Year 10 Art Dorrit Black
This exhibition of Dorrit Black’s work celebrates a great Australian modernist whose works range from portraits and landscapes to elegant figurative linocuts. Black`s career developed in Europe and Australia during the first half of the twentieth century, and was influenced by modern art practices of her time, particularly cubism.
A reserved young woman from a wealthy Adelaide family, Black was mindful that marriage might restrict her desire to be an artist. She was highly-‐talented, and surrounded by creative family role models of educated and successful women. But while her abilities pointed to a career in the visual arts, she lived in a society that did not value professional women. Black had grown up in an Australia that, along with Britain, had for decades been grappling with changes in attitudes to women’s rights and to suffrage. Black studied art in Adelaide, Sydney and Europe where she attended several art studios. She honed her skills and style through exploring the avant-‐garde international movements of her day, modernism and cubism. Black belonged to a circle of other emerging Australian artists, including Grace Crowley and Anne Dangar. At the age of thirty-‐five, like many of her peers, Black sailed to Europe to study the contemporary art scene there. During her two years away her painting style matured as she absorbed the ideas of French cubist painters, André Lhote and Albert Gleizes. Black had a passion to promote modern art in Australia, becoming the first woman to open an art gallery, the Modern Art Centre, near the new Sydney Harbour Bridge, where works by Australian modern artists were shown. However her progressive life in Sydney came to an end in 1933 when, at the age of forty-‐two, she reluctantly agreed to return to Adelaide to support her widowed mother. She adapted well to this enormous change by continuing to paint and teach, and by becoming an active member of Adelaide’s art community. Her work The Olive Plantation, set in the Skye foothills, was painted in her Magill studio in 1946 from preliminary drawings and watercolours.
Andre Lhote Andre Lhote was a French painter, sculptor, teacher and writer on art. He was interested in mathematics and the use of the golden mean (section d’or) which he used this to construct his compositions. Lhote has painted a landscape composed of many different views. The landscape is broken up, analysed and re-‐assembled in an abstract form, the image becoming increasingly fragmented and distorted. The landscape is not represented as a single viewpoint but as a composite of multiple viewpoints. In 1922 Lhote established the Académie André Lhote, and his theory of art, based on a personal understanding of Cubism and appreciation of Cezanne’s work, inspired the Australian modernist painters Grace Crowley, Anne Dangar, and Dorrit Black, who studied at the Academie in the late 1920s. Lhote used the underlying geometric structure of the landscape as a means to depict the poetic and soulful expression of nature. Blocks of colour represent the trees and buildings. Short, parallel hatched strokes of paint are applied to the canvas to ease, disguise, and soften the edge between solid and void. Lhote has used simplicity of form, angularity, and abstraction in his work. Lhote encouraged his students to develop a cubist vision in their work. Students began with sketches of still life groupings or from life drawing classes of Parisian models. A morning studio session might have a nude female model as the subject, and in the afternoon perhaps two sailors would be drawn. After two weeks of sketching Lhote expected his students to ‘produce a composition from these drawings’.
For this stage Lhote had his students redraw their sketches into pencil compositions for later development into oil paintings. Their task was to modify previously-‐sketched images to fit an underlying grid which was drawn first. Following this grid, geometric curved lines were made, and objects were linked together by applying ‘passages’ of tonal colour between them, sometimes overlapping.
Lhote’s purpose was to help students flatten their images of three-‐dimensional figures into more two-‐dimensional arrangements. Black’s Composition study – sailors and girls has incorporated Lhote’s teachings. We can see the structure of an underlying grid in her background of geometric tonal shapes and in the human forms. These merge with their surroundings and each other through her use of ‘passages’ of tonal colour. Her line work which defines parts of the figures contributes to the flattened look.
RESPONDING ACTIVITY
Andre Lhote, France, 1885–1962, Church at Normandy (Église de Normandie), 1911, Paris, oil on canvas, 38.0 x 44.0 cm; Gift of the Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation assisted by Frank and Mary Choate 2008 © André Lhote licensed by VISCOPY, Australia, 2009
• What shapes can you see in this painting? Notice how these shapes are often repeated. • Use the information provided on the golden mean, and explain how it has been used in Lhote’s
painting. • Compare and contrast Lhote’s painting with Mirmande by Dorrit Black
Dorrit Black, Australia, 1891-‐1951, Mirmande, 1928, Mirmande, Drôme, France, oil on canvas, 60.0 x 73.8 cm, Elder Bequest Fund 1940, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
Year 10 Dorrit Black Landscape Painting
Your task is to create a landscape painting based on the compositional and painting techniques of Dorrit Black. You will be required to complete research, ideation, a final painting and a practitioner's statement. RESEARCH Complete the in class activities of identifying the golden mean and the Black and Lhote comparison. Begin by researching Dorrit Black. Include images of her painting work with annotations. Your annotations should include analysis of Black's composition (golden mean) and her use of colour and technique. Do not retell what is in the image or whether or not you like the painting. (2 pages) IDEATION Begin to take a series of your own photographs to use in your final painting. Include these in your sketchbook with annotations. You may compose a fabricated landscape. Eg. Use the photographs from one image and the hills from another. (2 pages minimum) Here you will begin to experiment with painting techniques and colour matching. Use Dorrit Black's paintings as a reference for the use of colour in your own painting. (Teacher demonstration of colour and technique) • Complete a series of colour matching samples (2 Pages minimum) • Complete a series of thumbnail sketches of possible ideas. (2 Pages minimum). Manipulation of your subject matter (size/scale of trees etc) will need to occur to adhere to the golden mean
• Complete a small mock up in your sketchbook with painting samples FINAL PAINTING Sketch your composition onto your canvas and complete using acrylic paint. PRACTITIONER'S STATEMENT A 250word practitioner's statement is to be placed in your sketchbook along side your final work.
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