The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through” – Jackson Pollock
BLACK CANVAS REVERBERATIONS OF FREEDOM
Our freedom dreams are a roaring Black; swellings of coming insurrection manifested. This roar is felt in the tip of a brush about to paint the sounds of our resistance; in the cadence of saxophones, playing the drawings that our grandmothers sketched, of struggles unrelenting; in the poems inscribed by the movement of our bodies when that bass drops. The roaring Black of our art incites and cultivates our insurgent imagination to envision and sculpt autonomous and self-determined constellations of freedom.
“As a cultural worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible” – Toni Cade Bambara
Art is central to Black feminist struggles because it creates sites, with multiple entry points, to convene emancipatory dialogues within our communities. This is the tradition of the prose and poetry of June Jordan and Amilcar Cabral, the broadcasts of Umkhonto we Sizwe’s Radio Freedom, and the music of Miriam Makeba and Cesária Évora, amongst many others. The ones that came before us sounded the drum; we are reverberating the echoes calling us to freedom.
BLACK CANVAS | REVERBERATIONS OF FREEDOM, curated by NSOROMMA, is a series of pan-African cultural production processes threaded together by themes of liberation and creativity. Hawa Y Mire and I conceptualized NSOROMMA with a vision of incubating, supporting and amplifying insurgent Black art and artists. With this vision in mind, we are collaborating with the Black Feminisms Forum Working Group, hosted by AWID, to bring BLACK CANVAS | REVERBERATIONS OF FREEDOM to Bahia, Brazil in September.
BLACK CANVAS | REVERBERATIONS OF FREEDOM –Bahia explores the multiple ways that radical Black feminist cultural producers are carving out pathways of imagination, creativity and freedom. The participating artists work across a variety of mediums and are situated across the Continent and the Diaspora. They are painters, dancers, drummers, curators, beatmakers, dj’s, writers, poets, chefs, singers, and storytellers. Importantly, BLACK CANVAS | REVERBERATIONS OF FREEDOM –Bahia is woven into the fabric of the Black Feminisms Forum because we wanted to center the practice of art as inherent to our collective liberation. We want to curate a cultural production experience that moves through, with, and as part of every aspect of the global gathering of Black feminists.
Through poetry, culinary and visual art, music, film and movement BLACK CANVAS | REVERBERATIONS OF FREEDOM –Bahia will highlight the ways in which Black feminists are imagining and co-creating our collective futures.
The journey of building BLACK CANVAS | REVERBERATIONS OF FREEDOM –Bahia has in itself been a collective creative process with participating artists over many months allowing for bold co-creation. Among the wide range of workshops, interactive sessions and panels spread over both days of the Black Feminisms Forum will be one by DJ Lynnee Denise. Early on in our conversations with Lynnee we talked about how important it is to build radical feminist pan-African archives, and as a result of these conversations a session on DJ Scholarship was born. In this session Lynnee, along with other DJs, will position “Black DJ culture as a subversive multi modal research practice which contributes to shaping and defining social experiences. Understanding a DJ as a revolutionary rhythmic agitator and melodic inciter allows us to see the DJ as an archivist, cultural worker and information specialist who assesses, collects, organizes, preserves, and provides access to our histories and futures.”
Also, spurred by our conversations on archiving our movements, we began to discuss how it is that we are sustaining our movements. We explored these conversations with Angélica Moreira (Ajeum Da Diaspora), a Brazilian culinary artist, and within hours Nourishing Freedoms was in the beginning stages of its manifestation. Nourishing Freedoms is a community event that will close the first day of the Black Feminisms Forum. The evening will weave conversations about how food in our communities has been a site of resistance, creativity, and nourishment with storytelling and performance art.
Throughout each conversation with the 15 plus artists that are a part of BLACK CANVAS | REVERBERATIONS OF FREEDOM –Bahia the joy that is a part of each their artistic processes has been clear. The conversations have been an important reminder to me that, though struggles for freedom have difficulty, they are also joyful manifestations of our freedom visions. Freedom Sounds – Travelling Black in Time, the closing of the Black Feminisms Forum, is a celebration and honouring of that joy through sonic conversation between drummers and DJs from the continent and the diaspora, based on our traditions of call and response, reminding us of our unity in our multiplicity.
Our freedom dreams are a roaring Black, let the reverberations begin!
Through other fundraising efforts we have been able to secure some funding for BLACK CANVAS | REVERBERATIONS OF FREEDOM – Bahia, but we are still short of our goal by $30,000. On May 25 we launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise the additional funds. Any and every contribution is critical!
Thank you for helping us reach our goal to bring together an exciting group of Black feminist artists and cultural producers from across the Continent and Diaspora!
Some of the participating artists in BLACK CANVAS | REVERBERATIONS OF FREEDOM –Bahia include:
- Afifa Aza
- Aishah Shahidah Simmons
- akwaeke emezi
- Angélica Moreira
- Damani Baker
- d’bi young anitafrika
- Eliciana Nascimento
- Fatou Kandé Senghor
- Lynnée Denise
- Mimi Cherono Ng’ok
- Muptee
- Nadijah Robinson
- Neo Sinoxolo Musangi
- Sabriya Simon
- Sokari Ekine
- Yaba Badoe
- Yvonne Fly Onakeme
- & more
Luam Kidane is an African communications strategist, curator and writer. Luam’s research, writing and work examines contemporary African movement building at the intersections of communications, decolonial aesthetics, Indigenous governance models, art, articulations of self-determination, and media.
Paintable canvas in black
Canvas, brushes and paints – what more does the artist need to paint? However, before the first brush stroke grazes the canvas, a primer must be applied. Without this additional layer, the colors would otherwise hardly adhere to the canvas or even penetrate through it. With our paintable canvas in black, we can present you with a practical alternative to the traditional white primer. If you like to work on a dark background anyway, this saves you time and paint for your own primer. In addition, the black painting background makes bright, colorful colors glow and shine. Learn here what distinguishes our paintable canvas in black.
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Canvasi
Grammatur
300 – 390 g/m²
Zusammensetzung
Baumwolle/Polyester
Price
Minimum €
Maximum €
Paintable canvas in black: a painting base for any color.
For our paintable canvas in black, the popular Cotton-GL canvas serves as a base. The robust canvas is now also available with a black primer. Like any of our universal primers, this one is suitable for a variety of colors:
- Oil paint
- Acrylic paint
- tempera paint
- mixed colors
With a roll length of ten meters and a roll width of 2.10 meters, the paintable black canvas offers plenty of room for creativity. Simply cut out the desired format from the large cloth with scissors.
Our tip: To make a covered stretcher frame, of course, stretcher bars are also necessary. You will also find these in our range!
Radiant color effect thanks to dark primed canvas
A paintable canvas in black may be surprising at first glance, because after all, most people are more familiar with covered stretcher frames in bright white. In fact, a dark primer makes a lot of sense for many subjects and saves the artist a laborious step. Whether it’s Rembrandt van Rijn’s haunting portraits or the highly symbolic paintings of the Romantic period, many masterpieces in art history thrive on the contrast between light and dark. A black primer works this contrast all the more clearly, because the dark background brings bright, colorful colors to shine.
For our paintable canvas in black, we use a universal primer that allows painting with many different colors. Of course, the strongest contrast effect can be achieved with opaque colors. But also with glazing colors, for example for backgrounds, can be worked on the painting base without any problems. As a result, the paintings appear less striking and have more depth thanks to the dark primer.
Buy high quality canvas at Canvasi
Are you looking for a high-quality canvas for painting? Then Canvasi is the right address for you! Whether it’s paintable black or white canvas or a canvas without primer, you’ll find the right painting canvas for your needs. Stretcher bars in different sizes are also available in our assortment, so you can make a covered stretcher in your desired size. With our floater frames you hang your art then impressively on the wall. But our offer is not only for painters: In the print section, many exciting products are waiting for photo artists or photo studios, from printable canvas, to metal plates, to photo and fine art paper. Take a look around and feel free to contact us if you have any questions, so that we can advise you individually!
Jackson Pollock and his paintings
Jackson Pollock was an influential American painter, and the leading force behind the abstract expressionist movement in the art world. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. Jackson Pollock’s greatness lies in developing one of the most radical abstract styles in the history of modern art, detaching line from color, redefining the categories of drawing and painting, and finding new means to describe pictorial space.
Jackson Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912. His father, LeRoy Pollock was a farmer and later a land surveyor for the government. Jackson Pollock grew up in Arizona and Chico, California. During his early life, Pollock experienced Native American culture while on surveying trips with his father. Although he never admitted an intentional imitation or following of Native American art, Jackson Pollock did concede that any similarities were probably a result of his “early memories and enthusiasm.”
In 1929, Jackson Pollock studied at the Students’ League in New York under regionalist painter, Thomas Hart Benton. During the early 1930s, he worked in the Regionalist style, and was also influenced by Mexican muralist painter such as Diego Rivera, as well as by certain aspects of Surrealism – a 20th-century literary and artistic movement that attempts to express the workings of the subconscious by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtaposition of the subject matter.
In November 1939, The Museum of Modern Art in New York City mounted an important Picasso exhibition entitled: Picasso: 40 Years of His Art, which contained 344 works of Pablo Picasso and his famous anti-war mural, Guernica. The exhibit led Pollock to recognize the expressive power of European modernism, which he had previously rejected in favor of American art. He began to forge a new style of semi-abstract totemic compositions, refined through obsessive reworking.
In the decades following World War II, a new artistic vanguard emerged, particularly in New York, that introduced radical new directions in art. The war and its aftermath were at the underpinnings of the movement that became known as Abstract Expressionism. Jackson Pollock, among other Abstract Expressionists, anxiously aware of human irrationality and vulnerability, expressed their concerns in abstract art that chronicled the ardor and exigencies of modern life. By the mid-1940s, Jackson Pollock introduced his famous ‘drip paintings’, which represent one of the most original bodies of work of the century, and forever altered the course of American art. At times the new art forms could suggest the life-force in nature itself, at others they could evoke man’s entrapment – in the body, in the anxious mind, and in the newly frightening modern world. To produce in Jackson Pollock’s ‘action painting’, most of his canvases were either set on the floor, or laid out against a wall, rather than being fixed to an easel. From there, Jackson Pollock used a style where he would allow the paint to drip from the paint can. Instead of using the traditional paintbrush, he would add depth to his images using knives, trowels, or sticks. This form of painting, had similar ties to the Surreal movement, in that it had a direct relation to the artist’s emotions, expression, and mood, and showcased their feeling behind the pieces they designed.
The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through” – Jackson Pollock
In addition to the ‘drip and splash’ style, the All-over method of painting, is also one which is tied to Jackson Pollock, and many of the artworks he created. This art form avoids any clear and distinct points of emphasis, or any identifiable parts within the canvas being used to create the piece. The designs and images which were created using this style of painting, really had no relation to the size of the canvas that was worked on; the lack of dimensions, and disregard for size of the drawings, were some unique features which this form of art captured. Many of the pieces which Jackson Pollock created following this style, required him to trim or crop the canvas, in order for the image to fit in, and to work with the overall features of the art.
Pollock’s radical methods and growing reputation quickly caught the attention of the mass media. In August 1949, Life magazine ran a feature story posing the question: “Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” The text was alternately mocking and respectful. In 1951, at the height of the artist’s career, Vogue magazine published fashion photographs by Cecil Beaton of models posing in front of Pollock’s drip paintings. Although this commercial recognition signaled public acceptance – and was symptomatic of mass culture’s inevitable expropriation of the avant-garde – Pollock continuously questioned the direction and reception of his art. At the peak of his fame, Pollock abruptly abandoned the drip style. Pollock’s work after 1951 was darker in color, including a collection painted in black on unprimed canvases. These paintings have been referred to as his ‘Black pourings’ and when he exhibited them at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, none of them sold. But later Pollock moved to a more commercial gallery by returning to using color and figurative elements. In 1960s, Jackson Pollock was viewed as one of the most important figures in the art world, and one of the innovators of the avant-garde styles that were beginning to emerge. Like many other famous figures, the issues which Jackson Pollock suffered from in his personal life, such as his strife with alcoholism, added to his “superstar” status. And, his premature death, which took place when he was killed in a car crash, also added to the legendary status which he is still known from in the art world today.
To this day Jackson Pollock is known as a leader in the most important 20th century American art movements. The risks and the creative approaches he took, led future artists to create with passion, as opposed to trying to follow set boundaries or guidelines. In addition, Pollock’s radical paintings and dramatic persona helped draw attention to the broader group of Abstract Expressionists, including Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko.
Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.”
– Jackson Pollock
Just like Vincent van Gogh on Impressionism, Jackson Pollock’s impact on American Abstract Expressionist movement is tremendous. Jackson Pollock made it possible for American painting to compete with European modernism by applying modernism’s logic to a new problem. He created a new scale, a new definition of surface and touch, a new syntax of relationships among space, pigment, edge, and drawing, displacing hierarchies with an unprecedented and powerful and fabulously intricate self-generating structure. Although actively engaged throughout his life in a serious dialogue with the history of world art which ranged from Paleolithic and Indian art to Renaissance art masters Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci; from Mexican muralists to the Surrealists Salvador Dali, Joan Miro, and Max Ernst – Pollock’s aspirations always remained courageously and even chauvinistically of this continent. Pollock’s defiant refusal to stay within traditional bounds, violence, exasperation and stridency, all were paradigmatically New World. At a time – and in a guise that absolutely nobody expected – these were the unlikely characteristics that finally came together to produce an American Prometheus.
