Artist Style Analysis

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1st Artist: Agnes Cecile

Personal Appeal The artist’s name is Silvia Pelissero best known as Agnes-‐Cecile. She was born in Italy in 1991. She later attended an art high school in Rome and continued self-‐taught as a painter. Her piece below is titled “loss”.


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The piece above is an intentional half painted watercolor image of a woman facing left, her eyes downcast, with the paint primarily describing the shadows on her torso. There is a series of blues, pinks and purples flourishing inside her head and two birds at the back of her head over the ear, almost as if they were resting in a nest on a side bun of hair. A long stream of blue paint coming from underneath the birds and back of the head draws the eye down to her partially painted shoulders and chest. This is where the viewer likely guesses she wearing a dress or towel.

I like this painting, not because of how it makes me feel currently, but because I can remember times when I felt great sadness. The simple choice that Cecile made to fade out edges and highlight the shadows and darker areas in colour, pink especially, seems to bring a seed of hope into the painting for overcoming the female figure’s loss. The painting holds interest because it creates warmth of tones through the watercolors. It also creates an interest in the feeling of freedom of thought due to the relaxed stroke choices, layering of colors like the complexity of brain and the artist’s attention to detail and broad strokes to create balance. Cecile communicated this message by condensing the areas of focus by creating delicate combination of overlapping splashes of watercolor in tones of pink, blue, purple and torquoise mixed with fine brushwork for the fine points of the birds and facial features.

Historical Cecile’s style reflects a millennial take on Italian futurism that was established on the cusp of the 20th century. Futurists featured red, blue and white as dominant colours and humans in motion. Futurism was a modernist era that focused on speed, technology the violence of the future. It later was responsible for influencing surrealism, Art Deco and other forms of art. Cecil’s art seems to rebel against the harsh, ridgid style of futurism with softer, playful strokes, splashes of overlapping of the blues, reds and whites watercolour paint, with dripping, naturally created suggestive forms. Her drawing techniques accent the edges and shadows of the forms that are necessary to make out the basic human shape and details of facial expression. She uses dark, small, fan like strokes in the crease of an elbow just to show that it is there, yet not to draw attention to it. She sometimes paints controlled strokes, other times she lets the color run or expand naturally and surrealistic like. There seems to be multiple sources of light in the painting as the edges fade out into white, revealing highlights on the nape of her neck, her forehead and her chest. She uses specific colors to convey certain emotion and life such as pink to give the face a human glow, a blue line to indicate sadness or tears and white for the temporary, “not all there” or unfinished nature of sadness. The speckles of paint in front of the woman’s face as well behind the head indicate


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perhaps she is moving her head to the right. However, the straight blue line and waves of blue above the head suggest the user is melancholy, deep in thought and grounded to one place. The birds however, contrast this outer shell of the body, suggesting she longs for relationships, freedom, joy or happiness that she once had as signified of the two birds nestled together and those flying around.

Thematic Perhaps the artist is trying to have the viewer understand that this person is struggling with loss and memories, but the process of being distressed or downhearted is natural because she is still human, beautiful and full of life and colour. The viewer should look for beauty in what memories there are and realize the world is still beautiful and shining. People look because they know there is some truth to this feeling the work conveys. Viewers subconsciously realize there is a balance to everything and even in loss and sadness, beauty can arise out of it after the tears are shed and memories are cradled.

Analysis of Style The space is filled with soft definitions of a human form, with a large amount of curving white space on either side. White lines are carved into the face and neck, likely through taping before watercolor, seeming to reference a sun or complexity of thought and inner turbulence. There is a strong focus at the top right hand corner with first the eyes and mouth of the face, then the birds, then down to the shoulders and chest. The edges use a similar style to classical Italian sketch artists in that the edges are faded out for what is least important to convey the meaning. The watercolor goes off the page almost to suggest it is a never ending, ceaseless emotion or memory that never culminates. The back shoulder is has a more defined edge due to the darker color. All the areas with intense paint are the most defined edges though there are no hard edges made with ink or pencil. It is as if to suggest a peaceful, soft sadness, versus an angry, vengeful sadness. The artist uses a value scale that is quite varied from soft, pale pastel versions of the hues to the more saturated versions of the pigments. The value scale darkens in shades as it goes up towards the head, the main focus. The piece speaks volumes of sadness, understanding, some of wisdom and life’s natural cycle of beauty arising out of loss. This female in the picture is still beautiful though she struggles with her loss and how to communicate her emotion.


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2nd Artist: Dale Chihuly Personal Appeal Dale Chihuly was born in 1941 in Tacoma, Washington, United States. He was first introduced to the properties and beauty of glass while as a child. He remembers discovering gem coloured bits of glass while beach combing. He later spent time as a fisherman on the shores of the New England. For his education he attended the University of Washington for Interior Design and the Rhode Island School of Design. Chihuly’s materials for the work “Blue Herons” are blue and white colored blown glass. His installation was on display in the Royal Botanic Gardens or Kew Green Gardens, Richmond, Surrey, England from May 28 -‐January 15, 2006.


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The two images I choose for the piece conveyed a sense of rhythm and life that represented great birds. The first image shows the texture of the glass and the segmented, divisions that give a fluid feeling of feathers laid flat. At the base of each glass piece representing a bird is a medium, hollow glass stem in variations of dark blue to teal, fading into a lighter tint as the stem travels vertically along the form.

This piece stood out to me as an abstract yet realistic capturing of a beautiful and graceful species. The birds seemed as if the reveled in their freedom and were dancing across the water, all in their own natural stages of being upright, looking around, drinking, poised for flight or sleeping. Chihuly communicated his message by studying the arches of heron’s necks, and bending the glass to follow their forms. He also looked at the most prominent bodylines when they stood on one leg to abstract the form into a single flowing sculpture. He arranged the glass creatures in a nature’s seeming random, idealistic placement near an open space of pond, near tall grasses. The height, color and grace of the conveyed movement through glass clearly indicated that the installation was describing the beauty and motion of large blue and white birds known as blue herons.

Historical Chihuly historically is known for his beautiful glass creations that reflect the iridescence and sparkling of light from that in nature and his imagination. He traditionally creates his art with a team in a studio called The Boathouse, located on


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the Northwest coast. He carries himself as a professional, is always well dressed and lives with a passion for what he creates. When describing how he began creating glasswork such as the “Blue Herons” he said, “I learned more about the technical and fluid possibilities of the material and soon became immersed in my glasswork.” He has taken his passion and shared it with others, directly through his over 200 museum installations and through the Pilchuck Glass school which he co-‐founded. His style is known for an amalgamation of tight and loose curves of glass. He uses different colours and thicknesses of glass, some that span the imagination and others that reflect a wilderness from the natural world. He introduces a scientific feel into his pieces by showcasing a flowing depiction of physics such as in his birds and other life forms from the sea. He shapes the rims of the glass to bounce light in all directions so viewers from every angle will see his magnificent works glow, immersed in their environment. Chihuly uses a “stick” or blowpipe to blow air into the glass, a unique process, because no other material can be blown to create a form. He is more fascinated with the end product than the process itself. He uses teamwork, with each member assigned to a certain task and the master finishing the end product. His style was initially characterized by creating environments, then shifted to Navajo basket forms, progressing later to aquatic forms and large speckled pieces called Macchias. He never completely closed a door in aesthetics and continues to make pieces from previous series in the past.

Thematic I believe the artist is just fulfilling his inner imagination and dreams by creating and placing added beauty in the world. It’s almost a way of an artist fixing a broken world. They add beauty since they feel a need to be a creator. He is not communicating greatness or splendor of himself or his works, but more of a gentle merging of reality with his own works bringing them his own version of life. He was a humble spirit that allowed him to say, "I don't think about how I'll be remembered; I think about what I want to do next." People look at his works because of the eye-‐catching uniqueness, similarity to reality and abstraction of beauty down to its essence. The forms he creates are as interesting as the hidden creatures in the depths of the sea. The way he integrates his pieces into exhibits and into gardens makes them a fascinating spectacle to wander through, absorbing and seeing through a great artist’s lens.

Analysis of Style His space is filled by leaving open space for some the outside forms, especially those


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integrated with nature. These pieces are known for their layering and bending of glass. Other pieces fill space with air inside such as in the case of the heads of Blue Herons, giving them a breathing, lifelike character. The edges of the Blue Heron’s work are both placed integrated with their environment of the water and above, are curled up in a proboscis like fashion. If he had chosen to represent a beak directly, he would have taken some of the beautiful abstraction away and the sharp edges of the beak would have looked like daggers. His decisions for all edges create soft and peaceful feelings, never aggressive or dangerous looking with perpendicular, harsh edges or sharp points. Everything is created with a flowing nature. He traditionally has used a changing value scale and saturation of colors, but in the Blue Herons, he uses a saturated hue of blue that fades in different degrees to a translucent white glass. The composition is structured to allow the viewers to be across from and almost surrounded by these Blue Herons standing in the pond. Their different body postures created a convincing brood of birds, their motion captured in colorful stillness of glass.


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Bibliography Arthistory.net (2009). Introduction to the Artistic Style of Futurism. Retrieved

January 15, 2013 from http://www.arthistory.net/artstyles/futurism/futurism1.html

Casden, E. (n.d.) Italian Futurism. Retrieved January 15, 2013 from http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/futurism.html

Cecile, A. (n.d.) About. Retrieved January 15, 2013 from http://agnes-‐cecile.cleanfolio.com/about/

Cecile, A. (n.d.) Gallery +Water: loss. Retrieved January 15, 2013 from http://agnes-‐cecile.cleanfolio.com/gallery/631458#12

Chambers, K. (1987) The man who made glassblowing a fine art: Washington’s Dale Chihuly and the glass movement. The World and I. Retrieved January 16, 2013 from http://www.chihuly.com/the-‐man-‐who-‐made-‐glassblowing-‐a-‐fine-‐art_detail.aspx

Chihuly, D. (2006) Blue Herons. Retrieved January 16, 2013 from http://www.chihuly.com/Data/Sites/2/PhotoDetail/IMG_1632_06.25.06_NYBG_TNR_B.jpg

Dtgpix. (2011) Dale Chihuly Blue Heron. Retrieved January 16, 2013 from http://www.flickr.com/photos/dansflickpics/5504697196/

Earle, S. (1995) Chihuly and the Sea. Chihuly Seaforms. Portland Press. Retrieved January 16, 2013 from http://www.chihuly.com/chihuly-‐and-‐the-‐sea_detail.aspx

Artist Style Analysis

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