de l'Homme) in the spring of 1907 where he saw and was unconsciously influenced by African and Tribal art several months before completingDemoiselles.^[4]^[5]It has also been argued that the painting was a reaction to Henri Matisse's paintings Le bonheur de vivre and Blue Nude.^[6] Its resemblance to Cézanne's Les Grandes Baigneuses, Paul Gauguin's statue Oviri, and El Greco's Opening of the Fifth Seal has also been noted and widely discussed by later commentators. At the time of its first exhibition in 1916, the painting was deemed immoral. The art critic André Salmon (1881–1969) gave it its current name; Picasso had always called it Le Bordel ("The Brothel").^[2]

Superstroke lessons from Picasso

Picassofication in Superstroke

Notice the 3 figures on the right are painted in a normal style. The figures on the right resembles African Masks. This painting almost mark the beginning of Cubism, which started in 1907.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was painted by Picasso in 1907. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon appeared in the May 1910 edition of the Architectural Record, a US publication . Although it was labeled a "study", numerous sources confirm that the painting itself was reproduced therein. It wasn't published in France until 1925, when it appeared inn La Revolution Surrealiste.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon 1907. Oil on Canvas (244 x 234 cm)

Bull ( Plate I. - December 5 1945 )
(eleven developments of a lithograph)
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Pablo Picasso created 'Bull' around the Christmas of 1945. 'Bull' is a suite of eleven lithographs that have become a master class in how to develop an artwork from the academic to the abstract. In this series of images, all pulled from a single stone, Picasso visually dissects the image of a bull to discover its essential presence through a progressive analysis of its form. Each plate is a successive stage in an investigation to find the absolute 'spirit' of the beast.

To start the series, Picasso creates a lively and realistic brush drawing of the bull in lithographic ink. It is a fresh and spontaneous image that lays the foundations for the developments to come.

Picasso used the bull as a metaphor throughout his artwork but he refused to be pinned down as to its meaning. Depending on its context, it has been interpreted in various ways: as a representation of the Spanish people; as a comment on fascism and brutality; as a symbol of virility; or as a reflection of Picasso's self image.

Bull ( Plate II. - December 12 1945 )
(eleven developments of a lithograph)

At the second stage of the lithograph, Picasso bulks up the form of the bull to increase its expressive power and achieve a more mythical presence.

Bull ( Plate III. - December 18 1945 )
(eleven developments of a lithograph)

On Plate III. the development takes a change of direction. Picasso stops building the beast and starts to dissect the creature with lines of force that follow the contours of its muscles and skeleton. He cuts into the form of the bull much in the same way as a butcher would cut up a carcass. In fact, he was known to have joked with the printers about this butcher analogy. Also at this stage, Picasso introduces the use of a lithographic crayon to add more detail to the surface texture of the animal's skin. The overall effect is reminiscent of Dürer's famous images of a rhinoceros.

Bull ( plate IV. - December 22 1945 )
(eleven developments of a lithograph)

Plate IV. sees the artist start to abstract the structure of the bull by simplifying and outlining the major planes of its anatomy.

Ten years earlier Picasso had said that "A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is a sum of destructions." In view of this statement, lithography seems to be the most natural choice of media for this series of prints. One of the technical advantages of lithography over other printmaking techniques is that you can both add to and subtract from the image with relative ease.

Bull ( plate V. - December 24 1945 )
(eleven developments of a lithograph)

The simplification and stylisation of the image continues on Plate V. Picasso starts to erase sections of the bull in order to redistribute the balance and reorganise the dynamics between the front and the rear of the creature.

First, he reduces its massive head and compresses its features into the small area that was previously the bull's forehead. By enlarging the eye and flattening its horns into a more lyrical design, he creates a sharper focal point at the front of the animal.

Next, he erases a section of the back which has the counter effect of raising the front. He literally underlines this change with the bold white line that runs diagonally across the animal, parallel to the new angle of the back. As a counterbalance to this movement, he strengthens a line that runs in the opposite direction across the middle of the body, parallel to the shoulders at the front.

Picasso's process of development is like building a house of cards where balance and counterbalance of the individual elements is crucial to the stability of the whole.

Bull ( plate VI. - December 26 1945 )
(eleven developments of a lithograph)

At this stage, another new head and tail are created to conform to the style and direction of the developing image.

Picasso introduces more curves to soften the network of lines that crisscross the creature. Once again he adjusts the line of the back which now begins as wave on the shoulders and flows like a pulse of energy along the length of its body. The two counterbalancing lines discussed in the previous plate are extended down the front and back legs to act like structural supports for the weight of the bull. All three of these lines intersect at a point that suggests the bull's center of balance. Through the development of these drawings, Picasso is beginning to understand the displacement of weight and balance between the front and rear of the animal.

Bull ( plate VII. - December 28 1945 )
(eleven developments of a lithograph)

As Picasso recognizes the balance of form in the bull, he starts to remove and simplify some of the lines of construction that have served their function. He then encases the essential elements that remain in a taut outline.

Bull ( plate VIII. - January 2 1946 )
(eleven developments of a lithograph)

Plate VIII. continues the reduction and simplification of the image into line with another reconfiguration of the head, legs and tail.

Bull ( plate IX. - January 5 1946 )
(eleven developments of a lithograph)

While continuing to have fun with the drawing of the head, Picasso now erases the remaining areas of tone and finally reduces the bull to a line drawing. Only the creature's reproductive organ retains its shading in order to emphasise its gender.

Bull ( plate X. - January 10 1946 )
(eleven developments of a lithograph)

At this penultimate stage, the more complex areas of the line drawing are removed to leave only a few basic lines and shapes that characterize the fundamental forces and correlation of forms in the creature.

Bull ( plate XI. - January 17 1946 )
(eleven developments of a lithograph)

In the final print of the series, Picasso reduces the bull to a simple outline that is so carefully considered through the progressive development of each image, that it captures the absolute essence of the creature in as concise an image as possible.

Picasso's Bulls 1945

http://art-image-studies.blogspot.com/2009/04/picassos-bull-lithograph-of-1945.html

The above was the original link where this was published. Please visit the Blog for more art-image studies

Picasso's Bull Lithograph of 1945

Friday, September 11, 2009

The Art History Archive

The Art History Archive

To learn more please use this link below, as this was where the original article was published. Conrad Bo

http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/

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