Frank Stella
An American Artist
Frank Stella is an American painter who remains poplar after almost four decades of work. He was born in 1936 and studied at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts under Patrick Morgan and at Princeton University under William Seitz and Stephen Greene. After 1958 he lived in New York. He came to the fore in the 1960s as one of the most inventive of the new school of Post-Painterly Abstraction, a reaction against Abstract Expressionism. He was then exhibited widely in New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. A retrospective exhibition in 1970 was held under the auspices of the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He began as one of many post war minimalist painters, but then his work took a different route from the others, leading him to a "second career" in abstract expressionism. In this career, he struggled with issues, which had placed abstract art in a standstill after Mondrian, and Stella looked back to the sixteenth century for solutions. Stella has also been influenced by the Baroque period, first because of parallel situations, but also because of similarities in the creation of space ("Concepts in career: Frank Stella").
The point of departure for Stella in 1958 for his new approach to abstraction was the flag paintings of Jasper Johns. Using various devices, Stella emphasized the flatness of the painting pattern, abolishing the three-dimensional image, and he was uncompromising as he refused to permit the introduction of deep recession behind the picture plane. The result was that the figure-ground relationship was almost completely eliminated as the stripes and orthogonal constituting the picture echoed the contours of the format. To achiev...
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... some points I'm going to cross common experiences. Some of them are going to stick and become a little bit peculiarly mine . . . I don't worry about that. I worry about the paintings . . . the drive to make art ("Concepts in career: Frank Stella").
References
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Throughout the vast history of visual art, new movements and revolutions have been born as a result of breaking past conventions. This idea of moving past traditional styles was done by many artists in the 1950s and 1960s, including those artists who participated in the many different abstract movements. These artists decided to abandon old-fashioned techniques and ideas such as those of classical Renaissance, Baroque, or even Impressionist art. One of these new conventions, as discussed by art historian Leo Steinberg in his essay, “The Flatbed Picture Plane,” is the concept of a flat and horizontal type of plane in a work that does not have a typical fore, middle, or background like that of the traditional art from classical periods previously mentioned. The flatbed picture plane that Steinberg refers to is similar to that of a table in which items can be placed on top of, yet they are merely objects and do not represent any space. In his article, Steinberg explains that the opposite of this flatbed plane is the
...long career provides a lighthouse of hope to all artists who labor in the dark, uncertain of their efforts but determined to express their voice." (Schneider, 129).
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It can be seen in Chagall’s composition the application of these movements principles of arbitrary colour and reorganization of the visual field, but he incorporates these principles with a dream like scape to create his own personal style.
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The arts have influenced my life in amazing ways. Throughout my life, art has been the place I run to and my escape from the world. As I’ve grown older, art has become so much more than that. Every piece of art I create is a journey into my soul. It’s a priceless way to deal with my emotions and my struggles. I create art not only because I enjoy it and because I want to, but because I have to. Somewhere deep inside there is a driving force, urging me to put my heart down on paper. I become emotionally attached to each of my pieces because they are like dashes on the wall marking my growth. Each one is the solution to a problem I have dealt with and overcome.