Inspirational Artists - Antoni Tapies

The period of his work that I find the most inspirational was his work beginning in 1953 with his use of mixed media.  He was extremely prolific and has an entire museum in Barcelona for his work and enough left over to be housed throughout Spain.  His work is so innovative, imaginative, and beautiful.  He is among my Top 10 most inspirational artist.  More information about his life and work is available at: Antoni Tapies

"Tàpies started as a surrealist painter, his early works were influenced by Paul Klee and Joan Miró; but soon become an informal artist, working in a style known as pintura matèrica, in which non artistic materials are incorporated into the paintings. In 1953 he began working in mixed media; this is considered his most original contribution to art. One of the first to create serious art in this way, he added clay and marble dust to his paint and used waste paper, string, and rags (Grey and Green Painting, Tate Gallery, London, 1957)."

"The paintings produced by Tàpies, later in the 1970s and in the 1980s, reveal his application of this aesthetic of meditative emptiness, for example in spray-painted canvases with linear elements suggestive of Oriental calligraphy, in mixed-media paintings that extended the vocabulary of Art informel, and in his oblique allusions to imagery within a fundamentally abstract idiom, as in Imprint of a Basket on Cloth (1980).^[6] Among the artists' work linked in style to that of Tàpies is that of the American painter Julian Schnabel as both have been connected to the art term "Matter".^[7]"

John Cage Watercolors

I had no idea John Cage did visual art. While in the Houston Museum of Fine Arts bookstore recently, I came across "The Sight of Silence: which documents workshops he did at the Mountain Lake Workshop in Appalachian Virginia in 1990 --and the work is fantastic!

Note the effect of the paper laid over 
burning straw 

I so resonated with his process!  He uses randomness, chance (actually using the I Ching to chose the sequence of colors), natural materials (stones for shapes, feathers for applying inks, burning straw to tint the paper, etc.) while refining the right to judge the aesthetics of the final product. 

                                           

                                                            Using natural materials -- stones selected 

                                                   for shape, feathers to apply the inks

He makes judicious use of the enzo which the book defines as:  "a spontaneously painted circular form that is particularly identified with the japans practice of Zen and is under soon as a sudden manifestation of the immediacy of enlighten self-insight"

The results are delicate, ethereal works of art that are so compelling!