“Cafe Terrace 2015” 24″x30″ Acrylic on Canvas by Linnie Aikens (Collection of Mireya E. Avila)
The art period of Fauvism was very short-lived (1905–1910), however, paintings in this style mesmerize me and fill me with exploding creativity, probably because I have a huge love affair with COLOR! Lots and lots of in-your-face, swimming-in-it color! Some of my favorite paintings were from this period….Matisse, Gauguin and even some Van Gogh’s (“Cafe Terrace” being a favorite). Most of these artists are generally known as Post Expressionists, however, some of their work also can fall into the Fauvism period.
I began exploring this love with by just barely dipping my toe (or paintbrush, as it were) with an appropriation of this painting, “Cafe Terrace 2015,” with bimillennial contextualization. I am more concerned with color and feeling (and in this painting, message) than I am with the formal rules of formal perspective—to second Picasso, there are cameras for that.
Message-wise, our bimillenary culture seems so disconnected with awareness of what is physically around us. I watch and observe our young people, and I see so few connect with nature, their heads in their devices. They seem to manufacture natural & man-made forms of beauty with facsimiles. Instead of watching and listening to the birds, we “twitter”. Instead of going outside and climbing actual rocks, we go to rock gyms. It’s popular to fight for “green” causes without actually participating in the greenery around us. Even the nighttime beauty of a starlit sky and a lit cafe, spilling out onto the street, creating lovely reflections of color and shadow is lost on our youth, for the most part, as our screens blind our vision.
So I suppose this is my social commentary on our digital culture.
One wonders if we haven’t traded too much of our God-given beautiful world and the beauty of social interaction for a virtual and essentially solitary one of bits and pixels. And yes, I do acknowledge the irony in my communicating these ideas in this method.