It’s Day 220 and I absolutely had a great time painting today’s piece!  So much that I made it my profile picture in the Day of the Artist’s Facebook page.  You can visit and “like” that page as well. http://www.facebook.com/dayoftheartist

The title of this blog was taken from an interview in the Wall Street Journal.

Join me in honoring Martial Raysse today!

Martial Raysse is a French artist born in Golfe-Juan on 12 February 1936. He lives in Issigeac, France.

Raysse was born in a ceramicist family in Vallauris and began to paint and write poetry at age 12. After studying and practising athleticism at a high level, he began to accumulate rubbish odds and ends that he preserved under plexiglas. In 1958, he exhibited some of his paintings with Jean Cocteau at Galerie Longchamp.

Fascinated by the beauty of plastic, he plundered low-costs shops with plastic items and

developed what became his “vision hygiene” concept; a vision that showcases consumer society. This work received attention and critical praise in 1961, and at a commercial gallery in Milan, his exhibition sold out 15 minutes before the opening. Raysse then traveled to the United States to get involved with the pop art scene in New York City.

In October 1960, Raysse, together with Arman, Yves Klein, François Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, Jacques Villeglé and the art critic and philosopher Pierre Restany founded the group Nouveaux Réalistes. The group was later joined by César, Mimmo Rotella, Niki de Saint Phalle and Christo. This group of artists defined themselves as bearing in common a “new perspective approaches of reality”. Their work was an attempt at reassessing the concept of art and the artist in the context of a 20th Century consumer society by reasserting the humanistic ideals in the face of industrial expansion.

Biography above is from wikipedia.

French painter. He was a self-taught artist. His early works were assemblages which included plastic objects. This appropriationof prefabricated materials led to his association with Nouveau réalisme. Raysse exhibited a world, new, antiseptic

and modern. His approach anticipated that of the Pop artists, who likewise used objects and images deriving from advertising.

During the 1960s Raysse began to make more pictorial compositions, based on images from advertising as well as on high art. He also produced paintings in which a deliberate roughness of execution is emphasised by the superimposition of a single neon line. Raysse began at this time to create his own prototypes as another way of continuing to elevate bad taste and falsity to the level of art.

In the mid 1960s Raysse’s work developed around a number of recurrent themes; in particular he concentrated on the contours of a portrait, a mouth or an eye, repeating them endlessly using all kinds of visual formulae, and drawing on the most diverse types of materials.

He gave up his pictorial explorations in the atmosphere of the events of 1968 in France. When he returned to painting, his work had undergone an important change. Little by little he moved away from the urban world towards a return to nature, a bucolic ideal of a gentle and calm community with reminiscences of Poussin and of mythology. He used pastel and tempera to depict timeless magical or fantastic scenes, anticipating the vogue for mythological

subjects that appeared in the work of other painters in the 1980s.

Biography above is from tate.org.uk.

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I hope you enjoy my piece I created today.  I printed a photo of myself onto paper.  Adhered it to the canvas, then painted it!  I love how it turned out.  I will see you tomorrow on Day 221!

Best, Linda