[Note: above images are from my gap year in 2015, which I spent trawling the art galleries of Europe and taking lots of photos of artworks that I liked. Over the past summer I have organised+compiled all of these. By doing so and uploading them here I’m hoping to find connections and identify common elements, creating a record of the things I felt drawn to and inspired by.]
Top two images: Pierre Bonnard.
There is something that magnetises me to Bonnard’s paintings. The panels ‘Femmes Au Jardin’ in the decorative / Art Nouveau section of the Musee D'Orsay particularly stand out in my memory. His practice was right in the thick of the painting movements and styles I love the most (post-impressionism, art nouveau, the influence of Japanese aesthetics on European art, artists like Toulouse-Laudrec and Marc Chagall…)
His style reminds me a lot of Peter Doig, so I wasn’t surprised to find that Doig has cited Bonnard as an influence and also that he was involved in an audio tour commentary on a Bonnard exhibition at the Met.
Doig on Bonnard: “He manages to use colors that are exaggerated, but don’t look…psychedelic. They exist within the realms of a reality that we can understand…he’s using his imagination. And he’s trying to paint things that he’s remembered or things that he can see in his head. And I think if you think about what things look like when you try to remember them, they don’t look like photographs. They don’t look like reality.”
Author Greg Lindquist: “An affinity for a dreamlike, hallucinatory, and foreign realm created by painting is what Bonnard and Doig do share.”
Bottom 3: random paintings from the Louvre that caught my eye (flying horses, a still life of coral, a sketch of lizards.) It was in these art galleries in Paris that I realised I’m intuitively drawn to paintings made after 1800. The medieval + renaissance paintings are impressive but I could move on from them without a second glance, whereas paintings made in the past couple of centuries made me stop and really think about them. About what they were doing with paint that went beyond depiction or religious narrative.
