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A New Arcadia: The Cloisonnist
Series 1994-2006
.
Read
about the series
This
series began from impressions gained on a 1994 trip to France
where
Simpson was influenced by the Post-Impessionist, Fauve, and Divisionist
works at the Musee d'Orsay and the Orangerie in Paris. While in Italy
he
was also influenced by seeing Roman mosaics and frescoes.
These
paintings and works on paper begin as spontaneous invocations of real
or
imagined places. One of the real places was the garden of the Fondation
Maeght in St.Paul-de-Vence on the Cote d'Azur, which is reflected in
many
of the works from 1994 and 1995.
The
origin of the term cloisonnist comes from the technique of
making
stained glass and was used to describe a group of French painters in
the
19th Century. Simpson begins most of these works without a drawing,
seeking
to synthesize the initial, gestural brush work with landscape elements
to make compositions formed of abstract patterns. The
arrangement
of colour planes in Simpson's paintings are not therefore a result of
doing
a drawing on canvas first, then painting it in. Rather, these works
begin
with loose underpainting, evolving gradually to more precisely defined
forms.
This
series was the focus of the 2003 tlevision documentary, A New Arcadia, The Art of Gregg Simpson.
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Last updated: Sept. 12, 2007
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