Imagination For Northrope Frye

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Imagination, for Northrope Frye is the primary creative element in the mind that projects human desires and concerns upon the natural environment where human beings, like all other species, are born and thrive. This human environment is our home, the product of both our creative imagination we possess to construct a world to match our conception of it. In Northrope Frye’s essay an artist falls back on intuition and logic in their work. An artist feels what his world should resemble and what his intellectual resources try to achieve. A work of art not yet created will not be better or worse, from an already existing one, it will be only different. At 101 years old, Carmen Herrera is possibly the oldest working contemporary artist in the United …show more content…

“I never met a straight line I did not like,” said the painter of the straight line, Carmen Herrera. Important also: her love of color: bold, daring, strong colors, frequently only two, white and green – she loves white – or green and black. “A former architecture student says, she loves geometrical, rigorous forms and utter simplicity. The less, the better. Less is more. Abstract work from the very beginning, nothing figurative, for over seventy years.” Ellsworth Kelly’s colors are similar, they are strong colors, next to each other, the primary red and blue, the beaming yellow, the deep green, white, later the diptychs and triptychs, then the sculptures all screamed of importance. Kelly was eight years younger than Herrera and spent the same years as she did in Paris: 1948 – 1954. Like her, he showed in the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles. It is clear that the two painters had a similar sensibility, and surely they saw similar shows, visited the same galleries; as it turns out – for Herrera does remember him – they even knew each other personally. Who learned from whom and who was influenced by whom? Who was copied and who was imitated? According to Picasso’s Motto: “good artists copy, great artists steal.” Ellsworth Kelly’s works became more and more highly valued and today sell for several million dollars a painting. Herrera’s works have also lately increased enormously and cost a few hundred thousand dollars; …show more content…

He created complex linear designs, each subject to many possible spatial interpretations. “His best-known series of paintings, Homage to the Square (begun in 1950 and continued until his death), restricts its repertory of forms to coloured squares superimposed onto each other.” The arrangement of these squares are carefully calculated so that the color of each square optically alters the sizes, hues, and spatial relationships of the others. he encouraged his students to learn through hands-on experimentation. This progressive teaching method proved effective. Many of his students—Eva Hesse, Ruth Asawa, Ray Johnson, Cy Twombly, Richard Anuszkiewicz, John Chamberlain, Richard Serra, and Robert Rauschenberg among them—would later become some of the most influential artists of the 21st

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