Matisse: The Accidental Artist

How many of you have fallen into your talent or appreciation for art by mistake? Personally, I have been in love with the craft since I was old enough to hold a crayon. The artist I am focusing on this week, Henri Matisse, did just that: he became an artist almost by accident. It was not until he was twenty and recovering from appendicitis that he began painting. It was thereafter he spent more time drawing and painting than anything else. His father was the most upset about his decision to become an artist because he wanted him to study law.

Henri Matisse, 1869-1954, was a French painter, sculptor and lithographer. He experimented and mastered more styles in his paintings than perhaps any other artist before his time. Despite his late entry into art school (1892), he eventually became the one of the leading members of fauvism and one of the oldest founding fathers.

In 1905 he set up new artistic goals for himself at that time: "Construction by colored surfaces. Search for intensity of color, subject matter being unimportant. Reaction against the diffusion of local tone in light. Light . . . expressed by a harmony of intensely colored surfaces."

"What I am after, above all," he explains, "is expression . . . [But] . . . expression does not consist of the passion mirrored upon a human face . . . The whole arrangement of my picture is expressive. The placement of figures of objects, the empty spaces around them, the proportions, everything plays a part."

He said he wanted his artwork to give people pleasure, and be soothing - kind of like a comfortable armchair you can rest in after a hard day's work. Matisse would often let the plain white canvas show through to add sparkle to the colors. I have tried this technique with some of my own work and can completely understand why he adopted such a dramatic effect. He tried making his paintings more expressive using large shapes and thick lines. When he could not stand at the easel anymore, at age sixty, he began creating some of his most exciting art ever by cutting shapes out of colorful papers. "It's like drawing with scissors and sculpting with color." He would pin images to the wall and arrange them until an "expressive atmosphere" was created.

All of Matisse's inspiration was gathered from what he saw around him. His goal was to "interpret nature and submit it to the spirit of the picture." He was particularly interested in the decoration found in fabrics, tapestries and rugs. Van Gogh's work "encouraged him to strive for a freer, more spontaneous technique, for more intense, more expressive harmonies."

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