freewheelin-on-line take 20 |
|
freewheelin 218 |
|
100 years ago this year the artist Paul Gaugin died on a remote island in the South Pacific. Gaugin started his working life as a Stockbroker but eventually gave up the orderly city life and a loving family to become something of a revolutionary in the art world of the late nineteenth century. He desperately sought the unconventional and found it in Tahiti where he portrayed the locals using vibrant colours and rebellious techniques. Ultimately he went the way of all wayward artists by dying of syphilis and heart disease at the age 54. Gaugin’s art is represented on this months cover by his painting ‘Woman With A Flower’. In fact I have messed with his canvass and have re-produced ‘Woman With A Flower’ 12 times in colours of my own choosing. Sorry Paul mate, but you know how it is: love & theft and all that. The original study shows a beautiful and sensual Polynesian woman. The book that is open in front of me describes this painting as follows: ‘Although a traditional pose has been used, the artist has avoided the usual rules of Western art. The forms are simple, the colours clash and there is no depth or perspective’. Talk about a revolution? You have it before your very eyes. Sitting in the rows with Gaugin’s Polynesian beauty is one Jack Fate, alias Bob Dylan, looking more like a cowboy than a Stockbroker. The buttons on his jacket are impressively fastened implying the tidiness of conventionality. The stare however could just be revolutionary! |
|
|
