One of the prominent figures of the Abstract Expressionism movement in art, Clyfford Still was born on November 30, 1904 in Grandin, North Dakota. Still completed his study in art from Washington's Spokane University. Following stints of teaching at the Spokane Art Centre while the Great Depression, and at Washington State University, he founded the Nespelem Art Colony along with Worth Griffin in 1937 to bring out portraits and landscapes depicting Native American life in the Colville Indian Reservation.
Following two exhibitions in San Francisco and New York in the 1940s, Clyfford Still's first solo exhibition in 1943 did not showcase his characteristic style that would form someone else dimension of Abstract Expressionism - colour field painting. Still later became one of the prominent colour field painters, a style he developed after he met Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko following his first solo exhibition. It was Rothko who introduced Still to Peggy Guggenheim in New York. Guggenheim gave him a second solo exhibition in 1946 at her Art of This Century gallery. It was this exhibition that truly introduced Still and his mature style to the world.
Academy Art
Still wasn't alone in experimenting with colour, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman also organized colours, but in relative uncomplicated patterns. Still's style concerns with juxtaposing colours in separate forms. Unlike Rothko and Newman, Still's arrangements of colour are irregular, they look like flashes of colour that vary in shades giving the viewer the impression that one layer of colours has been torn off the canvas to retell the layer beneath. For this purpose, Still used thick impasto to generate subtle shades over the painting. This style can be seen in some of his most prominent paintings, named after the year they were painted; '1957-D No. 1', '1953' and '1964'. In the latter, the painting is chiefly consists of the colours black and yellow with patches of white and a exiguous red. These have been the colours commonly used in all of Still's paintings.
Still took up a teaching job at the California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco, in 1946 before heading to New York City in 1950. In 1959 he held an exhibition at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. The exhibition met with a distinct reception prompting him to donate 31 paintings to the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy. Still insisted that the paintings be never loaned out, clearly showing him to be single in the way his works are shown.
In 1960 Still decided to cut himself off from the world of art when he moved away from New York City in to his farm near Westminster, Maryland. He went on to hold solo exhibitions in Philadelphia in 1963 and New York in 1969-70. A permanent factory of his works opened at the San Francisco Museum of modern Arts in 1975, and in 1980 he was given an exhibition by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Clyfford Still won the 1972 Award of Merit for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the 1975 he received The Skowhegan Medal for in recognition to his lifelong offering to the art world. Still died in Baltimore in June 1980, it was the demise of one of the prominent and most unique soldiery of Abstract Expressionism.
sublime Artists Series - Clyfford Still - Abstract Expressionism Artist
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