Hayden Minor

 

"Hayden Minor -  is a young abstract artist and photographer from the Chicago suburbs. Beginning his art career taking photos as a young teenager, he was taking as many pictures as he could on any camera he could find. Soon, however, Hayden found his second passion: painting.
With the love and support from his mother, he began creating paintings, sometimes amounting to two or three a day. Channelling his inner child, Hayden displays grim topics such as drug addiction, violence, and political turmoil in his paintings through an abstract, jeuvenile art style. The purpose of this is to help break down these complex societal issues and display them in a basic, simple view. This, he hopes, will help in perspective and understanding among people.
Hayden is now in the process of creating an online artist coalition through his newly created HARM Gallery, an online gallery which promotes accepted artists. There, they are able to sell and display their work for free. In addition to this project, he hopes to place his own art in a gallery somewhere in the Midwest and make a living selling his paintings. "

More works by the artist

 

Domoto Hisao - Avant-Garde Abstract Art - Gutai Group

"Domoto Hisao was also born in 1928, and was primarily trained as a nihonga artist in his youth. When he moved to France in 1955, the artist found it increasingly difficult to continue using Japanese pigments as the dominant medium for his artworks, and switched to oil painting. His move to France also precipitated a meeting with the Informel group, who was gaining increasing moment from the fifties onwards. Almost immediately upon his arrival in France, Domoto’s works took on an Abstractionist flair, and were created organically with swift movements resembling half-circles swinging freely throughout the canvas. This bold movement is reminiscent of clouds or even waves, and aims to mimic nature. As can be seen in Painting 1960-14 (Lot 704), which is an early example of Domoto’s technique of mimesis of the ebbing and flowing inherent to his oeuvre, much attention has been paid to the balance of positive and negative space. Coupled with the light brushwork of each stroke, one is immediately reminded of delicate Eastern calligraphy or even lightly-pigmented scrolls, and it is easy to feel the amalgamation of such two worlds through the swift and bold undulations of his canvas. According to Tapié, who lavished praise on Domoto’s works, the importance of space was at the heart of the artist’s success at marrying Eastern and Western influences. They were all filled with “an ambiguous space that subsumes both the dialectical attainments of Western mathematicians in topological composition and the intuitive properties that Eastern painting has carefully upheld down through centuries. Which is to say that, no matter how complex, Domoto’s paintings are always elegant and intuitive, yet have the precision of clearly delineated proofs.”3 In such a way, Domoto can be understood as among the first of all Japanese artists—if not the first—to be able to marry traditional structured Western composition with the lyrical freedoms of Eastern philosophy."(sothebys.com)

  Avant-Garde Art

Corinne Michelle West - Action Painting - Abstract Expressionism

Corinne Michelle West (1908-1991) was an American Abstract Expressionist artist artist, who often painted under the name Michael Corinne West.  Born in Chicago, she attended the Cincinnati Art Academy and graduated in 1930.  She had her first solo show at the Rochester Art Club in 1936, around the same time she began going by Mikael to aid in her success.  In 1940, West adopted Michael, which she used in her everyday life as well as her painting.  In the late thirties she met Arshile Gorky, an early leader of the New York school.  They became close, and West became his muse.  They were probably lovers, but it is known that Gorky asked West to marry him several times, but she refused.  While some of her early work used figuration, West turned to pure abstraction before many of her contemporaries.  Her work demonstrates a profound understanding of the nature and effect of abstraction.  West occasionally used all black in her paintings, but most of her works are explosions of color.  Her later work demonstrates the same profound exploration of line and color.  The Wiz is a powerful work, that feels somewhat primal. There is an aggression that comes to mark some of West's paintings and this piece tends toward that energy, but does not feel angry, but rather ecstatically intense.  Using only primary colors, black, and white, West adds to that sense of primal urgency to create a very effective and beautiful painting. 

Paul-Émile Borduas

Paul-Émile Borduas (November 1, 1905 – February 22, 1960) was a Québec painter known for his abstract paintings. He was the leader of the avant-garde Automatiste movement and the chief author of the Refus Global manifesto of 1948. Borduas had a profound impact on the development of the arts and of thought, both in the province of Quebec and in Canada.Borduas was born on November the first, 1905, in Saint-Hilaire, Quebec (a small village 50 kilometers from Montréal). He was the fourth child of Magloire Borduas and Éva Perrault. As a child he engaged in bricolage - his first known artistic activity. He received five years of formal elementary school education, (which ended at the age of twelve) and some private lessons from a village resident. Fortuitously, Borduas met Ozias Leduc in the winter of 1921-1922, and Leduc agreed to take the young artist under his wing. At the age of sixteen he became an apprentice to Ozias Leduc, who was a church painter and decorator. Leduc provided Borduas with a basic artistic training, teaching him how to restore and decorate churches. Leduc arranged for Borduas' instruction at the École Technique, in 1919, in Sherbrooke, Québec. In 1923, assisted by a scholarship Leduc had secured for him, he enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, continuing to work for Leduc at the same time. He received prizes for his paintings at both of these institutions. Despite discord between Borduas and the school administration, he continued his studies at Leduc's urgings

 Borduas wrote Refus Global (or "Total Refusal", anglicized) in late 1947- early 1948. It was disseminated in a folder that contained other Automatists' writings. This piece was originally intended to accompany an Automatist showing, however it was actually distributed alone. "Global Refusal" served as an important manifesto that advocated the separation of church and state in Quebec, especially for the arts. In it Borduas "denounces the forces of oppression that had made of Quebec a suffocating environment. hostile to both individual and collective creativity".
    We foresee a future in which man is freed from useless chains, to realize a plenitude of individual gifts, in necessary unpredictability, spontaneity and resplendent anarchy. Until then, without surrender or rest, in community of feeling with those who thirst for better life, without fear of set-backs, in encouragement or persecution, we shall pursue in joy our overwhelming need for liberation.
Four hundred copies of the manifesto went on sale August 9, 1948. Borduas was dismissed from l'École du Meuble on September 2 as a direct result of his involvement in this social critique. Even those who had tired of the repressive Duplessis régime, and advocated great social changes in Québec, were reluctant to back Borduas' thorough condemnation of the Catholic Church—such a central influ nce on the French Canadian populace.

 Borduas was ostracized, he was unable to attain employment and this was necessarily problematic as he was a father. He decided to take matters into his own hands. Borduas produced another piece in his defence, «Projections Libérantes» («Liberating Projections»), which he completed in February 1949.[7] Unfortunately, this more moderate composition, which clearly communicated Borduas' intentions in releasing «Refus Global», was not enthusiastically received by the public or the presses. However, despite early denouncements, the manifesto marked the beginning of profound social change in Quebec and signaled the dawn of the Quiet Revolution.In 1953 Borduas moved to New York, where he saw the works of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Mark Rothko and began to use the palette knife to apply his paint. In 1955 he moved back to Paris where he died of a heart attack in 1960.
In 1954, works by Borduas, along with those of B. C. Binning and Jean-Paul Riopelle represented Canada at the Venice Biennale. In 1955 he represented Canada at the 3rd Bienal de São Paulo. In 1960 the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam gave him the posthumous exhibition, «Borduas 1905–1960» . In 1988 the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts gave him an enormous retrospective exhibition curated by François-Marc Gagnon.In May 2012 his painting Froissement Multicolore sold for $663,750 at auction, surpassing the artist's previous auction price record by $150,000.Wikipedia