Max SlevogtSlevogot was a ninteenth century German impressionist painter, and was one of the last notable painters to utilize the en plain air technique. At the start of his carrier his works were often were both dark in palate and tone, as was the norm in Munich Germany at the time. In 1889, Slevogot spent a semester studying at the Académie Julian in Paris, France, and eventually became influenced by French impressionist painters like Manet. In 1892 he attended the "Great International Art Exhibition" in Berlin where an exhibition of Edvard Mucnh's works was shut down by the Association of Berlin arts for being too vulgar. The outrage and protests of this eventually culminated six years later where sixty-six artists left the Association of Berlin arts to form the Berlin Secession. Slevogot became one of the notable leaders of this group.
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Around this time, Slevogot began experimenting with his use of color, and developed a fondness for lighter more vibrant colors and looser brush strokes. He also started to apply large amounts of paint onto the canvas at once, usually just directly using the palette knife. After the start of WWI, Slevogot was sent by the German government to be the official war painter on the western front. After witnessing the horrors of war, his subject matter got noticeably darker. |
On my left canvas I just mixed up a greyish darkish blue to thinly spread across the canvas in order to create a background for the darker tones I was going for with this one. However I spent much more time with the the first coat of paint on the left canvas as it would serve as my background or an impression of a cutting board. I probably spent an hour and a half just playing with splashes of color until I got it to the point I wanted it to. then I did a brief outline of the major shapes in my piece and free-handed it from there. In my initial sketch of the left canvas, I depicted a tiled background, However I wanted part of the background to tie more into the sporadic nature of the background of the right painting so I did just that. |