Who are the Suprematists ?

When I first came across the term "Suprematists" I had a vision of extreme right wing politically motivated activists. Even worse was the thought that they would also be involved in racism of the worst kind - Cross Burning, murdering fascists. But NO. That was not the case, thankfully.

Suprematism is the name given to a group of mostly Russian artists of the 20th Century. The interest in being supreme was merely to do with their Art. What they were interested in was developing the most "pure" form of art. For them pure art was that which was a reaction to the previous Western ideals of getting  closer to "reality" in their work. Realism was, to them, the antithesis of art. It was a distraction from the nature of expressive art. The ultimate expression of artistic supremacy was a work by the movement's founder, Kazimir Malevich, which consisted simply of a painted black square.

The nature of Suprematist Artwork was that it was abstract. It was a development of the Cubist Style but also contained influences from the Italian Futurist movement. It went further than Cubism in the sense that it abstracted even further from any hint of "realism". Instead it concentrated on basic shapes - rectangle, triangle, circle, square - and with block colors. 

Whilst the movement was essentially established by Kazimir Malevich, it was an artist who was influenced by the Suprematist style, El Lassitzki, who developed it and made it more acceptable to the mainstream Abstract movements. The style was also a big influence on Wassily Kandinski, who went on to influence the Bauhaus  and the De Stijl movements.

* To find out even more about the Suprematists and their work, take a look at The Digital Modernist website. 

* For short introduction see The Digital Modernist video, "Suprematist Art",  which contains lots of examples of the group's artwork as well as more detail on what they stood for and where they came from.

Who is "The Digital Modernist" ?

Who, you might be wondering is this self styled Digital Modernist ? Well there is a summary in the "About" page, but here is some of the background.

I cannot DO Art ! How do I know ? Well my Art teacher at school told me. That was aged 11.A lesson you never forget. Presumably he thought his job was to work only with those who were already artists ? Who knows ? Certainly not the student teacher who came in to do a lesson on "Pop Art". It fascinated me like none of the Classical Art the teacher had shown us week after week. Shame he had to spoil it by telling the student "Thank you - and now take that nonsense back to college and throw it in the bin !". Suffice to say that this man put me off Art for decades.

I took up photography instead. I started the hard way, with chemicals in a dark room. That taught me a lot about light and how to control it. Once digital photography came along and I got into Photoshop, a whole new world opened up for me. I could use the digital tools to create Art - firstly realistic photographs, then manipulated photographs and then blank sheet images. I realised that Art was not about using a paintbrush, but was about expressing yourself.

I started to look for inspiration from a wide range of Artworks. A pattern emerged. I could not relate to classical styles at all. They represented photography clubs with their competitions and rules and I had already understood that my desire to express myself would not be met by blindly following a set of someone else's rules. I wanted to express feelings and emotions, ideas and beliefs. I was not getting anything by simply recreating a copy of nature. Everything that I liked in Art in some way related to the Modernist period from the 1870s to the 1960s. At heart I was a Modernist

What did it mean in terms of my creativity ? Well I now wanted to break the rules. I wanted to express thoughts about what was going on around me, not static snapshots. I felt strongly about things and I wanted to somehow express my feelings. Most of all I wanted to prove that Art teacher that he was WRONG.

The first piece of Modernist Art that I did was a naive attempt to create a sense of what it means to suffer from Bi-Polar, a mental health issue that has plagued my daughter all of her adult life. I later realised that I had produced an image in the style of an Abstract Expressionist.

It is now my Mission to encourage, and free, all the people who, like me, were put off Art by a blinkered conservative so called professional. I am The Digital Modernist.