Gauguin: Life is Color
Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) lived in Peru as a child and spent 6 years before the mast as a young man. He became a prosperous Parisian stockbroker with 5 children for a period of 10 years before he took up Sunday painting in 1873.
By 1883 he ditched his family for his new love - art. He headed for Brittany, a backward province of France, where he hoped to find the “savage instinct.” He proceeded “to restore painting to its sources,” meaning primal emotion and imagination. And when Brittany was not primitive enough, he moved to Tahiti.
He refused to reproduce surface appearances, instead transforming colors and distorting shapes to convey his emotional response to a scene. “Life is color,” Gauguin said. “A painter can do what he likes as long as it is not stupid.” He freed us from the restraints which the idea of copying nature placed on us. He flattened forms, used color arbitrarily for emotional impact, and – above all – presented his subjective response to reality. “I wanted the right to dare everything,” he said and he dared to portray an internal reality. It is no wonder he is among the founders of modern art.