Henri Matisse - Master Colorist

Today's post is about Henri Matisse [click here] a contemporary of Picasso. He is one of my favorite painters, high on the list. Here you see a piece done by me freehand on gessoed packing paper with pastel pencils and soft chalks. I scanned the image in at 600 dpi and opened the tif file in Painter 8. There I cloned the image and painted it with impasto brushes.

I did not alter the tone or saturation at all as the colors came through clear in Painter. I resampled the file in PhotoPaint as it is a 101 megabyte 8" x 11" image. Here it is a smaller jpg version for display on the web. I really enjoyed working on this in pastel on the gessoed paper. Adding the impasto brush strokes was also fun to do.

Matisse is known for his painting from Impressionistic to Fauvism on to his paper cutouts later in life. He was prolific in producing marvelously colored works. His sketches are also famous for simple lines designing beautiful subject matter.

To me he is a Master colorist and I thoroughly love his decorative approach to painting. I include one of my favorite pieces here that I found on the internet, resampled for display here.

This is only one example of his use of color and line and appeals to me because of the inclusion of the guitar. Please see the above link for Biographical information and more of his Art work.

I continue to play in the DADGAD Tuning on my 12-string. I did some recording through my Toneport selecting an Archtop Jazz guitar style in the Gearbox software.

The recording came out too full of bass and not enough treble for my taste so I did not keep the recording. I am going to try using only the Shure PG58 microphone to record with a clearer vocal tone selection to see if I can capture the truer tones of the 12-string. I did try to alter the pitch a bit higher in Audacity but it sounded fake, so I decided to re-record at another time.

Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
115 x 115.1 cm.
1939