My top 10 pieces of art: 9

Fighting Forms - Franz Marc (1914)
Oil on canvas, 91 x 131 cm

For my GCSE project I studied the artwork for the Expressionist movement, but I wanted the body of work to be vibrant and busy that also had a unique characteristic to it, as our theme was "Happiness". I found the perfect genre of art and I was influenced by the German movement; Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). The movement lasted from 1911 to 1914, fronted by Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Albert Bloch and Franz Marc amongst others. I was more drawn to Marc's work because of his portrays of horses and creatures in the wild.

Bringing nature to life is why I love this movement; the colours reminiscent the Fauvism movement - another movement in which I admired. I like the idea of manipulating the colours we see in reality and making them even more extreme, and there was a sudden burst of energy that I was able to feel coming out of Marc's work. It was like looking into a fantasy land that had no rules on how the laws of physics affected everything.



Take this image here; The Flight of The Animals. It is hard to decipher immediately what's going on.

I think it's a very powerful imagine taking the fact that it's mostly coloured in basic primary colours that normally associates with youth and childhood, but Marc takes these basic colours and creates something quite explosive and dramatic. The figure of the painting is bold and direct, but that element is a complete contrast to my 9th favourite piece - Fighting Forms.

Fighting Forms feels much more organic and fluid; with much more emphasis on energy. However, it is possible to make out that the red side of the "form" is an eagle, but heavily abstracted, which joined with the fact that Marc based his work firmly in the Abstract genre by this time. It was also a reaction at the possibility of War in the near future - which marks a dramatic departure from his normally nature-heavy artwork.