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Friday 17 December 2010

Friday's Funerary Artist




Eugène Brands is frequently mentioned in connection with the CoBrA movement, however he belonged to it for only a very short time. With his very personal views on art, Eugène Brands was thought of as a loner.


He was interested in primitive cultures, especially their music and he tried to express many of the magical elements of these cultures in his work, which for a long time during the 1950s was also characterised by his fascination with children's drawings. This was a typical CoBrA feature, helped in his case by the fact that his daughter Eugenie was a toddler at the time. He drew inspiration from this source, resulting in little paintings, most of them oil on paper.

Gardener

In the 1960s Brands gradually abandoned representative art in favour of abstraction. He began to paint large areas of colour "of an impenetrable, cotton wool-like substance," said CoBrA historian Willemijn Stokvis. Which Brands continued to do until an advanced age, from 1993 onwards he concentrated on producing gouaches on paper, which he found less physically demanding.
Eugène Brands died on the day of his 89th birthday.


 
Flowing Landscape








2 comments:

  1. Ik heb het schilderij de Gardener thuis aan de muur hangen. Wie kan mij vertellen of dit een gouache is of andere techniek?

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    Replies

    1. I'm no expert, but I think that because Brands preferred medium was gouache, it's a fairly safe bet that he used it for this painting.......

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