Henri Matisse Inspiration

As inspiration for monoprints I'm looking at a few Matisse works. This is Woman with a Hat, an early work from his Fauve period, completed in 1905. He uses dramatic unmixed colors.

I've lost direction with my painterly monotypes, I'm looking for some new ideas, so will try a simple still life but being more experimental with color. I think he has kept connections to the original colors and values, and possibly kept warm colors and cool colors in the same places, so that is a good starting point. I'm also going to try using acrylic paint as well as the heavier printing inks.

I've been a bit uninspired as I live in a very conservative place (Saudi Arabia) and don't feel comfortable working outside, so need to draw inspiration from the objects I can draw inside. I have collected some interesting shells and coral to work from so am investigating the Beasts of the Sea.

 In contrast to the last work there is a controlled use of color here, these colors look like they have come direct from the sea. Only a few of the shapes look like actual sea objects, the most distinctive shape being the blue in the bottom left, which is not dissimilar to my coral. I have already tried a bit of back drawing shapes like this on top of my first masked mono prints which I was pleased with so want to take this further with this investigation. The use of black and white are bold and important and lead the eye around the piece. I also like the subtle contrast of the coral pink. An interesting challenge will be to make several different colors clear and distinct. In my last practices I laid pink over blue and it did not show well. So from this I will try to make a masked mono print using several layers of color with my shapes taken from sea objects and some invented shapes.

This next work is La Gerbe, 1953, a large ceramic mural completed to commission at the end of Matisse's life. The simplicity of this is very effective, I want to explore a piece made up of all the same shapes, first all independent of each other then with layering.

Last of all, White Torso and Blue Torso, 1944, from the work Jazz. This piece was conceived as a collage then reproduced as a stencil. This work is a very simple shape stenciled as a positive and negative shape. This is a figure, I will continue with still life work so will look for some interesting objects, I have a nice bottle that may work.

A few ideas to be going on with...