December 2007
Volume 1, Number 12

Inside this issue...

Artist Of The Month: Gauguin
Art In The News 
Outside The Lines
Segmation News

Artist Of The Month: Gauguin 

At the age of 17, Gauguin joined the merchant navy and sailed around the world for the six years. After the death of his mother, he settled down in Paris and became a successful stockbroker. He married a Danish lady in 1873 and had five children. But Gauguin’s true calling was to painting. The first Impressionist exhibition was a turning point and he began to paint in his spare time. He even purchased works by several leading Impressionist painters. From now on painting would be the driving force of his life, for better or for worse.

Returning to Spain after a year, Gauguin started painting decorative, rococo frescoes for local churches. He studied with Francisco Bayeu, a local artist, who helped him find work designing patterns in the Royal Tapestry Workshop where he stayed for 17 years, producing over 60 designs.

His friend Camille Pisarro introduced him to the Impressionists. He painted with Pisarro and Cezanne, but it did not take long for Gauguin to take his work in the direction of primitive and Japanese art. But Gauguin was before his time. His style of painting was rejected, marking the beginning of his bitterness and frustration with a world that would not accept his artistic vision.

The stock market crash of 1883 caused Gauguin to lose his income. He travelled around living on next to nothing, and the family moved temporarily to Copenhagen around 1884. Unsuccessful in Denmark, he moved back to Paris barely a year later, abandoning his wife and five children. He had made the first break with conventional middle-class life and was now free to devote himself entirely to painting.

Gauguin’s distaste for Western civilization was growing and in 1887 he set sail for Panama where he found work as a laborer on the canal, but was fired after only two weeks. His search for simplicity took him to Martinique, but since he could not make a living as an artist there, he went to Pont-Aven in Brittany in 1888.

By now Gauguin had moved away from Impressionism; the Japanese influence was dominant. His painting The Yellow Christ, with its large, flat areas of bold color marked his final break with the movement and was the start of a style that was to influence future generations of artists. Van Gogh’s brother, Theo, encouraged him in this direction.

Gauguin joined his friend Vincent van Gogh in Arles, where the two artists painted together for around two months. But their personalities clashed. They quarrelled. It ended with van Gogh cutting off his ear and suffering a mental breakdown. Traumatized, Gauguin left abruptly for Paris.

You can find a great collection of Gauguin patterns to use with SegPlayPC ™ here: http://www.segmation.com/SegPlayPCPatterns.html#GAU. 

Art In The News

Second Hand Sofa Hides Baroque Painting

A Berlin student has found that she was, literally, sitting on a fortune after discovering a baroque painting hidden inside her second-hand sofa bed.

The student had paid 150 euros (around $200) for the couch in a flea market. The painting by an unknown artist, entitled "Preparations for the flight to Egypt," sold for 19,200 euros (around $27,660) at an auction in Hamburg.

According to a Reuters report, the student used the sofa bed for a while before realizing that there was something stashed between the folding sections. It is not known how the painting got into the sofa.

Source: Reuters

Guilty Of... Kissing A Painting!

In what has to be one of the most unusual cases tried by a court, a woman in Avignon, southern France, was convicted of kissing a painting.

Associated Press reports that Rindy Sam, a young artist of Cambodian origin, left a lipstick kiss on a white painting by American artic Cy Twombly. She was convicted of “voluntarily damaging a work of art” and was ordered to do 100 hours of community service and to pay damages.

It cost $47,000 to restore the painting and its owner is asking for $2.9 million in damages, but Rindy Sam has been ordered to pay her only $1.47. Rindy Sam claimed that she kissed the painting out of love, saying "When I kissed it, I thought the artist would have understood."

Source: AP

Outside The Lines

Quotations by -- and about -- Paul Gauguin

"Art is either plagiarism or revolution." Paul Gauguin

"Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge." Paul Gauguin

"In order to do something new we must go back to the source, to humanity in its infancy." Paul Gauguin

Our SegPlayPC pattern collection is continues to expand (at last count over 700 patterns in more than 30 sets are available)!! We've added some popular new pattern sets in the past few weeks including "Horsing Around", "Camille Pissarro - Father of Impressionism", and "Christmas Time".

Be sure to stop and check out our new Segmation Video Gallery where we've compiled a bunch of nicely done YouTube movies relating to painting and fine art. You'll definitely get inspired when you watch the "Painting with Food" videos!!

We're always looking for more appealing art pieces for our SegPlay™ online paint by number collection. If you are an aspiring artist and am interested in setting up a free personal category on SegPlay to showcase some of your work in our fun paint by number world, drop us an email submit@segmation.com.

We hope you enjoyed reading this newsletter.  Please feel free to pass it on to a friend or colleague. If you have any comments or suggestions about this newsletter, please drop us an email to: comments@segmation.com.

Happy Holidays!!
-Mark & Beth

Segmation • 2822 Filbert Drive • Walnut Creek, CA 94598

  

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