09/01/2004: "Who's Stlye is it Anyway?"

Today a fellow Alaskan blogger (Markus) asked the following question:

"Does your work fall into any sort of style that I might be able to research into?"

I may have to defer to Holly on this one (Oh art historian extraordinare)...

I did study art history in school but after a certain date everything is lumped into "Contemporary" or am I wrong? All I can say is that I've been influenced by the Fauvists (particularly Matisse) and the related Expressionists (particularly Gauguin), the Austrian Expressionists Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, and finally the German Expressionists Edvard Munch and my hero, Kathe Kollowitz.

But, I would be curious if anyone else has an opinion on this? And similarly, how would you classify your own work, or would you?

How can one classify contemporary work by referring to art movements of the past anyway? Is that allowed? I'm so out of the loop on this. Anna is another good one to ask.

Replies: 1 Comment

on Friday, September 3rd, holly said

Well, I can honestly say that your style does not fall under the rubrics of Merovingian, Carolingian, Ottonian, Romanesque or Gothic "styles" (and all those titles entail), so your style is sufficiently out of my range of expertise. :-D

That said, your portraits (black and white) remind me a lot of Egon Schiele's style and your bright colorful goodies definitely have a Fauvist flavor, but honestly, I'd rather look at your stuff than a Matisse any day. Your colors have a transluscency to them that I've not seen evidenced as a general trait of Fauvism, but then again, I'm a medievalist and haven't looked at a large number of Fauvist works.