Miro's Study Journal Page 9

I love the feeling this picture has.  He is singing his heart out.  You can just feel him inhale as he looks as he has a lot of air.  I like the frets on the guitar and how they run off the image.  The keys are interestingly placed and provide more feeling in the picture than realism.  One thing I would not have noticed before I started to draw this was that there is a little bird, it looks like a parot, that comes to get the flower out of his hat.

I used markers for this and it was kinda a new experience using them on this hemp paper. They kinda ran or wouldn't get a medium color that I wanted.  What I learned?  Just keep drawing and keep having fun. Experiment.  Let go of expectation and learn from the markers what they have to tell you about themselves.

In continuing to our study of Miro One of the other artist that I want to highlight that influenced Miro is

Albert Marquet, who was born in Bordeaux, 26 March 1875; died in Paris, 14 June 1947. He was taken by his family to Paris at the early age of fifteen to begin a thorough training as an artist.  Albert Marquet studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he met Henri Matisse in 1890.  Matisse became a life-long friend; both artists were accepted in Gustav Moreau's painting class in 1897.  In 1900 they worked together on the decoration of the Grand Palais at the Paris World Exhibition.&nbs

Here are some examples of his work. 

Marquet early compositions were characterised by a clear and painterly Fauvist approach, in which he had a fine control of the drawing and responded to light, not only by intensifying the strongest tones, but also by seeing the weaker ones in coloristic terms. early compositions were characterised by a clear and painterly Fauvist approach, in which he had a fine control of the drawing and responded to light, not only by intensifying the strongest tones, but also by seeing the weaker ones in coloristic terms.


Dismayed by the intense coloration in these paintings, critics reacted by naming the artists the "Fauves", i.e. the wild beasts. Although Marquet painted with the fauves for years, he used less bright and violent colours than the others, and emphasized less intense tones made by mixing complementaries, thus always as colors and never as grays.


At the end of 1907 he stayed in Paris and dedicated himself, together with Henri Matisse, to a series of city views. The fundamental difference between the two is that while Matisse used strong colours, Marquet favored grayed yellows, greyed violets or blues. Black was usually used as a violent contrast to light colors for such forms as bare tree trunks or calligraphically drawn people contrasted with very light, often yellow or orange streets and sidewalks. Another difference is that Marquet used an approximation of traditional perspective, although his colors and compositions constantly referred to the rectangle and cut its plane with their calligraphy.

The human figures are much simplified, calligraphically drawn in a way related to Japanese Shijo style work. Matisse is said to have called him "our Hokusai".