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studies of tulips for a massive multi-artist zine i’m participating in!

Charlotte Salomon’s Art In Conjunction With Tragedy

Charlotte Salomon was born in 1917 in Berlin, Germany to a Jewish family. She would grow up surrounded by Berlin’s vibrant art scene with the emerging artform of film inspiring a great deal of her artwork. However, her life was heavily coated in tragedy of many forms. Her own mother comitted suicide when she was just eight years old, though she was told her mother died of influenza and would not learn of the true cause of death until adulthood. Salomon’s stepmother, Paula Lindberg would introduce Salomon to the art world and they would support each other in their creative endeavors. With the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, Charlotte was forced to flee Germany to southern France.

In France, Charlotte still did not escape tragedy. In her first year there, she witnessed her grandmother’s suicide. Determined to not go mad, Salomon threw herself into art-making to document her life and existence. While she had been classically trained in Berlin’s State Art Academy (something that was difficult and impressive due to their limiting the Jewish student population to just 1.5% of the total), she also found great inspiration in modern artists such as Henri Matisse, and took efforts to develop a style that echoed that of the artists she admired. Her expressive artworks conveyed both her inspiration and her struggle to maintain her own mental health while surrounded by the looming presence of the Nazis and the later knowledge of her family’s long history of suicide.

Tragically, Charlotte was not able to escape the holocaust even as she evaded the Nazis by moving from country to country. It was when she was visiting her grandfather in Nice, France that she was brought to Auschwitz and murdered along with her unborn child, her husband would die of exhaustion in the same camp three months later. Record of Salomon and her art remains because of Charlotte’s desperate desire to preserve the memory of her own existence. She documented much of her life in her bold, expressive style. Thanks to her efforts to document her life extensively, Charlotte’s parents were able to recover a large portion of her life’s work after the war. They were able to donate the art pieces to the Jewish Historical Museum of Amsterdam, where they remain to this day.

Charlotte created an enormous amount of artwork documenting the war with a great many styles, expressing a great range of emotions. Her family remembered her as a shy woman, but with a great vibrancy. Though they lost all correspondence with her through letters, her artwork brought a new connection. Thousands of autobiographical paintings and drawings made by their late daughter detailing their time apart. They saw her sadness, and they saw her vibrancy. Every painting was a window into her mind, seeing how she viewed them, seeing when she was low and when she was in love with life, seeing her on a page. She’s known as a woman who always smiled and was never cheerful, a shy introvert. A woman who loved her parents and her husband, and who lived in times of great darkness. She is remembered in all of these ways because of her paintings, reaching through time to show you her mind in bright gouaches and pencil sketches.

Charlotte Salomon was a woman drowning in tragedy, killed in a mass genocide. She was also tirelessly dedicated to recording her life. It is because of this that we know about her and her distinctive, modern artworks today. Even though she was killed, Charlotte Salomon’s work ensures she lives forever.

“Charlotte Salomon Biography, Life & Quotes.” The Art Story,

www.theartstory.org/artist/salomon-charlotte/life-and-legacy/.

Felstiner, M., 2020. Charlotte Salomon | Jewish Women’s Archive. [online] Jewish

Women’s Archive. Available at:

https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/salomon-charlotte 23

September 2020

These are the precursors to my final project nine, drawings that lost their energy halfway or that I lost interest in

I hope you enjoy Creature as much as I do because I love them deeply.

I have no clue what to say about this, It’s the product of automatic drawing (or, my attempt at it). I didn’t really think while making this because it’s an automatic drawing. sure turned out cool, though.

Since I am a cartoonist by trade, it was very interesting to watch this episode all about the subject. I was very interested in learning about the earliest stages of manga in Japanese illustration. I’ve seen early Japanese animation such as Astroboy, but learning about the predecessor to animation in the east was new to me. I was fascinated by the manga illustrations of figures such as the man who made the iconic wave illustration, especially knowing that they were likely made to help instruct his students. Seeing the evolution from narrative images to illustrated stories was interesting, in the west there was a similar evolution but I had never seen the same type of art evolution from the east laid out in a timeline the way it was in this program.

I also enjoyed seeing the difference and similarities in tools illustrators use in western and eastern illustration styles. For example, while many western illustrators use brush pens to illustrate, it is still more common to see manga artists utilize the tool. Since I read both western comics and Manga, it was also fun to see the acknowledgment of how much cultural exchange there was. Many manga illustrators were inspired by western illustrators, and many western illustrators have been inspired by manga. It’s very cool to see how that has influenced both styles while maintaining their differences. The co-influence is especially apparent in animation when you look at films like Astroboy, which was both one of the first anime and heavily inspired by western animation. It went on to influence western animation in turn. The constant exchange of techniques and knowledge is very impressive to see!

more pen studies, i just like them

I liked many of the concepts introduced in this video. As an education major the observation of how children draw was very interesting. Kids do not have preconceived notions of how to draw and they draw in a very interesting manner as a result of that. Many artists try to recreate that in their art but it is supremely difficult. In some ways, i think children’s drawings are lightning in a bottle, nearly impossible to recreate in a meaningful way. Children have different neurology and physiology to adults, there’s no reverting to that state. They have a really fantastic ability to draw from the mind, it’s very rare to see children drawing from reference. Even their mind’s eye has very little reference for what they are drawing. If an adult has seen 10,000 different trees, a child has seen maybe 1000 in their short time on earth. There’s no erasing the unconscious knowledge adulthood brings.
Automatic drawing was also very interesting to me and i’d like to try it, maybe for project 9? The idea of drawing what’s in your subconscious is very interesting. Especially since the documentary talked about artists with mental illness. I don’t usually think of my mental illnesses as something that influences my art beyond the occasional bout of angsty drawings in a personal sketchbook. Maybe I’ll produce something interesting? Who knows. Either way, I already enjoy meditating so i think the process of automatic drawing has a lot of appeal to me and I’m excited to try it.

I wanted to increase my confidence in my lines this week in preparation for my GE drawing which will need quite a bit of confidence to paint in a loose style. I used ballpoint pen and did some studies of animals to try and help with that