December 12, 2021
Winter palette
Winter: the season depicted by many painters, photographers, filmmakers and musicians. The time of the year when silence and darkness immerse us into a deep and diverse palette of human emotions. We slow down to think and to reflect on life, faith, growth, love, jealousy, hate, cruelty, mystery, redemption and.... nature.
1605 Publishers has prepared for you an inspiring winter palette of 5 of our favourite artists whose work deeply touches us, warms our creative minds and directs us towards the light during these long dark winter days. Enjoy the work by Masao Yamamoto, Pentti Sammallahti, Tacita Dean, Saul Leiter and Cy Twombly.
Tacita Dean (b. 1965) is a British visual artist. She was a nominee for the Turner Prize in 1998, won the Hugo Boss Prize in 2006, and was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 2008. She lives and works in Berlin, Germany, and Los Angeles, California.
Above, you can see the work created by Tacita Dean: an oak tree, one of the largest and oldest complete oak trees in England. Dean first photographed the majestic Fredville oak tree in Kent and then, painted the area around the tree’s leafless branches and trunk white, isolating its structure and form. The naked carcass of the tree indicates fleeting life. It became a symbol of endurance and strength that has already seen many winters and will no doubt see many more.
Pentti Sammallahti (b. 1950) is a Finnish artist from Helsinki. After visiting The Family of Man exhibition at Helsinki Art Hall (1961) Sammallahti made his first photographs at age eleven. His first solo exhibition was in 1971 when he was only 21. Sammallahti describes himself as a wanderer who likes the nature of the great north, the silence, the cold, and the sea. He likes the people and the animals of far off places and he records the relationships between them and their environment.
The image above of the birds in the field was taken in Poland.
Masao Yamamoto (b. 1957) is a Japanese artist who has started his art journey by pursuing painting. He studied oil painting eventually transitioned to photography in 1980. His painting background is apparent in his works’ painterly look, incorporating blurs and experimenting with printing surfaces. With many Yamamoto Masao photographs, he manipulated the silver gelatin prints through analogue processes such as dying the images with tea or actual paint and tearing them. Subjects vary wildly, ranging from Japanese countryside, seasons of the year to nude female bodies.
The painting-like photograph above depicts snowy countryside in Japan.
Cy Twombly (1928 – 2011) was American painter, sculptor and photographer. His paintings are predominantly large-scale, scribbled, calligraphic and graffiti-like works on solid fields of mostly grey, tan, or off-white colours. In a 1994 retrospective, curator Kirk Varnedoe described Twombly's work as "influential among artists, discomfiting to many critics and truculently difficult not just for a broad public, but for sophisticated initiates of postwar art as well".
His painting above belongs to the series "Four Seasons" and is called "Winter".
Saul Leiter (1923-2013) was an American artist and early pioneer of colour photography. With distinctive imagery suffused with painterly qualities, he is often grouped with other photographers of the New York School such as Richard Avedon, Weegee, and Diane Arbus. “A window covered with raindrops interests me more than a photograph of a famous person,” the artist said. He chose to shoot in colour in the 1940s, well before other art photographers adopted the medium.
His image above depicts winter snowstorm in New York.