Franz Marc – my inspo

I am a great admirer of Franz Marc (1880-1916).  He loved and respected animals and the natural world,  and is famous for his “Blue Horse” paintings.  The painting above is a small watercolour but shows his use of colour, the abstracted shapes of the horses and how they are integrated and subsumed in a larger design.  He was a member of an experimental artistic group, “Die Blau Reiter” in Munich.  I am interested in his empathy with the animal and his wish to depict animals in a different “inner” way and also in his development from tradition figurative art to abstraction.

I decided to make a study of this painting by “unpicking it” as I learnt from painter Liz Hough in St. Ives.  In order to get behind the skin of the painting and engage with it in a deeper way, Liz suggests starting by making lots of drawings based on small areas of a painting.  Here are some I have done.  They bear little resemblance to the original starting point but it is always present as a reference and inspiration and by doing these drawings I began to look more closely at and understand Marc’s painting better.

The next exercise involved using monoprint technique and colour to understand shapes  better.  I have had a go at this but am not sure I have fully grasped it.  The colours and textures run away with me.

For Stage 3 we were asked to create a 3d construct from cut-outs of simple line drawings.  Then I made drawings of this construction from many different angles. I found this a very engaging process. The three dimensional aspect tunes into my own sense of physicality.   Here is the construction and a couple of the drawings derived from it.

I made a series of collages on board derived from the set of these drawings, and then a large “travelling” final version on canvas.