February 10th, 2024

Happy Saturday! We’re now only 52 days away from NFT.NYC….the wife and I have been planning the trip now for a couple of months, and it’s starting to feel REALLY close now and the excitement is building. We’ve got a long list of restaurants to check out, too many really and I’m sure we’ll have to save some for a second trip 😆 

Aside from the amazing food, I’m really looking forward to being surrounded by incredible art and hopefully meeting some fellow artists. It’s going to be tough picking which talks to attend, but I’m hoping to find some gems and inspiration to bring back home with me and share with all of you.

This week let’s continue the deep dives on artists who deploy bold colors in their work. Franz Marc certainly fits that bill.

Artist Spotlight - Franz Marc (1880-1916)

Career

Franz Marc, born February 8th, 1880 in Munich Germany, grew up in a family with a strong artistic background; his father was a professional landscape painter. His mother, Sophie, was a strict Calvinist, contributing to the spiritual depth that would later permeate his work. This environment nurtured his love for art from an early age. Marc initially studied philosophy and theology at the University of Munich, reflecting his early interest in spiritual and existential questions. He then shifted his focus to art, studying at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. During this period, Marc's work was primarily academic and influenced by nineteenth-century realism and naturalism.

Around 1907, Marc's style began to transform significantly. Influenced by his travels to Paris, where he encountered the work of Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and the Fauves, Marc started to experiment with more vivid colors and expressive forms. Animals became central to Marc's art, symbolizing an ideal of purity and spiritualism. He sought to capture the essence of animals' beings, believing they were closer to a state of spiritual perfection than humans, tainted by materialism and industrialization.

In 1911, alongside Wassily Kandinsky, Marc co-founded Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), a pivotal group in the German Expressionist movement. The group emphasized the use of abstract forms and vibrant colors as a means to convey spiritual values and emotional states. During this period, Marc produced some of his most famous works, such as "The Blue Horse I" (1911) and "The Yellow Cow" (1911).

As World War I approached, Marc's work became increasingly abstract. He started incorporating cubist and futurist elements into his compositions, as seen in "Fate of the Animals" (1913) and "The Tower of Blue Horses" (1913). These works reflect a more tumultuous, dynamic approach to form and color, perhaps anticipating the chaos of the upcoming war. Marc volunteered for service in the German army at the outbreak of World War I, driven by a complex mix of patriotic fervor and a desire to find a new order that could emerge from the destruction of the old. His experiences during the war profoundly affected his views on humanity and nature.

Tragically, Marc's life and career were cut short when he was killed in action near Verdun, France, on March 4, 1916. He was 36 years old.

Contributions to the Art World

Marc's innovative use of color to convey emotional and spiritual content was revolutionary. His unique approach allowed for a deeper, more intuitive expression of themes and subjects, enriching the visual language of modern art.

As a co-founder of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), Marc was instrumental in shaping the direction of Expressionism. This group, which sought to express spiritual truths through abstracted forms and vibrant colors, was central to the Expressionist movement. Der Blaue Reiter exhibitions and publications, which Marc contributed to significantly, helped disseminate these new ideas about art, making a lasting impact on the development of modernism.

While Marc began his career with a more naturalistic approach, his style evolved towards abstraction, influenced by Cubism and Futurism. This progression mirrored his search for a visual language that could express the unseen forces and spiritual realities he sought to depict. Marc's movement towards abstraction contributed to broadening the scope of Expressionism and laid groundwork for future abstract artists.

Marc's artistic legacy extends beyond his contributions to Expressionism and Der Blaue Reiter. His theories on color and form, as well as his philosophical approach to the subject matter, have influenced countless artists across various movements, including Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism. His work continues to be studied and admired for its depth, innovation, and its passionate engagement with the natural world.

Style

Marc's style is a distinctive blend of Expressionism marked by vibrant colors, emotional depth, and spiritual symbolism. His approach to painting evolved significantly over his short career, reflecting his philosophical inquiries and his relentless pursuit of a visual language that could express universal truths.

Renowned for his symbolic use of color, it was not merely decorative but laden with meaning. He assigned colors emotional and spiritual values: blue represented masculinity and spirituality, yellow depicted feminine joy, and red symbolized violence and conflict. This use of color to convey deeper meanings was revolutionary and became a hallmark of his work.

As previously mentioned, animals were central subjects in Marc's paintings, symbolizing purity, innocence, and a return to nature's primal forces. He sought to capture their essence and spiritual significance, portraying them not just as creatures of the earth but as symbols of a more profound, universal spirit.

Influenced by the avant-garde movements of his time, including Cubism and Futurism, Marc's compositions became increasingly dynamic and abstract. He experimented with fragmented forms and multiple perspectives to convey movement and emotional intensity, moving towards a more abstract representation of reality.

Before executing his final pieces, Marc frequently made detailed sketches and studies. These preparatory works allowed him to explore different compositions and color schemes, refining his ideas about form and symbolism before committing them to canvas. He then used a technique of layering paint to create rich textures and depth in his work. He applied colors in layers, allowing them to interact and blend on the canvas, which added complexity and vibrancy to his paintings.

Breaking from traditional perspectives, Marc experimented with viewpoints that emphasized the emotional or spiritual essence of his subjects rather than their physical reality. This approach allowed him to create compositions that were emotionally engaging and imbued with a sense of universal significance.

Influences and Lessons

Marc was greatly influenced by the master of his time, as well as the prominent art movements he was surrounded by. The vibrant use of color and expressive quality of van Gogh's and Gauguin's paintings had a profound impact on his artistic development. Their ability to convey emotion and meaning through color directly influenced his own color symbolism. The Fauves' bold use of non-naturalistic colors and simple forms influenced Marc's departure from representational accuracy in favor of emotional expression.

Cubism and Futurism movements introduced Marc to the possibilities of fragmentation and abstraction as means to depict the essence of subjects and the dynamism of life, influencing his later, more abstract works. The spiritual and symbolic aspects of Russian Expressionist art, particularly the work of Wassily Kandinsky, encouraged Marc to explore the spiritual and emotional dimensions in his own work.

On the spiritual side, the philosophical ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche and Rudolf Steiner, which emphasized the spiritual and the transcendent aspects of life, resonated with Marc and informed the thematic depth of his work.

Marc’s reverence for animals and nature reminds us of the importance of the natural world as a source of inspiration and wisdom. Viewing his work encourages a deeper connection with and appreciation for the environment and its inhabitants. His evolution towards abstraction illustrates that moving beyond literal representation can offer more profound ways to express universal truths and emotions. Abstraction can capture the essence of subjects in ways that realism cannot.

He viewed art as a pathway to spiritual and emotional enlightenment. His work exemplifies the belief that art has the potential to elevate the human spirit and foster a deeper understanding of life's mysteries.

Style Representation

Collectors Corner - Thomas Art

Thomas Art - Noisy Pixel Management

I have a bookmark folder that is stuffed full (seriously, a couple hundred at least) with Github repo’s that look interesting enough to check out later. Last night I remembered one that I had saved from issue #58 of AI Art Weekly. (BTW, if you haven’t subscribed to @dreamingtulpa’s newsletter, you definitely should).

 CollageRL is a super unique project that uses training images that you supply to create a collage based on a target image. It also creates an animation of the collage as it’s constructed. The default newspaper training set it directs you to use is mostly uninteresting, but as mentioned you can provide your own dataset of whatever images you want.

It took some troubleshooting to get it running, like converting a Linux bash script to a bat file, but once I got it humming the results were super interesting and unique. I haven’t seen anyone use this yet, but I think it has some real potential if you enjoy collage art.

Check this out.

The training images I used were from an old model training dataset I curated of 50 futurism images.

This was my goal image, created with Midjourney using a style reference parameter.

After the collage training and generation, here was the final image (#3,758).

Not bad! Check out the animation, sped up 300% (the larger the image, the longer the animation. 1024×1024 generates around a two minute clip).

Considering the effort it took to get this project running, I’m thinking of forking the repo with my updates for running on Windows so others can easily test it out. Let me know and I’ll share the repo in a future issue 🙂 

Final Thoughts

I listened to a space earlier today with @VanArman, @Roope Rainisto and others and the conversation evolved into what AI art has become and where it’s headed in the future. Both Pindar and Roope believe that future AI art will be more custom and complex, with pipelines that are developed by the artist to make something novel.

Botto is back in the news, with a truly staggering sale of over $95,000 for what appears to be a generic VQGAN image from 3+ years ago.

If you haven’t looked into what Botto is, you really should. It’s a fascinating closed loop “art engine” that uses several diffusion models (and VQGAN in the past), an LLM, and voting in an attempt to create a fully autonomous artist that creates art free from human interference.

With how easy AI art has become to create and the quality level it’s been able to achieve in a dramatically short amount of time, I feel like the prediction proposed on the Space is quite accurate. We might be entering an era where work is valued more for the creative process than it’s visual appearance. That’s an interesting world to think about.

The talk on the Space was really inspiring and I know I plan on spending time digesting it and finding out how to evolve. I’d say I’m just getting bored with perfect and easy 🥱 

If you missed the space, you can catch the recording here. It’s worth your time.

As always, if you enjoyed this edition I would really appreciate if you shared it. Just hit the share button below. And if you’re not following me on X yet, I’d love to follow you back.

On that note, I’ll leave you with a quote that reminds us that flaws become cherished features as time passes:

Enjoy your weekend, friend!

P.S. If you have feedback I’d love to hear it! A reply to this email goes directly to me.

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