Inspired by a Master: Piet Mondriaan

January 20, 2010

Painting by Piet Mondria

Nike Shoe inspired by Piet Mondrian

Piet Mondrian is a dutch painter who became famous for his work in the early part of the 1900. His work Has Inspired many to copy his style or put his simple idea in to use in there own product. Working in the De Stijl style his painting idea was to take abstraction to a form where you were painting things using forms that didn’t represent the subject at all. Most of his paintings from this era are white canvases with bold black grid lines create boxes filled with primary colors. The images are based on bring harmony with in the image using just simple vertical line and basic colors. this of course made it easy for other to recreate the style for there own function. I am often asked Oh why are artist like Mondrian and pollack famous any one could make painting like that, and I will agree I think there is a lot of art in galleries and things that is not art and deserves no attention. but in the case of Mondrian and pollack they were both great painters before they switched to the simplistic styles. and they switched to the way they paint not b/c it was easy or they were bad painters they switched the way they painted b/c that style fit the way they wanted to represent the world at the time.

I have wrote several post about artist that inspire me. When I say inspire me though I mean I see images that I have taken that seem to be done in their style. I don’t go out there and look for scenes that would be like other artist, but I do always go to museums and galleries to see what other artist do and why there work is good or not good. In this case I was shooting for my new Collection “Introuvable” and photographed a retaining wall on the west coast highway. After developing the film the lines in the concrete and the boxes it makes really reminded me of Mondrian‘s work.