Gauguin Says Hi
We all know a Paul Gauguin. You know, the type who walks around with a monkey on his shoulder and spends the last years of his life in a Tahitian hut with a 13 year old girl? Yeah, those types.
Often known as a founder of modern art, Gauguin (1848 - 1903) went against painting from nature and opted for “restoring painting to its sources” — imagination and the primal emotional response to a subject. He flattened forms, distorted shapes, and used intense colors for subjective reaction to what he’s seen.
Gauguin would produce art occasionally throughout his life, but didn’t go full time until he was 35. Before that he was a stock broker and a middle-class father of five. When he left it all for art, he went through many mental and financial troubles. But ultimately it was what he called his longing for the unknown, that kept him going. Before his death, he wrote “It is true I know very little but I prefer the little that comes from myself. And who knows whether this little, taken up by others, won’t become something great?”
Maurice Denis, a painter, once said of him, “Gauguin freed us from all the restraints which the idea of copying nature had placed upon us.”
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