De Profundis: expressionistic art.

I haven't been to Leicester for a quite a while, but when went to college there (starting september 2009) I used to go to New Walk museum and gallery a lot during my lunch breaks for a good old fashioned mooch. There, they had (and maybe still do) rooms devoted to the German Expressionists. I recall, I think, a number of water colour sketches (or similar) by Karl Schmidt-Rottluf amongst other things.

In the past, oh many moons ago, I was blown away by the bold and emotive images -primarily by Die Brucke. Their non-naturalistic, wild colours and gleeful simplicity (primitivism, dare I say) always strikes me. The colours always seem willful abstractions - I'm too tired for this. Point is, I love them. Franz Marc I always enjoyed for his retro-cubist-y paintings of animals (weren't they always animals?) that wandered around looking blank and outlandish through landscapes of fractured colour like breaking glass in a cathedral. Largely, though, I must admit: I loved his somewhat mad colour philosophy. It was like he had synesthesia blended with some form of ritual-bound autism. This colour is this, always this, to the moon and back this. I feel like his art is somehow like a pictorial form of solipsism: I am all that truly exists. Good lord, I'm rambling again...

I grew to love Egon Schiele (well, not grew, I loved him since I first saw him) - I loved him for his same seemingly arbitrary use of colour and his often strange distortions of shape, but I loved him most for his restraint. His paintings aren't mass spectacles of shattering everythings. They ARE something, they are of something, they are abstract and they are not - they imply things rather than insisting on them like noisy little children.

With recourse to my title and initial meaning for this post... 

Workbook pages on skin and outward appearance that can imply more abstract things:

FINALLY to the point, I did some more 'automatic' style drawings to match with the opening of my De Profundis story (I find it easier not to get bored if I had a narrative to thread through the work - even if it's shit and it is of my own half-sleeping origins).

With reference to my implied marks etc and to a bound up witch doll I made - 

Deep beneath the sea:

a girl... lay bound in kelp:

(i didn't have kelp so i substituted leaves. but later made an approximation of seaweed and now regret sticking leaves on it so soon. i should have painted the girl dolly and let it dry then stuck down seaweed i had made. grrr. rushing things in the excitement of the splashing...)

the force of something falling turned her loose:

I also have some loose strands of 'seaweed' that i may or may not use for something. I think they look pretty good.

Other than this and my context book I haven't done any work today (ho-hum) but tomorrow will arrive with arm full of faerie tales and the like. We will progress. Onwards and upwards.

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