Discovering the Artist Paul Gauguin 

Assignments:

You have two assignments this week. The first is to watch the videos below and complete the reading. The second assignment is to compete the Meet the Masters art sheet at the bottom of the lesson.

One of the most important dynamics of studying other artists and their art is to expand our mental, emotional, and ways of seeing the world differently. If we remain in our safe and small world of only seeing what we wish or think we see or understand then we become naive or ignorant of the world we inhabit. It is like a bird who only chooses to remain in their nest. Like a bird, the greatest perspectives come at a great height. The French artist Paul Gauguin was such an artist. He took great risks to get to such heights allowing for a greater perspective on life through experiencing cross cultural elements of beauty through redefining form, color, and space.

Paul Gauguin, (born June 7, 1848, Paris, France—died May 8, 1903, French painter, printmaker, and sculptor who sought to achieve a “primitive” expression of spiritual and emotional states in his work. The artist, whose work has been categorized as Post-Impressionist is particularly well known for his creative relationship with Vincent van Gogh as well as for his self-imposed exile in Tahiti, French Polynesia. His artistic experiments influenced many avant-garde developments in the early 20th century.

Paul Gauguin first used his family’s influence to land a job as a stockbroker at the Bourse in Paris. He married in 1871, started what would become a large family, and was well on his way to a comfortable existence that included enough disposable income to collect a few works of contemporary art. His early acquisition of paintings by Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro, however, only deepened his passion for art and introduced him to a milieu he would find irresistible. Before the 1870s were over, much to his wife’s dismay, Gauguin abandoned a promising career in finance to take up the life of an artist.

QUESTIONS of CONCERN:

1. Can you see the person in the painting?

2. Did you see the person immediately? Why or why not?

3. How many people are in this painting?

4. Do the lines of trees serve a purpose?

5. Do you see color like this in real life?

Gauguin proved a gifted student, and he was quickly absorbed into the Impressionist circle. Just weeks after the close of the eighth and final Impressionist show in May 1886, Gauguin traveled to Pont-Aven in Brittany, on France’s rugged and remote northwest coast. He painted Bathing in Front of the Port of Pont-Aven, as shown above, that summer, and its soft, even light and the steady cadence of broken brushwork reveals Gauguin’s late Impressionist manner at its best. Moreover, among the Breton peasants, Gauguin found the simpler ways of life he so admired and eventually would seek in his famous journeys to Tahiti.

Gaugin taught us to see greater by embracing a conceptual manner of seeing life as opposed to an empirical representation. This basically means that he projected seeing life through a different color palette, shapes and forms much as Cezanne taught us. An empirical (seeing directly) manner of seeing is simply projecting what we already see or know about a subject. The predictable is always boring and disinteresting. In your life, no matter what your profession, it is the individual that is unpredictable who is the most creative and most successful.

Assignment #2:

Drag this Meet the Master art sheet to your desktop, print it out, and add your own interesting colors that are unpredictable. When you are finished photograph the image and send it to ihs.db@yahoo.com .