Foreign Study and Inspirations
In 1927 he had applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship and was denied, but he reapplied and won the fellowship in 1929. He studied in France for a year, and chose not to extend his fellowship another six months. While many contemporary artists looked back to Africa for inspiration, Motley was inspired by the great Renaissance masters available at the Louvre. He found in the artwork there a formal sophistication and maturity that could give depth to his own work, particularly in the Dutch painters and the genre images of Delacroix, Hals, and Rembrandt. Motley’s portraits take the conventions of the Western tradition and update them—allowing for black bodies, specifically black female bodies, a space in a history that had traditionally excluded them.
Read more about this topic: Archibald Motley
Famous quotes containing the words foreign, study and/or inspirations:
“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“... there is a lightness about the feminine mind—a touch and go—music, the fine arts, that kind of thing—they should study those up to a certain point, women should; but in a light way, you know.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“We must learn the language of facts. The most wonderful inspirations die with their subject, if he has no hand to paint them to the senses.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)