Embarking on a journey as a young man in my late 30’s I found myself asking many questions all students ask themselves in the early stages of my first year as a part-time student at the University of Manitoba. My journey was about another part of who I am, I say this because I already had a full-time career in the Justice Department. I entered the Fine Arts Program to search for a passion I had in the visual arts, although this was a new adventure, I was to jump in headfirst. You see I had no formal practice in art, no training of any kind in art, no skills, no simple little drawing hidden away to show I had some talent to even consider going into the University Fine Arts Program.
I even questioned myself to try to answer this ” Who is my favorite artist? ”
An artist should at least know some artists and the art they create, maybe even state why I would even consider an artist’s style, mediums of those artists, possibly know some of their histories. But that was not the case. While in one of my first classes a professor had ask the class that very question, “Who is your favorite artist? ”
In the months to come I was in my art studio classes, as well as the Library searching for artists in periodicals, art history texts, art magazines, art books, essays, trying to find an artist that I would consider someone I would be emotionally and cognitively attached too. My search had been extensive and I had found numerous artists, their artwork that I would find intriguing. But, there was only one who would influence me in my own artwork over the years, he was from Moscow, Russia, he was to exhibit while in the Bauhaus Movement and Europe of the early 1900s. He is now World-renowned, not alive but his work lives on.
I have continued to express over the years about the art I have created and the passion in which I create it reflects on the love of abstraction. I find myself increasingly excited about the first influences from Wassily Kandinsky’s years ( 1866-1944 ), his life and art that brought the history of the early 1900s to the present time and the question ” Who is my favorite artist !”
Clyde D, Finlay
“Capture the experience, the passion and the rhapsody of intrigue in art.”
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