Clyfford Still
American (Grandin, North Dakota, 1904 - 1980, Baltimore, Maryland)After studying and teaching art in Washington State, Clyfford Still influenced a generation of California painters during his tenure (1946-1950) at the California School of Fine Arts, now the San Francisco Art Institute.
He then spent much of the 1950s in New York, but eschewed any association with the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. Still chose to develop his work independently, relying on the primacy of personal experience and the study and distillation of his own painting. Unlike most artists of his day, he ground and prepared his own pigments, applying them to canvas with both a palette knife and brush.
Still's mature style consisted of jagged-edged fields of pigment, heavily applied and worked into a thick, scabrous surface. He was an outspoken proponent of the idea that abstract painting could portray his inner psychic state, and he vigorously denied any direct associations with landscape imagery in his work: "I paint only myself, not nature." Nevertheless, Still's large-scale paintings often suggest primordial landscapes, rendered in the deep colors of the earth.
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