Who is that?
While her face can be found on stamps in france she is realitively unknown here in the United States by your average person but her influence can be felt in our modern designs and sense of color.
Sonia Delaunay was a Ukrainian-born French artist and designer known for her colorful geometric patterns. She was born in Odessa, Ukraine in 1885 to a poor family before being sent to live with her well off uncle Henri Terk when she was only five years old. She studied drawing in Germany at the Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Arts, before moving to Paris in 1906. After entering a marriage of convenience with art dealer Wilhelm Uhde, her paintings underwent a formal shift influenced by the vivid colors of Fauvism which was led by artist such as Matisse and Derain, as well as the post impressionists Van Gogh, Gaugain, and Rousseau. It was Uhde that introduced her to her future second husband Robert Delaunay . Having amicably leaving Uhde for Delaunay, the new couple pioneered a fusion of Cubism and Neo-Impressionism, later deemed Orphism by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire.
When asked what inspired her transition into Orphism her response was...
"About 1911 I had the idea of making for my son, who had just been born, a blanket composed of bits of fabric like those I had seen in the houses of Ukrainian peasants. When it was finished, the arrangement of the pieces of material seemed to me to evoke cubist conceptions and we then tried to apply the same process to other objects and paintings." - Sonia Delaunay She used this new aesthetic approach to produce paintings, textiles, and designs over the course of her career. The artist heavily influenced fashion on her own and in collaborations with her friend Coco Chanel. Her costumes were featured in stage productions and multiple movies.
Her textile designs made their way to shops around the world and continue to influence fashion to this day.
Her influcence can also be felt in her support of other artists. She used her home as an art gallery to introduce other artists with prospective galleries, buyers, critics, and influential friends.
She participated in an exhibition of artist decorated cars to raise money for medical research. Her designs even helped to inspire Janis Joplin's famously colorful Porche. In 1964, after nearly six decades of Artistic work she because the first living woman to have a retrospective at the Lourve. Questioned about how her gender may have affected her thinking and work over the years, she said, “I never thought of myself as a woman in any conscious way. I’m an artist.”
Delaunay continued to receive wide recognition as her career wound down, with an art show at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in 1967, before finally being named to the Légion d’honneur in 1975, just four years before her death at the age of 93.
What does her art look like?
It changed over time. She started with more traditional subjects like portraits and landscapes but using more contemporary colors and style. She stumbled upon an idea while making a quilt for her newborn son. Different colors look incredibly different depending on what they are next to. This evolved her work into more abstract geometric patterns that experimented with color, both in her paintings, and in her textiles and fashion work. When asked about her work she stated, “For me there is no gap between my painting and my so-called ‘decorative’ work,” she once observed. “I never considered the ‘minor arts’ to be artistically frustrating; on the contrary, it was an extension of my art.” Here we can see a wide range of her work.
Create your own art inspired by Sonia Delaunay:
For this project you will you can free hand draw or use rulers and stencils. You can choose to add a recognizable image like her earlier work or be completely abstract.
If you want a subject do a line drawing of the object first. This could be a simple shape like a heart or something more complex like the butterfly one of my student's drew.
Free draw repeating curved lines, straight lines, or zig zag lines all across the page.Yes, they will even go over your original drawing!
Go over the WHOLE page using the same or another type of line going in a different direction so it crosses over everything!
Now you have a TON of shapes. color your picture where the exact same color cannot touch itself. You have to change color, or make it lighter or darker. You can use a lot of colors, only a few, or even just one color in different values (lights and darks). For my how to guide I drew a bird for a subject and I really wanted to make it pop so I chose Warm colors for my bird (reds, yellows, and oranges) and Cool colors for my background (blues, greens, and violets).
Here are some students's in action!
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