This week, I’m going to go in a totally different direction.
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been doing landscapes and still lifes, both styles I already knew a lot about and already knew I liked.
This week, I’m going to focus on a style that I don’t really know much about: modernism. Now, ironically, this style isn’t super new or used at all today. But! Back in the 1910s-1930s, this style was all the rage. Well kind of. The 1920s can really be characterized by the rise of Utopianism, the making of an ideal world. Now, we look back on this and see how that irresponsibility lead to some terrible things, but at the time, this whole ideal illusion was all-consuming. Now, some modernist artists really embraced this idea.
The main theme throughout modernist work is the industrialization and the major changes occurring globally in the 20th century.
So, some modernist artists embraced the extravagancy and the innovation of the 1920s and made some uniquely American art that reflected the new mixing of cultures and the rejection of European Enlightenment thinking. Out of this came Art Deco (which is most commonly an architectural style, but can also be applied to art), another popular style in the 1920s which also captured the simplicity of modernism with the elegance and extravagance of the Roaring 20s. (Now I admit, Art Deco is probably my least favorite style ever, it’s so gaudy, but bear with me, the other half of the modernist movement is much nicer)
Other modernists, while still keeping with the theme of new technology and a shift in “ways of life,” rejected the fanfare and idealism and chose rather to look at the “common man” or the middle-class worker. A lot of this art is made up of strong settings and recognizable landscapes and figures.
Modernist art tends to be abstract, relying on color and form to tell the story, rather than details and shading. One of the most influential modernist artists was actually a watercolor artist! Georgia O’Keeffe really was the modernist artist. She started her career in New York and Chicago, painting simplified buildings (She never did paint the Empire State Building like every other modernist, but she did do the Radiator Building and it’s kind of the same thing) and still lives. When she got married, she moved to New Mexico and there she painted some of her most recognizable works, her flowers and her desert landscapes.
This week, I’m taking inspiration from Georgia O’Keeffe and the modernist movement to paint some close-up, simplified still lifes of items on my desk.
This is such a cool idea! My mom loves Georgia O’Keeffe’s work, and as a result we have a couple of her flower paintings hung up in my house. I love how vibrant and colorful this style of art appears to be, it definitely catches the eye!